birdsongsofpersia

[birdsongsofpersia]

the wooing of the winds,

[Since my house burned down I now have a better view of the rising moon] ― Mizuta Masahide

He was one who you meet and know they will soon disappear.

"I was watching them burn their fingers away / they were so far gone that they didn't even notice the burning / fingers singed / faces stern / cards held like only beasts / can hold on. I watched them / waiting my moment / serving them ever more. Another whiskey on the rocks, Ming Chong?"

He was a forest of tattoos and wore thick rimmed glasses, a large beard and a way of looking at people when they spoke. He made you feel dear and then left you with it hanging in the wind for years to come.

We were inside an old farm house. There were goats bleating and cats slinking. The grass was overgrown, and the stars were out above us. A woman named Nisja had offered us a place to stay out of the blue right there in the street outside of Sofia and fed us yoghurt and cheese from the does, freshly made bread and figs from nearby trees. Nisja had spent ten years in South Africa and spoke like she were a meerkat would if it could speak in human words. She bade us farewell and goodnight, she had work in the morning, and instructed us to wander down the road to get a ride the next morning.

"I would get back and tell my old man these stories and he would just smile, tell me to go slow, be careful, never lose myself too much. I always listened. I would wait till I could see their heads dropping. They were too proud to ever turn me down on a few rounds.  Easiest money I ever made. A drunk always underestimates their mask in poker. And the Chinese, least most I know, need the thrill of the risk, of being at one with those ancient numbers, shapes, signs. It's as close to spirit as exists for the majority, throwing it all into feeling. There's nothing left when they get like this.

"This one night, I'm sitting there. I'd just swooped in. It had been a long night at the takeout - making deliveries all evening. The night hung to bodies, we left a trail of sweat everywhere we made off to. One of those nights where a cold beer had my name on it. I could hear it calling for me even before I entered. But just one. I had to be lucid for them. One that comes from a shock from the milder days - the cicadas put you into a trance - they lull you in and suddenly, just like that, you realise you've become your other self. Something completely separate from the day before. One you haven't known since the last heat came down. The one of the future, in plans, of what to do with the winnings even before you've made it. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth...you get lost, you lose your nerve."

We were finishing our dinner out in the grass. We'd been waiting for a ride so long that time no longer made sense. When had we begun? Regardless, the day had stretched before us...mocking us until Nisja stopped. We were bearded ghosts soliciting the fish motors swimming on past.

"I'm sitting observing them," he continues, "and there's smoke everywhere. They smoke like wild forest fires, you know the kind...which begin to swallow up the small towns and encroach on the cities. I never saw them without a cig in their hands. I'd catch them dozing off and their fingers blackened by the butts. Man, you gotta see it to believe it. Their chef will be dropping ash in the food, washing it out under the sink, repeat. I watch them, blend in around them, they accept me. And thus, I can sit in on their rounds."

He pauses.

"I went in only when they wouldn't notice their losses. I don't take everything. I let them believe they're winning. Some rounds I put in little and fold early to give them the sensation they're winning. By the end they're so drunk they can't count and pay up and collapse. One night I could make hundreds. Sometimes more than I could make in a week. But I had to be careful. Only the nights when they were far already wrecked. Sometimes months would go by…but I had the feeling that there was some approaching doom. I continued, regardless. It’s like death, isn’t it? You know it’s certain, but you keep living, you keep pegging away…”

There's a silence, a reprieve. If a voice could own a room, it would be his. Years will go by and it remains. “I put the money mostly into touring and new tatts. I was away sometimes for months at a time with the band. But I didn’t know what money meant at the time. I didn’t know you could live like this…” he says, as he gestures out towards the land. “Tom Waits crooned that money…” I sigh, “is just something you throw off the back of a train..” He begins to laugh. The next day will show us just how it is so. War and bodyguards and loss would await us. They were the days which were lived in the winds. Out there under that huge sky and the inked lines on his arms are pulsating like octopuses traversing moonlit seas. I watch them. Below him there was a puddle of black ink. When he crawls into bed later that night, I collect it in a small bottle. Something in me knows that one day, all this will be words written to the orchestra of the night rain in France, years and years after. Last I heard he was in Ecuador burning down his house, sleeping in hammocks, strumming blue grass out in the winds. And the wind shall say, are you trying to seduce me? And he shall reply, can I serve you another? And the wind will accept gracefully and blow some more,   Photo - Plaisir d'amour en Iran (The Pleasure of Love in Iran) 1976, dir. Agnès Varda.

#short story #agnes varda #poker tales #hitchhiking tales #hitch #hitchhiking #lit prose #bulgarian stories #bulgaria #mizuta masahide #iran

[birdsongsofpersia]

