Light
Light is faster than sound, that’s why some people seem brilliant before you can hear them talking…
Cookie of the day
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
— Frank Herbert, Dune
cynical love
Love… the “climb any mountain, ford any stream” love… the shouting in undying passion for his love kind of love… that sweet and sticky kind of love…
Why was this significant? Well, he was a love-hater just merely half a year ago. He was that person who would roll the eyes at someone like him now, and just say: “Get over it already!!!”.
In fact, he did. He definitely said that very loud to real people in public. Worse yet, he said it to some of his closest friends. His utter disdain for public displays of affection was both ferocious and adamant. Romance felt like a construct rather than an extension of emotional expression. Love seemed like an obligation, a constant game of one-upmanship where the stakes just get higher. Love. What the hell is love, anyway? It’s just a word.
What was it, you might wonder, that turned him into such a bitter curmudgeon at such a (relatively) young age? Same old story, I guess – he’d been in a good number of relationships, many of which left him so heartbroken it was hard to pick himself off the floor. After a particularly bad year, it was enough. He removed his heart from his sleeve and tossed it. It just wasn’t worth it.
Sure, since then he had other rendezvous. He even said the big “L” again, though it was more calculated, measured, and guarded. Love was something that could be rationalized. Marriage was something that could be brokered. Everything occurred in its due course, was controlled, and was expected.
Everything… except this.
He was in a rather deep denial over how badly the last relationship had hurt him and proclaimed, nearly the next day after the breakup, that he didn’t give a damn and that he was over it. The breakup, while not his idea, was just the due course of the relationship. Though he had plotted it differently, he rationalized it would have ended eventually, and she had been gracious enough to do him a favor. His love and him, they connected then, while he was stoically broken and when he still thought he knew all the answers. He dismissed her, back then, since he would need to grieve for the prescribed time (mathematically, it is half the time you were with someone, but he figured that he should be good in about six months, give or take). He told her that it wasn’t going to go anywhere. He saw other people. He even ended it with her. It just wasn’t in his logical and methodical equations. He explained to himself the significance of the break. Over those many heartbreaks, he realized that using “let’s break up” as fighting ammo just isn’t cool. To combat this, he’s implemented the “a break is a break” rule, meaning that if she breaks up with him (or vice-versa), then there was a damned good reason to do it. No looking back. A break is permanent.
So, when he ended it with her, he really had no intention of ever seeing her again. Ever. But something odd had happened. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. But there was so much fear. So much fear that something would go wrong. Well, he called “fear” “reality.” After all, she was German. He was American. She – here for just a few more months. He had a job here in Chicago, with no potential to transfer elsewhere. Where the hell can a relationship with limited time go? To the short-term-no-commitments bin, and that’s where he tried to keep it.
Maybe she found him at just the right time in his personal quest of self-exploration. Maybe they were so compatible that everything was just what love is supposed to be. Maybe, just maybe, there is no explanation, because that’s what love is, something irrational that just kind of happens. Whatever it was, it was as though his heart melted – literally. He hates such cheesy metaphors; he would apologize for all those cynics out there – don’t forget, he was you!). It was as though he’d put his heart in a cryogenic freezer and then took it out, just in time to be warmed by this beautiful and amazing woman.
Regardless of what it was, he couldn’t stay away from her for long. He invited her to the L Stop launch party, where he had convinced himself it would just be a hook-up. At Thanksgiving, he specifically skipped out on plans elsewhere to cook her a traditional meal, convincing himself that it was just that he was showing her a true American T-day. No, there wasn’t a possibility that he actually liked the girl. What’s done is done. No looking back.
Something, though… something was different. He felt his pulse quicken. “Breathe, breathe, get it under control,” he thought. Her perfume lingered in his car after she left and his pulse raced. His thoughts wandered off to her during the day. His heart beat uncontrolled within his chest, it felt like anxiety. But it felt so much better than anxiety. Damn? What the hell was going on with him?
