Nods ∞

Part I.

A thing of infectious persuasion burrows its way into the far corners of being, and though incapable of dreams, a routine cause of nightmares. A furnace of mechanical fatalism, infinitesimal reason and will inversely proportioned, driven by an insatiable voracity for its own identity recast. When mirrors meet, a mute rhythm is set to pulsate in aimless vibrations, echoing within the tenuous hollow of that living kernel. Inside every fibrous enclosure a factory of effigies quietly drawls away, in continuous, seductive murmurs. It is only when the host amicably offers her own shelter, and as the walls close in on themselves, that in one stroke she guarantees immortality.

Sometimes, daydreaming unriddles secret glances

A forest of hungry eyes, wind rustles the piercing branches,
Scraping the ground from time to time, in a rhythm of abandoned organs,
Nibbling at her cheeks, tracing maps along her skin, charting voyages,
Reverie dangling from the mouth like gristle.
“Isn’t it chilly here?” she whispers, though he doesn’t reply, since he cannot speak.
The great circle, aged leaves crumbling under delicate footsteps,
Withering principle supervening in layers, radiating reciprocal invitations,
Being is a matter of geodesics, hidden trajectories and
Hurried vectors pouring through lattice walls.
“Quiet! The Catcher lurks!” she cries out, though he doesn’t stir, since he cannot move.
Overlapping curved flyways, forming invisible embraces,
A network of glances, hand touching hands that touch, though,
Countless spheres amass on fingertips, quivering drops of dew,
And the Ambler’s gaze unties the knot, and weaves her way among the trunks,
Carving predetermined paths in the moist soil,
All stretching toward the same horizon.

Leaders Today, Vol. I

You (men) and mothers of all nations lived execrably well until you were won by the presence of kings. By today progress will equal life, issued from that soldier low with truth. You and I, rather we, were trusted with my sorrow, but it lay hidden in the advancement of rights. Though her diametrically opposed thoughts are policed by liberty and taxed in the court of Brahmins, the sound of her voice will eventually be restored. Because they who feel according to patient proposals, are citizens taught to love the battlefield. A sentence is upon the women strikers: their bodies are mere land to be labored. The insulted and tardy will of the people, should therefore be decided less by cannibals. I shall have it! The white market will not be overhauled under our boss’s entirely vile foot. That sister Sara and her three possessions fell, like wages, from the country into the streets, where she now dines. One of the sons of socialism works off his revolutionary lungs in sweated malignity. And their brains, first politically contained, then supported by catastrophes, will in time be abolished by work, the day when no corner of the West shall be weakened by the death of just mothers. A feeble Siberian peasant stands like iron by his speech on counterrevolution and the violence of conquest; his mind assembled, the sword blessed, before the theatre of high treason. The mountaineer slowly loses his teeth, imprisoned by the red god: these ain’t unlimited dreams! They escaped their local caste into the night of a new dialectic. A Network backed by partisans of imperialism wants to poison the soil with propaganda of grief. Rise little age! There the new land!  Society marked with peculiar instruments of justice, continents of progress, all embracing the end. You must have my next prophet killed. Leaders form classes, who cannot supersede them whilst firmly deceived by songs of beasts. An almost possible concept: decisive act tears and divides the institution of blood. It retreats. You wounded system that fought reconciliation: separate yourself from truth, part with promise, and we blind people, whose values of sickness and death you defended, will at last obtain the right to replace you. In the land of freaks, her monstrous imagination is not held by time, but signals strength. Sacrifice all our incapable words, every image of origins, to the living language of need. Spirit! Trade my name for the manifesto of the people. The reservoir of time births democracy; consciousness arises from the painful fog of compliance. Your socio-political machines organized our bitter and warring memories. A sole subject destined to power, a martyr of her own will, has nothing but community, so we the rich proceed to justice and sense. On change, and the cultural empowerment and imperialism of the poor: provide people the occupation of knowledge, Capitalism’s field of everyday life. Farewell to this infamy.