afghan scream,

[Wherever you have dreamed of going, I have been camping there, And left firewood for when you arrive.] -Hafez He, more than most, feels it in his bones. He's French-Afghan- eats cheese spiced with cumin and recites poetry, all the while fearfully looking at the cracks in the ground as if he could disappear into them. One day we're walking through vineyards at night drinking wine. It was Kashef's idea. He believed that things give off their powers when consumed in the place of origin. He swears, sometimes, the grapes speak to him when he's sipping on a glass out there. But tonight he can only listen to the dry-rainless earth as a sign of the menace that looms. He tells me that it's not the cracks themselves, it's that nothing is whole, or pure, that everything separates. That there is not one thing that is completely formed. I laugh softly. He has always been dramatic of his life, but I know it often comes with reason. The wine goes down warm in my belly, massaging my kidneys. He could pass for a bandit with his clothes - red handkerchief scarfed tied around his neck, tattoos of teapots and donkeys stretching down his arms, rolling around his back, and those eyes - black sesame and soft channelled intensity. "What's happening in your life for the separation to threaten you so?" "She's really leaving me this time" he murmurs. "We were cycling by the sea. I have six months until my residency would have been granted. It's been almost five years, tu vois? She'll cut it, just like that, and ask for a divorce. I'll be sent back. With what is happening...they will torture me on first sight..." She'd told him that she was leaving him many times now. I knew her, and knew that words can be a weapon, an ambush, a hideout, a dumbara lute to fall asleep to. We'd once spent a long time together camping in the woods, hiking canyons. But there was always something I couldn't place. "I just cycled until I found a way to drop straight into the sea. The waves woke me up. I began to scream with salt water in my throat. She'd disappeared by then. Perhaps I wanted to remember what I meant to her, but with her she just wanted to forget, to erase me, as if I were just a grain of rice thrown into the sea. Perhaps I was. Only I was rice with the tendency to scream. Not even the waves themselves wanted to eat me. Nothing, nobody, could desire me once again.” One night some time ago, we were pasting a stencil out at the top of a tower. Kashef would spend hours sketching out landscapes from his homelands and ask me to write about them - that is, blind, without ever having been there. We'd climb tall hideous blocks and work away real quick. Capucine, his wife, would follow us as a lookout, but this time she wanted to paint. "Va te faire cuire un œuf", she says, with a husky voice. She wears ripped fishnet stockings, a denim skirt, and a red flannel shirt cut at the bottom to rise up to her naval. We wander out over to the edge and look out at the city. Marseille is enormous at the best of times, but tonight it felt like it could go on forever. We smoke artemisia, a dream herb, mixed with another without name that Kashef was cultivating in an abandoned allotment in the city. He got the seeds sent from back home and in return would help out anybody who came his way on the boats. Something about these plants gave the oddest of lucid dreams - every time I'd find myself walking in the desert, slowly, so thirsty that my throat was being ripped open. But I could always navigate myself to water, and then from the water came a language I could not place. But every time, in the dream, I understand more, as if I could train myself to learn it through the desert trips. We turn back after a while. Behind us painted up on the tower, is a woman wearing a burka. Her eyes, though, are what reach out. Eyes that terrified me, but I could not look away, transfixed. Capucine looks on too, and then walks away without a word. Kashef tries to follow her, but comes upon the spray cans she left. On top of one is something dark. He picks it up, observes it, with a frown on his face. It's a ring. Her wedding wing, he realises. Sprayed black. Remember poetry, I urge him, that night as we drank wine together. The following days pass and his unease grows stronger, this fear of the dark matter that has consumed centuries. Under those stones lie memories, and the future unknown. This isn't just a metaphor, I tell myself. One can feel the earth in one's mouth in certain parts of the world. We'd been camping out by a river. One night we had broken into a holiday villa as we had the tendency to do those days, looking for a way to get the heart moving. Kashef had switched on the television, searching for an answer. Cooking shows. Kids shows. Political meetings. A woman speaking of existence. He settled on the news. There was a live shot of the evictions of Kabul. Planes were taking off before the Taliban took over. The newsreader just mumbles, with no human words to utter. The insides were so full that people climbed on top of each other. When they finally took off - full to the brim of spices and photos and a mix of genders long unknown, the camera stretches back- there are people clinging to the bottom of the plane, hanging in mid-air. The camera can't keep still, hands shaking from the unseeable. People start to fall hundreds of metres up in the air. One, the studio moves back to, keeps ice cool and captures the falls in minute detail. The cameraman zooms in on their faces, their last expressions before they hit the ground. They are all chanting, terrified, but chanting before their deaths. "What are they chanting?" I ask, bleakly. "They're passing over everything that has given them life" he says. "Perhaps some recite poetry, too. Words from the Koran. But most settle on poetry, gratitude. What else can one do?" Fuzz. Another camera angle, as Kashef weeps. It takes a close up of a young child falling. "They’ll make grief pornography out of us. We'll only be known for our tears. But puppets cannot cry. We always knew when they came that this would happen. Those stars, they wave while the sky is falling. Cardamom seeds will hail down upon us. An Afghan heart is like a pomegranate, don't they know?" I have no words. I rest my head on his shoulder. Outside there are noises. A car has pulled up. I pull at Kashef, but he refuses to move. The sofa is full of his tears, and he's screaming again. "What now, what now? Do I become one of them?" The front door. A couple. I can smell the perfume and cologne from the living room. They walk in, drop their bags and then their jaws. We had painted the walls with the faces of Afghan women. Poetry scrawled everywhere sent him by his friends. Kashef sees them, and begins to laugh. "Voulez-vous un peu de sésame? Ou un abricot afghan, peut-être ?" They begin to scream. Kashef smiles at last. It's time we left.

Photo, self taken, Graubünden, Switzerland, September 2021.

#Afghanistan #hafez #grafitti #migration #short story

[birdsongsofpersia]

The Pre-Natal Man,

Short story, written august 2020. Yes, these words still exist. Sorry for the abandonment. Everything has been abandoned, these days, not just them.

#typewriter #short story

[birdsongsofpersia]

inside the volcano,

[imprisoned here, my voice will fill the trees] -Ovid, Metamorphoses (tr. by Charles Martin)

You said, write a poem, out here, in front of this ridiculous blue sky. In India. Where you are not. Where instinct cut you off. My chest is of too many murdered trees for palm. Could barely wish the sun well / before it

sank away. You ate my restlessness, I ate great happiness. And one more, of isolation. Then you gnawed on my mother, my brother and all the things we have not said to each other. April 26th. Another year passes : once I climbed trees instead of swallowing them. The moon that night shone nectar orange. In India, we were walking a market together. Spices - Cardimon, cumin, paprika-bad-dream-chili. They say there was a murder close-by. A cow swallowed a huge lucid dream fly. I am always running to witness each crying beggar and each untouchable billionaire and I too am weeping for loss of life. On the way to the temple, I have a fight with a city cleaner because of shining eyes and we call it a stalemate, shake hands, and bow. In bed, my skin is a jungle, a ground alive with creatures that know only pleasure. Shhhh, you say. Shhhh. I have not slept for five days since --- then, I wonder, did I throw it all into the Barren Island volcano? Do I burn everyone I touch --- and great happiness too? Still, I saved a little inside a folded napkin with shiny beads, right here, to chew on...for desperate times, Photo : Steve McCurry, India Photography 15

#metaphorphoses #ovid #volcano #india #poem #non poem #sacred medicine #spiritual medicine #insomnia #happiness #instinct #lit prose #steve mccurry

[birdsongsofpersia]

