Lost for words

Bleak, a foreign continent my life
Seizing its air with lungs that aren't mine
Only my eyeballs grasp it
With the spiteful thirst
Of a dumb man gone to the cinema.

Les Poupees Russes

I tried to peel the truth of me
To its injuring essence, but
The Russian dolls keep getting smaller
And smaller, there's always room for another,
Always for each other
Is there a place for me inside?
I do wonder…
Is this my mystic hideout,
Too intricate to find the proper corridors within?
I never seem to feel complete
The blood eludes, and all I'm left with
Is plain skin tissues,
Forever surfacing me out.

The Ripper

Where is your laughter?
It's in my throat
See how it cracks, while raped by otherness,
While still awaiting
A truthful absolution,
A light, sweet feel to make it utter
Without distinctive noise, and in the graciousness
Of low octaves, the trademark of sincerity;
Silence, the breastfed child of selfness…
Still, where is your laughter?
Can't you hear it?
This hoarse babble, devoid of chastity,
Lacking in foolishness and high hopes,
A sour, dry lip losing its thirst.
My faint lust, a spinster blush that missed its ripeness
While rotten from within, with self-doubt.
The ripper is near me -
My laughter is his, whereas his hatchet
Is now in my hands,
Pointing at me.

The virgo epos

She lived with her father in an 18th century chateau
The very age when Sade's brain went for a walk
Only to come back with a testament of horrors
Neighbors and doctors pitied mum and dad
The day they saw her wayward looks and customs
Mum was the lady of the land
A rigid silhouette with pious manners
But no one was as good as daddy
Nor with so handsome an allure
The two would climb the hills of coal for hours
And she was smitten with his dreams of her
None of such fictions would come true though
They had to cope with the grim concept
She was too shy a nature to be schooled
Some days she heard the silly chuckles
Of youngsters rushing home from classes
That was a noise which always soured her mood
Until disrupted by her mummy's pancakes
And by her daddy knocking on the front door
She was the happiest with them
It was so nice to watch the good old Doris Days
Throughout the good old Wednesday evenings
All gathered by a pot of tea
Together
Their castle was a solemn wreck
Ivy and moist chaining its daunting walls
Madonnas paling on the ceiling
And port-fenetres stained by fog
She become lady of the land
A patron to her ailing father
The day her mother died
While praying in the kiosk
Their manor turned into a moody foster-home
Where she and daddy keenly sweet-talked
And pillow-fought each other
Not all was joyous in those days though
Autumn would come and sweep the brides away
And every year they'd get younger than her
Skin smoothing in prenuptial glory
She kept her dream of wedding some day
Although the beaus she happened to encounter
Would creep away from her politely
And laugh behind her back with fellow nubiles
The day her 40th January came
She felt it was time to grow up
She switched paper planes with macramé
Trying to sooth daddy's arthritis with gobelins
His cheer succumbed to brittle moans each day
Sometimes he was simply too much to bear
Until the day he spared her from his grumps
The very day she saw him lying shrunk
Limbs cramped under a snow of moths
Sheets eaten by dandruff and lice
It was as if she saw him for the first time
After a long surreal dream
How could that sorry pack of bones
Amount to daddy?
Men came with ugly big machines
As from an era she was unfamiliar with
They pulled her benumbed body out of home
And tore her castle down to dust
So baby walked away in dread and lonely
The air was new, the buildings tall and crowded
Nothing felt normal anymore
There was no tiny shred of obsolete
Fat cars screaming with people
Houses where folks jostled each other
To watch enormous colored screens talk
Women and men, women and women
Would touch each others' lips in cabarets –
The horror!
Her mummy had long taught her of the mortal sin
Which spreads far from the eye who's watching
All that she had once known so surely
Had left no crumbs behind for her to follow
Ahead was an odd ball of intersections
The latest trick she could not learn
What would become of her
Where would she take her laddered stockings?
Stray dogs, stray cats, stray her
Synonymous between the rusty leaves of fall
Leftovers of some whimsy womb
Laughed at by naked bellies.

