This life here i am dwelling,
it is already the next;

Nearby things sound distant,
distant things come near.

Of a brusque and brutish lion at midday i dreamed,
to rack, bite and tore my each and every limb.

to all those who agree that Dr.Stockhamm is but a fool. how fanciful it is to have the word ‘truth’—the word, i repeat, the word, no more; for it is nothing but a word—at one’s disposal; what a handsome embellishment it adds to one’s lack of insight; what a sense of fullness it gives to one’s empty thoughts; what a gravity it lends to one’s lightness of topic; how deep it makes one look, just to have it at one’s disposal, just by wearing it, like an exuberant lipstick, on one’s lips! how ‘truthful’ indeed it makes one look! or rather than ‘truthful’, how ‘truth-like’! and the worst part of it all is, in a certain case of which i am too familiar: how easily one mistake it as the cause of one’s inaction. “o i am sick, weary, tormented, for i have searched for the ‘truth’ everywhere, and as everywhere i have found it, everywhere too i have lost it; o i am sick, weary, and suicidal, and i have all the right to be so, because i know the ‘truth’”: but what is all this, if not merely youth? what is it if not merely a false act of lending dignity to one’s suffering? to assume maturity on one’s childish overtures?

(2009 – 2010)

I

Bandung, yr steel-cold midnight air strangles me so with yr dying lapse of breath that  brought sullen fits of anguish like that faltering frozen lips of an old queen;

Too long i have breathed you, too long, too long i have drown soaked, lying prostrate in your icy deathbed listening to your languishing melody of nocturnal thoughts;

Too long i’ve been in yr vain lapse of searching, hiding, towering cowering and everly falling and crumbling and wailing under the shadowy swarms of yr dead dreams!

Too long when night falls heavily pressing on my chest i pretend to sleep so as to take no heed to yr hideously jesting ghosts that crow under the dark clouds of my sheet whispering mockery in such ungodly tone, preaching humility in such preposterous drone – O let alone the aching of the drone; let alone the echoing of the drone i hear so loudly like a thousand pounding on the wall — “Failure! Failure!”, they say!

Too long i have managed to cope with yr dull yokes of dead souls, dead dogs, dead logs that engrave not a bit worth of memory on my head, that left not even a tiny bit of inspiration to shed!

Three and a half years too long ye feasted over your victory so callously and i fed over my defeat defeatedly; forever now ye’ll plague me like that plague of an unwanted child,

To live in you is like living in a box of mirror rusting itself: i could no longer see myself.

I am whom i long to escape so much, so much like you, ye wretched city that i love only when i’m drunk!

II

O how my heart trembles with glee                                                                                                         as i ride a hundred kilometers away from thee; away, away, to mount the vertical top of some impossible hill, upon which i placed myself before yr city scape, lofty and pathetic, watching yr buildings and shacks bedraggled in rains and fogs that burst from the vehement clouds in which, upon the calming of the weather, spread over its distant frame a rainbow monochrome, that towered with such a sickly hue, and hovering on the top of its curve i see my doppelganger—my first vision of another—grinning in a loud grimace, standing there unaware of the cruel flash its very presence provokes, hovering, pulsating below the bellowing gallow-birds that guise themselves into the form of a distant storm—i thought this is my eyes deceiving but from what else can i see?

My heart?—i forgot where i buried it.

My mind?—i forgot where i lost it.

I can neither see outward nor inward in this plateau of inverted abyss, from the very below of which i saw thousands of human ghouls assuming figures just like me, motioning like ancient apparitions over a sunken ship who see without seeing, who listen without listening, who speak without speaking. . . . . —who are they? are they not simply the consequences of my blank projections? i see how the light passes through them unashamedly, as uncomprehending as a fly passing through a dead screen. . . .

—Humans! vague, senseless moving objects. . . . . ! humans, if not mere gambols! humans, if not malingerers! later, shall this sickness be finally ripe, i shall teach them how the game is to be rightfully played . . . .