Sacred Insomnia for the timeless,

                 [They died because in the black substance of someone else’s night all the streets looked the same …] - Anne Carson in Men in the Off Hours                        Time enters, announces its arrival, then disappears to drink in the wardrobe, day after day. I spend months contemplating its arrival and departure, the bleeding in of the days. Coronavirus penetrates every vessel. It’s why I venture here, some nights. They call me in, round back into the shack. They are temporary sloths of all sizes after work, unable to rise to their feet after a long day. Their hands are crude oil black, crusted with their toils. “Come...join us...have a glass o’ poison with us”, they croon out, drinking home-brewed schnapps. They were already merry as beasts as if feasting within the centre of the earth. There are eight or nine of them, or perhaps four. They work as shoe shiners that spread out throughout the city during the day anticipating the move and insecurities of those in transit. This is a land full of important meetings. Everyone has to have immaculate shoes. It was 3am and I had been walking bare foot, feeling rusty. I was sleepless and longing for stormy dreams, the sanctuary. Without it death comes like a thousand mad symphonies. Do I need the rest, or the dreams that take me to wisdom? I long for the return to great knowledge. I have not dreamt for weeks now. I lose it all murmuring poetry at street-lights. In certain states of mind each lamp post contains a floating line beside it. I try to touch it but my hand passes straight through. They have come to show me something that cannot be touched. They have come to show me how to observe, to wait, to greet them with presence. Meanwhile, restless, I build a cathedral of memories. Of childhood. I watch the blossom fall through the cold spring nights. I peel away my mind. I hear the same words, over and over again. As if it is a funeral for the state of creation. All leaves me. I walk the streets and hear soft footsteps behind me. Something tells me they are of the tigers I once had nightmares of for months as a kid. I turn, though, and of course they are not there. Some of the ancients would sit me down in a desert to tell me : they are tracking you to see that you remain on the right path. And which path is this? They disappear off into the sands, laughing to themselves. “We never sleep”, admits one man, darker with shoe polish than the others. “There’s no time to give time away. This is the secret of the success of this little country. You watch the clock. You avoid eye contact. And you get to go where you are going. But we...enjoy the art of watch burning here. Ever done it?” I gaze at him. My mind doesn’t quite work in these times. Nothing adds up. Sleep can take it all away. He extends a grubby hand, mumbling about cleanliness in the world of chaos, and presents himself as Serj, and hands me a watch with a shot of Schnapps. I loathe the drink and switch it for a cup of cacao from my thermos. The watch is a Rolex, evidently worth more than I’ve ever spent in my life. There are those who spend more on a cup of coffee than I spend on food in a year. Who worry only of how to accumulate more. It is soon time for my annual burning of wealth  ceremony. Serj grins. The sleight of hand to take off a wristwatch without the other noticing until they were already halfway across the city. I don’t understand. With how everyone lives in time, how can they be away from it for so long? “We have truckloads of identical replicas...we replace them and their owners know nothing about it until weeks later and then who knows how it happened..” Another stretches her hand towards me. Wagna is her name. She had been strumming a banjo in the corner of the room, eyes like broken glass shining under the moon. “I used to ask people I met : tell me true words. Now I think it’s a little intrusive, and puts people on the spot. You are invited if you wish to share. But today I will show you the truest manifestation I can muster from within me.” She stands up. Stretches high up to the ceiling and begins to hum a song. I watch her, mesmerised. The more I watch her, the more her arms appear to become branches and her feet a tree trunk. “Damnit Wagna”, another says, a small cannonball of a man, “don’t leave your leaves all over the ground again when you do that.” She remains like this for a long time, only the winds outside communicating. She sits, as if falling, hit by lightning, then sits back up and casually begins to strum the banjo. They begin to toss watches into a large still drum. “All this wealth...” Serj laments, “and for what and to which ends?” A tiny woman, no larger than a baby kangaroo hobbles up with a match. She is clearly in great pain with whatever is afflicting her, but smiles broadly, filling her faces, wrinkles spreading like a sun across swamp water. She tosses it in, and the watches begin to hiss, going up in flames. There is the sound of motors dying, civilisation cracking, trembling, falling to a halt. A unseen voice from the darkness : “my truth is that once I dreamt I was a bird, like so many do. But I felt extinction stalking me, stalking...us. And ever since then, I haven’t slept. The terror of truth, and knowing what they know. I feel like I’m going mad, now...my unwillingness to face the end times.” I swallow deep down into my guts. I feel shaky. My body could perhaps give it all in right now. But I stand. I haven’t danced for a long while. Months and years. The cannonball-like man takes out a drum and begins to play along to the banjo. I begin to move to the sounds, urging myself to go into trance, to forget the body, the eyes, and pass into the lands of the groundless. I doubt it all. In the doubt, I throw my body more recklessly. I become a multiple car crash upon a cliff toppling into a vast canyon. Bodies who have lost their songs. Eyes without glimmer. Naked skin that does not reach out. One must live the inner live so absolutely that a path is cleared towards the future days. Return to this frenzy. I am lashing out at the future, at days of paying rent, getting by, becoming forsaken, a beggar, a speck with nothing but hunger. Sacred hunger. Tears leaving me as if trapped by a dam broken by thousands of fish taking back their river, the space where they have always lived and died.  I could sacrifice myself to return. Some hours go by. They had continued drinking, telling stories. But I had to go deep. Then dawn chirps. I collapse to the ground. The tree bends down to kiss me on the forehead, then leaves with the others to earn their daily bread. Just Serj remains. Only now, sitting up, do I see his long white beard that I swear wasn’t there before. I look down, and I too have one, long and straggly like a goat’s, down to my knees. I have become old again. And I will return to youth. The mind and spirit can transform anything. “This...” he murmurs, “is why we don’t sleep. Welcome to the lands of sacred insomnia. We remember why we’re here in these times...and no clock will replace this...” I open the door. Dawn has appeared like a threat, like a mango into my begging bowl, like an unstoppable herd of charging elephants. Days of order, days of workers running to meetings with their chests thundering, days of forgotten dreams. I step outside, and daylight does the rest, Photo - Stanley Kubrick, Story, began in early February, finished in late April, day before the turning of years. Some things must have a completion...

#LIT prose #short story #stanley kubrik #anne carson #corona #insomnia #sleep #night

[birdsongsofpersia]

A complaint / for I’m not ready,

[Haven’t you heard of the young lad from Shouling who tried to learn to walk the way people do in Hantan? Before he had acquired this new skill he had forgotten how he used to walk, so all he could do was come crawling home on all fours. If you don’t go away now, sir, you’ll forget what you used to know]. - from the Chuang Tzu, 17. “Autumn Floods“  tr. by Victor H. Mair Sterile office scenery. A huge oak desk. Two figures. Human or inhuman, no matter. “I have come here to lodge a complaint”, says the first voice, exhaust filling every word “Yes. You may proceed” says the second voice, equally tired, but evidently from routine, the hammering of keys, the monotony of everyday life. “I believe I was mistakenly brought for slaughter.” A sigh fills the air like a slow letting of gas. “What makes you consider that it was a mistake?” “For... I’m not ready.” A rustling of paperwork. A clearing of the throat, tired and tedious. “Are you questioning our decision-making abilities?” the voice croaks out. The lights go dim. There is a screaming, a pounding of feet. LIGHTS. Too much. To blind. A shielding of eyes. Another desert. The winds sound out as if communicating from beyond. TO PITCH BLACK once again. Only stars visible. Immaculate. Vast. The sound of a heart beat, like a drum, overwhelming. A voice that has no mouth spreading across the sands begins. “Even your slaughter...is a deepening. A re-becoming. You do not recognise the gifts in your ruin.” The heart calms. Blinding light once more. There is a fire. Dear friends are there to celebrate the life of this soul. They drink tea, in ecstasy, in trance. There are drums, more than the heart can beat, and the winds appears to sing. BLACK. “It is time”, says the voice. The figure walks out into the abyss, all the while dancing, mourning, heavy, light. / Photo from The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman (1957), the death dance..

