Plato and dead things or dying.

At the touch of a lover everyone becomes a poet, the old man says. I listen to him, and for my little mind; I make it all up in comprehensible colours and simple pictures in my head. I see a lot of red and fluid shapes, a liquid something. Everyone’s dead or about to die. I don’t tell him what I see. I keep it all to myself. It doesn’t hurt much. I tell him about something similar an average aged man once said, that when love is born a friend dies. I imagine a smile across his cynical face. I’m allowed to assume if it suits me. We all do. We all are. I have killed many people for this once in my life. He probably knows this. That I’m assuming or that many people have died because of my own teeth. He knows that I’m just a little boy. I know he is old. We try to not focus on that. With love; we have both learned that counting things isn’t a good thing. He tells me about the beauty of kisses and the many worlds they open up in our chests. He tells me about the niceness of holding hands even in sleep as if the lovers are trying to walk through the same dream. He tells me about the healing powers of shoulders when tears or fatigue and worldly things make us sad. He emphasises on how warm and comforting it is to just know that a heart is there at home or somewhere, beating in your name. I’m smiling at most of them as he relishes himself though his speech, his eyes are closed and his smile is not just my imagination now. That’s good, I assume. A cloud is shaped like a sore knee above us. We look at it and say nothing. There are no birds at all. This is terrifying. I assume an owl in my head. He assumes a bat, I assume. I show him my scars. He shows me rivers. I show him how new they are. He shows me a graveyard. It was opened a few months ago. Apparently there isn’t enough empty space for people to be buried, it might close soon. There isn’t enough of earth for people to keep dying. I show him a shirt I wore just last week, the stains on it are still fresh, you can even guess what kind of tears were spilled all over it. I shouldn’t have worn it that day. I imagine the things about kisses. The painful tongues we toss into each other. I assume a sadness form atop his forehead. He doesn’t look away. I imagine things about shoulders. The heavy we build and solidify on each other every time we don’t understand our respective meanings. The faulty wires of communication. I imagine the electricity of hands, the warmth and the comfort. I see all these from the other side. The shock, the burning and the aching, not so much a discomfort but something a bit lethal. My point is to tell him about the dead things I see when love is born, or when a touch from a lover approaches. I cannot find a good way to say this. I want to say something like; at the departure of a lover a poet is born or continues dying. I know he will definitely assume that I will further elucidate on this. I’m not certain if I want to do that. I mean; he should just look back at my scars if he really wants a better understanding. He will want to know if I got these scars from a lost love or an approaching one, I assume. I don’t know If I should continue this dialog. He’s heard a lot from the dead ones talking about my fears and doubts pertaining to this subject. He knows that they were all assumptions, propelled by their circumstances. I know that he knows that I’ve never feared dying. This time I’m not assuming. He’s heard about the other time when I enjoyed these talks and the experiences because I truly liked this love stuff. I still do, he assumes. Or we both assume. That I don’t like this stuff or I still do. He doesn’t really look at my shirt from last week. He knows I can cry more than that. I have seen him cry many times. Or I might be assuming, again. We both know that I’m either running or waiting. We both know that I’m either ready or about to die. I’m usually about to die, we both know this. He might be dead already. But I’ve always been good at dying, far classier than him. He doesn’t like to admit to this though. We both know that my last escape was exactly that, the last. Both him and I are fully aware that I might be running or waiting. For you to arrive or return.

Yours, 
assuming something alive or really dying or dead. 

The Hidden Boy with Circles. 

…back to The Shadows. 

