Charles Baudelaire: Fleurs du mal

Correspondences

Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,
Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Like You

illustration by Man Ray

by Christina Issa

Graciously featured on the Dead Beats Literary Blog.

intuitively, i am yours
without speech or gestures

of the body like plants
belonging to soil and

letters belonging to
words or the night’s embrace of

dark and a crowded elevator to
silence or like a song to

the lark and how foam
goes with an ocean

a cliff’s commitment to
its edges or how temptation belongs

to boredom or neurons
to our guts and how jokes

are to laughs and a sticky night
to the summer or cleanliness is to

baths and how a shadow goes with
light and like you, dances with clouds

Palm Reader

By Christina Issa

A man reads my palms. I'm holding back tears, then crying for minutes. Don't let them see.

I'm thinking about writing a play. About the brain. Specifically the disconnect between what we think and what we do. It's called cognitive dissonance. In reality this is evidenced by the world-wide human struggle to simply co-exist, and the subsequent identity crisis literally and figuratively dismantling humanity's bridges. We've disconnected from our souls while outsourcing our joy to the external world, only to be met by disappointment over and over. Am I wrong? Too many simple minds that can't process nuance, nor tolerate human difference and change that wield too much power and influence for society's good.

I don't know what else to write. So I just write what I know. But then again I know nothing. 

Life has been like trying to fit a cube into a round hole. I don't want a stubborn life. Or any analogy that improves it.

The human condition is an effect of all the things we have no control over, yet are trying endlessly to force into shape. Instead life shapes us but we still deny that it has a force of its own. Everything we do or don't do has a direct impact on our lives and on other's lives. We think we have control, and yet we have so close to none, in the big scheme, it is negligible. So what to do with this information?

The universe is vast, remember this. A full cosmic stretch would probably bump into many multiverses. Think of a Swiss cheese block but so vast that it's literally innumerable and spans universes....and we live inside one tiny hole. But we think we are the entire block of cheese. Lunatics.

Nobody thinks about this stuff, but I do. I internalize it. The palm reader knows. Internal turmoil he says.

You have self confidence issues, he says. You must value yourself more he says, like other's do. Your life is shit, according to my palm. Get your shit together he basically says. Ok. Thanks.

I think about being seven again and being the last kid picked for a team of a game of elementary kickball.

No one thinks about this stuff. Identity, where we came from and the space we occupy now -- sitting in traffic with round shrubs and iron gates staring back at you for miles. Where the hell are we even going?

But back to the brain. What goes on in our mind? And can this be recorded and documented in a meaningful poetic way? I'd like to understand what of the mind is reflected back into the external world and how does it crawl out of the brain dome of our skull. Is it in the palm? Can our bodies tell us something more about ourselves perhaps more than we even know how to handle? How quickly do we run away when the mirror is crystal clear and scares the shit out of us? The horror. But the palm reader knows. His dog is my friend, sitting on the porch around Persians and cigarettes like it is home. We're doing a garage sale today. My boyfriend's sister owns so much expensive shit it's disgusting. Just lighting money on fire.

The palm reader talks a lot. I'm tired and want to yell at him to go away. He just made me cry and for what! I did not ask to be transparent and interesting. But anyway, he could have read me from a mile away. I might as well get a story out of it.

love is a drain

by Christina Issa

love is a drain
an endless pipe leaking
acid rain
she carries the words
from mountaintops
all that heavy weight
cannot fill a blank screen
a white page
no beauty left to convey
love is a pain
because you feel so much
all at once
over and over
and while I cannot refrain
from infecting the others
the needle doesn't even
know my name
isn't it strange
that I have nothing to say?
where the words of my genius
once filled my eyes
and leaked from my fingers
love has replaced words
only silence remains

Blind

by Christina Issa

the stark light of love
has left me blinded to the core
my insides are illuminated
for your soul i weep no more

instead i weep for all the places i cant go
the distances i wont cross
the places i'll never know

i feel it in the depths of my breath
the ache of control
two humans that love
also take a toll

the hardest thing to do is
let go of what you know
but a blind bat doesn't float
unless it has somewhere to go

but to be blinded is to be lit up
with a visually clean slate
i dont see you any more
all i feel is your weight