#theatre #beginnings #chuang tzu #autumn floods #a complaint #lit prose #ingmar bergman #the seventh seal

[birdsongsofpersia]

Desert return,

[I am released from trouble. I thought it meant to die in comfort. It doesn’t. It means that I die.] - Sophocles, tr. by Ezra Pound, from Hercales’ last words to his son; “The Women of Thracis,”

I wake in an unfamiliar place, but more familiar than where I’ve lived for the last two months. Outside it’s raining huge monsoon rains. I dress. I put on my skin again. I brush my teeth. I hear breathing. I check. Nothing. I swear to you. Nothing. Outside, the desert : dry, endless, without mercy. I adore it. And my cracked throat. All night we wake repeatedly with an unknown thirst. The desert winds. The owl swoops low over the bed. Layers, openings, forgotten memories.  It’s been a long while since my skin sang like this. I see abandoned train stations, and the tracks I used to cross with my bicycle on the way out of all that.  Sometimes I would wish for a train to come on past, though it never would, long disused, and there is always one faint memory of wisdom somewhere, there, to move on out of the way just in case. A wild fruit. A closeness. A flicker of eyes. A knowing. I see the horse, too, on the path to the sea. He and I would stand and stare at each other for a long time, thinking of our sacred lives and mourning our fences, our cages, our prisons. I eat a little bread. The bread eats me. My tiredness fills the room. My insomnia pulls my skin back into place. I leave. I pull the castle doors shut. From inside the owls hoots, and it sounds like, why-why-why. We are cycling back together, in the monsoon. I always forget how these rains come back when I can’t make an important decision. I’m not surprised to see him. He came up behind me at an intersection. It had been years since we’d seen each other, and even then we didn’t have much to say to each other. Now he’s cycling without hands beside me, in the tram tracks, as if he has no worry about his safety. Why would he? His face is purple. When we reach traffic lights and stop, he checks out his hair in the reflection of a car. Moistens it down. A worm comes poking through his cheek. “Where did you go?” I ask him. He shrugs. The red in the traffic light turns to fire for an instant, and I look back at him. He’s styling his hair, once again, and pulls out a beer from his jeans pocket. “And where did you go?” he repeats, staring right through me. “You’re still here... but where did you go?” Photo : Solar eclipse, with a view of the pyramids and Great Sphinx, Giza. August 30, 1905.

#desert #short story #short stories #literature #prose lit #LIT prose #bern #hibernation #switzerland #sophocles #ezra pound #comfort #give me comfort or give me death #solar eclipse

[birdsongsofpersia]

While we starve,

[Me despierto en el río Con el último aliento Abandono mis lamentos Del Sol me voy a aferrar Busco la huella al camino Que alguien vino a marcar Ya los bueyes han borrado Quién me vendrá a encontrar] Fiebre, History of Colour

I slept under a large roof squeezed between towers of concrete rising high. I thought, what if it were to topple down? So be it. Better than live this day without sleep and full of exhausted regrets. It was 9am. There was snow everywhere. I had passed a policeman on the way and he greeted me. I knew he could be the one throwing the tear gas. I stayed silent. The protest gathering began at midday. It took a long time for him to leave his spot. It’s tough to find a place to sleep in the light of day in -6. I returned to where I met him, gazed up and down the road to find it empty, and crossed into the warehouse. It was a Sunday so no one was around but for office workers out beyond in front of their desks paying off their forevers. Sometimes it’s a surprise not to see people churning their bones away 24/7 in this country. I dream of snow falling into me, right through my heart. I dream it’s the end of the world and there’s nothing left but for snow. Snow and my footprints that I had as a child with those red boots. Then I wake. I dream again, and now it is just a blizzard as the police come marching forward towards to protect the last of the bread, piled high in front of a throne and growing stale while we starve, Photo : Day iii. Almost in Davos for the WEP (World Economic Forum). Large writing in the snow, for the military helicopters passing over us reading We Rise Up.

#world economic forum #davos - world economic forum #we rise up #Protest #switzerland #resistance #dreams

[birdsongsofpersia]

a stomach is burning,

And even in Atlantis of the legend The night the seas rushed in, The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves, - Bertolt Brecht, A Worker Reads History, 1928.