The old man and the G

There is an old man howling in my chest
A man decrepit in demeanor and morals alike
He's starving for unholy tricks of youth
The youth he never had the chance to visit
Caged as he was in his Catholic living-room
This man sees nubiles carrying both genders each
Women and men converted to androgyny
By the perversion of his appetites
Which is not yet to say that he's to fear
Few voyeurs lacking spirit in their phalli
Are so polite and clumsy while they're feeling
There is an old man crying
In the chest of a howling old man
And vice versa
Each taking turns in fathering the other
Both squandering the wets of lust and mourning
While watching love entangle others
Whose skins feel savagely eternal
There is an old men in my chest
Who just won't get through the rehearsals
And die for good.

Ana

She never had anything
Never had anybody
Sometimes she fooled herself
That everything and everyone
Was not really temporary
The first time her life went epic
Her joy had the sound of a telephone
The next time
She knew better
Her dream had become to elope
Every make-believe that rose
In a room full of people
In a room she knew would empty itself around her
Each time the cholera broke.

The girl who wasn't there

She broke all her homes
To keep her shell prim
She ran from her loves
To not lose her grace
Men's lust was a backdoor
To where she'd stay her
She married a fool
Because time fought back
And within their sheets
She'd remain untied
Her body just yearned
To deliver plump babies
But when she embraced them
They'd fall from her thoughts
When their birthdays came
She'd give them new toys
While making them orphans
By a look faraway
Pillows of smog would grasp her escapes
And choke her awakenings to all she could touch
The day she died was the day they discovered
She wasn't alive.

Mother

How I shout at you sometimes
And how I keep you waiting
Hoping you have the time to miss me
Hoping the nothingness in you is large enough
For your despair to validate
This pattern that we're in by hazard
O I'm the brat who knows no cuddle
The wicked whining for a pink prize
And all I want is to make you stay
When all you do is leave with an excuse
Always sooner than expected
Always with a gentle nod
Always neglectful of your own birthdays
The sadness in you, bottled up
Inside the limbo where you'd stick around
Fearing the dark, choosing the cold instead
Making the hide-and-seek a lifelong ride astray
O mother, the scorn and raging hopelessness in me
Are all the hints you need in order to make out
How much I love you...

Where cuckoos dare

Gentle thumbs, feminine thumbs
Fondle my forehead like autumn chill
Imogene, so fair and dumb,
She grasps my thoughts until they're shrunk
And sweeps the branches of my headache
Under her palm.
She makes it easy for my train to slide
Beyond my eyes, inside large Technicolor boxes
Piled up on villages of coal mines,
Population linen and chants,
And spinster daughters of cinder.
White is her element
Her silence focused and concerned
She knows her lullaby is here just for the summer
Then I will have to shoot my thoughts alone
Just like I did in century nineteen,
On my beige horse,
When people were dressed in chiffon,
Their bouquets gathering four fingers each,
Gold filaments kindly inviting me to tea,
Kindly inviting me to stay inside a nutshell,
Where cuckoos dare,
And there is no one else to hate.

Hair

Long-haired girls dressed up as Pisces
Buoyant maidens stagger seas far from their native shores
Black, raven, and blonde,
The mystic seams of laughter 
Virginal landers on so cold a platform
Become filtered by Scotland, where red is the rule
Black, raven, and blonde are sent to brothels
"Exotic misconduct", the euphemism of their rebuttal
As well as their appeal
Fiona, Fiona, the undressed dame running on snow
From graveyard to kindergarten
And vice versa, just for the chills of winter touch
Driven insane as tribute to the artistry of contrasts
Ocular gray and fire, the substance of her madness...
Fiona, I am the raven girl, let that be
A complement to white instead of crimson
Allow me to be my hair, and not my gender
I never chose to begin inside this absence
Honing its own survival,
My addiction to not being seen
Do not deliver me to all those armies grinning downstairs
To conquerors denying their sores the proper medication
Alexander and Charlemagne, the Prince of Aragon,
Wearing trim continental hats,
While the piano is played by a topless Creole
She looks tired, though not particularly hurt
Did she fight being chosen?
Will I fight wanting it?
I am afraid to land on no apologies required
I am afraid of Scotland, it's so wild.

