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The world’s most beautiful bellybutton

October 15, 2007

At night a hundred images of pretty women hovered in his mind, their bodies like a hundred dewy roses: women he had seen on the streets, in a store, turning a corner, boarding a train paraded through his secret self as his sex stretched in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself. A downy nape of neck, a milky way of freckles on a brown chest… Was it Love or Lust that visited him as he turned in bed, was it coy Bethlehem or brazen Babylon looking down on him? He asked Magic to unlock his loneliness and grant him a smooth open body. One day he met a girl who told him she had the world’s most beautiful bellybutton; her bellybutton she said was like the inside of a tiny seashell, did he want to see it? What he wanted was to be alone with this information, to guard these words spoken by the lips of a real girl that would have been enough to keep his fantasies churning for days, but she pulled him into a grove and showed him her tiny swirl and more besides, showed him her deep hungry mysteries, took his breath, took his dignity, and laid his secret life to waste.

* 

He walked across the border

October 21, 2007

Luck was waiting for him when he walked across the border into a new country. Fear covered him like a cage. But the air there was cleaner, the strays were friendlier and the inhabitants didn’t look at him as though they were trying to see through his walls. They let him wander anywhere: in the square at high noon where he swelled with a shameful smugness; in the shadows of passageways where even his sins fell short of their mark. Because they looked at him with indifferent sympathy, because they questioned him out of a false communion, he asked to become their student. They told him that wasn’t the way it worked. But they let him stay. When he drank and pointed at them they let him shout. When he fought against the bottle they let him do it his way, though he fought drunk. When he refused even his own help they let him alone. When he accused them of spiritual theft and every other crime he could think of, they said, There’s nothing to steal here: everything’s already been given. The cage began to lift. He failed into their world and grew accustomed to their concept of mercy. They said that mercy must turn in on itself afresh every day. He learned for himself to draw open the curtain first thing in the morning. He learned not to mock what he saw outside his window. This all happened in another country where the laws that had crushed him didn’t apply, or where the same laws crushed him differently, so that he was crushed not by solitude but by mercy, and every noon, broken in his idleness, he went back to the square where he knew he’d be counted in. And every noon his initiation was complete.

*

The man on the other bank

November 16, 2007

You, who’ve watched me through my own eyes all my life. My brother, my enemy. You, standing on the other bank, witnessing. I imagined you tut-tutting at my histrionics, accusing me by your very presence of being incapable of reform, back there where I was armed and mad and ready to destroy you if it killed me. I called you a coward and tried to scream you out of your silence. But you followed me. You live on behind the names I give you, like all the women I’ve berated myself for not winning and all the men who reached the courts of symmetry before me. On calm days I know we’re one but separate; I let you work out our destiny through me as I know I must. On happy days I even see in you my perfect reflection, my self fulfilled through no move of my own. But this isn’t one of those days. I drank all night in a locked room, and I’m hostile. Today I belong back there where I came from, I don’t know why I’ve come all this way. I don’t know who you are. Today I hate you: you make me cryptic, turn me against myself.

*

On nights like this 4

December 9, 2007

They worked me hard. I forgot how to sleep. One day I left them to their disorder and anger. Soon after, I left a woman with a belly like a ripening pear. She said I made her curse the life inside her. I walked as far as I could and lay down with mutts. Everything I’d been learning had gone from me. I’d forgotten how to laugh and cry. I cursed myself to this rented hut at the end of the coast. Here I end with nothing every 3 am, my grand quest to grow up dragged out on the floor before me like a sick animal. Nothing comes to me. I bring nothing to nothing.

Then maybe it starts from nothing. Maybe the first things that will whisper to me, from so far away, will be the thistles half uprooted by the offshore winds; and the winds themselves, always plunging homeward through new strange places.

What will they whisper? These nights are like dreams in which some task is demanded of me that I fail to understand. Nothing to do but stay still among the dusty things in this room, reflected like me by the black indifferent window; and stubbornly hold night to my heart until dawn chooses to break through from where I am not - and speak.

To stay here until dawn touches my window and tells me: I swallow the dark so you can praise. Walk out into a completed task.

It will say - is saying: The stars that eat your body now will one day be poured into you.

*

The Stranger

February 5, 2008

After all those lifetimes the Stranger descended from his wooden tower. He walked along the bank and across the cracked lands, still watching. There were no chapels. Leopards licked his feet. His solitude was perfect. He passed through the settlements, from Jerusalem to Constantinople to New York: a slow-moving, alien figure on the horizon. Patient. He sat for years with someone’s ancestor in a dusty room, he walked unnoticed beside pageants and riots held in his honour. Always beside. Bent and cloaked. Chapels were built with rocks of dubious origin, towers rose and fell in his name. Still his solitude is perfect, guarding against the terror.

*

Exile

February 25, 2008 by fromaroom

There was the Fullness and there were the wastes where the Angel roamed and found his first separation. He was chased by rays of light through the courts of symmetry and hounded through empty galaxies. When he hurtled into this air he hid in skies livid with the threat of thunder, in throats of caves. He ducked into the hut of mutiny, so different from his first estate, gritted to stay for eternities; asked and expected nothing. He practised his thousand voices. The earth’s hollows threw them back and forth; none wanted them. Spirits scratched at his shelter like branches. He let them into his Falling and gave them fake credentials for a wild solitude: he found his calling.

*

I made sounds with him I never made with you

April 5, 2008 by fromaroom

I made sounds with him I never made with you. He never talked about being shipwrecked between my legs, he never bored me with speeches about the essential solitude of sex. He never clutched Madonnas in bed. His house was airy and free, he gave me room and gave my body what it needed. He couldn’t have cared less about the Rose or the fullness of my lips. I never missed him.

*

I stood as one in a maze

April 24, 2008

I stood as one in a maze. My only chance was to open my eyes and let the confusion in. One day I gave it all up and the path opened up for me. I saw laughter coming from every blade of grass. The ground grinned up at me and every cell in my body thanked me. I had a day’s walk on all sides. I walked till I got tired then realised I didn’t know where I was going.