Approaching the border, some 20km away, we see them. In the mist and plummeting cold, towards zero. Walking towards us. A dozen or so of them. They are dark, desert dark, and have no bags, nothing. In the middle of nowhere. There's not a town's lights in sight. Not even a twinkle of a street light. "Coño", Eko mutters. It was 5 degrees and falling in the thick mist at almost midnight. We'd been driving together for a good two hours. They had stopped at the peage where the priest had dropped me off. We're squeezed in together in the front. They were driving back to Bilbao, and I was tempted to follow them all the way but there are other roads to be taken. They'll drop me off in Zagreb the next day. They're coming from the south of Greece. They speak of desperation out there in those lands, a country without resources. It's one of those nights where my Spanish gets stuck in the roof of my mouth and can't make it out into the air. Truth be, I wasn't countering on finding them here in the middle of Serbia. Suddenly, Xabi hits the brakes. We had only just passed the figures beside the road. There are many words and curses and shock in the air. The feeling that we can't just drive by as if they really were phantoms. I jump out, and beckon to them walking out there behind us. Merhaba. As-Salaam-Alaikum. And they turn, and begin to walk towards us. "Y ahora, que? Que hacemos? Los llevamos a la frontera? Y después que?" I ask my ride. For the first time in two hours there is a silence. The group walks very, very slowly. As if they can hardly pick up their feet. They are holding their stomachs and look like battered wildebeests. All but three of them -  a kid, who smiles broadly at me when she sees me waving. An old man, too, full of life, and a young woman. I don't understand anything. In a dream of a dream. The rest, their lips are hardened, sandpaper-like, holed cheeks. One stops to vomit into the grass. They arrive without any bewilderment. The young woman speaks English and presents herself to me. She tells me she is from Lebanon, and the rest are from Syria and Iraq. "Que hacemos, tios? Por que nos paramos aquí? Como podemos ayudarles?" I ask my drivers. They remain quiet. They stare ahead, into the night. From the corner of my eye I see the old man smiling softly. His cheeks appear to be made from olive branches, tough and sunken and lived. "Hemos estado esperandoles." he says, with lips that don't move. The words come from his chest. And I look in his eyes and I see them walking, walking, walking. Serbia is endless, but what of Bulgaria through the mountains, Turkey, Syria? "No me preguntas más, por favor. Tenemos algo importante para dar a la vida y nos urge compartirlo." They climb into the van. They all take off their shoes with great respect, apart from one who refuses to take off his boots and stamps his feet, froths at the mouth. I understand nothing. We are twenty kilometres from the border of the European Union with twelve or so refugees in the back of our van. "Chai?" Eko asks. Everybody nods. The woman speaking English introduces the group. Three are architects. One is a builder. Another fixes washing machines. One sews and makes clothes. One works in a desert-foods restaurant (a lot of strange desert meat, she explains). She is a translator. Several wince whenever they make a move as if their bodies are fighting against their will. They've been travelling for six months to get here, walking most of the way. The old man learnt Spanish through suffering with the Mexican telenovela his late wife watched every Tuesday. We pass around tiny glasses of steaming mountain herb tea once it's brewed. Xabi begins to prepare rice and beans. - Where were you walking to? Away from the border? The old man smiles and replies in Spanish, and says that they were walking towards us, and we'd taken longer than they expected. Thus they had walked many kilometres more than necessary. Como lo sabías?, Xavi asks the old man. He just moves his hand slowly towards his heart and closes his eyes, keeping his hand clenched there, and rocks back and forth. We serve the rice. Most hands shake when they take a plate. Collectively they slide two thirds of their food onto three plates - that of the small girl, the old man, and the translator. I gaze at this, dumbfounded. The translator explains that they give all they can to the members of the group who need it most, the young, the old, and in this case, herself, in order to translate. The old man, she whispers, so as for him not to hear it and allow it to go to his head, is very wise, and without wisdom, and courage, how can we sustain ourselves? But we haven't eaten in many days. We'd been eating the plants we could identify out here but there is little beside the motorway. Our stomachs are burning. Not just from the food, or lack of it, but what we have seen, what we see when we close our eyes. I gaze at the other members of the group. They all take their time to eat, savouring each grain. They look back at me as if a field of dust blocks our eyes. They peer at me though, as if we have all known each other before. There are points in my life where this keeps happening. It happened a lot this summer. Really a lot. With almost everyone I met. And then, suddenly, it stopped again. I definitely hadn't met the Azerbaijani guys before but who has? The old man still rocks back and forth clutching his heart. The kid suddenly begins to laugh. She's found the photo of the guys skinny dipping somewhere in turquoise waters. A teenage lad slowly puts his hand over her eyes, grinning, and tickles her under her arms gently with his other hand. She's an orphan, the woman explains. We didn't consider taking her. But she followed, no matter where we went. Now she's the one who finds us food. There's something...unbroken about her, and we need this, to keep alive ourselves.

I do not ask of the memories that remain, the ones that keep them up when they desperately need sleep. The ones that pass down and burn the stomach. When I've done this before it is as if to cut the air out of the room. I open up the sliding door, instinctively, and croon out into the night. I don't know what else to do. This is good preparation for the winter that is to come, I tell myself. There is nothing else to do.

Photo - scorched earth by Anthony Fletcher, oil - [Title ‘a stomach is burning’ taken from Melanie De Biasio's album of the same name]

#Bertolt Brecht #anthony fletcher #melanie de biasio #lit prose #refugees #serbia #borders #burning #short story #hitchhiking #hitchhiking tales #hitch hiking

[birdsongsofpersia]

the brothels of the black hole,

So the body wanders. / Sometimes it goes where light does not reach.                    —                Ann Lauterbach, from “Eclipse with Object A familiar conundrum : no matter how much we drive, we go no further. These infinite black holes that can trap a soul for hours, days, or even lifetimes. I have met figures that were once human beings who have come and then never left. One always finds such places, while travelling, but it is odd to come across it as an entire country. They stopped right after the border at 8:30pm. You wonder, for a while, if you are a ghost. Not just now, but for forever. What marks have you left? Who really sees you, in your life? I mean, entirely, actually, for all you are. Then you are seen, at least there, with your thumb outstretched. They exit laughing. Polish plates. Two cars. Belgrade? Yox. Niet. Bulgaria? Sofia ? Bəli. Da, they say, grinning. We’ll be crossing through the whole night. 600km. They are from Azerbeijan and among our nine collected languages, speak but a handful of common words together. There are essences expressed with no words. Like the concept of a brothel. Jorgei is a good actor, or one who mimes, I must say. He makes it very clear there is a selection inside a building. He gets very excited. When we pull into a petrol station he becomes like a cartoon mouse salivating over hanging cheese when a woman arrives with her partner. He is 41 and has six children. One is a baby that he shows me a photo of, naked, looking at the camera. By dawn, we’re not much closer. We pass Belgrade, which takes hours. Perhaps I block out what happens. Maybe I fall asleep. We don’t stop at the house of skin to my recollection. We enter the city and my jaw drops at the size of the buildings. The hustle bustle. The way people stand around with red eyes drinking from bottles and gazing at moving screens. The bridges. The macchinas. There are genderless beings biting the heads off of men with huge muscles and when they chew they express a sound of satisfaction as if at the end of a hard day’s work. There is a statue of Lord Shiva that my eyes are too heavy to take in but instead of his arms, there are snakes and the snakes are writhing in and out of his body. There are limbless beggars with their hands outstretched wailing and limbed non beggars who walk as if they need nothing of the world. They have fixed much of the bombed city that I know of NATO’s ruins. There are monkeys standing and pointing at cowering skinheads. There are the elderly with eyes full of the past stumbling past into another memory.

