Those of you who know me know how incredibly busy I am here in Hungary. I need to write some fiction; some real, lengthy, labrynthine mathematical mundanities… I haven’t been able to produce much apart from these petty spirical little poems I occasionally post on here since finishing ‘Driftwood’. Please have some patience with me, and believe me when I say some stories are coming – I can feel them amassing ever so slowly at the base of my neck, but they are still embryonic, cirrus little things. Next week, next week.

Love.

He looks up and dislocates a gazing bird, now

Some fairness, a sickening gauze falls down

Suggesting he really did miss the haze, the rocks,

The sooty terns that winterly nested;

Folded in the battered face.

„Go back to the sea”, they say.

„Go find the waders, their

Cotton sweaters thick with weeds

And lipid slips, trips old oars…”

Or,

Or,

„Draw the blinds and blow your brains, kid,

Do it, like you did back in ’04”

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.

“la, lalala, feeling so… la, la…my baby stayed out all night long, da, dadadum” and on, and on.

November in Budapest was more or less like November in any other city I had walked through at night time; it was cold, damp, air that the trees lining the boulevardes were breathing with sickly, shivering palpatations. I was breathing it to. In went oxygen, out went carbon dioxide, which in turn was gulped down by the last clinging and flaccid cedar leaves before being transmutated into yet more oxygen, which was sucked into my tired lungs. Over and over, just me, and the night time, and the naked knuckles of wood and vegetable matter to my right. Admittedly, there were a few other people sharing this transaction, scattered alongside the wooden chairs, just behind the misplaced statue of Shakespeare. The combined huffing and panting of life, be it vegetable or animal, was deafening.

A wedding had occurred somewhere, sometime today. The final drunken staggerers did as their nature commanded, and staggered this way and that drunkenly, singing songs of their own as the Danube scratched her way noisily through this old town, the same way she had done since before the stag parties droned their way here in orange or green metal birds, since before the Magyar kicked out the Turks with their triumphant orchestrations, since before the Turks kicked out the Romans with raised ouds and the clashing of darbhouki drums. I could go on. The Danube is no older or louder than any other river, and no more or less important. Tiny whispers of music came and changed with the wind. I strained my ears which involuntarily mangled electropop beats with lapping waves, smashed together violas with the violent rumblings of the metro beneath my feet.

All is sound, until there is shape.

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’.