A View from a Car Park

Plug it in at the wall,

Christmas checking filigree…

One of them must be broken, surely.

Take it back to ‘82

Tape-echo on your vox

“Return to sender”,

register those Gifts

sent in spite

This, worst of months for us.

For us.

Us.

-

.

For the second hand love of Columbine,

He split his head in two, they said.

The print left prints on fingertips

When hands that scratched for truth

(Inky, demised, fantastic blues)

Got stuck between page three and ‘done’.

For the hand-me-downs of the Empress,

He stamped his feet into his knees,

The snap-flashes almost ate him up

While he quivered on the kitchen tiles.

Nobody knows who called the men

But their coats came flooding through some door

Before you could even see the signs

That something was knocked askew;

Legs, scissor-fixes with retardant wire,

Eyes like an asbestos mask, they

Copied a million, front page stuff,

He was flogged in the street by a fool.

I write what I write to give small windows from different viewpoints from an imaginary tower somewhere. Here are some facts regarding what is here.

1. Just because something is dedicated to somebody (e.g a poem), it does not mean that it is ABOUT somebody.

2. The viewpoints/windows in my writing do not necessarily correlate to my own viewpoints on certain subject matters. As a writer, I withold the right and the ability to see through whoever’s eyes I damn well please.

3. None of my poems really ‘mean’ anything. I’m not interested in poetry with hidden messages, subtexts or solid meanings. I am interested in texture, musicality, the shape of words.

If I have offended anybody with my content (and apparantly, I have), I apologise profusely. It seems obvious to me that this was never my intention, and I am sorry if anybody has interpreted anything I have written incorrectly and thus has taken offense at their own synaptic, subconscious revelation.

The Rakshasha woman cast her eyes aside from her lifeless Rakshasha husband. His slayer lifted himself from his knees, paid his obesciences to a lowly tulasi plant that gently shifted her heart shaped petals in the breeze, and met the gaze of the mournful creature who had lost her lover. Bhima had killed again; the man whose limits of strength were unknown to even his creator, Sri Krsna, had spilled the blood of an enemy of man, had bested him in a yogic battle which had lasted several years during the exile in the great forests. The foothills of the Himalayas released a long, aching breath – a gasp and rattle that had been held in a cavernous plexus for millenia, and all the creatures that may be called jiva shuddered in tiny ecstasies as the exhalation reached their souls, each hair standing on end, each root curling slightly beneath the soil.

Bhima contorted the muscles in his neck, and rubbed the dusty soles of his feet. The Rakshasha woman could not hate him, despite his crime against her blood. She just watched him with eyes that betrayed her pity, and felt something akin to love beneath her parched skin. Bhima sat beneath the bhodi tree that had witnessed the battle for so long, too long, and he contemplated his pride, his vengeance.

Somewhere, a flute was playing. Young girls were singing, laughing. ” Such things can happen, even before an age of darkness, even before this great Kaliyuga begins”, thought Bhima. “I must walk in the forest for a while”.

Yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati bharata Abhyutthanam adharmasya tada atmanam srjamy aham.

That is all, for now.

…can be found at http://iconoclashed.wordpress.com

So, I am considering splitting off from this blog, which has so far dealt almost exclusively with creative writing of some form or another. There is a distinct possibility that soon I shall open a section, or indeed a separate blog, dedicated to art reviews, essays, critiques and musings. These writings do not sit well alongside fictionalised prophecies and poems from a long dead Frenchman, and yet my mind is turning more and more towards observation (perhaps due to my current location in Hungary). Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Many thanks, Benjamin Jiva

In the beginning was the word and the word was god and the word was ’bang!’ and the word was the stomach of a horse and the word took the form of crow shit and the word was water falling between the thighs of the mother of nothing and the word was om keshavaya namaha namaha

At the end there was the absence of breath and two blind birds and a ship made from dead men’s nails and a world-long snake with a thousand heads and the closing of the gates of the garden and ten-faced lions and seven times seven times seven and endless potential and a single old man

Calling the name of his son not knowing

The shape of his name

Was ‘all’.

Last night: visited again.

This time by two of them;

First, a pure-blood Magyar,

Black hair and corseted spine,

Mismatched eyes and lines

Of lace and ringed wood.

The second, pagan and nomadic,

Tattooed and haunted

Pipe smoke curling up thighs

Adorned with garter belts made

From pieces of woodland

Residue

The first promised light;

Bound wrists and quartz beads

Between breasts, my inspection

May pull me somewhere new

As warm, white hands might sweet away

The dust, the mists of my descent.

The second seemed to taste for harm;

Tiny scratches, horseback brass

Like little crucifixes and Ash trees,

Saplings lash and leave their prints,

“Make me a Punch for one night only

And let my lips touch soil.”

And these women raised the union flag

And writhed around my hands.

Tried to prick me into life

And collapsed, astonished and amazed

At their failure to raise a smile;

Astonished that I didn’t give a damn.

The dust gathered in pallid clots between the sandal straps of the men and streaked yellow against grey on the tatters and flicking zeniths of the women’s long garments. They were walking toward the meeting place between the old town and the market. The pounding of the earth grew immense, knuckling its way into the ears and thumping through the breastbones of the crowd, clattering like the kettle drums of the end days. The streets around the centre of the city were twisting arteries of choking air, humid and hanging with the ozone of purpose, of raised fists, makeshift banners and burning symbols piled together from old newspapers, kitchen utensils and goat hide. The multitude were raising their voices and carving the pavement into new shapes, screaming for the death of a king, praying for an architect to sketch in the billowing sand-clouds a new structure for them and their dark-eyed offspring.