Beyond Belgrade we pull into a service station. They drink big mugs of coffee and shout into their telephones. I wish I understood. I wish I understood less. A street dog, with silky black fur approaches me as I stand outside with just a shirt at 2am and licks at my shoes. When I lived in this part of the world he could have licked through my shoes themselves for they were hole ridden and I did not care. Apologies, comrade, I tell him. But he doesn’t mind, he keeps licking my shoes, and perhaps there were holes in everything back then and everything of me spilled out and I could never keep anything entire or untouched or preserved and it is hard not to take this street dog with us back into the car and protect him from the world but give him all the freedom he could possibly have by teaching him to be strong and wise and kind. Every time I stroke him he begins to jump up and down like he’d fly off with a few more strokes. We drive on and leave him and freedom behind. Within an hour Jorgei’s eyes begin to water like a rising well and his head nods. There’s almost no one on the motorway at this time so all we can do is crash into the sides. It likely wouldn’t be fatal but would put an end to their 3000km selling macchina idea. We pull into another rest station. This time there are two cars there, one from Austria, another from Germany. He climbs into the back, indicates that I wind my chair back, and begins to snore with the intensity of a huge digger. At this moment two Roma kids come to the car, open up the door and take off my shoes. The dog is with them, 70km further down the road. They take off my socks too. I do not protest. It is a part of my ritual here. The silky dog licks at my toes and his tongue is silky too. Back upon my feet, they replace my shoes with my old ones of eight years ago with the same holes, only now from the damp of the years, large mushrooms grow from them, throbbing white in the night. I laugh, and the Roma kids laugh too and scamper off into the night. Jorgei is dreaming of the brothel I see, his waist moving up and down. Once dawn comes he wakes and makes it clear that the brothel will have to wait until Sofia, till I am safely delivered, and Serbia is a black hole and will not encourage kind intimate affairs. He widens his arms to show the size of the hole, until I am afraid his arms will snap attempting to measure it. I wiggle my toes and see my present day shoes back upon my feet and consider what exactly I am returning to, who I am, what I have been, and what street dogs I have known in these lands. Till Sofia, we still have Niš to pass, another black hole, of Constantine The Great, and we humans are great too, sometimes.

Photo - We lost Jorgei’s friend in the black hole, at one point. This was their reunion,

#serbia #hitchhiking #hitchhiking tales #autostop #hungary #road stories #Romani #Azerbaijan #georgia #georgians #LIT prose #dream prose #ann lauterbach #brothel #constantine the great #belgrade #bulgarian stories #no borders #frontier

[birdsongsofpersia]

No memory,

I enter the place of not-thinking, not-remembering, not- wanting. - Mary Oliver, from Six Recognitions Of The Lord in “Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver”

[i]I am drumming as if my body does not hold memory. I am gazing as if I have no eyes, and I am touching as if you were another, far, and these deserts that surround us were full of bones, and that I hold their history, And so these bones become my bones, and I cannot unbecome their skeletons, and all of their living, and all of their dying.

One says to me, one sunken night, Tío, he olvidado como respirar. Yo también, yo también, I tell him.  But here I am, learning to breathe again, on another night Below a mountain, and soon there will be a rockslide. G.G once said, “How can anyone that does not write not go mad?” A boulder said to me, how can you continue on, Without breathing?  I shrug. Since then, I am learning how to breathe again, but often I do not write, and I do go mad. And they enter me deep green, of jungles, go down my throat in vines, the jungle is teaching me how to breathe again, I did not know it then. I am in the back of a pickup truck. It’s the first time of my life. Corn rushes past. An enormous sense of freedom. Then I am breathing.  K yells, from out front, STAND UP, STAND UP. TRY TO FLY. And I do, nervously, I begin to fly. It was far before I learnt how to fly within my dreams. The corn tells secret poems in the lands of the wizard of oz, and I did not know that I would spend the next nine years working with corn every summer back across the ocean, I did not know that this would be my first flight of many, and back in the rolling valley of bones, I say my goodbye to Granada and wish the dead well and decide once and for all - I am not dead. I must give everything to life, once again. I feel the medicine slowly loosening its hold. The mountains sighing. Goodbye, Granada, land of my bones and heavy heart. I will breathe again, and I will fly,

#mary oliver #lit prose #spain #granada #the living #the dead #flight #lucid dreaming #cornfields #sacred medicine #shaman #shamanism #spirit work

[birdsongsofpersia]

skin flees,

I want to unfold / let no place in me hold itself closed / for where I am closed I am false / I want to stay clear in your sight/ - Rilke

My skin is winter leaves untouched by sun in northern skies for so long and deeper down there are homes where people know my name and smile even when I am intoxicated with forgetting / and say this is what you have lost, here, buried in the gardens of abandoned dances. Am I of the age now where we somewhat... live? I tell you, I am not yet alive the way that I know is true, somewhere inside. But I dance, and I dance into the earth, and I breathe out the weight of the dying and the dead, attempt to let them go, to move on to the next world and they speak of the regrets of those who have too little time, mine would be not reaching down into the depths to drag poetry into a world that has none. For it has so many faces, so many lives, so many deaths. The jungle beckons, but in the concrete seas, why have I turned my back on the words and sights that have given me so much?

Every night I am fleeing something, someone. It has no face. I have decided to name it winter. A winter that comes to my dreams. A winter that I have abandoned in search of warmth. But capi-tan, what about/ fingertips tracing your skin, giving calm to those inner organs on fire and the restless heart ready to leave all comforts and wander the eastern most mass of the Sahara? and when all desert cold disappears into the wagon untouched since he left this world and his cat is old and sick and has teeth hanging out of his mouth. And where do the old and uncared for go? They crawl into shadows and wait to be taken. And wait more, more, the passing of seasons. I swear, as I write this (no poetic coincidence) he comes slowly up to me as if he can hear me writing of him, purring, rubbing against my legs. I still exist, hermano, he says. I still exist. And I have lived a life worth knowing. Memories of moving through the deserts of Morocco, that ancient feeling of the winds howling at night, and the days of sun upon the skin. And how the old congregrate outside beside the road and watch traffic move in and out of the villages, content to see the river of life gurgling, and there was no discontent, just acceptance, and pride, at having lived.

