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.

I was thinking of men who knew when to die,

Who chose their moments with care.

“Put a rhinoceros beetle in a plastic matchbox

And set it out, to fly”, they’d say.

Seconds slip, not much like sand, but

Rather like a child

Pissing the rays of an old god through glass

To decimate the ants.

I was thinking of men who knew when to die,

And how their death was wasted

On cracked Elephant skulls in Indian plains

And on chariot wheels, gripped in the mud.

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

For Lara

The women decided they were leaving. They packed up all the poppies, bound the white and red petals tightly into their skirts, and they wrapped the hatchets in strips of wet leather so the blades wouldn’t cut as they swung against their thighs. They woke up early, before the cattle began their morning lamentation, and rustled their way quietly through the tents and leaf curtains that held the men and the children and the broken crockery inside, and kept the night-time outside. The night was not looked kindly upon in this part of the plains, not even by the men. The night was for the dead to walk through. The night was for the speakers of Ugric and Sanskrit. The night was not safe. The coldness that sharpened the air lacerated their faces, but they held their heads up in the air. The darkness that blackened their lips further hooded their eyes, but they looked ahead into the night. The women formed a line, and barefooted, they padded their way over the dead ashes of yesterday’s fire, staining their soles with charcoal and hardened pig fat, and whispers began to spin around the stumbling knees as the women bent double, to duck beneath the fences, to attempt to see the soil. The woman at the front of the escaping congregation wore a series of silver bangles, hung heavy with pewter bells and tiny cymbals. Tonight, each chime was wrapped tightly with frayed pieces of torn felt, and they rung a testing silence into the sky as they struck each other.

Their henna stained ankles tore their way through the gardens that had grown slowly with their grandmothers, and their pace began to increase. Breathing collectively grew more ragged and rapid as the ivy was uprooted around toes, exposing the generations-old rosemary that lurked delicately beneath. Hands grasped at nasturtiums that gathered at the bases of the settlement’s boundaries, and the petals joined those of the poppies in the folds of the women’s skirts, and muddied hands filled pockets with flowers of all flavours as ash stained thighs vaulted the embankment build by the founders of the homestead. The women broke into a run, just as the sun threw shards of light along the edge of the world. 

The women decided they were leaving, and their feet carved and irrigated the ground behind the fence.

The men awoke to silence, and hunger, and clouds of dust kicked up by heels.

To my surprise, more so than to anyone else’s perhaps, the madness seems to be fading. Gone are the sickening textures that used to gather in fungal clumps behind my eyes, gone are the ghosts in the stairwell. Gone are the fattening concaves and vexes of vision, gone are the lapping waves of insomnia, of which every seventh brought with it voices of phantom ship wrecks, sticky grey strands of seaweed and tiny droplets of blood bursting across the front of my mind.

 The dropping lights are no longer there. My eyes are no longer pulled for no reason towards a single teardrop that falls from nowhere into nothingness in the centre of a room. I no longer jerk involuntarily to mean little whispers in my ears, I no longer run passed closed doors and turn corners with pine needles prickling somewhere in the region of my kidneys. The stone faces and shapeless neons have abandoned my feverish dreams. The smooth-eyed women have given up chasing me through the early morning.

 (On a television somewhere, an old Welsh harp is being plucked by pale fingers. The static flickers in and out, in and out to pointless arias and half-forgotten melodies, but this is only simplicity now. Heimlich, even, if you feel the Austrians can be trusted, after all this time. Anyway, static is merely directionless noise, caught in a tube like an unmade child and bounced against glass, scattered into motes of monochrome applause. I used to see vast Olympic crowds, in static. I would spend hours trying to see someone I knew, wildly cheering an unseen athlete, breaking time. Time beneath the aerial is reduced, somehow. Each second has a sixth or seventh dimension removed, carefully, surgically. Eventually, it is reformed, strings shaking in a particular direction to take the form of a rhinoceros beetle, caught in a balloon, buffeted on the Gulf Stream. From here, to there. That is all.)

 The madness is fading, and it will fade further, until I will doubt it was ever present. An old guest, like a Cheshire Cat that fades from the stomach upwards, leaving nothing but a battered old trilby and a single, semen coloured ring on a coffee table, left by a mug of peppermint tea. I used to take a battered old mirror from house to house. People knew this about me, and people knew very little. I made sure of it. I trapped a single hair in that mirror, flattened between three panes of glass. One day, that hair will split the reflective surface into raw states of volcanic matter; of this I am quite sure. The popular misunderstanding of karma can only exist in this state, it seems to me. “Call no man happy until he is dead” can sit alongside “Omnia mutantur nihil interit”, and still that single strand of ammonia dyed polyformous keratin will complete the dharma I have bestowed upon it. Certainty never came easily, and possibly never will. But once metamorphic, always so, I say.

So, the madness is definitely fading. It really, really is. From my home on the plains, I can see for miles. Actual miles, not the disneyfied fictional miles you get back home. I watch the sky turn itself into the belly of a great horse each evening, I watch clouds gulp shoals of fish as they flex their way across the horizon, and I know that I am part of that. I watch carnivorous plants and young women smear their faces with redness, and I know that I am part of that as well. I see the earth crack with ennui, I see cars ending more microscopic life than I can ever comprehend and I see stray cats and aubergines and broken locks and dull eyed policemen and god and divorcees and filthy carpets and know that it is all me. If I concentrate, and shake my hand at just the right speed, it will pass through this wooden table. If I pull the strings from my arm, and trap them between three sheets of glass, I can do almost anything. The madness is fading.

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 old man and his hat;

Battered from Harlem back to Camarthen

Gravy stains and camembert,

Man, he took some beating.

Stays away from statues

Nowadays, he slowly blinks

Ivy snagging drain-lids to

Catch the train back home.

Bells in china

Shattering eunuchs

Alabaster wristlocks

Stinking petals

Chop it off, boy

Join our troupe

We´ll dance with Sacher

To Andy´s Chest.

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.

You shut out cities

To orate on The Swan and

Andromache’s fall

To the Euphrates’ dry bed

Until the gales cease

You rest on corners

A cross-section of love, then

A theorem of god

Splitting lily stems like twelve

Atoms of grief

You claim to have gone

Without rain for fourteen years

Yet we all saw you

Drenched, wringing with more loose streams

Than I’ll ever see.