Falling

(Falling Angel by Elena Kalis)

Centrul pamantului este sub copita stanga a camilei mele

Zicea el ca in desert numai umbra ramane. Restul piere sub soare si sub nisip. Scorpioni de foc ce se furiseaza in noapte si iti infiereaza sufletul, sa te recunoasca paznicii cand incerci sa evadezi. Miros sufocant de smirna. Dinti micuti ce sfasie bucati de curmala ca dintr-o carne invizibila. Zornaind prin blana, degete lungi se furiseaza. Fumul isi schimba directia.

Ziceam eu ca sunt apasator de multe stele pe cer. Si nici una nu arata nordul. Danseaza, danseaza in fundul ochilor mei si rotocoale de lumina inegala ma transporta in vis peste aerul inselator. Oaza este acolo unde omul pune piciorul in pamant si zice ca este. Oazele nu sunt despre apa, ci despre oameni.

Zicea el ca am cortul prabusit.

Ziceam eu ca daca nu esti macar o data zanatic, inseamna ca mori fara sa fi vazut vreodata zane.

Golden Fish

I haven't written in a while. In the meantime, I talked to a golden fish:

I will write again. Before I forget how. Before my neurotic stutter affects my writing.

Let the dream begin

Mirrors. Smoke. Candles scattered about. Pianos. Black cats. Chains. Music. And above all... masks.
Mine is slipping away. And this fills me with a dread as black as night. I hide trembling in my cave of solitude where no ray of cruel sunshine tears away at the fabric of my dreams.

Open up your mind,
Let your fantasies unwind,
In this darkness which you know you cannot fight,
The darkness of the music of the night.

Predator fangs coated in honey

"A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than dawn." (Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Books)

Smile your different smiles for me

I think about you and your apple red cheeks and your curious sparkling eyes. I mostly think about you when you smile your different smiles, when you make me giddy with the tinniest twitch of your lips.
And how you glisten. Oh, how you glisten in the peeking sunlight.

She came one day, with strawberries in her hair and reached for the moon, jumping up and down, punishing the earth for not letting her fly. I sat on my branch and I smiled my all-knowing bitter smile. Inside I was mesmerized, spellbound by this new woman-child who came in stomping her feet and demanding everything. I froze in terror for a while.
Then I descended from my tree and studied the little creature who laughed and crinkled with each step she took. She had a silly dress made of bells, tiny bells sewn together for the sole purpose of never letting me sleep peacefully again. I snorted. This can't be it! She can't just waltz in and take over my world. I am Mighty Cat. She will obey my icy stare.
Just as I was about to go back to my place of wise ruling, small liquid diamonds appeared in her big brown eyes. And to my utter dismay, I found that I couldn't go back anymore. I turned around to the sound of her sniffles that threatened to tear holes into my heart. I let her pet me. She smiled.

That day I realized I would never love another more or even as much. I just cannot. It is a metaphysical impossibility. It involves apples.

The cat and the moon

Black as desire, white as dream.
I am Blackfox with the eyes of a cat. Longing, loving, chasing, never giving up. And I will get my Moon.



Someday.

Dunes of despair

I am walking through the desert of my emotions. Or my emotional desert, if you will.

Here and there, elusive footprints leading to nowhere are blown away by the wind. I tried to figure out the North, but the leaves keep spinning wildly in my imaginary puddles. No compass works here. Be it moral, or otherwise. Which is another thing that I noticed while casually strolling through my desert. This desolate, utterly empty space abolishes all sense of morality. For what is morality but a social construct meant to set cultural guidelines so that we don't end up savagely killing and eating one another? Well, let me tell you, when there is nothing to eat, and alas not even something to kill as far as the eye can see, morality seems rather pointless.

So, as I was saying, this amoral being, me, is treading the sand of an emotional dreamscape. Usually we associate sand with beaches and frolicking in the frothy waves of childlike 'happee'. None of that here. Sand is coarse and insidious, made unbearably hot by a black-eyed sun that sucks all that is living out of you. And I would honestly be terrified of that prospect if there were anything alive left in me. As it is, I merely sneer back at the dunes.
"Too late, love, you will have to satiate your hunger elsewhere. I am as dry and as ruthless as you are. I might decide to set you ablaze and turn you into a sea of glass."

