Nadia Part Eight

THE LAST DAY

The surf rolling in and out, but mostly out, as the mist sprays salt kisses goodbye to the wind. The smell is sweet, almost spring. Gulls cry in almost symphonic tones that they are no longer annoying to the ear, but escalating to a finale. They make your heart race, not those quick beats from fear, but those of new love, each beat raises your senses, a peak awareness. New sand soft, felt-like on your old feet gives you the impression that your feet have never touched the earth before, tender, infantile. As you approach closer to surf the water embraces your feet, legs as a blanket from your youth, folding its gentle span over you. The sun splits the clouds to display jewels in the water, shimmering a thousand suns. You think this moment is the same as your fist unconscious memory, warm, soothing and yet, it is mostly indefinably intense.

You begin your swim, as you have the many days before, slow with your head above the ocean top. Today the resistance from water that seemed to always prevent you from going forth, encourages you to go on. Your motions become effortless as an albatross flies overhead and a pelican 'V' soon follows. Almost a parade of sea-life begins before you or a procession you are unsure; but as the dolphins begin jumping and flipping before you, you soon realize it’s a procession and it’s yours.

The sea soon fills with all the swimming fish around you as land disappears. The dolphin swim along side of you like pall-bearers of the sea, and a school of fish below carry you. A great white bird, perhaps the albatross, the sun now reflecting its many jewels almost blinding now, sets a crown of shells of many color upon your head. You feel royalty flowing through you as you become less aware of your body and the sea and the fish and the sky blue over you. The sun becomes white and you float effortlessly into it, your last day...

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.

you must!

you must listen, read and write
you must turn right
you must act like this
you must act like that
you must constantly be on the defense

you must forgive
you must have compassion
you must help
you must need help
you must not be you

you must buy this
you must not buy that
you must buy this

you must consume
you must telephone, fax, email
you must be home when called
you must not be home
you must be the answering machine
you must reply

you must recycle
you must produce, reproduce
you must waste
you must not do this
you must not do that
you must be alone
you must be watching TV

you must not speak until spoken to
you must have a plan
you must be spontaneous
you must be different

you must be different

you must laugh
you must be funny
you must be social
you must be dysfunctional
you must be joking

you must conform
you must want money
you must spend more than you make
you must not look poor
you must be poor
you must let the rich get richer
you must be getting poorer

you must not think
you must think
you must not think out loud

you must use
you must be used
you must choose
you must embellish, lie
you must have choices

you must be horny
you must be having sex
you must sin, lust
you must win

you must believe
you must ask for forgiveness
you must have faith
you must be right

you must escape
you must concede
you must be a prisoner
you must agree

you must fear
you must be sad
you must die
you must be mad
you must live long

you must pay taxes
you must be free
you must sell your freedom
you must give it away
you must not be free

you must be too young
you must be too old
you must be just right

you must never admit you’re wrong
you must enjoy every second
you must be too busy to enjoy every second

you must marry the perfect person
you must divorce
you must suffer
you must be me
you must not be me

you must be tired
you must sleep, dream, wake
you must be wired

you must you must
you must increase your bust
you must be slim
you must diet
you must eat
you must not enjoy food
you must be a vegetarian

you must exercise
you must be lazy
you must have an eating disorder

you must be criticized
you must criticize
you must be the wrong size
you must be circumcised

you must wipe
you must wash your hands
you must brush your teeth
you must not reek

you must breath
you must calm down
you must be angry
you must leave

you must do drugs
you should say no
you must be on drugs

you must scream
you must not be listening
you must must
you must
but do i?

Death, Deception and Cold Water

no longer needed…

they tell me.

need a farce
for an
abstract
capitalist good-
bye:

nothing
personal,
it’s business

an unethical
dis
burse
ment of cold water, relieving blame

there is a big picture
and I am the photographer’s
assistant’s assistant

but my rutted ass needs a lift
a lift to a higher ground, and
sometimes dreams are made
from another’s motivation.

the wall

a wall
about this high
finger high
and not many
make it over

life can be so simple
and so hard to overcome

The squanderer not a wanderer or the grasshopper

not good at saving money
but pages from the daily paper
thrown away too many
gone bys and they are gone
and I am closer to the end
and the grave dirt smells fresh
and I am not done
I haven't begun starting
always chapters full of page ones
or books with chapter ones
and I haven’t even begun
damn this place of fleeting space
should of…why don't you
this ride is near over
this place has almost forgot me
hasn't even had a chance to remember
me know me