(And then sleep too, my one and only recourse, has done nothing but betray me; it grew into nothing but torment; i came out of it ever more exhausted than before i entered—O how the Voice presented itself before me only to later deny me! how close, yet how distant! Spirits, they descend into my dreams—their presence filled me to overflowing—the self, having no autonomous space left, withdrew, clearing up a vast hollow in which words, disemboweled from their everyday penury, scatter themselves like disposable loins—and lo!—the most beautiful poems i have ever seen composed—the most magnificent visions—ways of reasoning i have never thought possible—thoughts i never have thought plausible—wondrous, ecstatic insights—burning maxims, anecdotes, dialogues—the typewriter racking manuscripts after manuscripts without respite—O this god who is so set on expressing himself on human language, pity me! Breathless, i borrowed the cosmic breath—i inhaled the stars, the planets, my whole inner constellation — my dilated chest make as if to burst—but no sooner than i wake up then everything became quiet, i am thrown back again into this worthless mortal morning shell, dumb, paralyzed, pale, blasted; in vain do i try to spread my hand, reaching for the glorious white inks that shone in the bottomless depth of the night i have just been snatched from violently. . . the words dissemble like smoke into the air, nothing is left except this foreground consciousness, this gaol of being in which my rejected genius lay hidden behind the curtain, jacking and wasting itself off into one long empty masturbation that is this life. . . . . .

—O Voice! begone, tease me no more! i know that i make such a pathetic figure, unworthy even of your pity—let alone your charity! Angel, doppelganger, dare not open your masks before i open mine!—O vulgar mortality. . . strange horns that sang lowly in the depth of the night. . . . —O consciousness without body! sparks of divinity that came storming, magnificent as lightning, only to later vanish, as stupid as lightning!

Who, if i explode, could contain me?—Who, if i cried, could hear?—Who, as i speak thus, could understand?

—O futile, useless lament!

III

—Away!                                                                                                                                                  Freed i be from the shackles of the cities!

—Away!                                                                                                                                                Freed i be from the tangles of the world!

But lo! what of it even if it were so?                                                                                                         —For forever I shall stay bound by this thing called self.

no one has ever been given to record it; no coffees nor wines has ever been served as the means by which one guzzles one’s time talking about it. (perhaps its because it is so obvious that it has never got mentioned?) one sensed it, but one would rather not trust one’s sense; one acknowledged it, but one would rather have one’s knowledge erased. for thousands of years it has been going on in this way, humanity never learns, it refuses to learn, even if once upon a thousand years a potential teacher comes up and elaborated the white, chalky truth over the sky: quite effortlessly then one prayed for rain, for the clouds to come and wash it away, as if it was a bad omen or something. the fact that mankind has always been able to avoid it is unavoidable; and that the game’s reach extends even to physiological sphere is of no avail: one inhaled it, but it refuses to be exhaled back; one devoured it but it always got lost somewhere between the appendix, or the intestines: one could find no trace of it whatsoever even if one were to dissect one’s shit. it passes every means of digestion, inscription, transcription. one writes, one reads; but there were never any fingers nimble enough to jot it down as quick as it appeared; no gazes are astute enough to be able to see it, transfix it: human eyes are too given to blink, yet it is within the instant of the blink it revealed itself; it is within the spaces that stretched between the words––not on the words themselves, which is only a formality––a thing written for the sake of form––that it breathes; it is in the armpits and groins of literature it dwells best; it is in places that few has ever dared to put one’s nose it lurks and groans. for millions of years it has been passed on in silence, until the silence became heavy and rotten of it; o how i have heard it breathing, how i have seen it flaring up dejectedly at sombre times, waiting and longing to be liberated from ignorance! even now as i am typing this i could smell it reeking, the odor wafting from every steaming gas-sewer and empty biles….. i see how the wind carries its seed everywhere, i see how it gets landed on one’s hairs, one’s hands, how it travelled down the gutters, the roofs, the streets, the oceans, yet at nowhere mentioned i have seen the seed grow; i carried the flower over my mouth but no butterfly came to suck the juice out of it…… perhaps it is afraid lest it gets turned into a dragon…… (tonight i slept a butterfly, tomorrow i wake up a dragon…..) today the sky eyed me hypocritically, i guided my eyes elsewhere, i knew not where to stare….. and this night too, i shall hear it snore, gasp and choke, it shall cough blood and shit chimeras, it shall get thinner and thinner. aye, i, too, kept on taking from it without giving anything to it back. tonight i shall hear it asphyxiate. like one stricken by consumption, it is dying..

