Delusions about the world

Cave art

every window is open wide
candles are burning brightly
and every single battery is dead.

morning imposes itself
by an assertion of new life so determined
that it’s almost comical
somewhere between the sorrowful and exceptional,
between vacations, wall painting and emergencies,
amongst infinite possibilities, we are here
forming a family,
a fleck of presence in the hollow,
offering our little lies as
landslide prevention,
offering our thumbs
to shush, tame, approve, pleasure
in the gyre of rage.

all I do is adjust the space
before the profane corrupts love.
this house is a cage, a monument.
I burn it all,
like a man buying sparrows from a street seller
only to set them free.

I kneel down
adjusting the space between us,
all windows remain open,
candles into flames,

batteries matter no more.
no human conflict is recorded in cave art

say this till
till it echoes in the maze of caves.

I get off three stops early to think
then four
then five
then I don’t get off at all
I stay until the train takes me to a cave back
where no human conflict is ever recorded.

Delusions about the world

No: I cannot try burning
something made of fire
and call it alchemy
when it fails.

No: Pain doesn’t always enlarge the heart.

Yes: Pain shrinks the heart

more often than not

and exhausts what meaning can do.

Yes: I, too, shrink in the moment between reading news of massacres and, in the next breath, making toast and brewing coffee.

No: Coins to the homeless musicians don’t roll to the underground sewage, finding its way to a junkbox and play the music we forgot from ancient times.

a memory with an oracle or an oracle without memory.

Instead: Thousands of matches can come from a single tree, yet a single match can destroy an entire forest.

Yes: This is the world. This is the logic of it all.

Instead: I am choosing another compassion.

limping mind, porous heart, thin blood, yeasting all the deserts.

No: nothing, nothing remains like an open scissor in my heart.

Taxpayers

A race to arrest my gaze
on the 11 a.m. ride,
among long-legged men,
gazing, staring, looking
all at once, in a continuing atrocity.
A beggar approaches,
limping, asking for money
the dirt in his nails,
the dirt of money,
if he could extract it,
no.
Taxpayers resent him,
for staining the cityscape
at Deutsche Oper station.
‘We work and pay taxes,’
someone says.
‘I don’t,’ says the beggar,
howling with laughter,
smelling of rot,
on the verge of sweet,
occupying more space
on a molecular level
than taxpayers in the U2 line.
I lift my gaze,
giving to him the 45% cut
from my salary
in other words,
my full attention
that corresponds to the cost of living,
no.

For my own sake

Today, I chose to live like a painting
examined from all angles,
malleable, obedient, frozen in stillness,
with a need to be seen larger than itself,
like glass brimming with thirst.

Only to say:
I was once a painting,
and still, I am.

Not in self-pity, not in praise,
but in the quiet of a finished work,
resting, before entering another’s mind.

More a landscape than a woman

Night forest. Lakeside. Water boatmen leave perfect concentric circles on the surface.
A force pounds the dock. A dog howls inside me.
The moon, amplified – it appears so close that we think
we’re going to be poisoned by cyanide.
I feel more like a landscape than a human.

Your crystal teeth grin endlessly,
explaining to me that a smile means a threat in the animal realm,
but we call it a smile, call it warmth, in the human realm.
I don’t get you. I nod with a forced smile that doesn’t reveal my teeth.
‘Good coffee,’ I say, to not to say anything. 

Everything reminds me of a post-war shelter here:
the bottled-up waters in the shape of pyramids, woodcutters, wet clay sculptures,
a radio humming, arresting our attention with its unpredictability.
I feel more like a landscape than a woman.
I stutter facts when I talk about big things –
numbers, statistics, percentages.
You’re not listening to me anyway.
I’m just talking so that I won’t say anything.

Are you assuring me in this black breeze
as a shadow passes by in the wooden cabin we’re in?
Or are you distracting me?
Or is this distraction meant to assure me?
Whatever it is, it seems to work.
The ennui in my chest has lifted.
The edges of my insanity have smoothed out.
I stop treating this affair as hostile,
as you become tender, and then even more tender.
No longer clawed by the hands of animal freedom,
I let myself be remolded
on the reflection of myself in your eyes,
before I am poisoned by vitreous humours,
giving shape to what it means to shape a love story
instead of a love story shaping us.
Your eyes shine like wet pebbles.
Remolding is working.
I can’t tell you this, but you understand.
You say I’m an open book.
‘Very good coffee,’ I say.

