achey, old, and defiant

Now I question nobody. But I know less every day.

A ferocious morning has turned into quite the delightful afternoon. This morning I was ready to smash glass, crush cans in the parking lot against the hood of cars, and scribble obscenities on the freedom wall. (There's a chalkboard wall dedicated to the first amendment in my town.)

But then, solace in the used bookstore. Solace in radiohead.tv. Solace in an amazing butternut squash/apple cider soup. Solace in fizzy grapefruit juice. Solace in the perfect songs at just the right time.

I used to go into this one used bookstore whenever I felt like my head would explode at my neck and roll off my body into the street, biting as many ankles as possible before its inevitable demise into the sewer drain. This remedy has led to hundreds of dollars spent on volumes that mostly cost something under ten dollars. It adds up, it does. Lately money has been tight and so I just went in because I can't stand eating lunch fuming mad. Food should remain a delight, rather than something that suffers the effects of stewing. This old man with a long, grey ponytail and glasses pressed against his face runs the store. He keeps all of the coin-change in the fifth pocket of his five-pocket black jeans. He knows the poetry I read. Recently he has begun to point out his favorite new volumes to me when I walk in. Once I bought an Ayn Rand novel just to try it out, and he expressed shock and surprise. He knows me well, if only through my literary taste.

Today I bought a collection of poems by Pablo Neruda. And it was meant to be. Maktub. I needed this book. I've been starving for nourishment; I've been wandering; I am lost. I hope that I will soon find my way.

Return to a city

What have I come to? I ask them.

Who am I in this dead city?

I can't find either the street or the roof
of the crazy girl who once loved me.

There's no doubting the crows in the branches,
the monsoon green and boiling,
the scarlet spittle
in the eroded streets,
the air heavy--but where,
where was I, who was I?
I understand only the ashes.

The betel-seller looks at me,
recognizing neither my shoes
nor my recently resurrected face.
Perhaps his grandfather would grant me
a salaam, but it so happens
that he succumbed while I was travelling,
dropped deep into the well of death.

I slept in such a building
fourteen months and the corresponding years;
I wrote out my misery.
I bit
innocently into bitterness.
I pass now and the door is not there.
The rain has been working overtime.

Now it dawns on me that I have been
not just one man but several,
and that I have died so many times
with no notion of how I was reborn,
as if the act of changing clothes
were to force me to live another life,
and here I am without the least idea
of why I cannot recognize a soul,
of why no one recognizes me,
as if everyone here were dead
and I alive in the midst of such forgetting,
a bird that still survives--
or, the reverse, the city watching me,
and realizing I am the one who is dead.

I walk through the silk bazaars,
and the markets of misery.
It is hard to believe the streets
are the selfsame streets; the black eyes,
hard as nailpoints,
glare back against my glances,
and the pale Gold Pagoda
with all its frozen idolatry
has no eyes now, no hands,
no longer any fire.
Goodbye, streets soiled by time,
goodbye, goodbye, lost love.
I return to the wine of my house,
I return to the love of my loved one,
to what I was and to what I am,
water and sun, earth ripe with apples,
months with lips and with names.
I come back not to return;
no more do I wish to mislead myself.
It is dangerous to wander
backward, for all of a sudden
the past turns into a prison.