Torturous, Agonizing Words.
I am hesitant, almost timid...I am hesitant to write...my words knock on my palate, trying to push their way through my lips...
My fingers oscillate, they roam a keyboard, feeling its texture, holding back...like some pianist who would love to play that final sonata, a final say, a final spectacle, a final concert.
I write and I know this is not the final concert...I know that more audiences will queue, I also know that the hall is very empty, it looks very empty from where the pianist is seated, right there in the darkness of that hall, a long corridor, with no exit signs...
Maybe am bashful, maybe am fearful, maybe am numb...the numbness of too much, an overdose from a powerful, violent drug...
The whispers, the secrets, the faces, the screams -- all are shoved in a cupboard, the cupboard of my mind...the attic, the cellar...right where you store the wine bottles to mature, so their aroma can filter through your nostrils -- unbroken bottles.
Mine is just a crowded cupboard...where there is no space to breath...so I try, try very hard to lock them up -- the whispers, the secrets, the faces, the screams...and block my nostrils from the smell of blood...
I set them aside, in a waiting room, like the one you visit when on a doctor's appointment. I leave them in one huge basket labelled -- pending.
Pending...hanging...glued together like inmates in a cell...I leave them there in that tray like some humiliated prisoner eating from a tray, from a dog's bowl...
Often, rage slips through the cracks of this cement wall, another constructed wall, another ghetto where I find myself...jailed behind the cold walls...another prisoner in the night.
I drown my horror in bathtubs filled with sea salt, I was told salt purifies...I curl myself into a cocoon, a fetal position, tucking myself underneath white sheets, avoiding the light -- like an arrested man with a bag over his head...I smoke it away, exhaling it, hoping for some wind to clear the staleness, that fog that hangs over me like a dark mushroom cloud, like the odor of burnt human flesh...I say to my imprisoned self -- this is your last cigarette -- like the one about to be lynched wanting to puff his last bit of oxygen...
I hide, escape, flee...I blot out the words, I muffle the noise, I bury the secrets in graves, I erase expressions, faces, like a blindfolded detainee.
And yet...
My fingers oscillate, they roam a keyboard, feeling its texture, holding back...like some pianist who would love to play that final sonata, a final say, a final spectacle, a final concert.
I write and I know this is not the final concert...I know that more audiences will queue, I also know that the hall is very empty, it looks very empty from where the pianist is seated, right there in the darkness of that hall, a long corridor, with no exit signs...
Maybe am bashful, maybe am fearful, maybe am numb...the numbness of too much, an overdose from a powerful, violent drug...
The whispers, the secrets, the faces, the screams -- all are shoved in a cupboard, the cupboard of my mind...the attic, the cellar...right where you store the wine bottles to mature, so their aroma can filter through your nostrils -- unbroken bottles.
Mine is just a crowded cupboard...where there is no space to breath...so I try, try very hard to lock them up -- the whispers, the secrets, the faces, the screams...and block my nostrils from the smell of blood...
I set them aside, in a waiting room, like the one you visit when on a doctor's appointment. I leave them in one huge basket labelled -- pending.
Pending...hanging...glued together like inmates in a cell...I leave them there in that tray like some humiliated prisoner eating from a tray, from a dog's bowl...
Often, rage slips through the cracks of this cement wall, another constructed wall, another ghetto where I find myself...jailed behind the cold walls...another prisoner in the night.
I drown my horror in bathtubs filled with sea salt, I was told salt purifies...I curl myself into a cocoon, a fetal position, tucking myself underneath white sheets, avoiding the light -- like an arrested man with a bag over his head...I smoke it away, exhaling it, hoping for some wind to clear the staleness, that fog that hangs over me like a dark mushroom cloud, like the odor of burnt human flesh...I say to my imprisoned self -- this is your last cigarette -- like the one about to be lynched wanting to puff his last bit of oxygen...
I hide, escape, flee...I blot out the words, I muffle the noise, I bury the secrets in graves, I erase expressions, faces, like a blindfolded detainee.
And yet...