I Am Nobody by Emily Dickinson

by Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody!
Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name –
The livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You by Pablo Neruda

By Pablo Neruda 

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Pasty Colors

by Christina Issa

pasty colors fill the face holes

of voids we didn't know existed
holding hands is contrived 

tepid manners replace love

tricky words fighting patience

hinged on thin-string semantics
playing the harp of language 

this polarity is rough

we want what we desire

breaking dishes against the ceiling
definitions are now fleeting
and intimacy is enough

making love is immediate
timeless energy that treads water
we forgot about the dishes
it's raining fragments from above



https://twitter.com/ChristinaIssa

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

We Could Create a Second Sun

if we fell into the ocean

we'd fall so hard

that the starfish would shoot in the skies 

and scatter

and cluster

and become our second sun


https://twitter.com/ChristinaIssa

Piano

master,

hands fall numbly to your sides

of the piano

and graze the thick of my thighs

faster,

strokes delight the slumber of my vibrato

and you key the notes of our tomorrow

while our today sleeps upright

Litany

By Rebecca Lindenberg


O you gods, you long-limbed animals, you

astride the sea and you unhammocked

in the cyprus grove and you with your hair

full of horses, please. My thoughts have turned

from the savor of plums to the merits

of pity—touch and interrupt me,

chasten me with waking, humble me

for wonder again. Seed god and husk god,

god of the open palm, you know me, you

know my mettle. See, my wrists are small.

O you, with glass-colored wind at your call

and you, whose voice is soft as a turned page,

whose voice unrolls paper, whose voice returns

air to its forms, send me a word for faith

that also means his thrum, his coax and surge

and her soft hollow, please—friend gods, lend me

a word that means what I would ask him for

so when he says: You give it all away,

I can say: I am not sorry. I sing.

Rebecca Lindenberg On Writing Poetry

By Rebecca Lindenberg

"I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you “have something to say.” I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it."

Craving Poetry

There are certain things we will each always crave, whether we know it or not. I find myself constantly craving poetry.

 Writing has always been my primary tool for creative expression. Ever since I discovered the spiral notebook at age 5, I became attached. I wrote and wrote and wrote and soon enough, my writing became me. I felt that I could write, therefore I could be. Suddenly, I learned that I could write to change, and even transform.

 A Nietzschean urge kept speaking up inside, to destroy and rebuild all my own preconceptions. To excavate and analyze the artifacts of my mind, things that had been accumulated unknowingly. Even when working in design studio in architecture school, I explored my conceptual ideas initially with words, in a pragmatic way. Words turned into paragraphs and paragraphs began to give form to visual and spatial experiences, which then sparked my initial design concept.

 I will always crave poetry. Writing and reading it. I lust it, I want to be a part of it. No matter how streamlined and routine my life becomes, I need poetic ventilation (as I like to call it) to satisfy my inner need to jump around and yell like a Banshee. Poetic ventilation helps to bend and exercise the mind - to get me out of my comfort zone and thinking about the things that are deep-rooted, subdued and often too categorical.

There are no limits but there is also no mercy – just me staring into the vastness and complexity of life that inspires me to put words to paper daily.  I’m just a girl who knows that no amount of writing for an audience (or doing anything for an audience for that matter) will ever give me the same satisfaction as those sixteen words that don't mean a whole lot to anyone else but mean absolutely everything in the world to me. X Chris

Quakes

by Christina Issa

Slight nudges are like modest quakes

Empty cavities reveal the stretch of

A porous and lighter existence

Joni on her side but still

She feels adrift

Light nips at her fingertips and

Daylight shakes off her moody weight

Withered tomorrows signal for

The night to drench her

Only momentarily

She hasn't seen a thing yet but

Roads have not been so friendly

Passer-by's and their evil eyes

Pierce a thin veil and cull

Her overgrown weeds

Clouded by fantasy

She is

Sleeping wide awake

Only woken up by the

Most modest quakes

Valentine's Day: Don't Over Think It

stoic seas

nowhere to go and nothing to say

I can't remember the last time I felt this way

somewhat euphoric and somewhat defeating

deep in my mind i'm always retreating

into fractures i sink endlessly

grafting myself onto tumultuous seas

grayness engulfs me - i think i can swim

then i remember i don't think anything

silence resonates under crashing waves

hollow like a pair of wooden claves

nowhere to go and nothing to say

I can't remember the last time i felt this way

Gull

Watercolor on 8.5 x 11 bristol 

pencils, down

Original mixed-media drawings. All of these were drawn from still life props.

