Nadia Part Seven

CATULLUS THE FOOL

You remember the day too, the day you met the fool—a long bather in the pool of mediocrity, a champion sooth sailor of misery’s correct manner, a boy ripe with lust ready to follow the thumping mid-range. You are the entrance.

The truth is he changed; they all do. When a man finds his heart within a woman, they change, but the problem lies with the expectations of the woman to comply. Some women do, but not you. When your lover comes to this crushing realization, you glow with life, a pleasure form of immortality for you, remembrance creates permanence...eternalness. Forever is the time in which you exist, and until your lovers reach this point, you feel nothing.

Your initial intent is not harm, but you are drawn to these flowers of blossoming innocence. They are there in need of an admirer, because you believe girls love trophies. But the fool is special, he, you immortalize. You see a chrysanthemum growing among the weeds in your fields of rye. There isn’t some romantic reminiscence of love; or you lost the man of dreams; or the one that got away, no, he wasn’t special like that at all. He was a boy who needed to be taught the ways of manhood and poetry, a student and you, his mentor, his muse: “...qua sunt totidem mea: deprecor illam/ assidue, verum dispeream nisi amo.” Farewell.

“...because it is just the same with me. I am perpetually crying out upon her, but may I perish if I do not love her.” - Catullus Poem 92

Nadia Part Six

THE POET

She told me once that she traveled the world.
She told me all the places she had been:

A lioness with a mane,
A cobra’s back, a fox’s tail
Tender, defender, loyal
Venomous, always on the run

No one could catch...

Spain, the spiral Barcelona
Kenya, aiding weakened impulses
Mexican salvation in ruins
London, roundabout renegade

...and no one could catch her.
And everyone dared...

In the town of Kalandastan,
You promised an evening of the three passions:
Magnetism, Solar Radiation, and Optimism.

Enough for everyone.
A rattail in my beer.
A junkie priest.
A homeless home.

We are not talking of a second coming.
Or a ravaged revengeful plague.
Or a stroll down a stream.
Or a Kabbahlist’s mystical number.

A monk’s haiku thought
A rebel’s sonnet sword
A devil’s septuplet tongue
An angel’s wasteland edit

And her actions, her verbs, her swollen affection
A rock star without a band, sound, audience
But with all the applause, venue, harmony
She captured me there, inside those walls of that symbolic play.

Action! Cut! Edit...
Exterminate, execute, an exercise.

‘things were much harder then,
we didn’t have money then,
we didn’t have much at all’

And sometimes we were happier
Much more in love
Much more in touch with each other
And we were never alone.

I loved that girl, and she loved the wind
Always moving through me, a slow desert roll
Music from my vanity for our love
Passion screams at my concert, my audience, me:

The fool.

Nadia Part Five

DAWN

Seagulls, a gaggle smear of white-grey on the tan sand stare at you. You pass by behind the scene, an extra on a movie screen and the birds, the theatergoers. Unlike theatergoers, they care not for your drama, your middle, your end of three-part Aristotelian art. You pass; they scatter; they return as the waves remove your footprints.

Sun diamonds shimmer in the distance alerting the cool air to give one last attempt at temperature, and this gives your nose a final refreshing blast, the remainder of the cool air. Your lungs fill as you too feel the struggle, the hopelessness of the day to come.

A wave crashes, an alarm reflector of dawn’s first light. The day has begun.

Nadia Part Four

THE ENTRANCE

Concrete plain, massive, grey, and in the middle an opening: a rotating entrance, people mingle at its mouth, swinging in and out. We met there, the day or should I more accurately state: the evening, at dusk during our setting sun.

You looked very good against the mortar, glowing, a flowered weed climbing through the cracks: majestic, natural and trampled. Against the black and white hues of suits and dress suits, the original costume of the modern slave: distinct and plain, a matching attitude apathetically clothed. We stood staring into the void producing the mediocrity, wondering if we too, were like them? I thought yes, but you, you were different. It was you who cracked the concrete ways of my life; it was you who would.

Nadia Part Three

SCAR

Out there...across the sea— that is where they are... that is where they are... that is where...your mantra for many years.

Why did they leave you?

Who took them away? And there you remained in your twelfth year paralyzed for the remainder of your days. At least some days feel that heavy, you think.

That was the summer you swam every day, all day: body-surfing until your knees scraped raw, and your breath: part salt, part surf. In the tumultuous waves is where you forgot the scar—memory. The waves beat against your fury twisting your body and slamming it on the seabed. This was relief. And when the surf was too low to surf, you swam out sea until you sank. The sinking into the deep azure comforted your scar, and when your air ran out, you sprinted for the surface, air.

Then you’d float on your back and dream, the only time you would. Sleep then was black and unforgiving. There is a comfort in dreams; in knowing you can create new realities. And that is why you would wake before the dawn to swim, to be near the dreams, to be in comfort.

The ocean makes sense; she wraps herself around you, a large salty blanket and a home. She protects and forgives, judgeless: the only cure for the sufferer. A dive into her redeems the sleepless black nightmare, and your emergence through her cool sheen mends.

Nadia Part Two

BLUE

Sitting, you look over the calm blue water as the swells line up bringing in your past, wave after wave.

A dream wakes you into your twelfth year of life. Your aunt and uncle stand above, an aura silhouetted by sick cerulean curtains. Are you in a coffin? It is cold, very cold; drips of sweat dribble off your brow, saline drops trickle through your lashes. Drip. Blink. Drip. Blink.

Pain scrapes tracks across your bones, the hub: your heart. This is unlike anything else, unlike broken fingers, or face kissing shattered windshield spurs, or convulsive radioactive cancer therapy slams—this is loneliness and emptiness.

A green-cerulean wave crashes churning shades of browns and whites into murky smooth ripples, a wet-cement smoothing of the shore. Will the dawn ever break?

Nadia Part One

A WINTER MORNING

Overcast eyes, cloudy and grey, a desolate cool beach morning unsure how the day will begin—and like your eyes, so is your heart. You are a woman.
You wake up before dawn and walk along the cool, dark water’s edge. Waves spray salty mist across the flat newly groomed sand, in your face and on your tongue. Low tide smells of rotting seal corpse, fishy and spoiled, yet refreshing. The smell reminds you of the many mornings when walks transformed into cleansing swims. When waves pounded out your frustration, a mother’s caress, a mother’s tough love, because the water has redeeming qualities, reminiscent cool stinging prickles of salt that burnt off the night-before’s layer of skin.
But today, like those recently, do not follow with a swim. You are a wanderer now, in search of driftwood not to carve nor to store on empty racks inside a tomb, garage. You admire. Where did it come from? Where is it going; or will it be seen again?
Water coats your feet. You never wear shoes and your rolled pant legs stick to your calves, rubbing salty sand up and down as you walk.
A flock of toddler sandpipers run an instinctual choreography in and out with the waves, the dance of their mass, grey-brown reflectors of the dawn. Their little legs so close to the sand, reminds you more of your youth when the earth was closer to you and yet, today the earth and you are closer than ever before.