engentada

We will create a hum together - a moment of intimacy, a hestitation in time, a space that is lost.

Play It as It Lays

Your quiet acceptance at 3 p.m.
When the world is still,
Breaking and swallowing you.
Out of necessity, you look for answers in ellipses, figuration, or aphorism.
There is good in your search
Until you stop to realize
3 p.m. is always too early or too late to do anything.

Present Laughter

Comically tragic,
It hurts to have hope; is hope enough?
Better to laugh and seize the present.

Verse Provoked by a Recent Visit to the Stacks (1951-65)

All the forlorn futile faces
Drifting, ghostly, through the iron and book-filled cages
In a sunken filtered light remote from day -
How often in these melancholy places
(so like old dungeons in the Middle, Dark or Christian Ages)
Am I impelled by fearful piety to pray:
O Lord, preserve me from the fate of these poor hacks
Who bury their lives in library stacks.

To be a dot running and staggering,
Should I stay?

I have been a being of solitude,
Letting go of a tension that is within me.
It is the sort of tension that permeates through my two sides.
One side is quiet, solemn, and introspective,
Remembering scenes from a past where I once existed during moments of respite.
The other side is reactive, magnetic, and extroverted,
Reverting to a culture I have assimilated myself into.

A hint of frustration has turned into a moment of deep pain.

Last night, I dreamt of my mother.
In the middle of a bath,
She turned herself into a bridge,
With the fluidity of water,
As I watched passively.

A blunt refusal of time,
To savor what?

She dusts herself off layers of love,
While radiating trust from everyone else.
Brazenly graceful, she materializes her words and silences,
And remains untouched by her own exile.
When small pieces of loneliness begin to crackle,
She extinguishes them as if reality were to consume anything but mortality.
But the moment she could no longer glow,
She would be the first to cry.

Ignoring your tenderness, I will let you sink
In silence, I will retrieve my focus.

Colored by my ghosts,
I draw lines through myself
To erase their traces.
But who can escape from space and time?
So I become trapped
In my own design.

Tonight, I feel the urge to surrender,
To obliterate the phantom of myself,
To swindle out of my shelter.

Dusting off your vulnerability, my annihilation shivers.

Why are you asking for my love?
Swallow my language in you dwell.
Deafen your noise through I burst.
You would like to be the one who rescues me,
But I cannot save you from yourself.

Why am I terrified of loneliness?
Tremble your motion by I lay.
Flutter my wound for you mourn.
I would like to be the one who pervades you,
But you cannot shine your light on me.

Walking alone in the graveyard,
The unrecognizable approach me.
Take a seat, they say, and join our stories.
Unexpectedly moved, I throw away my body,
And leave myself amongst the dirt.
It is too late not to, I reply.

I draw my portrait in jazz, in order to cut into the reverberation of chaos, only to find a congruity of confusing outlines.

Suddenly broken off, a dialogue that was once opened is now closed, but I sip into lines after lines.

When language becomes static, I stare into your dying eyes.

In my wasted hours, I induce serotonin to keep the glare away from the tunnel.

Whistle my words;
Nothing to me.
Rustle my dreams;
Nothing to me.
Echo my cities;
Nothing to me.

Nothing means nothing.

Fused together is your loneliness and my incapacity for love - on an empty mattress, in an empty room, under an empty roof.

As a chaser, you stagger back and forth, and flee toward the center of your verbal labyrinth, so you can be consumed by the ecstasy of solitude once again.

Quietly, you metabolize information that comes from the black mass.

We were going hyper-speed, fueled by our reason and desire, verging on our practical limits.

There is an attack of humility, where false similarity aligns with reasonable reality, and abstract relativity reverberates around magnetic impartiality.

My mind is a box of velvet matchsticks, easy to reach, hard to sustain.

In my sentimental mood, I refuse closure.
Instead, I open every door of absurdity, and walk into the total silence of unrealized possibilities.
Deafened, I make pictures out of memory, until they become an interminable pattern of ideas, only to be hallucinated with meaning.

With a period and a space, I return to sanity.

I ask my personal God to put me inside a crystal ball, and assemble my values by hand.

Inside a blackberry lives heartache.
Pluck forth her leaves, stems, and prickles -
The only way to bloom.