An architect's taste in gothic

Words jostle in my mouth
Trying not to be enemies
But then I see you, and they hide
Confined to the rigors of bashful solely
And I become plain crumbs of me,
Some odd Egyptian crypt delivering a beam
Before your look away shrouds it in beige tarpaulin
Words stray from me as you forget to nod at them
And build up silly instead,
Or my tragic feeling of it.
The hungry motion of your eyes
Disjoints my self-awareness,
And throws me inside tiring interludes,
Where all I'm given is a comb.
My chatter thieves both of my hands –
Left mocks me with incorrigible farewell
Whereas the right pushes me in your greeting.
My final voice slides through your cleanly ears
To thoughts opposite to me,
To memoirs devoid of Chekhov…
But for some reason, I never stop putting on rags,
I never stop to learn the graciousness of quiet,
Of muslin walks through my inlying Yorkshire…
I comb myself to death instead.

Fanny Brice

A stream runs through me with my birthday present: 
An old decrepit stage
It cracks each time my thumbs caress the footprints on its surface
The holes through which I eavesdrop in the damp wood
Mimic the outlines of my curious ear, drawing a seashell
To my childish delight, their prosthetic Abracadabra;
I capture music that has never been recorded
Tinkles forever in rehearsal,
Unable to eschew ingenuity
However under pretense of perfectionism.
And so I see The Follies crazed and vivid in the backstage
Waiting for a command to pop out
Hoping to turn a foot stretch in a proud step,
And then another
But then remembering they're not allowed
Remembering they have not yet to master tiptoes;
It's quite a life form what they share in the unseen
Parallel to the red curtain –
The laughter and the small talk;
They blush while gazing at the oval they so wish to dance on
In order to be baptized –
Identity papers only lie in beauty;
The limelight is a hoarse seduction
Prepared to ossify their chuckle in a diagnosis
Of lunacy and nearing death
A black voice gently orders them to step ahead and learn
A lesson in grace and suicide:
Chin up, shoulders pulled back adroitly
Precision in the spreading thighs
Toes skimming wood while jolting
All replicas of jolly living 
And so they find they cannot match the blubbers of their nameless frenzy
With symmetries ending in a rhyme,
A vertical demeanor back and forth
No thumb's allowed to wave or scratch their heads outside the repertoire
No arm can curve while halted by a sudden thought
Just mournful lines in compass motion, they render
Flawless calligraphy in thinking
Their soul assassinated for a baptism.

They conjure red ink to usurp my stream 

Proud to be worth every carnation they are darting 

On the dance table where I'm auditioning now.

Photo & Source: "Woman in a Corset" by Henri Toulouse Lautrec –www.artunframed.com

The chaperone

The laddish gait the cigarette flaunted in the beginning
Dissolves in silence,
Imminent orange reduces it to bleach deformity
And then to sticky powders of grey,
Turning the O-shaped wonder of ashtray in a sense of eerie.
I'm lying scattered on the couch beside it
The phone cord captures the uneven motions of my thumbs
Converting them in Doric demands;
And so I have to teach myself the hide and seek
The sole back door for blood flow
Throughout this treaty for grandeur.
My walls are gnawed by rabid colors,
Bare diaphragm for Bedouin legends
Of eyeballs sneaking
Battles ending in suicides flaring upon them
Just as the sun is turned off by my aptitude for fearing...
I don't quite know where this sequence began
All I can see is my afflicted body
Dying for some translation of its nightmares;
And then
A foreign voice slips mildly in my head
Sheer clairvoyance, rooted beneath relentless centuries of granite
In eyebrows untrimmed
Proverbs turn up to spot each grin of my annoying folly,
Hoping to send them all to boarding school.
And while I hear the gentle utterance on the spirit of my visions
Draining like gracious sand from my black telephone
I'm undressed and asleep;
How odd that she should come upon my nightmares
And peel their shrouds off while I'm dormant,
How grim her haughty logic should be a limb of dreaming...
The cord entwines my hands
And I am floating somewhere gluey, equivocal,
Between colors defined,
Maybe behind the retina of blind;
I'm shunning every trick beyond the diction of salvation,
Yes, I am sad to say
I've been past scalpels and Gesundheit for some time now.