Her mind is made up

Nods ∞ 


Part II 

Once again, her body became a vessel for objects, a curious condition she had not been afflicted by for years. During her adolescence, and those ambivalent hours of dawn, she would often steal away and climb on top of the hill overlooking the valley (maybe as a minor token of rebellion or an effort to domesticate a growing array of confused sensations arising and consolidating in her chest, which made her mouth water and a faint smell of dried flower buds swell up in the back of her nose). Her body motionless, hands limping alongside her torso, yet her eyes wakeful; observing as the morning fog would rise and billow in quiet translucent waves seemingly out of nowhere. It traveled in a hunched mass across the landscape until it had folded itself into every crevice leaving nothing untouched by its obfuscating presence. As always, the sun rose in conjunction, at which the fog would bulge upwards to greet it, all the while glowing from the inside in bright red phosphorescence, like a giant deep sea creature that had washed ashore and wriggled its vaporous tentacles in elation at the introduction to a new world. However, she did not habitually return to the high cusp of the hill because she found the spectacle aesthetically pleasing. She was rather lured by arcane thoughts on the vacillating being of the fog, its strangely wavering structure, which seemed to straddle two worlds, or none whatsoever. It was not of the earth, and not of the air, but marked the condensation of the two, without properly being either: a nexus of effusion, metamorphosis, obliteration, all at once. She contemplated this as a pastel sheet made its way up the hill and wrapped itself around her ankles, diffusing her feet, which made it appear as if the two had merged. This would replace her earlier ruminations with something entirely else. Filled with a brief sense of weightlessness, only to be suddenly gripped a moment later by an urge of being pulled down into the valley and swallowed by that inordinate body. Of course, this scenario never presented itself. Instead, she would nod in resignation and languish, drooping over the hovering surface, until the fog had evaporated and she finally found the courage to retreat back home. But this time, the last time she ever returned to the hill, the fog did not dissolve, but congealed, encircled her body and then entered through every pore of her being. A river of objects followed suit, amassing like a wave on the horizon and sweeping in roars across her visual field, then uncontrollably pouring into her, each thing evoking a distinct sensation upon entry. The world was attached to the fog as to an unyielding string, drawing every object, every phenomenon in its wake, even her precious woods, through which she usually found her way home, came tumbling toward her, tree for tree. Until alone, amidst omnipresent quietude, and before her, a plateau of barren and shapeless space.

Now that these spells had returned to plague her, they never presented themselves in the same manner as they did the first time, never the same enveloping placidity. Each time, it brought with it as much distress as it did satisfaction, though once contained, a richer quantity of the latter. To avoid this, and to properly delimit the boundaries of her being, she developed a method or tactic of sorts. A habit of nodding timidly toward strangers, mostly men wearing the pattern of clothing that seemed to trace a fortifying outline somewhere deep within her, an almost tangible cord. When night had fallen, she hid under its covers, and placed herself at the precise center of the town square, a point in space she had gone to considerable amount of trouble calculating the coordinates of. Moving her head with the same integrity as a factory worker maneuvers his limbs in concert to the machine invented to act as his servant. At first, she stretched her hand upwards and blithely ran her finger across a prefigured segment of the darkened sky in arbitrary undulations rather than straight lines. Erratic, though circumspect, strokes of a blinded calligrapher conjuring an orchestra of bizarre figures from sand. Pulling back at times, as if to start anew, her pace then quickened and steadily the glittering sketches grew increasingly rigorous and systemic, the elegance of which would have made a geometer weep. A flurry of stars gravitated toward her celestial engravings and mirrored the procession of her movements with scrupulous mathematical precision, until they broke loose from the faintly shimmering wall, piece by piece, and finally trickled down to the square, replicating the prior markings by rotating and bending in the exact same patterns. Hoping to produce the desired constellation, the neutralizing alignment of unattached fulfillment, but only if someone chanced to reciprocate her nods at the exact same moment. On most occasions she only succeeded in awakening the attention of loners, drunkards or misfits, and an ancient vagabond routinely gave her majestic bows before disappearing into the crowd. Once, she felt as if the universe had shifted its center to mirror precisely where she bent her body: after a graceful exchange of nods, an unusually pleasing person drifted hesitatingly toward her, and said, “I apologize for my lack of creativity, but have we met before?”
“We have not.”
“Are you sure, may I ask your name?”
“Fuck off please, I’m quite engaged in something.”
“I see.”
She resumed her nodding, as if nothing had happened, as if the entire doleful trajectory had not exhausted itself, and finally reemerged in another orbit.