I take refuge in your silence, like a blues singer drones a weary tune.

Toying with our conversation, I intrude your agency with humanity.

Choked with observations, the observer becomes the observed.

Dancing in the rain,
You believe in the sun and
The purity it always pours out.
I believe I am my own puppeteer.
What can I do other than
Appearing as shadow,
Clutching at imagination,
Getting soaked?

Charlie's house of dreams has the power of reflection.
When she dreams about Felix, he passes through her pain and returns through it.
When she dreams about Adella, she traverses her past and loses herself in total blackness.
But when she dreams about Antoinette, she diffuses across her selves and radiates at each octave.

The gods whisper sacred utterances.
Hundreds, thousands, millions of them float amongst the clouds, pass through the wind, overtake the waves, and run up against the shore.
Then they spread themselves out - compressing, expanding, disintegrating.

Whirling in a field, and bored
I was at your vibrancy.

At the end, it is all the same.
We step into a public sphere,
Hoping to circle ourselves back from alienation.
But instead,
We stand by the periphery,
Observing others from our vantage point,
Framing them for the sake of spectatorship.
In multitude we find no one.

This is a summer of hate.
I let water rage against my hands,
So I can be in a fever of apathy,
Fantasizing your fate.
I let air suck out my oxygen,
So I can be intoxicated with clarity,
Gasping for your virtue.
I let heat burn through my veins,
So I can be in absolute solitude,
Waiting for your paradise.

You talk to me in justification.

To navigate your words, I head north for permanence, south for wilderness, west for violence, and east for convergence.

At our intersection,
I contemplate.

By your authority,
I necessitate.

I step back from the edge as my spirit breaks.

You say you don't want to do this anymore.
And I look at you across our living room.

You,
Who gather strength to endure,
Who give everything to quantify what cannot be quantified,
Who seek solace in dread -
Must we kill whom we love?

Yesterday I stood outside a house looking in.
Two people inhale each other silently,
And the intensity shone through.
They were who they were because they had to.

Tonight, may you dream of weaving your identities in a web of contingencies and necessities.
Or nothing at all.

Every so often your grace comes undone.

For a moment I got obliterated by your balanced argument, your gentle and indifferent words, and your stoic measures.

A human decided one day that being a human didn't suit her.
The time had come for her to jump out of the earth as a frog.
Day by day, she exerted herself to jump.
2x, 10x, 50x her body length - could she do it?

Stretching her legs out,
Exposing her flash colors,
Gliding down stage by stage,
She only wanted to be a frog.

But she could never succeed,
Because she could not give up gravity,
The safety of the masses.
And now she is ruined.

When talk is cheap, it becomes an addiction.
So I paper our conversation up, and carve out your singularity.

Sometimes I wish we were improvised as sounds.
Because then maybe we would have no choice
But to be infused together into a chaotic whole.

It is overwhelming,
To have your emotions in action.

You cross a border,
You walk a mile,
You build a facade,
You unlock a force.

I lay dying, as you make inference without reckoning.

I chew on my solitude, ambiguities, and words: while you call me out of my dialogue of thought and complete my nothingness.

I trace myself onto you, just so we can constitute our momentary coexistence.

When obsession becomes delusion and delusion becomes self-destruction, we are prompted to ask, this Sweet Sickness for whom?

Sometimes when you read a book, it is like walking inside a physical echo chamber. You hear whispers, but not fully grasping what is being said. You feel emotions, but not completely sure where they come from. At the end of the day, though, you can walk out of the chamber without caring much about your impotence, even if it has changed you in some inexplicable ways.

Come to my store,
where you can get all sorts of ice cream -
charcoal, chocolate, coffee,
hazelnut, banana, vanilla.

I sell diversity, haven't you heard?

Save me, if you wish.
But part of my reach for ideas is
My pledge to date. I cannot be saved.

Haunted by experience, I stagger my way
Towards an independence.
With my head up -
I yield to humanity.

I walk amidst the islands of God.
I look up and see myself floating.

Guide me,
I moan.

You carry me like an eagle with her prey. I do not move. I pray. I close my eyes. I surrender. You spread through my body like cancer. I twisted my soul. I interact. I do not inhale. I vomit. You stare at me as if I am your sun. I do not confess. I kneel. I hollow my blood. I spit.