I have moved no closer to accepting my body to how it is, but when I dance, I have learnt to let my mind go, and without the mind, I am all spirit, and it comes and goes like migratory geese. This friday night there are few that I really am drawn to. I am lost in that for a long while. The loneliness of a lifetime accumilated fills me for a while as the songs get real slow. I see Lizzie with her eyes upon the wall most of the night. Pablo with his tattooes stretching around his back the night long sitting amongst it all, and his horses outside the city, and his Patagonia further away still. There is one, from the first moment, that has a line attached to me, and I watch her, and I curse, for there is still a part of me that rejects it. Do not come too close, this part says. And I watch her all night long, and she will dance with me only for a second before moving on, and she has an eyebrow piercing to her right and tape covering tattoos, and I too once had this same piercing till it fell in carribean jungle plants and life said let it go but I will bring it back again soon. T and I got them done together, four years before he disappeared from this jungle garden earth and perhaps if I get it done again he will return and speak to me in dreams of where he is, what he has learnt, and there are two girls that are so joyful that I dance constantly amongst them trying to show them, I am just motion, don't be nervous and for the first time I am smiling broadly almost all night while dancing, and perhaps they can feel it, and one comes up to me and says in Spanish that she adored my energy, and I did hers, her laughter filling the night, and how the moon shines full and and fuller than my belly could ever be. I am experimenting with fasting, what it is not to want, but I cannot put away this feeling of wanting touch and at night, hours later, I do not know what to do with myself while staring up at the attic ceiling to not have another's breath beside me, filling me, to not share these visions, the images beyond eyes and those streets, suddenly alive that were once dormant, how worlds open, how can one be away from that...even for one moment? And so many moments, now, but one must find ways to grow upon different paths, where poetry finds roots and my skin will hold in the sun all dark winter long without fleeing, and touch will return again, a moment or the next, and this dance will be full of footsteps pounding the earth with shimmering eyes, the dead and the living breathing the night air, remembering.

/ Photo - Francesca Woodman, from Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976.

#skin #touch #poetic prose #lit prose #prose lit #Rainer Maria Rilke #dance #ecstatic dance #dreams #morocco #sahara

[birdsongsofpersia]

the wandering goat,

There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is.                    —                                    Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry              

And how does one retain strength for oneself when giving? You know these moments when you are an empty vessel completely spent..? I asked her. I had been under the sky and it was real close like it could touch my skin. But it was relentless, this night, and my mind is a wandering goat that I must keep following and leading back by the horns. And my belly is full of sunken memories that are just now rising back up, and I still remember my name but my head - shaved at the sides, is cold and I am deep in my sleeping bag this august night. She reached into my chest and pulled it open so I could see down through my ribs, to the organs. There, you go there. Lungs, heart, rib cage. This is where your energy can be stored. Right there. Focus it. I’m gazing in for a long time, and it just begins to rain, and those candles are still burning out on the marshlands and my goat is asleep at last,

Photo : Paricutin Volcano erupting in January 1944. Michoacán, Mexico. Arno Brehme, field work photographs. Smithsonian Field Book Project via Nemfrog

#anne carson #spiritual medicine #ayahuasca #energy #prose lit #lit #lit prose #spirit #shaman #shamanism

[birdsongsofpersia]

The white owl and shipwrecks,

[You will lose everyone you love but the love will always return in new forms] - Kafka As I entered, she flew out and though I knew of the possibility, I still took an extra breath. I always enter abandoned buildings softly, not knowing their history and what lies there and with experience, know that I could be disturbing life amongst what we consider dead, in decay, without use. I see them and see the life that was, what is now. All in this world that is left to ruin, the forgotten dreams and wishes that we have for things, people, lives. And she flew with large wings, far more taken surprise of me than I was of her. And her eyes never left me as she swooped down out of the door. Those wings, almost unmoving, gliding. Hooo, hooo, I call after her, softly. She doesn’t answer and I am sad to have disturbed her and her home, and I think of my little sister, Jasmine, who was always scared of owls, and I’ll have to tell her this story one day, when we meet again. She will tell me what it all means, and what the owl was telling me as she flew out. / G wasn’t as far gone as I had feared, but at the same time, there were moments when he was further. His stove was covered in a thick black syrup and there was something in me that thought if I touched it I could be sucked right in. I have been shipwrecked, he said, over and over again. This is how I am, brother. Far from everything else. I looked him in his pitted date eyes and I knew. I knew this because I had been there and somedays I still find myself washed ashore with no being in sight. But what a time to be wild, I chant, on my better days.  More rain came down that day of the shipwreck than we would normally have in a month here. It was my fourth day back on the old continent. I waited it out in my tent beside the owl’s home but it never stopped. That night I showered in the light-less bathroom and my skin held the hot water as if it was the last left in the world. On the third day we took a picnic out to the field beside the owl’s home. There was little sun and I could not make myself believe that it was August but it was still a summer picnic albeit with winter stalking the skies and he took his whiskey and I saw how he watched me to see if I took my wine, and I did, though I didn’t feel like drinking but told myself these grapes will return you to the sun...and took small sips every now and again. In three nights I finished the bottle. His boss had laughed at me when I had bought just the one. Two or three you need for tonight, mate, right? And he was serious as he clutched his bottle of vodka that he would finish within the night. He drove us back to the caravan on the industrial site and of the rides I’ve ever had, and there have been a lot crisscrossed across continents with meth-heads; insomniacs, deep sleeping wheelers, preachers, convicts, lovers loving before seeing road, conspirisists, fried businessmen, the dying, the living deep great powerful but o’ brother o’ sister you gotta concentrate on the road and the present - of all of them he was one of the worst doing 80 on 30-40 mile an hour country roads, And G said, I dreamt this, of you coming here, months ago, and this field, and your tent and the owl building. I went to find you today there but you were not there, only was there rain and more rain, and even our owl friend was not. And now the full moon is rising and it is a great white.  And how are you, really, brother? He asks.  I have been a volcano awaiting eruption, I reply, finally, on the last day. But I do not erupt. I lie dormant. And sometimes I awaken again. You must be careful of where and with who you erupt, he says. I am giving my everything to transform this burning into something that heals, I say, perhaps to myself, perhaps to the owl late at night. And...where now can I take my volcano? Photo- self, field, August 2019

#franz kafka #healing #volcano #abandoned buildings #short story #LIT prose #literature #poetic prose #prose literature #returning love

[birdsongsofpersia]

unremembering borders,

[Could I live like this? I ask myself and I know, somehow, I must. More and more my life is peeling paint, straight horizons. More and more my name dissolves in the air, salt, something invisible I taste, and forget.] - Naomi Shihab Nye, from At Otto’s Place

"Whatcha doin' there, man?" he said, approaching me. I had been urging him to shift his attention before he made it. A heron swooping down and swiping his bag, or a giant fish that begins to speak of the end of the world. He could be around for a long time, and rides never come with the homeless meandering. And that stench. I tell him of the border. I tell him that it has already swallowed me up. I tell him that I dream of Central America reaching up into the states like vines but machetes they come always trimming them down endless controlled violence,

but damnit, time is hounding me, I have no time to talk, I gotta get to Wisconsin and it's 2000km away in two days,

and he says, you sure you don't have time? We can go fishing, I got liquor, and time can go on by with the river,

No, I have no time. And liquor nor fish take my calling. And I said it cursing myself, travelling like this, speedy gonzalez. I could have spent a dinner listening to his stories. I'll give you a dollar for the bus to the border, he says, if you need it, he says. And I stand there, open jawed, my judgements stretching my mouth open, as he trots away, hobo days by the river, Photo : Vermont, close to the Canadian border under some of the most stressful hitching conditions of my life - those two days to get to Wisconsin...