A sea of glass that I would skate over in delicate white dancing shoes that have deadly blades attached. For, you see, I have no compassion left for mirroring surfaces. They are not Dorian's portrait. Why aren't they? Why am I the only one who turns darker everytime I see their reflection whereas they remain the same? I hate mirrors. And I will rasp and grate and dig my blades into the sea of glass until it reflects no more.

You are afraid now, aren't you, you glassy mounds of ...nothingness? For you are indeed the dunes of despair. But it is not mine. Yours.

Sometimes the illusion

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
...with the soul of a crocodile. There is no patch left unscarred. It has become my armour. Isn't it ironic? My scars protect me now, like a chainlink body suit. My capsule of painful reminders, that both protects and imprisons me.

Other times I feel like a leaf in the wind. At the mercy of the elements. Carried to and fro following the whims of various people blowing bubbles of air.

Grab on to me. Hold me tight. Never let me go. Just like you would with quicksand.

Hello, white rabbit. Welcome. My veins are ready. Pour in your magic potion. Give me pleasure. Make me feel special, loved, cherished. Make me feel alive.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures. (Oscar Wilde)

Scarification

Ceilalti lupi m-ar sfasia daca ar sti ca urletul meu e un plans. (Octavian Paler)

I am never going to die. Nothing can kill me anymore. For I am immortal.

We. Together. You. Me. Water.

Tribute to Terence Malick
(Brave New World - one of the most poetic films I have ever seen)

I am in need of words to express my emotions, my feelings, my turmoil, my pain, my rage, my beauty, my triumph. I find none.

Swim in me, my love, and see for yourself.

Blood

Rising with the tides, with the Moon, with swirls of dust in the air, with wolf howls. Blood rises till it drowns every other voice, breath, conscious thought. Blood brings the animal and the animal knows no mercy.

To devour another person is to possess, to own, to rip to shreds. Because Eros always goes hand in hand with Thanatos. And desire...is the beginning of the downfall of man. Visceral desire that treads on dreams, on whispers, on discrete sighs. Its vise-like grip will not loosen till blood is spilt, licked, drunk.

I am sometimes in awe as to how fragile we are as human beings. And how powerless subjects we are to instincts. Reason is of course to be developed and praised. But how little reasoning is involved in the complete abandon to another person. How the body actually becomes the mind and the flow of erotic energy carries you like a furious stream would carry a leaf.

I am thinking about the Minotaur as an archetype for masculinity. The head of a bull, the body of a man and the prowess of both combined. Fire and brimstone! How is it that such monstrosities are the epitome of sexual predation? How could they not be? And what does that say about us as people?

Hm. The beast is relentless. And blood will flow.

Drug of choice of the day

Command and conquer

I have bathed in the blood of sacrificial bulls, yet I have not found the answer to my question. What is the shape of the heart of man?

How do you conquer something that has no shape? How do you approach it, how do you encirle it, how do you starve it to the point it starts to feed on itself? How do you make it surrender? How can you even know when it surrenders, if it has no knees to fall down to?

I am the commander of my legions. I will conquer this land, even if I don't really know where I am. Because there is nothing else that I know but war. A child bred out of strife who grew up fighting demons and darkness and fear. A child at heart still, who will barge in and slash and maim and kill lest he stop and deal with his own fear of the dark.

The lesser kind are not my kind. Yet I still do not understand how to fight an enemy that you cannot describe. Subscribe. Always beating at an arms length, always close enough to hear, but too far to reach. A fist thumping in the chest of other mortals. Like myself.

I reach within me, I feel around my heart. It is bloody. Angry. Loud. Afraid. Soft. Scarred.

A half smile. Dawn brings another day filled with dirt and blood. A good day.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Sometimes I think that the greatest perversion is hope. The fact that it dies last. And it eats at your heart in the meantime, like a slow serpent carving channels through the soft flesh.

I have had my catharsis a while ago and it took me almost two years to get it. It meant the death of hope. Isn't it ironic? Deliverance came in the form of death. I cut out a part of me and killed it. In front of my eyes. I sighed in pain with its passing, but it set me free. From the bonds of slavery. And after rain comes the rainbow and the promise of another tomorrow.

And tomorrow never dies, or so the song goes. And with my tomorrow, today came to bathe in my emotions and swim within my body. "I found romance on your menu" it declared and, with an unsympathetic smile, proceeded to feast upon my dreams. "I know no yesterday, no tomorrow, no sorrow" it said beween mouthfulls. I watched in fascination as little pieces of me disappeared in it. It had blue eyes.