But we die a little
every day we live in the past.

To be haunted by memories;
Thy selfhood come.

So as to pray for forgiveness;
Thy will be done.

Saving oneself
From an imperfect deliverance.
Turning oneself
Out of a blind devotion.
Peering oneself
Over a religious sacrifice.

Strait is the gate.
Dread is the self.

I
I walk into the dusk of
Logical calculation.
My thought is
mathematical.
My conclusion is
consequential.
I reason in an unholy
system, in a
Holy time.

II
In the finite ritual of we,
there is no place for
I.
Preserved in bloom,
unroofed in decay -
In the name of the
Promised Land,
2-4 close 3-3-5-5 eyes.

I was loath to embrace, knowing I will be suspended between two stories.

I gulp your words - eat your choice - puke my guts;
while God begs for you - delivers Her void - smothers your nothingness.

Your words no longer matter to anyone, so you might as well sharpen them, and fling - after all, it is to hurt or be hurt.

the dreams,
which are reality;
the particulars,
which are universal;
the beauties,
which are suffocation.

Wandering in a garden,
He looks for possibilities of life.
He does not know what they are,
Except that they should be recognizably human,
To be aspired for,
To be worked at,
for he is not ready.

Suffocated by futility,
Numbed with indifference,
Drowned in tedium,
Always and never.

Come to me
(I never learn)
Pick your poison
(I think about death into every moment)
Halt your morals
(I fear to lose my self)
Bire your id
(I need to be in flames)
Open your heart
(I beg for redemption)

We, as humans, are subjected to mortality. Acutely aware of this, we take great care to choose one possibility over another. Should I be an author, or a married man? Should I continue my search for pleasure, or commit myself to social obligations? Should I hold on to the past, or move forward to the future? But here is the rub: our mortality puts us within the confines of ignorance, such that our great care could be all for naught.

The legendary immortal, Elina Makropulos, took an elixir of life at the age of 42. She was a writer, a singer, a mother, a queen. Her life was ascetic, erotic, arbitrary, dutiful. She had been loved, betrayed, accepted, shunned. With an infinitely long span of time before her, the most difficult thing for her was to remain herself. She was someone, and yet she was no one.

The possibilities in life cannot be exhausted by mortals, but they can be selected, twisted, and dropped.

We live in circular ruins. We develop our outlook out of our experience. We attend to what is around us through our own lens. We disregard what we do not agree with for the sake of our integrity. In a word, we strive to know more about our human world, even though we are lost within ourselves.

For mortals, life is and is not a repetition. On the one hand, life is about searching and realising possibilities. Since possibilities are multifacetedly unspecified, such that we cannot know in advance how to best realize them, we can only do the same thing over and over again, in the hope of culminating a better grasp and gradually reaching the end. On the other hand, this takes the form of progressive learning: what we repeat we do so differently, apropos of our refined understanding.

In living our mortal life, we must infuse ourselves with uncertainties, be it about ourselves or others. We must take a leap of faith to move out of our ignorance, albeit in the context of our finite existence. We must have a kind of unconditional engagement with the world, so that we can become human at last.

At my old age, I do not know what it is to be a mortal, if mortality is simply a continuity of the past, present, and future. Sometimes: I forget what I had for breakfast. I do not recognize myself in the mirror. I have no ambition. At other times: I recall my previous profession as a porter. I look at my wrinkled hands and know that they are mine. I imagine myself taking a stroll in the garden tomorrow.

Every morning, we should, like Penelope's web, undo our past reflection of the world. By this, I do not mean that we should renounce what we have previously committed ourselves to. Rather, I mean to emphasize the complexity of our own thinking. I mean to underscore the contingency and perplexity of our concrete reality. I mean to highlight the danger of self-deception, as driven by our egoistic tendency to be closed off within ourselves. In a word, I mean to call on our courage to transcend our human nature, as we imagine ourselves to have an infinite amount of time to play with infinite actions, circumstances, and ends. In undoing our web of thoughts, we are mortals who are immortal. Pater hemon.

Breathe in
The pain, and let it
Engulf you.

Breathe out,
Now.

It is dangerous to escape from your past self, to impose your outlook on others, and to be bored.