Lone-Cheilos

days and nights 
of wayward and circuitous roaming
impetuous visitations 
through town and land
leaving dizzying trails of violence 
and unkindly manners
as vehement as they were coarse
yet, in their final act of perambulation
the roving band circled a hill, 
limbs moving wildly 
furiously slicing through the soft evening air
shrill voices – and above – birds echoed
the secrets of the firmament
to heedless ears
until finally they came to a halt
gleamed the jewel
under the lucid blue moon
which, for a few breaths, 
ceased its cosmic drifting
rested and observed 
in illuminated affirmation, 
bandits and marauders, aging buccaneers
up the hill they went, toppling, tumbling
one over the other
racing, to be the first
to glean the ancient treasure, 
the archaic Tree, Lone-Cheilos,
bearing fruits of unfathomable reward
yet, little did they know, 
for night had fallen, and dark risen
speaking in devious tongues
Lone-Cheilos was no more
and a gaping fissure in its stead
frenzy ensued 
and they were swallowed
one by one,
what became of them
one can only surmise, 
yet, their restless wanderings
came to an end,
time was ripe
and the young peasant boy
pulled the trunk into the mill
shriveled from the hungry sun
and stood wavering
with sullen eyes
sunken boughs
as the great Tree pulverized
a vast plume for a moment
pursued the draft,
fell quietly to the ground
yet, branches grew, gathered
and offshoots emerged
along the margins of which
ran the ramifications
he could finally cling to,
the leaves of Lone-Cheilos
rushed forth
once more.

Something Icarus related

Monsieur Verniz dans sa maison

A fragile December morning reminiscent of a faded minor tone spread across the floor of his Paris bedroom, and swelled, cold, crisp and immaculate towards him as he raised himself up in the bed; a promised day of asepsis. He coughed and ran his fingers across his stomach, through his already-turning-grey fur, and found the only bare and pale hairless spot, about the size of a button, and pressed his index finger against it. This pleased him greatly, a furtive little private act of transgression, an austere gentleman such as himself, he thought, could allow himself such a gesture strictly by virtue of silence. Morbid and insipid, perhaps, but only if seen (yet, this danger was precisely that which (though unthought-of (an abysmal sediment of desire)) sustained the delight of the act, its hard kernel, and conducted his fingers towards the secret centre of his body each morning). He rose, and proceeded to the mirror, where he inspected his teeth, his nostrils, gazed deeply into his dark eyes and then, not lacking in fascination, exclaimed, as he did almost every morning (especially on mornings such as the one confronting him now), “i am still dreaming” (he called this his “principle of parsimony”) and smiled at his ability to summon scientific knowledge. Now, the monsieur was perfectly aware that this condition was not what you encounter in sleep, he was not sleeping, in fact, it was just stated he had risen (fully cognizant it should be noted (he recalled in vivid detail his dream of the night (where he found himself as a caged rodent))) and he was no somnambulist: the exclamation issued directly from Reason, unadulterated by imagination or fancy. It was simply a necessary instauration, a ritual, drawing from his general condition of being-not-quite-human, yet, contemporaneously, being-human; an uncomfortable antinomy which would tease and tickle any sense that could rightfully be called common. Yet, despite these unfortunate daily confusions, and given his virtue of prudence (and a firmly established reputation concerning just that): on this cold, crisp and immaculate December morning reminiscent of a faded minor tone, he had engagements to meet– he was already late, far, far too late, for an appointment with a busy tailor and the city’s most exquisite photographer awaited in the afternoon (so, as always, this particular mystery had to remain unsolved (for the time being (would there ever be time))?