The horse went far west, the human-wagon must have followed

I have new music. I want you to hear it. I want to come to your house. I want to find you next to whatever tree of your choice. I will pick you up from there. I will place you into my wagon and hope the horse gallops west. I want us to go there together. Drive and drive and drive. Towards the sun. I want us to relish the soft sliding landscapes past our windows. I also want to see the random dog crossing the highway with no house or any civilization nearby. The dog; I want to see it cross successfully, unharmed. We might be happy about that. We should also be quiet and listen to my music. My music should be loud. I can only hope that you hear it as I wish. It’s good music, after all. Not much to the ear at times, but the heart loves it much. Much much. I want us to really go towards the west. We should be wearing our sunglasses because the sun, though distant, is very blinding in the afternoon driving thing that I want us to do. I want us to hang some of our hands outside the windows. The other drivers on the road will be confused, but we won’t care. We will make shapes of our spirit birds with our fingers. I will not laugh at yours, but mine is okay to laugh at, I hope you do. But in silence. We will look slightly at the city moving away from us through the side mirrors. This will not scare us at all. You will want to touch me and I will feel this before you move your mind from the thought or your hand towards my knee. I will almost cause an accident. You will quickly jump to the wheel and I will look at you like you’re just a little bit crazy. It is in this moment you will understand my idea of seeing forever with you. You will remember all the words I said to you about the future, my hands, the absurdity of time and growth, about death and eternity. You will remember me from a future you once dreamt of. I will remember you as well. All the plastic yellow flowers in your house and the owls on your face, I will remember them. I will remember the sage hanging loosely in your living room air. Your room is quite alive, you should know that I know this. All this will happen while we are trying to bring the wagon back to control. But the horse will be gone. The horse’s disappearance will teach us about control. From this we will instantly learn that we shouldn’t ever try to control anything. My hand will bleed slightly from something we both didn’t notice. When you see this, you will want to fix me, but the bleeding wont stop. When I look at your knees I will find them bleeding as well. I might think of fixing you. I will not attempt to fix you. We will both look at our respective bleedings and forget that we are there together. You will cry and hate your body. I will be angry and feel weak, in a derogatory manner. You will realize that I might have caused your bleeding. I will do the same. We might laugh about this and move on. Or we might drive to the west and find the sun gone then cry more. You will remember your wonderful east and I will remember my displaced centre. My music will keep playing. Because it really is good music. You will start hearing the songs as you wish and I will cry because you will love them more than I do. And then instead of driving back home; we will never, regardless of our hearts, our wounds, our wishing and blood, we will never be. But the music will play on and the horse will be gone and the wagon will be there, playing the music inside of its own chest, wishing it was human.  Wishing it was one of us. But it will only wish and then move on to find another horse to introduce my new music to.
…back to The Shadows.

Remedy to the chronic

In the house there are beautiful cups. They were coffee mugs just a few nights before. Today we call them cups, the name might be too much for them. We cannot handle them anymore. We don’t really remember how they lost their mug handles. It must have been night when they broke. We might have not been home. One of us might have mistakenly broke them. We would like to say we don’t mind, but we do. We really mind. Because a lot of things are broken already. A lot is broken. When the day is done and the work is complete, nobody wants to return home. The broken things are too many. We go home to fix them. The fixing is so difficult. No one can sleep peacefully at home with so many broken things. The tree outside is not broken much. Each of us selects and brands their side of the tree. We don’t want anyone sleeping on the wrong side of the tree. The cold does not bother us as much as the broken things in the house. At noon, if it happens that we return early, we try to fix them. But when we take the fixing tools and attempt to fix things, the tools themselves break. the other day we let go of everything and decided to fix things with our bare hands. The people at the hospital hate us now. The hospital is not a place to fix hands, we were told. They seem to be tired of looking at our daily broken hands. We made a plan once to fix things one by one, we made lists. The important things on top. The hierarchy of priority. We saved our fingers for straight two weeks without fixing anything, hoping to not break quickly the day we decide to get back to the fixing. Our fingers were made for pointing out broken things and not actually doing the work. We don’t point anymore, we simply stroke the broken edges and bleed slightly. We know we are alive. We are alive because we bleed all the time and not die, well at least our fingers don’t die. We fixed the bed the other day. The bed was the biggest broken thing after out hearts. Then the stove, the second biggest after our family. Then the windows, the most important after our eyes. We also fixed the door handle, the most, most necessary after our hands. We thought the floor can wait a few weeks, our knees are more important. After saving so much of ourselves from the breaking, everything in the house is breaking more, everything breaks and we cannot do anything about it anymore. We are afraid now. Everything we touch breaks, last night I touched my hair and something out of my head fell off. I pulled the pillow below my ear and something broke, it could have been the pillow or my ear, I didn’t hear properly. Today I was reading a broken manual of fixing things, the last page contained the most important lesson of mending broken things. The page was going to save us all. The tree would finally be free of us. It would finally be able to spend a night alone and dream nicely. I swear, we were finally going to give it space. The page had many spelling errors, I’m far too accustomed to fixing things. I tried fixing a few spelling errors, the broken English. The last page, so so important, far important than all our lives combined, it broke with my fingers, then my heart followed. Something broke from my face. I went home and nothing was there. Broken things everywhere.
…back to The Shadows.

