not man, not even the man

one day you wake up and discover that it is in you. it is not even yours. it also did not come from the outside. it is nothing that you picked up along the way either. you were born for it to exist. your own life has no other purpose. you are not important. it is what is in you that is not yours, and you were born to give it expression. that is the sense that there is to the whole of the comedy. there is no life, just comedy. that ordered state of matter that brainless and spineless invertebrate intellectuals call life does not exist. the abstract is absolute, deal with it.

not now

no.

that is all: no.

it is a block of stone

chisel away

incomplete.

return

blindness returns and the poetry is past in this vast horizon lost.

the magician calls once more for the total eclipse of the being.

i am lost to it all.

lost and impatiently lost.

exactitude and precision are far from veracity.

i wish that i was capable, and i surrender incapacitated.

i return to being lost and fragmented

i return to not existing

i return to my insignificance

yesterday controlled and tortured me

i know the strength that you deny

i know the power of you

pray!

nights and days...

then there are taboos...

nights.

days.

taboos.

then there are the interstitials of god.

right now is all there is:

no god

no interstitial

no taboo

no day

no night

all, nothing.

maybe.

once

the desire is for silence

the desire is to disappear

the desire is to not exist

i am tired of words. they do not communicate

character after character

just abstractions vague empty

take a line. take its psychology

where are you? who am i?

what am i doing?

then close your eyes!

but you did not... you read. you keep on reading.

you wonder what is it that is not being said

what is it that i am not saying? what is it that you are not saying?

she hesitated, she did.

turn the page, do!

i am tired of thinking. i am tired of being a fucking genius. i am tired of you.

really, i am. i am.

it hurts

it pains me

it hurts

it really hurts!

there are all these ideas aching to get through and out. i write and the writing is metaphoric delusion, nothing communicates, not the words, not the letters... not the metaphors even!

i love her, truly i do. i read her letters, all her love letters, her love letters never mailed... i have read them, and i have cried. i have loved that woman, oh, i have!

it hurts, it pains me, to see her gone... she is no more. and how i loved her when she gave me her best mask, her best smile, her deep and intense gaze...

oh, i loved her! i did. i do.

i love her. how can we ever be separated?

she loved, she did. all of them. they had all different faces they had all different faults

blue eyes brown eyes green eyes tall dark short blond

compassionate pragmatic optimistic depressed passionate frivolous narcissistic ambitious idealistic brave

married divorced unsolved

they have all been so very different, so very human and she... she loved them all.

she loved the faults, she loved the strengths, she loved the weaknesses...

she just loved them all.

then she would sit there on that corner, she would smile and ask me if i really knew what it was like to not really know...

i never knew what she meant, i just loved her.

her eyes, her smile and what she could see... i could never see what she sensed, i could never dream what she experienced, i could never draw what she could paint, i could never imagine what she could be.

she no longer is. where is her mask? where is her smile?

why her? why not me?

knowing

i read your words, i drank your words...

are you inside my mind? are you inside my spirit? are you inside my body?

have you read my story before i wrote it?

who are you? who am i?

if you and i can think so, who are we?

are we one?

how could you have possibly have known what i am thinking...

but you do know it is possible

we both know

grateful

this is still the place of abstractions. you are the reader and you are the inspiration. this is for me, this is for you. you are a muse across the border, you are a loyal friend, you are dear to me, you are my family and you are my life. your face changes, our lives go on. some go and leave memories, other linger and share precious moments of just being here.

fluage remains the only active blog with the voice of cairo otaibi. i still need this one here while i am busy in the background furiously writing that story that has had me in its grips for a couple of years, and that has me now waking up at four in the morning just wanting to write. i still do not know if i can or if i will succeed, i just want to. i have no choice but to write it. prose is rare here on fluage, and when it is prose, it is very abstract, but then... that is the noise that i like producing, abstract noise. when i began writing fluage i knew that i had embraced a journey and that i would tunnel through to another side unknown to me; you all have been the midwives of this tunneling journey of mine. within the past four months my being got accelerated through the tunnel and all my resources were absorbed in the process. it started while i was in another european city, a city that in the past had spoiled and pampered me with both creature comforts and successes that i had yet to understand. when i returned there four months ago, i returned as "the poor artist" who slept on her cousin's home office floor and used public transportation for the first time in that grand place of glory and tradition. yet, the unexpected manifested itself. it was a good space to be, i was with family and i felt at home. there were a few questions on my mind, and i wanted clarity as to what the answers were. i started asking, and i started making some of you uncomfortable.

home, being at home has been a rare feeling with this creature inhabiting my body. i have rarely felt at home, and i have felt at home everywhere in the world when i am in touch with my own being. yet, before i could ever become conscient of it, that feeling has much too often drifted apart and i was left all over the place and no where, homeless and orphaned. this journey now has taken me to that place of being conscient of home and who i am. you all knew already who i am, i did not. i had hopes and i had dreams, and i have worked adamantly at getting here, and i was clueless and blind, deaf even.

one of you had a gentle boldness, and you were not about to drop the ball. you told me how you saw me, you repeated it, and you did not know that i did not know, but you were sure, and your words were those that i could barely discern from what i thought was noise. i have heard noise before, and i have learned to be weary of noise. while i could barely hear your words, it was the rest of your being that finally transmitted the message. the words just barely got through, but your being, that i fully got and i found myself at a place that i barely knew, it was home, it was me.

one of you! how can i dare write such generalities when you are so very precious? how can i dare? just last night i wrote to you and i told you a whole lot about me, all that you already knew. where was my concern for you? don't i know that you are there busy in the joy of your own dreams? i know, it does not even occur to me to question it. you are sharing your dreams, that i know.

freedom. my first poem ever published was about freedom, it was also my first publication and i was barely fourteen. i have long lost a copy of that poem and i do not remember the name of the publication, the byline read my original name and i was just another girl full of energy and life. i climbed trees and run for miles, swam in the ocean, and made a whole lot of people uneasy for girls are just not supposed to be that way. i built soap box cars with the boys at the seminary and i was not interested in kisses or boys for that matter. i had a dream, it was freedom.

somewhere between then and now something happened. they call it traumatic experience. i have suspected for years that one traumatic experience happened when i was fifteen, but its core and its pain have eluded me and most of therapy until just now. in a way it is as though it was only now that i was ready to deal with this part of my life, first there were earlier experiences that needed to be reprocessed and accepted. i have wondered very far from my self and my home, i have travelled far and wide outside the confines of my being to return now to that being and to find myself very humbled by the magnitude of my own existence. oh, what a ride indeed!

i am here. there is no distance between you and i, there never was. grateful i am.

tremulous

what is the sound of the monk's silence?

yes, i am asking you. you the muse, you the teacher, you the man, you the mirror of my imperfection, you the want of my strength; i am asking you what the sound of this monk's silence is.

i ask you what the smell of the moon is, what the perfume of the hours will bring, and i ask you all the impossible questions that i can only ask of you.

you have constantly been around dancing in the silence of my numbness. you tempt me, you seduce me, you are indulgence in flagrant!

my desire for you shall not cease, yet my lust has no desire. my power is infinite, yet my strength is not.

i get a tremulous shimmer of vindication, and i think of you. you are the very ecstasy of an abstraction.