The silent embroiderer continues to weave. The rain tinkles, their spherical bodies dashing themselves against the window panes.
Her needle; quick – sharp – is the sniper resting on the water’s edge. Then it dives in, that little pinprick of red, and a flame slowly flickers on the surface of cobalt silk. That sudden flare, the inevitable anger! She stops her work, startled.
Then it quivers; dilating in a spectrum of orange, and the sudden memory of a held-back slap inches its way to the surface. A tear-streaked face, painted in hazy shades of white and grey, keeps repeating: “No, mamma.”
She tilts her head, grappling with the memory, her eyes narrowing involuntarily. The hazy film continues, unaided. But the persistence of her laconic reply rapidly gives way to the explosion. The hand moves suddenly, from out of the corner of her eye, and a tingling sting radiates across her fleshy cheeks, stippling its anger across naive flesh. “But why, mamma?” And another slap. “But why?” Slap.
Then it dims to night, as if someone had turned the light down a notch, and a blanket swims into view. Its hunched folds, pregnant with a slowly ebbing warmth and some strange, pernicious yearning now seems to her like that distant glimmer of stars, brushing against cold, stiffened feet, offering some unfulfilled premise of yet another forgotten story:
But what? And why?
She touches the cool metal, that sits neatly in the clasp of her throat, that silent observer, yielding no truth to her curious fingers, but pressing down on that hollow at the base of her throat.
Her chair creaks. The damp air clings to her. She stops her embroidery, and looks out through the dirty windows.
The cuckoo, doomed forever as that instigator of abandonment, starts crying out its wretched call in the fading daylight.
This poem is written with relation to these quotes by Osho. Or maybe not. 🤣
“So I say to you, even to a well frog it is possible to communicate something about the sea. And if the messenger is really inventive, he can create devices to communicate. That is what a Buddha is doing, a Jesus is doing – creating devices to communicate something of the sea to well frogs. Because there is one thing in common – the water. If there is one thing in common, then connection is possible, a bridge exists.”
And this quote here could describe both the ecstacy and frustration that occur when we communicate with someone else.
“There are three hundred languages in the world and three hundred languages for rose; there is no relationship, all relationship is arbitrary. Cold is related to hot, well is related to the ocean. Their relationship, however indistinct, is there – real, not arbitrary. But between a word and reality there is no relationship, they are not related at all. So you can have your own words, a private language, you can call anything by any name.If you like to call it something else, the rose will not fight in a court. And nobody can prove that their word is more correct than yours, nobody can prove it because no word is more correct or less correct. Words are irrelevant, they are not related.
And this snow –
born in the cold:
the shade of an old man’s beard,
marking transitions –
the pearl, glistening,
spread open, all opportune
nestled between hinges.
The untouched language
of Indian textiles; before
purple and gold existed –
the bare glint of a pebble,
all lonely on the sand.
How could I even try
my hand at comprehending?
There’s 50 words for snow,
but no single word
to cut to the absolute bone.
Ruminate all you want,
come up with dialectics
till you go blue in the face –
but still,
“All this snow –
always born in the cold…”
I’m really, really enjoying this book…and really, really enjoying this rain….
A few things have been keeping me busy lately, but not too much. And also – a realization that I’ve had over the past few weeks:
Trying to set up an online presence for a business. I can’t say who it’s for just yet (well, maybe in the future), but this explains my on-off absence. I’m currently teaching myself the ropes. I could have someone to teach me, but….I would probably never learn. I’m a stubborn ass mule. The cliff’s as steep as hell, but I *think* I can do this. WELP
Erratic time schedules. This will be a challenge that I’ll have to tackle head on. It used to be that I could squeeze some time out to write/edit/schedule, but as of now I won’t have, or at least have very little of this common luxury that I used to take for granted. Writing on the go isn’t alien to me, but editing on the go….that’s another story.
No man is a complete island. I know everything is ultimately inter-connected in the end, but thinking and gut-feeling do not always go hand in hand!
Thinking about advancing beyond poetry into article writing. i.e freelance writing, i.e. to write for a fee. I want to venture beyond non-creative writing. I realize that I like flexing my brains as much as going into the misty realms. (er, yes – I did just say earlier that I couldn’t write reviews. Somebody, please slap me now). But I’m not sure if I should do it?
And to cap this off, hello to my readers again. It’s been quite some time! What’s on with you? 🙂
I notice the twitch marring his inscrutable expression, an ugly crack in a porcelain jar. But, before I can ask him about it, he’s already off, red-hot on his invisible mountain trail. Whatever anger he could have worked up earlier now simmers in his eyes, glowering softly in the near-darkness, two transparent eels traversing the black waters with nothing but their luminous tantalizers dangling surreptitiously off their sloping heads.
“After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body.”
He paused to clear his phlegmy throat.Then, beginning again, a stop-starting engine nestled in his wrinkly throat: “He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell.”
The knife falls from his trembling hands. I nearly jump from the sudden sound of the metal clattering against the floor. In such a setting, that sound could have stopped everything in its path, I reckon. Perhaps, even time itself. Had he done it on purpose?
Not wanting to admit my skittishness, I immediately think up of something to say. “Well that was pretty interesting, Bill. Did you know that they have the potential to grow into malignant tumours? That’s what stopping them from using it legitimately. And it sounds a lot like Ditto’s function. Do you know what Ditto does? It’s the amorphous whorehouse of the Pokemon world. It’s apparently sexless. Isn’t it fascinating? You should play Pokemon some time soon.”
I tap his foot impatiently with my index finger. “Do they have video games over here? How the fuck does one come here, anyway?”
He gives me a “well, I never!” sort of look, almost pausing mid-sentence to ask me what the hell a Ditto could possibly be, but his eyes narrow and he chooses to continue his tale.
“So, finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig.”
“Well, you ain’t seen anything yet, you young fool.” he rasped.
“That’s one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off.”
He picks up the knife, humming under his breath. Polishing it again with his hanky, he continues, pale blue eyes seeming to glow with an unearthly effect. A horizon that offers nothing to me, the keen follower, but the bright, blue sky –
“For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.”
Then, without any warning, he flings the knife, which whistles past my ear and hits a giant checkerboard now hanging on the wall – the same shades of black and white as his mask. For the first time, I catch a glimpse of a little black teardrop tattooed below the right eye, smoky iris crouched at a far end of the portico. I turn back to see where his knife has landed.
Bingo.
And I hereby come to the conclusion of Reading Naked Lunch! I’m not very good at writing legible reviews (if you see this attempt over here) so this was my way of compensating somewhat! I wanted to capture the feelings I had when I was writing this, and feel that I could have done better, but this may well become a springboard for future projects.
Zelda Reville 