Fortunately, though, he was too intoxicated with her to think straight. He had blurted out things like, “Why don’t you come over (again) tonight” before he could think them through. His poor roommate had to listen to “Why the hell do I like her?” over and over again while he picked at the teeny tiniest minuscule faults wherever he could manage to imagine them. This eventually morphed to, “Why can’t I STOP liking her” and eventually an all-out, “Oh GOD, I think I’m in LOVE with her”.
All the reasoning in the world couldn’t rationalize this away. In fact, despite their separate nationalities, there was no legitimate reason holding them apart. He could always move to Germany; she could move here, she had an in-demand job that could always warrant her work visa, maybe no marriage needed. She was smart, funny, gentle, and crazy hot – what the hell was there not to love?
Well, after leaving behind his own hangups, and letting it just all unfold with no plan…it turned out there was nothing not to love. Was it…was it that he was just too scared to try love again? Scared? Him? But, it turns out he was. He kept thinking that this wonderfully amazing woman would just walk out of his life (and really, he had given her plenty of reasons to).
But he let it all go and decided to put it all on the line. Instead, with a shaky voice, while they snuggled on the couch, he leaned over to her ear. Just as much because he was scared he’d mess it up in German as he was scared to say it out loud, he whispered:
“Ich liebe dich”.
1100 words, Adela Galasiu 2012
Photo: Photobucket
the sandal poem
agitated life, hectic every day
fast love, fast food, no dreams…
it was love at first sight
when she first laid her eyes on them…
she waited and waited to order them
but then fear took over her
that they might sell out …
today she finally bought them.
they remind her of
that rock candy she used to eat when she was a child…
she visualizes them with a vintage sweater
and tattered denim…
such a pretty shoe,
the crystal embellished sandals
filling her mind with sweet memories…
she’s head over heels for them!
remains of the day
days have passed with a crazy velocity… most of the friends that she managed to make in the year have left. she finally unpacked her suitcases, cleaned the whole apartment, disappointed that all changes so quickly… fortunately she was not left completely alone. there still was someone for the next three weeks, someone to drink coffee with and a companion for concerts….
… concerts.. yes, all those concerts… yesterday glass and smith. there was strike again, she had to walk again, she walked the distance between four subway stations in the heat of the ending day, suffocating heat, thinking to take a taxi to return after the concert because the area was creepy… she arrived two hours too early, there were only ten peaple ahead of her(including a sixty years old lady with short hair , blue and white strands and the biggest tattoos that she has ever seen… on the right leg a huge violet grape, on the right foot the tattoo was so abstract that it seemed impossible to realize what it was meant to represent…)
this time the concert was at odeon, in the smallest of the two amphitheatres… about 1000 people but clearly the most various public she had ever seen attending a concert… with curious eyes she explored the faces and dresses and people and made herself an idea about the everything… sitting in the second row, she was very close to the stage, next to two girls that were smiling and talking about their sexy fifty years old literature teacher sitting in the first row…the guy was looking like one of the teachers of philip roth….
and it all begun well and ended wrong… patti smith is the perfect voice for ginsberg’s poems and it would have been just marvellous if she would not have started talking on her own, expressing her own ideas… at the end a big group of vintage enthusiasts run in front of the stage bothering everybody … they have started screaming happily “people have the power” raising their fists and militating as if right that very moment they were about to start a new revolution….
but of course, this disappointment did not spoil the rest of the concert for her. she adored philip glass from the first moment, thinking that he deserves a title of nobility like “Sir”… she adored him from the moment he said in a very elegant french that he was about to play… by metamorphosis two she was already holding her breath since she could only hear the piano and the crickets….
