waiting

she sat across the table. it was one of these brass tray tables that you can bargain for at any souk in north africa, or without a comment or gratitude pickup at the local imported goods store. they had never sat there; he had lived there for over forty years. he had been waiting for her unexplained and uncorrected. many years ago she had began to read his stories and the words crawled under her skin and aroused every single meme of her conscience. it was a taste that once encountered, it would be hard to forget. instead time passed and that taste intensified.

now, he was there across her, his stories had not changed, charm he had none. his stories had lived him and each utterance of their fragments seemed like a magic spell. she knew that magic, that magic had been in her possession, but that was a magic without potion and it rendered her spellbound and afraid of the next breath. arousal, catharsis. each new breath unlike the previous one. time disintegrated in their conversation.

what was that thing that they called love? she asked herself. there in front of her sat a man. there was a time when dreams had possessed her, now she waited for the proof of those dreams. she blinked, the proof stood there bare and naked, asexual and brazen.

from "Manuel's Child" (draft)

mercurial

sometimes my words are dark and deep. you read or listen and you are on the edge of fear wondering when will it be that i fall off the edge of my insanity's abyss. sometimes you cry and hold out your hand, not that i may console you, but to touch me. i look and do not care. i look and feel. i look and witness. i look and refuse to see.

the hate and the rest

i hate it that you ask me to make decisions that you think i can make better than you. i can not decide better than you.

why me? why now? on what kind of film do i find myself in now? who wrote this screenplay? whose story is this?

i remember when a wise old man asked me if i was getting anything out of the tales he had to tell. i looked at him in surprise for i was convinced that he had something sweet to teach me. i was deaf, not blind. you and him share a name, gender and not much else as you both have encountered me at very different stages of this comedy of my life. his teaching was indeed very sweet, overwhelmingly sweet it was. that very question of his encapsulated what i needed. then i could not quite fathom what was going on. how could i have possibly been so rich and fortunate? how could i be so lucky and have so much when others had so little?

that is how i stayed and discovered that i had written my story and then proceeded to live it. when the subconscious bubbles up dreams that have me wonder what reality is because these dreams subsequently happen during my waking hours while i can make no sense of them, then i want to curse it all. now i am just annoyed and hating the fact that it is as it is. i want to embrace this hate like i have embraced this love. i do wonder why i have not yet ran away from it all. you tell your stories and you muse of your fears out loud and hidden in plain sight, and i do wonder if i will abandon caution and pretence and just hold out my hand to you. if i hold my hand out to you i know that we will stay alone as alone as we have always been. but do i want to hold your hand now?

so it is that i know no love, no hate, no passion, no glory, no emotion. am i like the wind? water is the most humble of all elements. are you like water?

disarmed

the thing is that i do not know what love is.

it is a four letter word in english, a five letter word in german and french. other four letter words in the english language do better with me. still, i already have trouble figuring out what work is. with love i am at a total loss.

yet... with every stone, and every rain drop, once more i fall in love with life all over again and again.

i am tired of the romantics and i am especially fastidious about straying from the existentialists.

fear. fear is another four letter word quickly joining love in my mind of meaningless.

what is fear? what is love?

do we fear love, or do we love fear?

believe

i believe in nothing

i do not believe in your existence

i do not believe in my words

i fell in love once. twice. many times.

i fall in love each morning

waking up

it is the morning hours and i wake up before my alarm. on good days this is how it starts. i have this deep love and affection for the tender morning hours regardless from which side of sleep i do approach them.

last night i finished writing and mailed a long long love letter. writing love letters is nothing new to me, all that i write are love letters. i have fallen in love with life, and that is all that i ever write about. i write about life and sharing life. even my most complex stories are about life, life and death, and that illusory four letter word that we call love, and that has us spellbound and helpless, for all it ever wanted to represent is life itself.

i love you. i am cairo. i am life.

who am i? who sits here?

i am nobody. no-body.

freedom.

life, what is it really?

i thought that my life was borrowed. it is not, it is mine.

me, just me

me and nobody else, that is who is here. just me.

these days i feel so completely raw. i feel vulnerable like i never have felt before. i do not know if it is that i have forgotten how i felt on other days, on other occasions, or if it is as i sense it these days. i have tunnelled through to that other side that i said that i would tunnel through. i do not know this side.

i had no idea of what i was talking about then, i just felt that there was something to tunnel through, and that there was another world on the other side. all my muses and friends have been my tunnelling midwives, who are you all? i am filled with gratitude and tears are never far. who am i? where am i?

it was something about discovering one day that there is nothing easier than to be me, and if life has been hard on occasions, it was because i thought that i had no right to just be me. it was something about a couple of months ago just wanting a bit of clarity about that muse's canvas. what was it that i wrote then? what was it that i wrote a few months ago? why is it that when i am confronted with my own prejudices, i want to die?

then, that was three years ago, it was something about a name. i, i do not even have a name to my identity, i am just here. but then it was a gift of the universe, and all i could do was to bow and say thank you.

being myself is doing nothing, or so i thought then. today, i do not even know. i just feel, raw and fragile. i feel tired of all the memories. yet, those memories just need a bit of compassion. they are mine, all mine!

whatever those memories in need of compassion are they come with aggression stored up somewhere in this body of mine. i have run and hit the tatami, and i have felt the love for the enemy in practice. there in front of me is the aggressor and all i can do to defend myself is to be totally aware and meet that aggression - mine - with all the universe's love. just me.

 

 

seeing and not looking

falling

secrets. our secrets. desires, none. all.

goethe was there, rilke missed it. it is just a place: rocks and water

i was talking about you, you were the one with whom i was talking.

we do fall in love with our own delusions.

in hallucinations, we see perfection in insanity we disconnect and call it reality