Pencil 

Pencil and Charcoal 

Pencil and Charcoal

Conté Crayon

Huntington Beach

Image overlays done with my Nikon D3000 

White Lines

white lines
make us nervous
white lines
unnerve us,
where do we draw the line?
we are only 25

the logic of our design
floats freely between two minds,
not within these lines
that are either black or white

darling;

would you rather be a sketch?
an undefined etch
blood without its stream
flows but what does it mean?

but let's not complicate;

a heart does not lie
and we are here until we die
that is neither wrong nor right
this is neither black nor white

if we only
learn to comprehend,
without words we cannot misunderstand
(with our eyes we can exchange)

white lines draw the end
silence is our only friend

Anaïs Nin

“I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic-in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”

—

Anaïs Nin

Perfect Death

somewhere between her foul mouth and genitalia

a life dying to take her first breath

raging impurity of oceania gives birth to a perfect death

imbued with wisdoms of the waves

waiting for a wilting love

the irony is what she craves

kills her more than life above

the dirt ground choking under her feet

diminishing sky in her lover's eyes

chasing life is as futile as the quest for truth

and the arrival of death holds no surprise

event horizon

infinitely dense content overload resulting in a near-brain implosion
thank you internets.

firefly

unexpected firefly flickering his light

tangos with the shadows and dances with the night

nocturnal creature swiftly roams looking for a mate

marks the dark as his home, such a lonely wait 

he saunters onwards on this journey

humming a single man's free will

an anomaly between the trees
in his heart so still

Love is a Parallax, by Sylvia Plath

Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
where wave pretends to drench real sky.

Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
implacably from twelve to one.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks
to knock them down with logic or with luck
and contradict ourselves for fun;
the waitress holds our coats and we put on
the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun
who insists his playmates run.

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
should inflame the sleeping town.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
playing his prodigal charades.

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
graves all carol in reply.

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
brazen actors mock at him,
multiply pink harlequins and sing
in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing
while footlights flare and houselights dim.

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins
and separate the flutes from violins:
the algebra of absolutes
explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes
that jar, while each polemic jackanapes
joins his enemies' recruits.

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':
though prima donna pouts and critic stings,
there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion
which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:
an insight like the flight of birds:

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
away our rationed days and weeks.

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
the simple sum of heart plus heart.

unsung

sounds will not suffice to say 

how much it is we swim

in melodies of blue and gray

dancing on a whim

silently, we know no chords

but silence knows us better

anxious for what is stored

beneath this quiet tremor 

words have failed us many times

but harmonies prevail 

in a sea of crisp white noise
electric rhymes set sail 

what is an & sir?

what is an & sir?
would you dare say
is it the way home sir?
or is it where I stay?

what is an & sir?
would you ever claim
that it brings us together sir?
or will it make us stray?

what is an & sir?
is it more-or-less?
is it a sound argument sir?
or is it truth-less?

you want an & sir?
are you looking for it here?
I'm sorry sir- I don't have the answer
I don't have it my dear.

wake up

it's so simple
as you say
even when we sleep
waves carry us away

while bringing us closer
in a spiritual way
better in dreams
is our trembling fate

saves us from tempest
earthly desires
the waves travel between us
while pushing us higher

wake up
on the crest of this ocean
we are the tides of our passion
a microcosm of heat
energy everlasting

belong

where are you purple flower?
you are a natural, lonely pose

an endless stamen
between shameless petals,
your saccharine nectarie shows

your moon peeps
from behind rocky boulders,
settles above smoky peaks
shrugging his lonely shoulders

lights up the night
the search for you is all he knows

and he never seems to wait for us,
he just goes and goes,
stealing all of our time
warping the days into nights,
flashing a guiltless glow

