Oblivious Audience

A city where theater is considered solely a street activity. Actors take up large slices of the road, tossing flowers in the air, proclaiming themselves rightful heirs to dessicated thrones, boys dressed like serpents scatter fire around their feet, markets are occupied by troupes who put on puppet plays long after midnight. Social space becomes theatrical space. Theater happens where crowds rush home, where cars stall in traffic, where fruit vendors whistle. And because of this, every member of society becomes a member of the audience. Since theater is such an integral part of daily life, no one watches. Actors invest their souls into their performances, but people casually stroll by. The lack of distinction between performance and everyday life has rendered performance banal. And yet it continues. The sets grow more elaborate. The plots more intricate. Actors don more make-up. The indifference on the part of the citizenry has no effect on the performers themselves. They're completely satisfied performing in front of an oblivious audience.

Mazurka

Invite the stranger into your house. Ask him to perform rituals which he's never witnessed. Place a wafer in his hand. Look in his eyes. Meet the ecstatic gaze. Receive his rite. Wish him fortitude of spirit. Half cunning fox, half grumbling lion in the halls of his own fortress. Drink a glass of wine for each apostle. Seethe with vitriol at the memories that cling, that cannot be laughed away. Watch him sprawl out beneath the candles, deflated soul with a warrior's grin. His hunger absolved.

Somnography

The writing of sleep is different than the writing of dreams. The realm of sleep is lost to the ego. Whereas there are still traces of consciousness in dreams. Sleep to write. Wake to dream.

00:00

Midnight already and the street becomes a body too immaculate to be approached. Stumbling seducer. You may learn, in some book or another, how to slip your fingers through the chill that blinds us, how to end self-pity through self-resolve, unlearn, revive the child inside who cannot curse for love of the naked world. The hooded Turk whistles his wares on the frozen lake in the park named after Murdered Communist #19 from The Book of Malleable Memories. He sells you your own demise after which you skip home with it tucked away in your coat, held close to the heart murmuring within.

Hof

Sometimes the sky above the silent field would resound with the noises that should've been heard within the trees, in the grass, among the flowers and weeds, in the barn where animals were tied and children slept, fingers trembling beyond reach. The stars buttressed by their quaking shells. You noticed the goat trying to chew off the bell dangling from its chaffed neck. Where the voices once were, the dark blue horizon now folds in on itself. I would clean bowls and glasses, set them on the wooden bench in the yard, let the wind dry them. Clouds betrayed the rains beyond. All the noises held in the sky would soon be unleashed, pouring over the quietness we kept.    

Threats from Oblivion: A Letter of Motivation

I'm a writer. A plague of words. That's my bodily structure. How I heave. Ventilate. You have a heap of words somewhere in your room, or in your chest of polished rosewood, and you know they will kill you either way: they will either bury you, obliterate your whimpers during the stone-cold dawn, weigh on you until you can breathe no longer, or they will drive into a feverish pace, propel you to outrun silence itself, exceed the very limits of your own consciousness, chase down the smoke trail of your melting core. Accepting this bodily structure, this perturbed composition is truly accepting the role death will play in your destiny. How language will first create you, then undo you. How silence will incite you to speak. When I realized I was a voice with a face that changed  over time, a body that took on various shapes with each day, a system of signs orbiting around some perplexed form, I began appending words to a tree beyond my window (rigid, lean, bright, trimmed, translucent) until it multiplied, exceeded itself, flooded our suburban lawn with its infinite essence.  

When Chaos opened its oily palm...

I want to step into this phantom life. At this moment. See how it unfolds. Watch the intricacies of time collapse. I live on one street. My mother, she lives on another. Sometimes she'll come by, tap on my window. She reminds me that my head emerged from her vagina over a period of a few nights during which she learned how ecstasy can be distilled from patience and how pain can be reaped from creation. I pushed a cup of Earl Grey across the table, sighed in my chair, said to her one day I'll speak one language, and you'll speak another and such lessons will be repeated ad infinitum.