25

It takes nine months most of the times

Seven or eight, the casual exceptions

It took me longer to become a baby –

25 years past my baptism, to be more precise

The blow of candles every late February

Was actually a sigh.

Before I was born,

I was taught how to spell

My first word was sorry,

The second was please

Along came techniques in seducing my mother to stay

Such as good grades

As opposed to my nullity few inches away

My bad math worthy of bad echoes on my face.

Throughout your discontent with me

I grew a couple of mimetic ears

Which later came to name me Magdalene

And Forrest Gump, only with balder tits.

Too close to my angles to grasp what they add

The simple right dress concept

Me, a shape no language could ever define,

A shape every language would rather side-step

With utmost contempt.

You pinned a pair of invisible needles

In each end of my lips

So they could fake laughter whenever they itched

For all those whom you knew or not –

My scars, the price of it.

25 is a long, lonely time

When all you can pull is you

Purity lost in a divided sight,

My heritage –

Divorces in and out.

But as I buy myself a BlueAir ticket

You lure me to prattle and do the bear

While handing me tea and ruby earrings...

Cancer has now become a sign of affection

Virgo,

Pisces,

And Sagittarius, as well

All four of them chipping in for amnesia.

25 is a respectable fraction

A quarter century from left to right

Dismissed, and then back in line

Late virgin goes lousy lay

Lapsed Christian, lapsed suicidal,

Lapsed beautiful

Lapsed would-be-s, too

Misdiagnosed by turned on shrinks

Constantly trading love for its misconceptions

Devising a cycle of steps in and out of insomnia

And failing at everything just to confirm first impressions –

It only took the irreparable for you to awake.

Now that the check writes 25 years,

And 2-pennies change,

Not to mention hopeless disgust in milk,

I am the apple of your eye

The sweetest baby in the world, at last.

Beige

They live in a room of macramé and china

Grandmother's knitting cashmere and fates

Her eyes lighten air with a pretense of wisdom

Her agelessness hypnotizes each atom of dust

Lulling them into slumber…

Her wrinkles fracture her face in uneven segments of flesh

Slices that drain on the shirt she's preparing

For gentlemen-callers as old as the fairies

Whom she had taught the little one manners for

The manner of fear, the pearl in her dowry…

Her lovely ballerina, so well-behaved,

Always sitting on the side of an armchair

Thinking some beau with a tweed hat

And a fat bouquet in his left arm

Would love her for that…

The air is cluttered with cupboards that smell

Like wood in its terminal phase

Moths fret around, a little limp now

Never turned into butterflies

Ignorant of the test they failed

In respect of a natural course of becoming.

The room is obscured by the beige paint on its windows

The walls are damp and the velvet is shriveled

But she's still keeping her hands polite on her knees

Trying to hear a knock on the door,

A knock her grandmother had always prepared her for

The man with the hat and the white sheet;

She sits on her armchair, toying with china

Fearing the door and strangling the sparks

Not knowing the fact that their house has no backyard,

Its synonymies failing to sprawl in a world that derides them,

But it's placed instead in the town's pile of trash

Where everyone throws their holed socks.

Go to sleep, my beautiful lily

The grandmother mumbles serenely,

And so she obliges, at peace with her pillows,

She falls into slumber, time she elopes;

Salt slips from the ceiling and covers her gently:

Dormant she lies afraid of that knock

Unwitting she failed to arrive on her date.