Elysium performance by Ikaye

A lessons in abandonment (or whatever I kinda don’t care)

Now, let’s begin with a few tricks, okay?

Right, disappearing; let me tell you about it.
The trick to disappearing is a little less difficult. Not much effort is required. Just disappearance. Never appear, ever again. Now this can easily be traced back to yesterday and our recent childhoods. We’ve seen fathers do it. We’ve seen lovers do it. The convicts have done so as well. We remember those birds we instantly grew fond of, singing us from last night’s slumber into a wonderfully aligned new day, we know how we’ve never seen them again since then, how that moment of us trying to get closer actually scared them away. Milk disappears through sand. Something as easy as air! Always disappearing. So I trust you will not have a problem with this.

Let’s get to disappointment.
This is also another easy one to perform. Don’t worry about it. Here you can occupy either side of the phenomenon. You can disappoint or be disappointed. My advice to you; be the less sad one. How you do this can be up to you, but because I think you’re cool and I kinda like you, I will tell you. So the trick to not being disappointed is easy. Never expect anything! There. Now you can go and disappoint people. Great.

Very well.
Let’s quickly pass through the shit about trust, honesty, loyalty, betrayal and all the crap you’ve been taught and thought to be most important. Now listen, fuck all of that. Just move.
Yes, a lesson in abandonment.
Now when all is said and done. It will be. Complete. Done. You will make homes out of people’s chests, the cobwebs between their eyes will remind you of heaven, the cold in their hands will, at least for that time, be the greatest warmth you will ever come to know. Their emptiness will be enough for you. You will relish all your wounds and loneliness above their shoulders. You will learn to see flowers in the desert of their ugly. You will Love! Empty all your contents into their leaking buckets. You will, for those moments, know what it is to be home, to be clean, important and visible. You will forget all your shame at the touch of their cynical hands. Their glance will be purification, no matter how disengaged it may be. This will happen. It will be nice, enjoy it. Or whatever, it is your life after all.

Now, always remember this; people are that. Just that. Nothing else, though your heart will make angels and saints out of them, allow your mind to remind you. People are just that. Soon you will fall. Soon your head will be below your knees, not so much a bleeding but an open wound needing only a blow of soft air to heal, just that. But they will be gone! The people. They are just that. Derrick says ‘You cannot be abandoned, you can only be released’ True, pity though, but true. So abandonment unlike disappearance is an act that the actor is fully aware of and is done with an aim to destroy something. So you will be abandoned, only you can release yourself. Only you. Because when people abandon you, they have no courtesy of releasing you. It is not an act of mercy, but that of war. Ready your hands for waves, your tongue for quiet and your feet for goodbye. People will become people and you will remain empty if you have released all your little self into their emptiness. Now beware, always save some for yourself. When abandonment arrives, always find a way to return. Always return.

Yours, always hidden.
Thababosiu
…back to The Shadows.

When darkness swallowed whole, The Shadows.

Indeed, the orbit is complete. Earth was exactly at this point last year.
It is not the sun that reminds me of this, but the cold at the base of my heart. I am shaking. The cold has nothing to do with this.
The air feels so familiar. If I had slept then till now, I would assume no motion at all. I would think all is still the same. The fear, the tears, the dangerous wind, the needles on my bed, the emptiness in my chest. Routine nocturnal dispare. I have been here before.

This is how you kill a man before he stops breathing; You make him wait!