The papers had been counted, it was said. The people’s voices had been heard, they were told.

The chanting begins as a dull murmur, and rolls, wavelike into the statues of the central courtyard. They begin to quiver.

A million hands point upwards, turn, and fall to hammer into the paving.

Great cracks appear.

I. It takes some time to walk. Nobody could deny it; your soles alone could most probably tell the story of the crackling footsteps; from Mahabhaleshwar to the gored soils of Kukashetra, each split heel and calloused instep holds at least seven thousand stanzas. Maybe more.

II. We should have bought better sandals, these cardboard tongues lick roughly at my torn ridges.

III. We left the holidaying families halfway up the mountain, and steadied our gaze on the telephone spire that ruptured through the dark red earth of the iron-gorged summit.

IV. Strawberries grew here, it was said.

V. Near the river below, a woman was being born of fishes, and was begging the sun for a son, or seven.

VI. We heard her wish granted, noisily. Her birth pains must have been carried across the valley. Not that we noticed at the time, not with Indra’s hot breath sellotaping our kurtas to our retching shoulder blades.

VII. I needed some tea.

VIII. The grass was thinning as we moved through the stunted fruit trees. Here and there you could see huddles of wiry blades in groups of a hundred. Identical, more or less. Reedy, grass-like brothers, they were. Brothers who knotted around one another to reach for their born-blind father, and to grasp at their mother who took blindness upon herself.

IX. I never was comfortable with sun-glasses, they never sat well on my face. I’d rather shield my eyes with open palms, should the sun grow too heavy and threaten to splash my retina with black-filled window shards.

X. The seven sons were growing fast. By the time we passed the heaping of scarlet tor-stone we had spotted from the house, they were walking.

XI. Within minutes, they had taken on a teacher, and we could hear their competition carried on pinkish breezes.

XII. One was piercing the eye of a bird with iron-tips, apparently.

XIII. I turned to my companion. I needed to rest, to sit awhile and look south across the coughing, heaving jungle, her tendrils flapping down, her fingernails scraping at the base of our mountain. The grass had grown since we passed it, and a hundred tall shoots wavered in our wake.

XIV. “There is going to be a war”, you said, and I knew you to be correct. It had happened a thousand times before, after all.

XV. So, dice were rolled. Wives were saved by boys with cows, and land was relinquished to selfish soil.

XVI. My toes curled and compressed dust between my clenching feet. Tiny pebbles fell and skeins of silk came from nowhere, it seems. I’ve never known twelve years pass so quickly. My walkman registered half a song before we saw seven in hiding, one dressed in my sister’s clothes.

XVII. “He reminds me a lot of me, as a younger man”, I said, to which you quickly reminded me was probably the point.

XVIII. There was a face in the puddle.

XIX. We looked away.

XX. The musician came out of nowhere, I swear. He sat in the tall grass and chewed on a tiny piece of earth, reminded the blades that they were little more than wicker chairs, something to whistle between your thumbs, something for the cows to consider. It didn’t seem to have much effect, and the battle-lines were drawn.

XXI. I almost took out my camera.

XXII. The man in the dress recognised someone. The musician and he spoke for a very long time.

XXIII. There was a flash of light, and the sun set with some very unusual cloud formations, even for this time of year.

XXIV. A lot of leaves were trampled.

XXV. A man ate with a fork.

XXVI. A tortoise was split in two.

XXVII. I twisted the rings on my finger, and ate my strawberries. Twigs crackled and spat underfoot, and my companion claimed her heard the sound of an elephant’s skull being struck with spears, and a man weeping over him as if he were his only son.

XXVIII. We did see an elephant’s skull, incidentally, a few hours later. Ulysses was sat next to it, throwing pins into the space where its trunk should have been, looking hopeful, almost.

XXIX. We picked ourselves up, already knowing how this was going to end. We would reach the summit, and it would take a while.

XXX. The musician looked at me, and before hobbling away with the gait of a young deer, flicked his hands around his face as if to say “Ah, that’s life”

Come on now Influenza,
Lets me and you take a walk outside.
I’ll show you fishes slipping through
Slices of stone, you wouldn’t believe
How small and silver-quick
Such things can be.

Come now, Influenza.
Your Spanish hands are small and hard
Against my aging fingernails.
I see you, and we know (don’t we?)
That your greatest work, like mine
Has long since past so

Come here, fallen star,
They may be scratching out your name
On slate again, but we all know
It’s not the same
As your great summer
Of Nineteen-Nineteen

They said she was found with the fulmars and kittiwakes on the cliffs of Lindisfarne, naked except for a bunch of storm-grey feathers smeared onto her torso with some sticky, clear fluid. They said she would scream at the sight of the walkers and boatmen, her head thrown back and her red throat gaping. She would jut out her boney elbows whilst the gulls would settle about her stone-shattered feet, and gather the twigs about her bare, hardened haunches in the limestone hollows above the scathing sea.
They said that when they brought her to the city, she kept her eyes shut and refused to open them. They said she tried to jump. They said she had killed a man.

We lie in nylon
And gnaw our white knuckles through
With old thoughts of Wales.