spinning circles around the earth,
tranquility is for the weak of heart (this he also knows)
in the dark his madness empowered
searching for his purple prose

in white

white walls
white walls
white waiting-welcome walls
we were there, do you remember?
wearing our beat-up overalls

white paint
white paint
a dripping monologue
we had a dance, do you remember?
waltzing in and out of dialogue

white words
white words
careful, special scenes
we had no tapes, do you remember?
just our fragile memories

navy blue

she rises clear above the range as
a silent moment brakes and
we focus on her flight

moving slowly, dressed in a strange

disguise of fog as

she changes in the night

your shadowed face is plain and as
predictable as her movements

shifting in and out of sight

the only color i see is navy blue,

swimming between me and you
turning quiet moments bright

sitting thigh-to-thigh

I glance your waning eyes

filled with sudden might

pressing your head against mine,

our eyes locked tight

a sweet kiss revealed

beneath her pale moonlight

copy-cat

i make things that look like things that other people make
i am an artist
i am inspired
but i am also a trembling fake
what would it look like if I was not among the rest?
would i be uninspired and irrelevant
or would i be at my very best?

Drown

Last time we went swimming
the sea stood up and hugged you
as though you were responsible
for keeping it blue

Bianca Stewart, 2011

summer thunder

beats like thunder,
words are echoed
i'm not fully aware
resounding in my mind
sometimes
sometimes
sometimes i'm here
sometimes i'm there

falling to the ground
i'm nowhere
falling without a sound
i'm nowhere

blackness
blackness
i'm happier there
gracefully by your side
you don't know it but I still care

time is convulsing
it's not me
it's not me
summer thunder is
blissful blackness
i'm still here don't you see?

Every Word You Say

Your words are branches long and limber

I leap from comfort to hang from timber

Someone once told me I was Godless and brave

I'll hang onto every word 

you say

Your words come from far and travel deep

they drift up and fall down blue hills, so steep

I'll keep a bookmark in the best parts of my life

To hang onto the words

you say

Your words tell a story, a beginning - an end

They grow from a gentle tree, around the darkest bend

I'll water them until they bloom the utmost conviction

So I can hang onto the words

you say

On making it, says Ira Glass

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” - 


Ira Glass

The Cult of Dying Adonis

beauty like Adonis, bearing
nothing but a simple frown
born from foam, he left to roam
and in her arms he drowned

searching for his Venus,
knocking down pitted castles of sand
left him nothing but the nectar's blood
from Nahr Ibrahim, to his drummer hand

Medea dips down to drag him
tosses him towards the ocean's waves
Persephone's Eleusinian mystery teaches
him naughty ways to behave

never if he followed a fresher trail of flowers
could he be more fire-and-ice
from Cythera to the Cypriot, as she danced her way about
Venus calmed his solemn cries

forgetting where he came from
the fruitful belly of the ocean's crest
he fell to Sirens calling on his lonely
crashed and burned his boat just like the rest

The Only People For Me

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

-Jack Kerouac

Wolves With Guns

I have waited for you day and night

You find a way to creep around my sight

You fill the outer edges of my retina

Is it a dark ring or is it full of light?

I can't tell between what's wrong or right

Leave me in trouble now, I will be alright

I am waiting for the wolves to yell

to take the prisoner's will with my own might,

I am waiting for the wolves to yell

To kill the queen and have a story to tell

Broken windows, just to get to you

I am running, I am hiding from the truth

You won't touch me, you won't kiss me anymore

Who is gonna love me when I'm lying dead on the floor?

I am only one of many queens

Behind every throne is a treachery

I am only one of many kinds

Of foolish lovers that will steal and taint your mind

When in the dark, there is no shame

Another hope lost with every story gained

When losing sparks, no one's to blame

Another love lost with every story gained

The others think I'm crazy, they think I'm having fun

They don't see past the fire, that I'm not the only one

I sold myself to freedom, and now I'm done

No one is gonna love me with my head stuck to my gun

i don't want to be in love, i wan't to be in sadness

i don't want to be in love
i want to be in sadness
an only space that has no place
surrounded by my madness

how will you feel when i touch?
my weary eyes that stole your badness
let me discover you, sullen boy
so that i may hide in you my crassness

not the brilliance of a thousand slivers

not the brilliance of a thousand slivers
of silver and gold
of bright things and bold,
not the last rose
in it's loneliest pose,
with its bittersweet poise,
making its covetous noise
could take my eyes off of you.  

