A Skin Too Few

The Window Shakes

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 03:18:00 -0400

I woke up to autumn’s first cold snap.

My drawn curtains breathing then snapping shut.

While I gathered my conviction to get out of bed and close the window.

I reflected on the dream I was having,

You were sitting on my bedroom sill,

Peeling a Chinese mandarin, tossing its skin aside.

You asked that I leave you so you could change

Coming back in you were wearing new clothes.

While I thought about this my sense of smell came back,

And I could smell your hair over my pillow.

It takes two nights for it to disappear

A sweet artificial flavour, maybe mandarin.

As I got up I thought, Is that why I was dreaming about you?

Your indistinguishable presence has worked its way into my dreams.

I pulled up my blinds and closed the window.

Outside the cold breeze taped on my window rattling it softly,

Drawing my attention, it was then that I realised.

This is how I know myself

As a reflection in my bedroom window.

I’m a vague image transposed over the pane,

I look to close and I see only shadows of what’s there.

My eyes stay and my gaze wanders too deeply

Now it’s beyond the veneer, down the road where the river is ebbing.

My Unremarkable Portrait

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 06:58:00 -0400

Ellie I’ve reached a new low in writing, I think this poem is god awful tacky. But It’s probably best to keep writing tripe then go on waiting for good inspiration and while waiting go stale.

My Unremarkable Portrait

I often wonder how I’d turn up in a police composite sketch.

I’ve nothing remarkable to remind you of me,

Mildly handsome,

Emphasis on the mild.

Always unshaven,

My girlfriends chide me over that one.

Perhaps something like my voice?

Just putting it like that reveals how indistinct I am.

And I’m telling you I only have a degree of my father’s charisma.

A love of mine once remarked that I have a smooth back.

I can imagine it now – “I can’t remember officer-
I mean… He has a very smooth back.”

“Tonight on the six o’clock news,

Police search for purse snatcher;

Victims say he has a very smooth back.”

I think I will just start wearing wacky ties.

Untitled.

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 20:02:00 -0500

The drinks,

You ask me.

‘Have you written anything lately?’

The answer is ‘no’.

What is there to write?

The excitement of revolution,

Has given way to dead children.

I won’t document the suffering I don’t understand.

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve being too busy.

There is nothing to write anymore.’

‘What about this?’

‘Can you mark the passing of hope,

Against the urbane?’

‘Isn’t that what post modernism is?’

A facetious poem for every child solider.

The Bouquet

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 22:51:37 -0500

As I wait for you with the bouquet, I think:

These lilies have pollen the darkest hue.

And I’ve learned that there are colours beyond this spectrum,

So I cannot see the beauty that attracts the bees.

They have one chance to sting you;

Then they die.

Peripheral Limb Paranoia

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:54:00 -0500

I first noticed it when I was holding Laura on the couch.

Her lithe figure was a dead weight on my arm. It inebriated life in my tingling limb. I moved my arm to be underneath her neck but then my leg somehow became stuck in an elevated position; life drained away. I twisted my torso, lowering my leg but now my breathing became laborious. She turned around and looking concerned asked,

‘Are you okay?’

‘I just can’t get comfortable.’ She seemed pensive. ‘It’s just the couch.’

‘Do you want to go to bed?’

‘Yeah, I do. I’d like that.’

My frustrations didn’t leave me; I gritted my teeth and bore out the sensation of pins and needles. When I woke up early in the morning I found that in my unconscious sleep I’d slipped away from her. I reached out and rested my arm over her shoulder, than I gently tugged her, drawing her out of sleep. I whispered.

‘Hold me.’

‘What?’

‘Hold me.’

She didn’t seem aware, still asleep, but then she rolled over and her breasts pillowed against my spine and her arm bent over my shoulder and held my chest tightly. Everything eased out; fogginess and haziness returned me to sleep. In my mind I tried to see the image of us in my bed. Happily, she’s holding onto me, except something inside of me, like a cavity or a cold fire is consuming everything inside and if I don’t do something to stop this it will consume her too. The thought of her annihilation is too much to bear and the thought that I might cause it makes me sick inside.

avecaesar: Upekkha, 2011. por Nermine...

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 06:49:39 -0500

avecaesar:

Upekkha, 2011. por Nermine Hamman.

http://www.nerminehammam.com/

ya3nibahibbekb2a: “الجيش و الشعب يد واحدة”

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 06:48:23 -0500

ya3nibahibbekb2a:

“الجيش و الشعب يد واحدة”

When I Wake Up

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 08:37:00 -0500

I feel like a open cut Mongolian mine.
A missing pole on the sphere.
A conscious as jumbled as an Indian Jungle.
Endangered as a Burmese tiger.
As sick as a Chinese river.
As disparate as a Tibetan citizen.
A stray cat in Tokyo.