I cometh upon a stone and I spake unto it: BE. But nothing it be; then with my finger lifted I spake unto it once more:—BE! WHY, BE!! BE A STONE!! Nothing’s game; and hearing me raving like mad, swearing, perspiring, the owls that stood watching giggled; the trees around rustled with a subtle hint of mockery; and through the foliage I see the sun glinting, shining with a loud, blinding grin. I stood benumbed, even the whole mountain, silent and bewitched, joined the heckle. Then for the whole hour of the week I stood still upon these bullies, pondering and reflecting, pondering and amazed, baffled, lost amidst their jeerings; until one day it came unto me—AND MY! How i too giggled! How i too guffawed! Grinned! For suddenly it dawned upon me: why, they, too—the stone, the owls, the trees, the sun, the mountain—aye, they, too, have been pointing to me all this time, coming unto me as i cometh unto them, speaking unto me as i speaketh unto them: BE!—it saith; BE!—but I no more BE-ing than they do.

literature! literature! everything is literature and fiction! a dose of irreality real enough to make one mad! fancy living in a mesh of signs, symbols, language! where is the real world? everything i touch i touch with the hands of a spectre; everything i see i see only a copy, a translation, corrupted by the glance of discourse, construed by the glass of projection! no sooner i shook hands with another than he took the form of a character, a someone, an image, a person; i want to see real souls! real stones! real reality! i want to live in a world free from inscription, devoid of perception; i want pure, tangible experience, unmediated, unabridged! i want to see things coming as they are from the eye of a stone, things undiscriminated, things without wonder, things indistinguishable from each other; i want to have a taste of matters before they turn into phenomenas; facts before they turn into interpretations!—nay! not even matters! not even facts! enough of knowledge! enough of reason! imagination! is the world concrete enough to be abstracted by thoughts? nay, there’s not even a thought without presumption! not a word fit enough to fit the world!—there’s not even such thing as a world! for a word is only a description of itself; it signifies nothing; it hits nothing; it reaches nothing; on the contrary: it cancels everything…..

“in the beginning of everything was the Word”—never before has nothingness so blatantly declared.