The Discourse of Power & The Fabricated Self

(A short clip of a longer essay by Christina Issa)


Based on the ideas presented by Foucault in his book "Disciplinary Power," it can be argued that our identities are highly fabricated products of an invisible grid of power-relations, which constitutes the mechanism through which disciplinary power operates. In the greater sense, this is the basis for our inescapable arrest to which Kafka so subtly alludes in "The Trial." As our lives and identities are threaded through this lattice of power-relations, we perpetually reinforce ourselves as effects of power. We are systematically bound to a machine, which we ourselves fabricate and inadvertently attach ourselves to. We do this through, among many other things, awareness and ‘self-consciousness." Ergo, ‘The Self’ is a function of disciplinary power and we are just effects of this power. 


How do we break this? We cannot. It is impossible. For as long as the techniques of disciplinary power continue operating through our conscious and even unconscious awareness - through our struggle to assert and re-assert our identities, through our struggle to give meaning and definition to the world, through institutional operations and their assertion of power over the people pressed into the service and ‘improvement’ of the many - no one can avoid the grasp of power, and no one will ever be freed from the grasp of power. In this way ‘The Self’ will never cease being an endless subject of power perpetually being organized, examined, and observed. Moreover, as the individual reacts to these techniques of disciplinary power ‘The Self’ will never own itself and be its own justification; (To Nietzsche's disappointment...) it will only be owned, as a function of another operation. 


Among other things, this reality is why revolution is hopeless. This is why rebellion is just as absurd as the dictatorship in which it seeks to overthrow. As one attempts to reverse the dominant discourse they merely re-establishes another discourse under which he will be bound and existentially contingent. As one redefines, they merely re-subject. The most he can do is hope to have more power than others, so that he may enjoy the power of domination more and experience the effect of subjection less. 


Despite the transference of more power into the individual’s hands, we will always remain caught in the webbing of power-relations. Accordingly, our identity will always remain a figment of our imagination, evading us more and more, escaping us quicker as we tighten our grasp on it. Identity is hugely fabricated in this way, and exists as just an afterthought; in the present we remain to be effects of power.

when neurons are fleeting, Neruda never fails me.

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973)

coin-slot eyes

Coin-slot eyes steal glances in the still of dawn,
sometimes tender, sometimes bare.
We sleep with windows wide open.
Light falling on freckles and you trace my arms, my neck, my back.
Waking takes eternity, if ever we are not in dreams.
Rolling skin to skin feels brand new every time, like the baby’s first cry at the first chance.
And your baby-face profile can be drawn with charcoals of reds and blue - somehow I forget too much, to say, that I love everything about you.
Waiting for a new moment, or just the same one again. Waiting brings me alive when it’s your thoughts I’m waiting in.
Waiting for the right second to steal looks or smiles.
Saving them for when your far away, many lonely miles.

throbbing loud and hard with fervor

Throbbing loud and hard with fervor
making risky ripples inside
Do we at once, turn and walk away
or stay and take the ride?
A risky endeavor
that cannot be measured
but in leaps and bounds of selfless action
feelings are crisp
like edges of aged leaves
poking through our feet, providing traction
certainly indescribable,
for lack of better or worser words
which seeking for would be as fruitless as the sinners' tree
and as isolating as Kafka's absurd
Writing in colors without definition
in books without binding or edges
filling it with songs absent their rhymes
hanging it off hundred-story ledges
On the tide of tricky desire
burning up gems of blue and gold
bars and flakes and hearts that break
riding as brilliantly as the bejeweled we behold
Swimming steadily in our emotions
through endless lakes, we wail and swallow
loving from belly to thigh, from drunken eye to eye
inciting physical sensations, within we wallow
Grasping the electric while we are able
leaving behind the stable but useless words that restrain
rather we ride the current throbbing cable
since what we are together, is what love is to pain

truth-less reality

For his project in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier asked his head engineer “What is the truth really?” Then he drew two parallel lines, with a wavy line in between. “Truth is like a river,” he said, “it flows continuously, changing course, modifying itself, without ever touching either bank”.