conclusion: she should better read ginsberg on her own, and she deffinitely must see philip glass one more time, in one of his concerts alone… and if cohen and glass (and ginsberg) all met in the buddhist ideas, there must be a reason. she alone was convinced she is not compatible with that inner peace for which the western people find no words, but she would have loved at least once to try it…
when she returned she found no taxi… among thousands of curses said in her mind in the honour of the greatness of the French nation and her strikes, after ten minutes of fast walking , she noticed with de corner of her eye the pencil tower from part-dieu, exactly in the opposite direction that she was supposed to follow to get back home… she returned , passed again in front of the same arab merchant sleeping on his chair… she and her lovely 70s dress that she wore especially for ginsberg… maybe if she would not have wore this dress it would not have all ended in this hippie apocalypse…
she arrived home cursing the country she declared one of idiots and the idiots that strike all the time and also herself, the greatest idiot, for not being capable, not even at her age, to learn how to ride the bicycle.
memyselfandela, 2012
hypnotic love
Shadow by my side always
Nobody
Am I a lunatic?
Sounds of a scintillating music
No flutist
Am I insane?
Hypnotic words on paper
No poet
Am I sleeping?
Vermillion clouds at sunrise
You’ve been in my dream
Am I awake?
Rumpled body, swollen lips
Am I crazy?
Or this is the only sanity?
Viens lentement t’asseoir , Emile Verhaeren
Viens lentement t’asseoir
Près du parterre dont le soir
Ferme les fleurs de tranquille lumière,
Laisse filtrer la grande nuit en toi:
Nous sommes trop heureux pour que sa mer d’effroi
Trouble notre prière.
Là-haut, le pur cristal des étoiles s’éclaire:
Voici le firmament plus net et translucide
Qu’un étang bleu ou qu’un vitrail d’abside;
Et puis voici le ciel qui regarde à travers.
Les mille voix de l’énorme mystère
Parlent autour de toi,
Les mille lois de la nature entière
Bougent autour de toi,
Les arcs d’argent de l’invisible
Prennent ton âme et sa ferveur pour cible.
Mais tu n’as peur, oh ! simple coeur,
Mais tu n’as peur, puisque ta foi
Est que toute la terre collabore
A cet amour que fit éclore
La vie et son mystère en toi.
Joins donc les mains tranquillement
Et doucement adore ;
Un grand conseil de pureté
Flotte, comme une étrange aurore,
Sous les minuits du firmament.
Les heures claires (1896)
Evocation / Évocation – Nichita Stanescu
She was beautiful like the shadow of an idea
Her back smell like baby skin
Like freshly broken stone
Like scream from a dead language
She had no weight like respiration
Laughing and crying with big tears
She was salted like the salt
Offered at big feasts by barbarians.
She was beautiful like the shadow of an idea
Among waters, she alone was a shore.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Elle était belle comme l’ombre d’une idée.
Ses épaules sentaient la peau fraîche d’une enfant;
à une pierre elle semblait – vite brisée,
au cri elle paraissait – dans une langue morte.
Elle n’avait pas de poids comme le halètement.
Souriante – larmoyante aux grandes larmes, rares —
elle était salée comme le sel poudroyant
consacré aux festins par les vieux barbares.
Elle était belle comme l’ombre d’une pensée.
Entre les eaux, elle était à elle seule, la terre affamée.
Jeune lionne – l’ amour , Nichita Stanescu
Jeune lionne, l’amour
a sauté sur moi.
Elle m’avait guetté, toute tendue,
depuis quelque temps dejà.
Ses blancs crocs, elle me les a enfocés dans la face,
aujourd’hui la lionne m’a mordu la face.
Et brusquement la nature
se tourna en cercles tout autour
de moi, tantôt plus large et tantôt plus près
tout comme des eaux serrées.
Et le regard jaillit en haut,
arc-en-ciel coupé en deux,
par l’ouie aussi rencontre,
des alouettes tout près.
J’ai porte la main à mon sourcil,
à ma tempe, à mon menton aussi,
mais la main ne les reconnaît plus.
Et elle glisse inconsciemment
sur un désert rayonnant,
sur lequel passe en douceur
une lionne cuivrée
aux perfides mouvements,
pour un temps
et un autre temps…
Chaque heure, ou je songe a ta bonté, Émile Verhaeren
Chaque heure, où je songe à ta bonté
Si simplement profonde,
Je me confonds en prières vers toi.