am i changing too fast, my friend? too fast to your taste? or are you the one who’s moving too slow? could it be possible—let the horror be mine!—that i don’t even see you grow! have i overlapped you too many a time? can you still listen to me now? do you still hear my steps as i ascend the stair? (could it too be possible, that you are not even on the same stair as me anymore!) whither you’ve gone, my friend? are you tired of climbing this stair which is without intermediary? are you tired of having nothing to cling on to—no rails, no walls—but your own voice, whenever the pebbles slipped your feet off its balance? are you tired of having no place to rest but on the dissolving steps alone? are you frightened of the fact that you too might dissolve? are you tired of seeing the lights ahead flickered, yet, as we approach them, too quickly they fade? are you tired of being limp again and again, discouraged, nullified, after seeing over and over that instead of it, a mirror is what we always see at the end? and to see that the lights too are nothing but the lights of our mirrored reflections!—lights flashing from our eyes, withering and dying as soon as we question them. . . . are you sick of being petrified? to not only have to stare at the gorgon’s eyes, but to the void behind them? then ascend faster, my friend! depechez-vous! for as the lights get more brighter and the mirrors thicker, so does our wings that, passing them by, crushes them! ever more brighter! thicker! ascend faster then, now! let the clamors from below beguile you not! or could it be that, on the contrary, i hear you descending? horror! whither have the voice left you? is the sight up here so unbearable that you would rather go back? is the silence so deafening? the loneliness so embarrassing? could their shrieks of jubilation from down below allure you so? but listen, here, i could hear them no more! they only make a faint sound, no more audible than an atom’s whiz! you only have to ascend faster, look back not, hear back not, lest the spectres try to sing you down! o what is your conscience made of? i once thought of iron; but now it doesn’t seem so—of wood, then? of plastic? of bubbles? of airs? how weak? how gullible? do you expect me to help you grow wings? do you hope me to summon a giant steel beanstalk with a lift in it so that you could climb more easily, more effortlessly? do you want me to reach you down to help you get back on the track again? well, but i cannot! for the steps that i have trodden behind me are now gone; i have stepped the stair too strongly that it cannot but crack and went to pieces. . . . (and could you see the bricks falling? let it rain upon you not! use them, build the stair again from them if need be!) . . . . . . . . . ahead of me now nothing but lights without distance; behind me a yawning abyss in which only old echoes resound; i could go nowhere but up, up, reaching up to my unreachable sarcophagus, to uncover the mummy that i am, that i am yet to be, to transcend the cocoon of self into which i am glued! a slight slackening of will and i too, will fall, as fallingly as the falling bricks. . . . or are you expecting me to do just that—to fall to you—o my friend, my fellow, my brother, my mother, my father, my sister, my spectator, my illusion, my shadow, my universe, my world? though even you too know—that you won’t be able to catch me?

perched as it were on the heart of the district, the megaphones blared forth waves after waves of exhortations, absorbing all attention, reddening all ears; with such a barbaric manner it made a symbolic gesture of authority; it does much worse than merely verifying its territory: it claims it. the air was apocalyptic, totalitarian, the speaker emphasizes his words with such thunderous intonation as if afraid he would be waylaid at any second by the last trumpet, as if preparing a troop for a battle with verbal abuses impossible to be disputed, so warlike it was, so didactic, delirious, with the frenzied ardour of a fanatic, like the halfwit Caliph that he was, so inexhaustible, so loud, so, so unbearably loud a volume indeed that it seems set to prick the very ear of the night itself, so loud as if it wants to convert every single entity in the vicinity by its dictums, even dead cats, even dead mosquitoes, even dead inanimate things; and with this callous, deafening noise called by men piety it preaches empty articles after empty articles of woebegone faith, of moralities that only crocodiles and donkeys could level with, and every so often the speaker, as if realizing the looseness of his own speech, backs it profusely with recitals of Koran (which is to say, this is final: this is indisputable: i’ve got a sovereign reference sent straight from above: hence all of you, stop what you are doing and hear me!!) while in reality, every word of it is a contradiction, a moral stupefaction (and i don’t need to reach Khatam to realize this.)
i felt as if i was surrounded by some murderous primitive clan on the heart of a river, so backward the whole affair was; i felt as if transported to the days of pogrom, in which i was the witch in hiding, waiting to be carried to the burning stakes by the sectarian crowds; oh if only i am a witch! if only i know magic! i’ll send their megaphones to the northpole, to the atlantic, let them preach their things to all their liking there to the salivating polar bears! the animals need enlightenment better than us. (or better still, to the deserts; and let the birdbrained camels and the dead Bedouins hear ya preach. for was it not from there you sprang? and hence where you truly belong? and wasn’t the main motive that made your prophet summoned the whole thing was to reform that particular chaotic period and to straighten out that particular chaotic clan? (can’t you see how incongruous you become the moment you step out of the desert? can’t you see that no ears outside your continent could actually understand the point of your blabbers?) and to claim to stand for eternity for what is truthfully momentary! to claim to have experienced a divine transcendence for what is in reality a monomaniac’s delirium! and can’t you see that what you are now preaching and fighting and yearning and yearning for is some long lost god, the god that you have yourself abandoned and buried amid the torching stupor of the desert? o funny, funny, o humanity…..)