Hafez on Selflessness

A Persian poet once said...

"Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
You owe Me.'

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky"

(Hafez)

soul feels older

soul feels older
while heart feels young
i crave your breath
to fill my lungs

winds push forward
loves sink west
burning in the suns set
feels like our very best

laughing is so easy
when secrets are concealed
between apologies and flattery
only in haste ever revealed

like paper through the wind
truth flows through the wicked lyre
steady paths will light the flame
and words set them on fire

backs turned to light
a hardened steel glow
still we press on with might
lingering only in shadows

big hearts or bust

Why is it that having a big heart is what always gets me into the most trouble?

So counter-intuitive.

Dionysus & Apollo

complex minds rotting with love
how they struggle to stay above
cursing while the world is burning
an eternal agon filled with yearning

deep red ocean - minds run free
in this obscurity both remain to be
driven by the dark roaming around
sometimes lost and sometimes found

and reason seems incongruous with passion
they move violently in a gallant fashion
together afflicted with so much pain
the lover loves to dream in vain

sometimes sex
sometimes fornication
undercover masters of imitation
lovers test their limitation
by somersaults of the imagination

inescapable doubles are
lovers who love to dream
in vain while every kiss
bleeds death the same

Build, Break, Bloom: Some Very Unorganized Thoughts About Architecture

(Written weeks ago)

Contingency itself is the only condition of life and all things in existence pivot around a point of contingency. I am contingent. You are contingent. Life is contingent.

Time and space are the constants under which we manipulate our reality and define things. Our physical environment sits unassumingly as the culprit of Apollonian violence. Quite literally, architecture is the pinnacle of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle. The violence is unbearable sometimes. Existing within a vacancy of meaning while warped by a Dionysian chaos, this time-space experiment remains defined by mathematical boundaries, points and lines. Mastery of it is elusive in the sense that ‘truths’ are only as figured out as we determine them to be. It is only through formal manipulation that we build upon contingencies and thus assign definition and form.

Architecture, as a formal act of construction, is the wildest form of creative destruction, as well as the most tangible expression of the Apollonian and Dionysian struggle. As you build you are systemically assaulting nature and assigning meaning to the inherently meaningless. In the process of building you are destroying all else. Physically you destroy and create while conceptually you are deconstructing the definition of what it means to be and to dwell at one point in time and space. By virtue of its process, the language of architecture is an attempt to control chaos and grant form to the formless.

stillness

still as you were
watching for moving lights from down below
waiting
exhaling
above our heads leaves hang low
reach up to touch the sky-ceiling
but not too far off the dirt ground
in a state of limbo
incredible peace is found
cradling you like the
w i d e o p e n a i r
wrapping arms around
holding you even after you're not there
feelings still tightly bound
still as you were
i'm still as I was
still as you keep changing
be still just because

all things exist only in passing

All things exist only in passing,
nothing is truly ever-lasting
the impermanence of life
moves with dangerous quickness
always open
shifty swiftness

and as soon as we think that we can control
the thunders from above begin to roar
reminding us that freedom is a folklore
and life is just what we do while we wait for more

every object in space dives into our eyes
moving at an uncontrollable pace
aimlessly through the skies
paints for us the tragedy that we all die trying
waiting, rushing, wishing, pushing
never knowing that while we are living
we are just dying

instead of making life from flames
the fire that rages as we pour out our hearts
we douse with lies to keep it tame
so that we do not fall apart

and withholding our very own swells of breath
we slash throbbing hearts that are the soul
doing so, still burning
to find answers that will make us whole

paper into ashes
dust from coal
the fire lay weeping
at our weary core

time

move too slow
move too quick
as we fall
time will tick

closer to you
further from me
from your eyes
I can see

sometimes how you're
stuck inside
all the time how you
desperately try

still as we float
falling upwards
to pass the time I write
in frozen words

tomorrow is not far
when i can write
in scribbles of motion
waiting just to cross that ocean

The beauty that is Baba.