My love she is an Indonesian needle,
Poisoning my Timor heart.
She treats me,
Like a forgotten aborigine,
As an abandoned land owner.
We’re as divided as a Pakistani mountain range,
As lost as a Korean crane.

On the Train

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 06:13:59 -0500

We’re two old friends on the train from Harajuku going back to Khaosan and in a single glance we’d appear as two tired journeyman. For a while now we’ve been lost and in silence we wait until our journey will come to an end. I wait in a reverie for that last stop to come and reflecting I wonder when it was that we had become lost. If I asked you, you’d tell me that it happened when we went down that alleyway with the bizarre shops selling children’s toys. When we reached the end of the alley, you said the bar was down the lane on the right and walking down that lane and then taking another, I descried eventually that it was the lane to the left. Back tracking we went down that lane but we never found the bar; it wasn’t obvious to me then, but now I realise I was just as lost as you. When we gave up and found our way into the first bar we saw; I said to you what Beccy had said to me before we left on this trip. “We’re reaching a point in our lives where the only thing we share is how long we’ve known each other.” You didn’t take to that point. I tried to talk to you about art and the influence of Japanese prints on Van Gogh; but you weren’t interested in that either.

I’m on this train with you and we’re waiting silently for our stop. I look across at the window opposite us and in it I see our reflection. Translucent and vague like the surface of a tumid river; the world is empty and it moves on underneath or just past this pane. Then breaking my thoughts you say, “We look like two bookends.” And so you begin a Simon and Garfunkel tune;
“Old friends, old friends sat on their park bench like bookends…”

When I Remember You It’s Like This

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 06:10:42 -0500

I’m swimming in Tea Tree Bay.

You’re under a Pandanus,

Lying in the de jour rain, you sunbath in a sun-shower.

Are as distinct to me as the irony.

The shore is in constant metamorphous yet always remaining the same.

I come out of the water for my towel,

And handing it over,

You thank me for putting up with your problems.

And when you say that-

I hate the chagrin smile across my face as I have to empty out another cliché.

‘It’s okay- I mean; I don’t really know what you mean.

I don’t think you have any problems.’

Because at this point it’s too late,

You’ve become my noetic love.

Your soft voice and my anxiety,

It is as the cold rain that’s over this ocean.

Dissolve

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 06:09:47 -0500

Seeping out of our social circles,

and escaping through my over glorified laughter.

The drone of this party is a Sirens song.

Its acerbic air dissolves me, I keel over, onto your couch,

I’m sinking into the folds of your lounge.

About sails in our conversation and below is my wan smile.

Lost in a fog of voices, I’m losing the tack of your discussion.

Eyes like bright white filaments blink back to me in Morse code,

I’m untethered, swallowed, yawning down these cushions.

I used to breathe, but now I gasp and dissolve.

Falling tip-topping into the overside,

Drowning in the folds of your lounge.

broadsidezine: ISSUE#4 of BROADSIDE Otherwise known as the...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:28:01 -0400

broadsidezine:

ISSUE#4 of BROADSIDE

Otherwise known as the “boobs & water in black & white” issue… kind of like all our issues, except this one had a lot more tits.

leaveobashar: A little boy takes a bath in a UNHCR bucket in...

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 06:51:55 -0400

leaveobashar:

A little boy takes a bath in a UNHCR bucket in the Zaatri Camp, Jordan.

The situation in the desert camp is not a pleasant one, it’s very hot and extremely dusty and Jordanian authorities do not have enough funds to place Syrian refugees in proper temporary homes. (video report here)

You can help these refugees in Jordan by donating to one of the following:

International Rescue Committee

USA for UNHCR

The UNHCR in Jordan

Islamic Relief USA

Muslim Aid

Thanks to Lens of A Young Emigrant

My Dear Friend, Do not trust this voice. It is only another dialogue which I’ve taken to...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 09:04:41 -0400

My Dear Friend,

Do not trust this voice. It is only another dialogue which I’ve taken to convey this text.

It’s vitally important that if I’m to start this queer text, I’m to start it here. That is the subject matter of heteroglossia and the abject sense of truth in these matters. It seems to me quite clear that the way I present myself in various social settings, on print and in all forms of expression is delicately balanced with the appropriate needs of my ego. Examining the carnival of expressions one is left to ask which is really me. Obviously they all truly fail and that it’s really a fruitless search. I’m no closer to an understanding of it then you will be. Perhaps we can’t grasp the essence of who I am but only feel it as we do the wind. I’m more inclined to compare it to an ocean, we can see it viscerally before us in this text. The wind is ever ethereal but my soul has taken the shape of the vessel it is carried in and that sea weighs heavily at the bottom of my very existence.

