"lines on my face, tears in my eyes, words in between my lips: a life unfolds"—-Secrets|Letters to Sylvia
“I have learned that when sadness comes to visit me, all I can do is say “I see you.” I spend some time with it, get up, and say goodbye. I don’t push it away. I own it. And because I own it, I let it go.”
Carolina Zacaria
dear people who have been seeking to contact me via every possible platforms and planes, i gladly would like to inform you i am alive and somewhat well (let’s just call it that). we’re keeping it on the DL since the big bang and the rattles that follow. we are scattered around the world and are unable to regroup (yes i am that many, i am we and us and them) thanks to the ever prolonged pandemic. we have thousands stories to tell, poems lurking here and there, and we are looking (and longing) to share again like the good old days.
though these past three years have changed us in a way that is unimaginable, rest assured, we are still productively creating in abundance of peace and in a more private realm.
for you especially who clicked here, yes i see you and i appreciate you (i can’t really say i love you but i do). we will soon be together again though soon seems too far away.
until we meet again.
they say tomorrow might be the waves i cannot see
the sheer anticipation of what might have been
we’ve grown so old from heartbreaks so young a dream
we’re so vast a universe but no words to swarm in
this existence hurts my skin it hurts more everytime it doesn’t bleed
here in this dark place everything is shameful and unforgiven but
there’s a rabbit hole down here and there’s you and i and the world disappears we need to be somewhere else
but here we are, bloated up
and shrunk down into an instagram post
I dream you still. And there I will be.
You don’t know my name. This is the past. And us is just a butterfly effect that didn’t happen. We are apart and at peace, just as before your eyes met mine, before our hands brushed and our words hushed. Before our secrets born into judging eyes. This is before everything.
And I am telling you this so you will search for me no more.
“I Want These Dreams Inside of Me”, When I My Own Daughter
Now we will count to twelve,
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
“Keeping Quiet”, Pablo Neruda
thinking of how you light up the dead parts of me
i seem to know how to pick them
out of a bunch I picked the darkest one
who’d call up cancelling whatever whenever
just to watch me dance all night
my then insecure boyfriend asked what’s going on
i don’t know, kid
i didn’t. but i knew i was
in for trouble
you stared and stared and oh that gaze, i wanted
those eyes staring at me for the rest of my days…
When I look into your eyes, I realise I came from a long journey across time, before yours nor mine. I knew this from recurring dreams. They’re so vivid that when I wake up, my arms my feet my body’s broken, sore and tired. These dreams are more than just a realm in my subconscious, they’re real.
In my dreams, I have your eyes, your smile, and everything’s new under the sun. In my dreams I am lost looking for something, anything feels like a mother. In my dreams, I too am abandoned, unwanted. In my dreams, I am you.
When I Look Into Your Eyes, When I My Own Daughter
I imagined Mum running wild with her ponytail, perhaps clawing her way at a concert to get closer to Dad on stage. I never picture her as a free-spirited human being (or a groupie who jumps around at a concert). In my mind she was timid and sad right after she was born. I noticed she forgot to breathe at times, she was the epitome of absence. It’s hard to imagine her being beautifully present. Even to this day I couldn’t for the love of god see the very thing that made Father fell madly in love with her that he literally gave up for her his fame, and eventually, his life.
All languages that derive from Latin form the word “compassion” by combining the prefix meaning “with” (com-) and the root meaning “suffering” (Late Latin, passio). In other languages, Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance – this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means “feeling”.
In languages that derive from Latin, “compassion” means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, “pity”, connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. “To take pity on a woman” means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.
That is why the word “compassion” generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
To have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion -joy , anxiety, happiness, pain… there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.
Life After God, Douglas Coupland
drips on honeydew holy water new
icy breeze colourful rainbow rain, rain on me
don’t bite the bliss on an empty stomach
but ignore ignore, red flags or compliance
so wobbly a place you barely stand
filled with cracks you’re bound for heartbreaks
here we are and here i am
you go be you, i’ll stay and pretend
a friend that is not till the end
a ship that is slowly sinking
quietly drift drift like the wind softly
gone and forgotten, i’ll be
a ring on your plate when i cooked you
eggs, our years apart summarised into one morning
of jars and jars, bottled up feelings
of you looking into me, looking into something
of me saying things without a sound
our lives in suspended compartments
bubbles of cliches against time voices people
it is kind, it is patient and it is all you need but
it doesn’t conquer all, it’s never the answer
my love for you, insincere and vague.