March 01, 1957.

The day Souhail Khalil Issa was brought into the world. My Baba. My Daddy.

I got my middle name from him. I also got a lot of my good looks from him. My hands-on attitude and wild love for exploration. Digging through the dirt, building and assembling, seeing and fixing, it's all from my Baba. My unassuming curiosity that leads me to try new things, I know it's also from him. My technical mannerisms, and my even more technical mind. In a strange way, even the creativity somehow stems from this man of practicality and simplicity.

With the good always comes some bad, and I certainly get my fair share of imperfection from him. The temper is my Baba. The feisty attitude, that is my Baba. But even those imperfections are what make the good so good. I get from him my ability to let it all go, to move the soul onwards and upwards, towards better things.

That is the beauty that is my Baba.

He's taught me to become infused with all that is meaningful, beautiful, and valuable in the world - to have the courage to know when it has all run it's course and the strength to know how to let it all go.

He is gracious and kind. A man who even if he wanted, wouldn't know how to use the word "no". He would never turn his back on the people he loves and never refuses a single friend. Even a stranger on the side of the road, he will go above and beyond to help. He always greets the world with a smile so big, no matter what he's been through. He is a man with enough heart that if captured and let out to sea, could overflow the oceans from here to India.

My father is an amazing person. A beautiful human being inside and out. He has so much love to give to the world, and like me, he also doesn't always know what to do with that love. It is in his imperfections that he is one of the most incredible people I have ever known. Not only because he is my father, and to whom I owe my life. But he has the ability to live his life with strength and courage, never letting the ups and downs of the external world change how much love he is willing to give back.

greatness of friendship

I would rather have the greatness of your friendship for as long as humanly possible, than the sweetness of a single moment of passion, which I fear would last only as long as emotionally possible.

Sadness

Can we be blessed with sadness?

Sadness, like all other things, is a state of mind. It's a place that we, ourselves, place who we are and who we think we should be, within. It's a place. It's a stage. I might be blessed with sadness only so far as it inspires me to create. Only so far as it moves me to progress as an individual who strives to master her own existence. I can manipulate that which I think is sadness, or those things that I believe to be sadness, but sadness has no inherent goodness or badness, it's just a state of mind that really, in the end, means absolutely nothing at all.

So, no. No Matthew. I am not blessed with sadness. I don't see it in that way, at least. In my own peculiar little world, sadness is the cessation of a struggle; the struggle is for a doomed-happiness, which I will never deny myself. The struggle to be real with myself and to be truthful to who I am. That is what you lose when you wallow and dwell in sadness. Like all other states of mind, sadness is just a human creation, a construct that which we bury our true selves under. Just as easily as I can create it, I can destroy it (realizing that it is slightly more difficult to destroy).

(Thanks to Matt Stangle, for inspiring me and succeeding, yet again, in distracting me from the "real" things I should be doing like studying for class and writing a paper on NAFTA...)

La Caída

Parece que acoba de nos encontramos,
algunos momentos pasado,
y a la misma tiempo
me siento que hemos conocido por mucho tiempo

te dejé atrás
salé en Cercanía

cada segundo que pasa
la distancia crece
es una sensación maduro
inexplicable

cada palabra
demasiado sentido
y a veces palabras no estan bastante

para que quiero significar,
para que quiero dignificar,
los sentimientos
es una pérdida, cuando traducimos
compensamos en exceso para llegar al destino,
usando el gesto
del mano
de la cara
del ojos
miramos
pero entendemos?

todo el tiempo en exceso para llegar a la cresta
y nos caemos como uno maremeto,
caemos en uno maremeto
uno maremeto de gestos


(July 2009, Madrid, Spain. Escribé esto poema cuando estuve en España y conocí alguien muy especial...)