—but i’ve been flattering you too much by making this look personal. oh you’ll have to wait a million years for that! all i ask is for you not to be so loud; every people have their own business, have they not? and so i’ll tolerate yours if you tolerate mine. but you would rather, with the brutal, belicose nature so inherent in your lots from the days of yore, violate my private sphere. by robbing the night of its sweet silence, you’re consequently robbing me of my only recourse to sanity, o my peace of mind! and i’m too much of a reactionary to be content with sighing. never, never if i could choose my abode, will i have it anywhere near you blasted megaphones—and wouldn’t it be heaven.

hail the heavenly holy shapes! the impaled moon, the star! hail, all you god’s excrements! for the holy month is due: at every verge of dawn one could hear some moribund voices topping one another over the air, waking the dozy faithful to their knees—and to their dining tables. loose your corsets, bleary-eyed mothers went astray, here’s a holy way to trim out your bulging bellies; and keep the porn streaming low, scant-haired fathers, for you know no trace of lust is allowed within this blessed period. or for that matter don yourself with sarongs, will you, to hide your hard-ons—if not from your Boss, well, then, at least from your fellow slaves.

so the holy fasting month has arrived. very well. let’s see how far i could endure playing the hypocrite. a month? bring it on! roll the dice, shuffle the deck here, sonny, i think i’ll play some rounds. what i wouldn’t do to avoid your stupid questions. i’ll follow your rules. i’ll readjust the hours my pillow soaks in my dreams. i’ll ask my stomach to cooperate with its new ration. i’ll even perhaps teach it to feign some intestinal groans. oh! not only that! i’ll wear your silly white robes! i’ll join your pilgrims! i’ll follow you to mount Sinai, to Mekkah, up to your seventh heaven! what i wouldn’t do to stop you from sending me those suspicious, fatuous looks. what? the call to prayer is announced?—and the prayer rugs are spread! very well, i’ll wash my parts according to the precept; i’ll assume my position, set the angle to which i face; facing that black square dung of a building, right? and the imam has sung!—no worries! i’ll mimick your empty gestures; i’ll pronounce the holy liturgies; i’ll see to it that my lips move; and i’ll draw my breath long, i’ll heave my breast deep and let my lung explode the sacred word “AMIN!” at the end of that familiar sentence. but for your comfort, i’ll spare you the erotic scenes my mind are actually projecting while my body’s stuck in these nonsensical rituals of yours. please excuse me for these stealthy, lecherous daydreams of mine, carried at the most inappropriate of time. the best i could do is to be silent about it. neither you, nor your Boss should know. oh, especially not him! for he and i have shat ourselves of whatever contact is possible; the string that stretched between our attics is aptly broken—the string that is never there in the first place. but of course, in front of you, i’ll admit my full dutyship to him. “AMIN!”, i’ll answer to each of your lines of praises to him. “AMIN!”, rather than “HURRAH!” — rather than “HALLELUYAH!” — “AMIN!”, and nothing more; no laments behind them, no insinuations; nothing—so far as your ears are concerned. what i wouldn’t do to save you the long explanation that you can’t in the first place able to understand, for you’d rather abruptly associate it with your prejudices and labels, asinine simplifications, which you’ll keep on brandishing over my face, disturbing my peace of mind, insulting me in my clarity. no, not only that i’d be silent about my truths, i’d go so much as to disguise them under the undubious artifice of piety. for your world is this small, here, no bigger than the size of a dice, which you could see only its one side: while the five others, you don’t even know it exists. and even if you’re given the knowledge that it does exist, you just simply can’t comprehend it; your mind could reach neither the height in which they dwell, nor the abyss in which they lurk; you’ll turn your head upside down at the whole logic of it, or logic in general, for that matter. but what am i saying! i forgot to play the buffoon here! its high time, isn’t it? “AMIN!” then to every one of your open sesames! AMIN! but it’s about time i take a dump now. O great fat Boss, forgive me my ill-behaviour.