you are
hope, hopping
you trample here
and there and in between
existence
for absence is what
you do best, to make
the heart grows fonder
resilience
isn’t your strength
you’d stay in bed for days
for tiny heartbreaks
persistence is
when you speak
of love you never
speak low
even in silence
your screams
aloud
loving to the end
longing to be
found
again
you’re my star, my big big shining star, I met you
one night, I met you under the limelight
your oversized shirt and my boots a number too small, they hurt my feet I’ve been limping dancing my years away
if only I knew how to tell you how I long
to hold your hand, but your fingers show me you want nothing but to slip them into mine and be vulnerable
so I held my guard down for that one. minute.
you didn’t turn the lights on and sat in the dark with me and I turned sluggish swimming an ocean of pride,
where’s my life-jacket?
still I let you
I let you love
you’re something big and I am
nothing more than forgotten dew in
a windy morning, but you,
you are sunlight
you are a new day
you have that smile, that
held back smile and a twinkle
in the eye
that says that I am
more than what I show
and I feel that I am more
than I want to be
hello hello, you said hello
I said goodbye, I love you, goodbye
-hello, goodbye, I love you
from Letters to Lovers Lost, re-published just now.
These were the nights when gaps spotted in our time loop and father came back to us.
He’d travelled to stay for few days, playing house. Mother’s smiles reappeared and she’d dance under the moonlight.
At night I would see from a slit on the door slightly ajar, his eyes turning tender and kind, her complexion radiant.
I’d see them holding each other, her breasts upon his chest. He’d tell her places he’s afraid of, she’d tell him her dreams.
She’d say, “Wherever you are in life you’ll always have tonight.”
They’d look each other in the eyes and after a while she’d lead him but she’d be the only one who was dancing. She’d twirl to the ticking clock, she’d circle through time while he was drinking –one gulp after another, gazing intently at her –a much younger her, at their younger selves.
He’d hum her old letters he knew by heart with a voice barely heard.
Time would stop and in that second I’d know, wherever I am in life I’ll have them forever in my heart.
there was a time when
everything was everything and
we didn’t try to be anything
what do you carry around all day
besides a bucket of flowers
and heart full of promises of a new day?
here’s a tiny sting of guilt to share
there there, i’ve been there
nobody likes anybody in this town
forgive me i didn’t know better
Lately I’ve been thinking of the reason behind all of these words that I am writing (and carelessly spreading into this fucked up wounded world).
But then I remember this young girl who changed her mind about jumping out of her window, because of my words, and I thought that is enough of a reason.
Camus died of a car accident, and not of his lungs. Life is absurd. Everybody thinks they knew the answers.
i can never understand how
the universe works; or how you
expand like the milky way spreading
in space i can only stare from
a good distance.
“…there are clouds in these dreams and i am flying hard between ashes,
did you not get burned at stakes?
there are words in these dreams but I am not one saying them,
to swallow alone is pain. to breathe, a sin.
not one word out but here are letters for when you wake up,
she said, you will tell them how to say it out loud,
even with tears in their eyes. tell them.
and so I write.”
Get this book here.
it’s always messy down here in your basement
where memories go to a happy place
they say i’m in love with love
but i never knew how to flaunt it
in between unsaid words and
staggering poetry so let me write it simple:
i want you, life, serene and tender
i want you, love, without going so much on a bender
Right before our parting, mother sat me down in a meadow. She apologetically held my hands then placed a flower crown on my hair.
She said, “Remember this, love, for time is a loop. You will come back for me.”
Little did she know, time was in denial.
So suddenly as I realised this, she turned into a montage of old photographs between flashing lights.
I saw her,
the staggering girl between
dark webs,
I saw her vague fingers inside
his feathered glory,
such indifferent beak cloud,
white rush oh there there
brute brute blood!
here’s burning roof and tower
the centre cannot hold,
things fall apart…
____
Phrases in W. B. Yeats’ poems “Leda and the Swan” and “The Second Coming”, in this part of my book, are rearranged in an attempt of deconstruction. WB Yeats poems are an integral and essential part of my book, When I, My Own Daughter, available here.
Photo Credit: Alessio Albi