#Boston #hitchhiking #Wisconsin #road stories #short story #lit prose

[birdsongsofpersia]

Clear and Wild,

All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter.—   Mahmoud Darwish, in “In Jerusalem” from The Butterfly’s Burden

ما أكثرك في قلبي

There’s so much of you in my heart -M.D

We’re walking through a throbbing olive grove, and everytime I pass a tree I strike it, I strike it strong with my stick, acknowledging the tree and its presence, and then time goes silver, goes like migrating birds, goes like a life that is moving on and without acting, and what goes on? I mean, going towards, I go, to that burning, to those clear bristling eyes, that yearning, And Za says, “I haven’t been sober for fifteen years if you include tobacco, caffeine, all those common addictions...” and something in me splits, And I go to the foot of an olive tree,  And I fall to my knees, and my knees touch the hard Andalucian rock earth that’s more red than I can promise my heart is, and my heart is full of wild moose covered in snow, and snow is my winter in Andalucía once more far away upon the mountains, and I’m touching that burning earth with my hands, so that I can feel, And more I see I have to give up all that ties me to my days - that chains are always chain no matter their form.  Off my knees, and suddenly we are mounting a small road, and there’s a security van and I’m sure he’s coming for us, for me, for all that I haven’t done in my life and I’ll be in handcuffs beforeyouknowit and tortured with pictures of my life if it hadn’t been for my heart/mind struggles, and all those that I could have met and shared life with, And Za, says, right then, do you think we go to death, or death goes to us?  And I see it rolling in and out, And the times when I have chosen it, shamelessly, and lived as if buried alive, that even cold earth becomes comfortable, And I have no words, so I just call out into the air, with whatever my lungs can turn into bird songs from the persia that I so often leave and swoop down upon again. Then, with a leap, Za jumps out on a ledge, “This, my dear friend, is our kingdom!” spreading his hand across the landscape, to Granada, my adopted home. From here, above it, I cannot understand it, it sprawls, its ordered lines of trees, its parking for Alhambra, its cars. I feel nauseous, more nauseous than before, wanting to vomit out all the ugliness of life, of cities, of nameless people, of people and their phones, of industry,  And replace it with poetry, with stories, with theatre, with canyons and wild strange animals, and wisdom that speaks of the centre of earth and life and what is most important. How? Here, one word by word, through all this weight, all this struggle, till eyes become clear and wild, Painting - George Lacombe, La Forêt au Sol Rouge

#granada #alhambra #granadaspain #litprose #proselit #moose #plantmedicine #mahmoud darwish #healing #Palestinian poetry #poetry

[birdsongsofpersia]

Andalucía and Seductive Vanishings,

[Very little grows on jagged rock, be ground, be crumbled, so wild flowers will come up where you are. Be ground, be crumbled, so wild flowers will come up where you are. You’ve been stony for too many years, try something different : surrender.] - Rumi, from A Necessary Autumn It’s said that one must turn off lights to check if one is dreaming or not. I have no light switch, but there’s a electric pylon beside me so I begin to climb it. It’s said that it’s dangerous, but if I’m dreaming it’s no problem. I get to the top and pull out the wire cutters I take around in my backpack for just in case situations. With one swipe. Only it’s day, and there are many pylons, and who knows where they go to. No evidence at all. I sit somewhere high up on that pylon. I sit and open up The Three Halves of Ino Moxo and soon there are voices, and I pull myself up straight, and their colognes are strong, and they are clean shaven and they say hola, buenas, and they go on, speaking about the weather, enough for birds to swoop down and attack them, for the birds are sick of all this cloud talk, solo es vida, tio. Dejalo. Jolín.  “Tienes un cigarrillo?” one asks, turning back, looking up at me. I laugh, and ask him if he knows what the weather will be like in Antarctica tomorrow.  ”Tio, y que haces allí?” I tell him I’m dreaming, and that I’m going deeper into dream. Confusion marks his face, and he keeps on walking, spraying cologne under his armpits.  Down. It’s too uncomfortable up there, and it’s getting cold. Feet are desert stones, and I try to lift them but can only trudge. And the mind is a black whale washed up under the Andalucian sun, and I wish I could fill it with all the wonder that I have known. But I am reaching out to the orange clouds at sunset and asking, what is it to talk to another human being, once more? How is it that I become these rocks? Something, though, is softening.  Turn a corner. This path is endless and I wonder if I’m not going on till I can’t take another step. The body is strong beyond measure. And weak, bruised, battered, ready to give in. Heart, are you so spent by what you have known? This chest, beaten by the last month. Breathe more, it says. Instead of breathing deep I think of those that have made me feel whole. I think of those who have made me feel broken. Those that I have made feel whole, or perhaps not whole, but filled, the cracks, somewhere. I think of life and how it goes by without stopping to see if its okay to keep moving. Of my good friend T who died suddenly, without warning, and that life doesn’t stop for death either, ten years later.  Around that corner, comes the sound of flamenco, a burst of it, warm and strong. From nowhere. Wild, warm, sensual, crying out into the night. Andalucía. It comes, and then, just as quick, it disappears. Seductive vanishings. I go towards it, like a puppy, and it comes back, then ends. Caressed by a song. All my skin alert. Tantalisingly far away. But medicine, for a body that must breathe deep, and allow in the caresses of life. Andalucía with your almonds cracked along the path and your cobbled streets out in protest again Castillia y Patrimonio. The architecture of admiration of life, and your roasting sun, and I miss the donkeys, and I miss the poetry read out on street corners that you murdered with a cross for blasphemy against your God. I take your Gran Via de Colón and spit on your streets that pulled out the old lanes to make way for endless shops and car access to kill donkeys once and for all.  I take your flamenco and let it feed my wilderness longings. I am watering my whale, and soon it will return to the ocean, far, once more,

Image  - “With its protective coloring this toad feels much at ease near mushrooms.” Elementary Science by Grades, Book Five. 1930 [via nemfrog] 

#mushrooms #toad #short story #litprose #proselit #granada #rumi #poetry #sufipoetry #Sufi #Sufism #wanderings #wander #shamanism #plantmedicine #brexitpoetry