I trusted the bricks and frozen cement to protect my troubled soul from the spiteful world. Hermit to all good happenings, my face was nowhere to be found. My name was everywhere. Outside my door, footsteps would send an icy lightning down my bones. Every siren scream dirty in the Johannesburg busy air was a death threat to my frightened heart. The giant lock could not protect me from the fear. The old cloth I tucked under to block the wind at the foot of the door did not help, tears found their way in anyway, like apocalyptic floods, under blankets, a liquid serpent, they made it to my face. The walls had already fallen deaf, lost all sense of sympathy, my throat became just a passageway of sound, nothing else.
'Men don't cry yo!' …
'Use your pain to better your art yo!' …
'Yo, are we still on for Friday?'…
…Imagining the future was a burning spear cracking its way through my chest. I had to stop making plans for the weekend,
'No my friend, I cannot confirm that I will see you tomorrow.'
It is ten o’clock now, thinking about lunchtime is too much of a dream for me, a mare; I cannot allow myself to see beyond the now. They might be here any minute now to take me. Fortunate are the madmen who wander nameless in these streets, for even though they are unconscious about their freedom, they have basked far too long under its warm wings and they know all smiles of a life without fear. I am dying. Waiting has never been so painful for me, ever, it gave me time to think, to dream, the senseless soliloquies with other shadows. No longer. Can it be over and done with already? I cannot do anymore waiting. Because of my curiosity, I was born with wide open eyes. It is not the terror that death promises to bring that kills me, but my silly talent of always wanting to understand and know things, it is my innate quest for certainty. I would rather be dead and know it. I’m a ghost, wandering in a living body, trapped. The scars mean nothing to me, nor does the hunger, ghosts have no opinion about the cold.

Just tell me I’m dead and there’s nothing to worry about. Someone please pinch my spirit and confirm that I’m not here? Tell me I’m just an insane unborn child dreaming up an erroneous literature assignment, a tragedy of a hidden boy with circles, the story of an undying dead person. Say all this is just my imagination. Conversations with a God I never gave a chance to exist, but only my sad reality replied. I couldn’t see anyway this could ever end. It hasn’t, even to this day. But that’s fine, The Shadows are warm sometimes.

Time has moved, events came and left. I have seen faces and shook hands. My face too has also been seen, my hand did also shake and wave. It is my heart they never saw, I wore it on my sleeves hoping they would shake it off. It found its way back to my chest now. More than it, it is the rock it carries that I feel. How metals break glasses between my ribs. This machine is becoming too ancient to carry this heart. Soft as it is on the hands of strangers. Light as my smile is on their pupils. These bones are becoming outdated to carry these scars, this daily crushing spirit. It is not a new body I’m yearning for. Give me certainty! Tell me everything is alright.

Seasons change and I’m thrown back to a ghostly past, benighted. The problem with time is that it is ever constant. We exist in the past, future and present concurrently. Well, it might not be about time, rather memory and intuition, how we can travel back in time and skip to the future even when the present gleams with so much smiles. In gigabytes; how big is memory? Can I fill my head with enough knowledge and new experiences to push out the past? Tell me there’s a hidden delete button behind my neck that I haven’t yet discovered.

Hugged by strange emotions right now, I’m re-experiencing all the terror. It is true that pain changes you. There’s a lamb inside me that this new beast cannot consume. It must die! I failed to die. It must die! I’m searching from my fingers the name of this lamb. Index and thumbs command me to repeat the lines above; It must die! I failed to die. It must die!…(cut to the present: A man tells me a joke about bricks and feathers, the fun in it is what Samuel Beckett once said ‘The essential doesn’t change!’…I find the joke too profound to laugh at, it makes me sad) …Back: I’m naming the lamb…It must die! I failed to die. It must die!…I found the name: the essential doesn’t change, says the lamb. If the lamb fails to die just as I failed and the essential doesn’t change,  who am I? Who is the lamb?…Sadly, I = Lamb.

I cannot insist on being a lamb when the world calls a beast out of me. I have died too many times before. How infinite can I continue dying?
I have met many other strangers with death written on their palm and still the lamb shook their hands and found a home in their hallowed chests. Even to this day, the tyranny persists. Something in me must die!