A final note, please consider your own ego when taking in the breadth of mine; as it will undoubtedly influence you in any attempt to measure that ocean inside of me. Understand that it is subject to the arbitrary existence of infinity, you aren’t the same person you were a moment ago. If I read this five years from now I may as well be as sufficiently distant from myself that I’m addressing a friend and not myself. Just understand that you received this text because at the moment of bequeathing I trusted to you what I consider to be my ego death. I trusted you despite knowing that as infinite perpetual change goes on I might not trust you tomorrow.

Take me Back

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 21:18:22 -0400

The Muezzin holds the Minaret,

Empties out the Adhan,

and me out of bed.

The flights called me home,

The ticket stump and not the homesick heart.

See my ribs then hear phlegm on my chest.

Hair greased in sweat.

Don’t mind mine pediculus humanus capiti.

Summer was there winter is here,

Everyone I see is sick

A girl coughs up the verite de jour

Bandaged in a fauve of new clothes

And every suit an apparatchik

Everyone I see is sick.

My uncle is sick.

And no one has seen him in three weeks.

That’s sick.

The first thing I do when I get home is call him.

The second is call my friends.

Let’s go out and get fucked.

That’ll be sick.

I’m sick.

We’re fasting- the spiritually dead.

Take me back I want to breathe again.

Take me back to the minaret.

Let me tell you the cliches short

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:40:00 -0400

Let me tell you the cliches short.

Cut my conversations quick,

The river is in ebb.

Fast and hold my breath,

Said everything to be said.

I’m a wave fading on the shore,

Watch me dissolve.

I’m a body oscillating in the dark,

Watch me disappear among the stars.

I’m born a skin too few,

Watch me disconnect.

On Henri Le Sidaner and going to Art Galleries.

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 06:37:15 -0400

The Voyeur opines with both his posture and his yawn.

The artist has a fondness for the scene,

ardently waiting to be joined.

The half empty bottle of wine, the candle lit table, the love seat by the water.

An empty Venetian canal.

To appreciate the scene you must stand back,

as far as the canvas was to the inspiration.

For balcony overlooking the harbor; this is two metres.

For the Voyeur, in the art gallery, time is quiet.

His posture will fall with the brush strokes,

His posture will relax when he is immersed.

His posture will frown when he’s curious,

If he is bored his jaw will explore the space.

The painter was faithful but the Voyeur was not.

The tables were left empty, the seat is still cold.

The canals are still.

The Voyeur is seeing a Picasso in the Fall.

Sam Harvey.

She’s holding my hand and my heart is just going pow-pow-pow like some sort of damn Buddy Rich...

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 10:14:13 -0400

She’s holding my hand and my heart is just going pow-pow-pow like some sort of damn Buddy Rich Drum solo.

A Girl I Knew - J.D. Salinger

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 01:36:31 -0400

A Girl I Knew - J.D. Salinger

Why We Broke Up

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:24:06 -0400

“…Would you listen? –Hey come on. I want to tell you something; you know that? I’ve got your attention now? Good, I just wanted to say something. Sie sind sehr schön. Weissen Sie dass? What does it mean? It means something in German. Well I’m not going to tell you. I’m obsessed, you know that? Really obsessed. By J.D. Salinger of course. Everything is about intertextuality. Bahktin calls it Dialogism. Well I bought Nine Stories two days ago, and last night I read The Laughing Man, when I finished I nearly cried. There’s this moment, in the story, where- the girl, the girl, wants to play baseball and she’s fielding right, but she’s using the wrong mitt. And it’s the same mitt. As the mitt in Catcher in the Rye, the one that his younger brother used to carry around. Allie, well don’t you think that’s brilliant? It’s a symbol for his refusal to cast off his innocence.

I’ve been reading online all about how he never published a work after 62’; but he allowed a publication for a collection of his short stories- in Japan. In Japanese. There’s this one story in there, apparently, but no one can confirm it, about a soldier’s perspective on the landing in Normandy. And in it he’s watching all of these people dying around him and he sees this priest, who’s crawling about the sand trying to find his glasses because he can’t see what’s in front of him. Someone- online- said that maybe- the Japanese book-relates to his short story A Perfect Day for Bannahfish because in that, Seymour Glass gives Muriel Glass a book of German Poetry which he claims is the best poetry in the world, then he expects her to learn German in order to read that one book. So if you love me you’ll get me that book from Japan. I’m only joking. How brilliant though; is that?”

“I’ve never read Catcher in the Rye.”