Je suis venu si tard
Vers la douceur de ton regard,
Et de si loin vers tes deux mains tendues,
Tranquillement, par à travers les étendues !
J’avais en moi tant de rouille tenace
Qui me rongeait, à dents rapaces, la confiance.
J’étais si lourd, j’étais si las,
J’étais si vieux de méfiance,
J’étais si lourd, j’étais si las
Du vain chemin de tous mes pas.
Je méritais si peu la merveilleuse joie
De voir tes pieds illuminer ma voie,
Que j’en reste tremblant encore et presque en pleurs
Et humble, à tout jamais, en face du bonheur.
Les heures claires (1896)
He who dies (Ode to Life), Pablo Neruda
“Slowly dies he who becomes a slave to habit,
repeating the same journey every day,
he who doesn’t change his march, he who doesn’t risk
and change the color of his clothes, he who doesn’t speak to he whom he doesn’t know.
Slowly dies he who makes of the television his guru,
he who avoids a passion dies, he who prefers
black on white and dots on i’s rather than a togetherness of emotions
exactly those that make the eyes shine,
those that make the heart beat
before error and feeling.
Slowly dies he who doesn’t overturn the table,
he who is unhappy in his work,
he who doesn’t risk certainty for uncertainty
to follow a dream,
he who doesn’t permit himself at least one time in his life
to flee sensible counsels.
Slowly dies he who doesn’t travel, he who doesn’t read,
he who doesn’t listen to music,
he who doesn’t find grace in himself.
he who destroys his own love dies,
he who doesn’t allow himself to be helped.
He who passes his days lamenting
about his own misfortune or the incessant rain dies.
Slowly dies he who abandons a project
before beginning it,
he who doesn’t ask questions about topics he doesn’t know,
he who doesn’t answer when he is asked something that he knows.
Let’s avoid death by small doses,
remembering always that being alive requires a much larger effort
than the simple act of breathing.
Only burning patience will bring within reach a splendid happiness.”
Little things
Little things can ease
The wounds of your soul
Maybe only the thought of
Being sheltered under a wing…
Little things can fill
The emptiness of your heart
Maybe only the love
You have not been yet given…
Little can cover
Your hundred years of solitude
Probably only
My solitude.
The only
When I
see you in the crowd
You are the only one
that sees my eyes
The only one that recognizes
the colour of my soul
And breaths the same
like me…
In the midle of the night,
in the middle of the tempest
Will this ever
change?
This look in your eyes,
my only spark.
New leaf
Time to turn a new leaf.
To finish the old
sad long chapter,
to cross over things
which I should, perhaps,have done long ago…
Now, finally!
I feel I’m ready.
Ready
to write the last dot.
Definitive.
As all stories
indisputable end.
End.
Finally, I am prepared to accept the given situation.
Time for an end now.
As I continue waiting
I mark a blank slate.
And every end is a
a new beginning.
——————————
memyselfandela, 2012
Magnified
Did it ever cross your mind
as you walked along the beach
what treasure lies beneath your feet?
Only when I lose myself
When I think of you
when I breath
I can still not understand
what you want from me
it feels like you have never enough of me
it feels like I’m completely losing myself
but only when I lose myself with you
I can find myself
Thoughts
Thoughts rest on my mind
like tired birds
on their path to the promissed land.
When they come upon me
I can hardly hear myself
I can only hear them talking about you.
Every once in a while they come back to me
singing me about your face
telling me about your kiss
making me remember the slightest details.
When they feel strong enough
my thoughts fly back to you
always towards you
leaving me far, far away.
About me
the Mother and the Child
the Destroyer and the Builder
the Teacher and the Pupil
the Darkness and the Light
the Tear and the Laughter
the Dreamer and the Realist
the Rebel and the Submissive
the Traveller and the Guide
the Dispair and the Hope
the Loneliness and the Shelter
the Lover and the Solitary…
I’m all in one name: Woman.
memyselfandela 