A dead prophet asks me to change myself and the world will follow. I’m afraid sir I cannot do that this time. I have been changing, I have even lost the landmarks to lead me back to my true self. I cannot do this changing thing any longer. I have been changing and the world is still the same. I have learned that significance is a relative phenomenon. I’m not that significant at times to the world, but the world is always significant to me. The essential doesn’t change. So, forgive me. I will not change this time, I’m going to destroy everything I hate about the world. I’m going to remove all the insignificant objects and obliterate all toxic people that the world has presented me with, starting with these beasts disguised as lambs shaking my hand next to my heart with their sharp claws. I today am the essential and I will not change!

…Back to The Shadows

The open sky has hidden Shadows

Behind your shoulder blades the sun cuts the city sky to sleep, the skyscrapers seem not to be ready for bed though, they fight back with open and lit windows. Those annoying traffic lights are getting useless as the machines have retired and probably dreaming of the next morrow’s drive. Heard in the still urban wind is a loud breath of big air-conditioners and a smellable music of frying pans inside the buildings. You are not here, something under these pavements is silent. Their patterns seem new and obscure to the slumbering bodies of the homeless. It is not sadness, but a feeling of unfamiliarity. You’re somewhere between a weakening nexus of urban and rural, or future and past. 

The open road will be good to you. There will be unnamed lands besides you. Look at them and inhale all dreams of fellow nomads who came before you. Do not name them. Fall in love with the empty sky, rid your mind off its limits. You are free. Indefinitely. So take all you can get from all those vacant spaces in the quiet horizon. Follow the ungoverned movements of those slowly flying birds, they have no destination, so be patient, victory isn’t about arriving but the experiences collected and treasured throughout the trajectory. I will not yet speak about the spaces in my heart. Be joyful. You can look back if you want, I don’t know much about leaving so such advices have not yet been planted in my field of unevenly growing knowledge. Look around you. Moreover, I cannot yet suggest that you look inside you either. 

I will tell you though about the openness of the road and the spaces in the sky. I will speak less of the scarecrows in the corn gardens and the dead fish below the rivers you will cross. Not much about the tired souls now invisibly wondering atop the mountains you will see. I have seen the bonfires in your eyes, how they keep growing regardless of the winds motion or presence. I know about your hidden passions. I have sensed the warmth woven into your shy palms when the city is cold. You can hold an infant without a blanket or naked in this winter night and they will not cry. I marvel nightly at the miracle of your calm voice. Every word that passes your larynx sounds like a song. Angelic! You are such an oblivious healer!  There is beauty in how you curl your limited body between these cluttered city streets, untouched. Your serenity is magical! 

The open road: This is not even about ego or me blowing my own plastic horn; I’m not that big or insignificantly small, but you will miss me. The emptiness in the sky will remind you of the frivolous things I spend the whole night talking about, without any solid hypothesis. The silent horizon will remind you of my pointlessness. The lack of stop signs and traffic lights will remind you of my unstoppable laughter. How I stretch one stupid joke to a million stories without end. Those trees now standing without their leaves will remind you of my dry jokes. You will feel like I’m your favourite thing about the city behind you, though invisible now, you will see my face traced by the starless spaces in that rural night sky. You will think of all the strange things about me, those that you like and those you would rather do without. You will swallow the void in the horizon and the emptiness will fill you up, you will miss me. Who am I kidding? This does sound egotistic. Forgive me. I should have told you about me, how I feel about your absence. But…That will be too much for your travelling bones to carry. I want you to travel lightly, so I will keep all my feelings about your impermanent departure to myself. 

Your height is a symbol of how much you respect gravity and not so much interested in what happens in the sky. I realise now that I’ve painted so much of sky into this letter that you probably won’t read much into it. I think that’s what I want. For you not to read too much into it, but decode more from the things I didn’t have the courage or the skill to express. Don’t read too much into it. 

Be there and enjoy all the emptiness around you.

The city probably misses you. Just a probability. The skyscrapers are not giving much in that regard. Only open and lit windows.
Read all the omitted parts of this letter somewhere between The Shadows in the sky. 

Yours concealed by light and exposed by Shadows,

Elysium Garcia…back to The Shadows