coffee's bitter-sweetness

i loved
i loved
the freshness of you
cold side of my pillow
case, your hands (do tremble)
they touched me
blood pumped
feeble mind raced

illusion of you
death strong i couldn't erase
it, after you'd left
so long ago,
too much space wasted

still skin feels how when you left it, so
brand new

awakened her quiet
feels like she loved you
in seconds not hours
feels like time measured her intimate powers

she fit you, she did
into mine she devoured

your breakdown
your weakness
she's speechless
she's speechless
like
coffee's
bitter-sweetness

danger, us

never has the brimming mind
felt so dangerously inspired

elusive moments sting like wired, thoughts
grow wings atop dead-letter spires

we want to move in leaps and bounds, but
do so cautiously from here to there,
carefully not to expose our care, we satiate
our roaring appetites

andallthewhile
loving your stories,
themed childhood-places,
affirming your heroic glory
like footprints, you leave the past
behind paints and strides
doused in bitter wines
in deconstructed angry lines
hidden dirty appetite, that which
you have covered in streaks of light

going home
slender limbs graze my thigh
a blush i cannot hide,
must resist it so i try

and this will soon fade away
let's not get attached
you say
deepening curiosity is strong, but
do not let me forget
how this is wrong

Oh how I wish to sing
to you,
too much, much love could bring to you
the death of you and I (merely mortals)
into an afterlife

don't you know?
you leave many breaths behind
the moving heavy-passion kind
they cross oceans from your lips
to
my
mind

(for which you need a floating device)

wild looks I catch in your eyes
make it hard
to make-up lies

so

maybe i will trace your youth
and down it with a splash of vermouth
a simple mixed-up drink
or would it be uncouth?

stillness on the fringes instances
carries us for quiet distances
dark colors and places melt with our behaviors
pull the sky over honest smiles, it might save us

to want this with so much eagerness, stuck in
self-effacing bliss

many earnest words we spill
to overcome this will, this
box bleeds red and wheat
leave the sugar, we
don't need that which is sweet

tomorrow you'll wake up in the sky
and eat the ocean with your eyes
like the King, you'll steal the sun
in this world of disappearing fun

today i am Simone
in the shadows of wits my own,
you lived in me,
this day was never known

Language is war.

It is impossible to truly understand what another person is ever saying. Impossible to figure out another's concept or perspective born in their mind. It is impossible because no matter what we do and how we try, the only way for us as humans with cognitive activity, to learn, is through language. Through asking questions and attaching meaning to words (which will invariably be diverse and distinct in different minds), we taint the original meaning of words, of messages, of statements. The only thing that is guaranteed is that we humans will interpret things as we see fit, and in this process we will build and destroy. Language is war. Language is a problem. The question is now, how do we live with language?

Agreement in dialogue is technical. More than anything else it is technical. Agreement comes when my use of a set of terms and my chosen vocabulary reflects and triggers in your mind, the same associations by which you linked your original thought. That original thought you probably expressed using a different set of terms, different adjectives and subjects and verbs. Unique to you. Not until we have exhausted our ways of conversation, not until we find a point where I can say what I want and how I perceive what we are discussing to exist, and when that expression of my perception through careful use of language aligns with the idea in your mind, not until then, have we met agreement. Again, which can only occur when the words I have chosen to use to explain myself, happen to mean either the same or relatively the same things to you, in your mind, as you know and use them. And neither of us will ever know the true discord in existence, that lies between the shadows of our words, since we cannot feel it, since we strive for agreement, for peace. We will never really know how different our thoughts really are because we will always be striving to be in harmony. This duality is deadly but beautiful.

I recognize in this process that language and meaning is also always recycled. Social relation and communicative activity encourages the development of meaning by relying on other meaning. This is not important to me here.

It seems the only way for us humans to overcome this "problem" of language, to ever really see eye-to-eye, to ever truly see one thing from the exact same place in space and time, is to not speak. To not communicate. To not question. To not articulate. It is in translation that words will always lose their meaning, their associations, their histories. As we assign them meaning relative to ourselves, we destroy what they meant to another. As they pass from ones lips to another's ears, they morph into something new. That is why we as the carriers of the meanings of our words, are the ones to blame for the consequences.

True peace is silence. Pure peace is blackness and emptiness. Might as well be dead. If language is conflict, I don't ever want to be peaceful. Bring on the heartache.