If time is but a gaping black hole where we lose ourselves, can space come to the rescue? Can there be a place where you exhale, where the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true? Where the sky is blue and the grass is green and drops of dew kiss you good morning. I know this place exists, I have seen it in a dream. A dream with teeth marks on it, granted, but still mine. Alive and kicking.

If happy little blue birds fly
Across the rainbow,
Why, oh why, can't I?

A world of cookies

Delicious cookies. Happy thoughts. Soft dreams.

Chocolate

Some people live just to play the game.

I live to taste it all. Dip my fingers in the chocolate that binds all of us together and... wouldn't it be cool though if we were bound by chocolate?
Hearts made of chocolate, babies made of chocolate, soft happiness. [Cue smiles.]

While you smile and reach out for a cookie, I want to tell you about one of my favorite memories: I was for one night in a theater where they played just for me. Great personae, lights and shadows, rabbits, stolen kisses and sighs, intrigue and fate, hopes and wonders and too much of it all that made my heart race in my chest. Cherry blossoms in bloom and the glimpse of what could've, would've, should've... But that is mine to keep.

Exeunt to today with me licking my fingers, sipping champagne and blissfully ignoring the nine to the two. Would I trade it for something else? Yes and no. Yes to the inner peace, no to the personal freedom that I enjoy. And this I would not trade for the whole wide world. You know, all the Ws.

I am the brave little soldier that soldiers on to his own tune. And there's so few of us left, my love.

The Messiah complex

I have always suffered from something I call "the Messiah complex", namely the belief that I can make people better. That somehow, under my influence, while feeding their positives, they will reach their full potential and become better, whatever that means for them. And the greater the challenge, the more I thought I could make it work, that somehow there is a cosmic reason why our paths intertwined.

I have learned in time that it absolutely does not work. No one ever gets better and definitely not under my influence, because it was an incredibly arrogant assumption to begin with. By no means am I a role model. I am just a person, flawed and imperfect as they come, perhaps with slightly more imagination than others. Is that in any way redemptive? I think not.

Now, if you believe that my intellectual ruminations from above stopped me in any way from continuing to manifest my Messiah complex, then you don't know human nature. We are all aware of the distinction between the intellectual side and the emotional side in man. And we pride ourselves in being cognitive beings, endowed with reason, self-awareness and all that jazz. All that is swell. However, as my friend says, I have found that most of the times, we act upon emotional drives rather than rational ones. Our decisions are based on how we feel about things, and our feelings are determined by lots and lots of networks of details that make up our personal experiential structure.

Therefore, it was with no small cost to me that I had to accept that people do not need drawings on the wall, butterflies, flowers in their hair, soap bubbles and chewing gum. And I am nobody's savior.

"The Flower Duet" from Lakme by Leo Delibes.



The flower. It is pretty. My lady.

The pursuit of happiness

I am back, apparently. With a vengeance, they say. And although I would be tempted to say I am not vengeful, I would be lying.

I am very much preoccupied these days with happiness. What is happiness and how do we achieve it? Tons of stuff have been written on this subject, and I do not intend to add to that, but I would like, however, to give my own take on it.

Happiness is...[wait for it]...a matter of choice. Doesn't that sound mind-bogglingly simple? Well, because it is. And no, I don't mean simplistic. Just simple. People complicate things endlessly with their own fears and frustrations, insecurities and incapacity to think, no, live outside the box. Life is way more safe lived in patterns. Social chains that yank us left and right, just like cattle. But that amounts to merely breathing your way through the days. Happiness is about ego (feel free to contradict me here) - who I am, what do I want and what brings joy to my heart. A joyous heart is always a kind one (so you can relax about the egotistical juxtaposition).

We are not, and I repeat, we are not defined by our good or bad intentions, or by what we think we feel or do. We are defined by our choices.

There. There is nothing simpler than this and yet more complicated. If someone had told me some time ago that I am not happy because I do not want to be, I would have thought him insane and cynical. "What? Who? I would be happy, but the others! society!... it's their fault." But no, that's exactly it. You have to want it, to fight for it, to pursue it like a wild horse that needs to be tamed.

Butterflies all havin' fun, you do know what I mean?
Freedom is mine, and I know how I feel.

I leave you now, my sunny little friends. Feelin' good.

Tiger, tiger

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
(William Blake)