Mankind in a loop

The fences are covered in must
Shriveled throughout their adherence to fur and fairies
Scribbled with centuries-old stories of mankind
Mankind shrunk under binoculars
Mankind in a loop with a name different from its other portraits
Nonetheless
All of them conjured in the same definition of shape
It's past tense reproduced
Somewhere in a bulb
Or not
Who knows which the round is?
Us, out of their massive mania
Or them, outside our microscopic one?
The torturers and healers, two opposite-looking breeds
All sat together at the same last supper
All winners
All people
Outside me
Us
Somewhere incoherent with nothing but an oxygen mask on
Unaltered by the cries and interspersions of time
Watchers of a vocabulary we've come to learn the words of
Speakers of consonants we have not yet to scrape reality of
B-level pantomimes
Builders of sciences inside a dolly house
Vicars of recipes and clay gourmets
I
I'm forging fences just to see what I need to escape
My favorite playground
My deadliest playground
A medicine woman deprived of corpse
Who belittles her blankness around swollen red dots
Just for the thrills of seeing the scab reformed
And the moon restored in the smooth amplitude of a face
A self-killer, a self-curer
My repetition for no part
I
The puppet always with a fake thermometer on.

An English guide in losing your daughter

The pink lay dormant in a belly
It may as well have been for an eternity
For all it cared,
Aging without becoming was hardly a problem
If not a privilege per se
But when it did come out, months later
It became she
And she become her,
As did the black locks she just loved to see
In the gigantic oblong mirror
That hanged on her tall, snow-white wall.
Her mother gave her a peculiar name
And dyed her hair red…
The problem was,
She could not recognize her after that
So she began to search for her all over
Becoming tragically aware of prepositions,
Testing each,
Wondering which would turn out the winner:
Behind, beneath
Up
On, under
In, out?
Her money was on in
Although the in she knew
Was her bare misconception, e.g.:
In her room
In the phonebook
In the papers
In the limelights
In blood stains on some highway
Or another…
No wonder she never found her.
And all this time the little one
Was lying pliant on the dinning sofa
Right beside her,
All covered in fake hair
Dressing herself in a big pretty ribbon
So she could fly herself off
To some man’s birthday party.

Blue

I hate to linger on this lip
This no-land that easily puckers
The tightening that awakes my grand-fear
My nature has not yet been acquainted
With instinct
Nor has it ever derived pleasure from milk
Although I owe my teeth to it
A sturdy prole – my being still
The letters I have learnt to tag kitchen jars with
Did little to remove the metal
From the delights of eating
The sweating man who wears a smeared cap
Pushes the handle bars inside the steel blue
His stare having lost edges
I fear
I fear becoming once again
My stitches interrupted

Marriage V

Long time no see, my enemy
The sneeze that burst out of my horror
Followed by "never mind"
You fell asleep inside me
Till we were one,
Until I lost my knack at spotting you…
The only white I can remember through our wedding
Were my trembling socks
It's funny you should rhyme so freely
With my liking to chocolate and Bunuel
You, of all people,
So lacking in discretion,
Where are you now?
You took a leap inside my mouth
And filled it with must nots
You and your paradoxal privies
Locked up the sobs inherent to my voice
Far from my grasp
Now I am such a friendly tenor…
A historical moment
When my crying got broken
And each dot stopped being
Symmetrical to another.

Light

I'm landing on thick memories today,
Vertigo towards the roots of me;
Sun bakes some spring and squeezes deja-vous from green,
Angles of self throughout the chaos of their dawns prolonged.
I'm tracing all my births as I peel off amnesia,
And downward I'm becoming me.
Each one of you, historical, is me today,
All the peculiarities in light that I once shared with you
Fuse the inherences within your bygone presence,
Perhaps even your right to be,
And marry tenses in a simultaneous I.
When I brood on it all-out,
Perhaps you never were real to me,
Just as I'm never facts,
Perhaps you're all my very foster homes.