omen

The sunrise cuts a sharp red through the cold air. I look up from my desk. Outside my window a massive bird of prey is perched. A red-tailed hawk, hunched over a freshly killed pigeon. The head of the pigeon is gone and strips of red flesh are being torn out of its body by the powerful beak. I walk to the window. When it is done eating the hawk hops onto the railing and surveys upper manhattan from the sixth floor. Sensing my presence behind the window, it turns around and we gaze at one another for a time. The stillness stirs. It says something in a language I do not understand. After another glance around, it is gone. All that is left: the half-devoured carcass of a pigeon and the epic absence of a predator.

the sun burns
i shed my skin
the air tries to suffocate
i punctured my body with holes
the ocean moved to drown
i become a wave amongst waves
the wind seeks my last breath
it was broken by my throat
the moon's seductive glance
is met by my indifference
time's pacing stumbled
at the rhythm of my dance

I became extinct.

cornered by death
my fangs gleam -
a grimace or a laugh?
the cemetery of hope

I become extinction.

for Liege's graduation

Where are your limits?
The cold metal bars of finitude
Press reassuringly against your palms.
But a desert cannot be caged.
The wild heat behind your eyes
Remains untamed.
Not until you accept the abyss
That hides under your name.
Not until you have disrobed yourself
Of yourself, can you truly
Begin to be born.
And we will watch
Breathless at the worlds you unfold

self portrait II: becoming

Pessoa - Disquiet #262

Today I was struck by an absurd but valid sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash, what I’d supposed was a city proved to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that showed me myself revealed no sky above. Before the world existed, I was deprived of the power to be. If I was reincarnated, it was without myself, without my I.

I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I’m no one, no one at all. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn’t know how to complete me.

I always think, I always feel, but there’s no logic in my thought, no emotions in my emotion. I’m falling from the trapdoor on high through all of infinite space in an aimless, infinitudinous, empty descent. My soul is a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a hole in nothing. And in these waters which are more a churning than actual waters float the images of all I’ve seen and heard in the world –houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices all moving in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

And amid all this confusion I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

w.s.

Speech is not dirty silence clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.