Unguided tour

I’ve never confessed this fast. I look at you and I am doubled over in confession. A form of honesty peculiar only to songs. I want to destroy everything without hurting anyone. But destruction is difficult; it is as difficult as creation. The penalty for picking sand lilies is

244,315 TL. I’m carelessly careful, making wrong moves in the right order and right moves in the wrong order. Back then, things weren’t left unsaid, unbroken, unsqueezed, untethered. But now, I lead the carriage of another life. Destruction is as difficult as creation.

Why do the beggars in this city beg with their faces down and backsides up, as if in

prostration? What is there to be so ashamed of? I want to embrace them all, just to tell them not to be ashamed. Between giving birth and killing, creating and destroying, there's a thin pendulum swinging between my legs; if I turn around, it will entangle my feet, so I stand still, unable to embrace the beggars, nor step left to enter a cafe, nor step right to head to the Alchemy Museum. I stand right in the middle of the face-down beggars, the astronomical clock, and the piercingly sharp sounds coming out of a cathedral, notes minced twice.

I stay up late here in the city square. Tourists come and go. History is rewritten in the mouths of a city tour guide. I am here, just to see you come in. Till an hour is spent. I take my leave. As the sun comes up, I leave my light. I leave the morning to you, as we’ve never shared one. I spill the dew, take the morn, wobble through the granular, shadowless air.

We are bound to each other, with long invisible threads, muted, exhausted, a vein of abiding mineral flowing under my feet, not discovered yet. The alchemy. The museum. Is it there? I could have learned how to turn my heart into a word, outspoken.

Frescos. Applause. Pulp. Bach from the cathedral. Wisdom or ecstasy. Small steps between a kick and ballet.

If you hold your desire under your tongue for so long, it turns into a blood clot exactly seven millimeters thick. Destruction costs exactly 244,315 TL. Insanity tastes exactly like a rusty balcony railing from your childhood. I’m herded into a guided tour, indexed back into normalcy. I play a part in history-making, albeit as an ear. An imperial edict inaugurates a bloody century: executing those who pick lilies in the court garden, selling beggars to foreign lands, and leaving the condemned to choke on their own blood clots.

Necropolis, falling upright           

once you leave a city behind, you think its gravity will be less.
and you’re not mistaken.
the gravity lessens.
but more like:
a levitated drop in an acoustic field.
it is suspended over there, up in the sky.
you and your city, you both
melt into the horizon and bounce back
like the hanging pouches of the skin of
an old, pale, black-clad woman.
you look into each other
until both of you are out of sight.
(Atlantis is upside down)
now the city is abject.
as in:
the Adriatic Sea for the European toilets
(manage the waste)

I have some news for you.
the flies you inhaled and swallowed while crossing the ancient Roman bridge
they now have grown in you.
they left their larvas somewhere
beyond your reach and
seeded escape.
then you left.
they remained in you.
the flies were supposed to be extinct because the river
was a pitch-black swamp,
plastered with black mud.
nobody, nothing could live there.
they did not extinct, the flies over the river. Instead
talking big-wide-mouth,
they made their way into your mouth.
and they grew in your paternal insides.

(a fly can perish in mud and a bee can drown in honey)

years later, here, while watching a tangerine sunset
you see a fly colony
making a sign for you
in the four-cournered sky.

if your grandmother were here, she would see that image
from the leftover coffee grounds in your cup.
she would recite your future:
(was it pensive, beautiful and sublime? or was it material and mournful?)

you cannot decipher the fishbone shape of the flies hanging in the sky
like bulbous droplets of water,
with their dilated eyes,
gazing at you,
flushed with opulence.

they swell until they are heavy enough
to make the leap into the half-filled sea.
they pierce you
in their transcendent strangeness

you, who always need the trampoline of reality
to jump.

the sun of another country rises.

a gravitational vacuum between you and the you before
remains there, over there, up in the sky.
you capture the moment like a fly in a camera shutter.

to bear witness to nothing but the perpetual continuity of things.

you come back into the presence of still water,
into symmetrical gardens, as silent as flour,
resting in the grace of ever-lasting fly larvas
who do not tax their lives
forethought of displacement.

you could die today and live again.
so they do.