Of far more delight to me, Is the music of the offstage whispers The polished wing tip high heels The polite rain of applause and clean-pressed coattails The whole perverted high-toned scene! Well dressed pigs at a satin troff! Taking little sips of this and that, little opinions about this or that The sterile murmur of conversation And teaspoon chink on china cups, The third bowel movement in the diurnal music of the well off! Meanwhile, sitting in the plush leather armchair, I fight the desire to crawl up into the silk lap of the pianist, lost in concentration, like a dead leaf falling, and embrace the heat of her cold shade, her vanished days, her withered roses, her famished wolves, her sharp winds, her uncertain sorrows. All presented so neatly! I notice nothing that is not there. And the nothingness that is. The aroma of the hair of the woman sat beside me, The sultry tones of her Fellahin voice, The amorous dark light of her lowered gaze - These seem far more sacred to me, The way she runs her fingers through her hair creates the most mesmeric music! After half an hour of listening to these thoughts I realise the music communicates almost nothing to me! Virtuous, to be sure. But it’s all pomp and ceremony. Mozart was a master. But he was no Led Zeppelin! Then you surrender your senses You CLOSE YOUR EYES, Give yourself over to the music and let it carry you up out on a wave. The spectacle of the bassoons fades away, The boundaries slip so the sound of it reaches the shoreline of your dreams. The walls recede, the roof vanishes, and you float quite naturally. You float uprooted, dragged off, lifted high. Transported, immortalised, saved. CLOSE YOUR EYES! It all becomes so clear! A song unto itself, carries you in lagging consciousness, As though an ink black stream, Towards love and death and the blood that has all the rhythms needed to entrance. That impossible confluence Where you find stillness in death and stillness in love. And the thin silk scarf hanging off her shoulder, threadbare illuminated by the limelight, hides none of her beauty. In fact creates it. It all becomes torrential, so that each note finds you and reaches into your love, Until there is no longer any meaning, No muse or method behind the sound itself, Just as a poem cannot go beyond the words of which it is composed. It is always already there, When you choose to look. Observing the act of perception Is a form of music too. Sublime, triumphant, ex-static - and then gone. The Indian boys with the slicked back hair heave at the double doors, The murmurs pour out in empty suits. The quotidian car ride home, the silence in the dust, Something was stirred, you can feel it there, tumorous, tumultuous, tenuous, But you can’t put your finger on it! Sat beside your husband, silently watching the blur of lights and the buildings and passing cars you mistake for your life. passing through. But it’s really nothing at all. That tiny sound. Something you will think about again on a quiet little Sunday morning walk. That high toned little flame burning in the fissure between words! The same thing that makes the stray cats roam all night, makes priests pick up a bible, makes some of them put it down. The same thing that made the pianist sit upright and completely still for decades. That subtle continuous rhythm That comes to meet you at the edge of the light, That distant music, That incessant tap-tap.
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I wept on the vasectomy operating table. Legs spread, balls clamped. Dr. Yasser tried to make a few jokes, but he’s Egyptian. My tears were not caused by pain - but by the immense burden of guilt I’d built up over the years. I’ve become accustomed to it now - all the heartaches, all the loveless fucks, the abortions, the wasted time, the incongruence of my words and the feelings they betray. I saw all their faces as I lay there, passing before me one after the next like a chain I’d forged out of my own misery.
Romina from Argentina, who I almost married in Borneo and love to this day, who had a miscarriage on the toilet which, I suspected, was because of the visceral distress my reaction to the pregnancy caused… Jenny from the Philippines, who had been taking the pill whenever she felt like it, had to go to Hong Kong in the middle of the riots to get an abortion… Then Jessica, the stupid wench who wiped my cum off her belly onto her vagina, that abortion was in Japan… And recently Tryness, from Ghana, it must have been the discharge, no other reason, we were careful and I didn’t cum inside her. So many truly blissful nights. For a decade my appetite for the sensual became an obsession and took my place. Sometimes I was intimate with 3 women in one day. Sometimes with 2 women at a time. I couldn’t count to the nearest hundred how many there have been. Yet I’ve been depressed and isolated throughout. And today all that misery suddenly weighed down on me. But I also cried because of a deeper sentiment: being irrevocably stripped of the fundamental purpose of existence: to reproduce, to share life with a family. Immeasurably valuable and wholesome things, to be sure. I’ve often adored the thought, idealistically, but the fear and self-centredness and aversion to responsibility always kept me well away from it. So I’m lying there on a metal table with my arms outstretched like the crucifixion, in a green open-back robe, being sterilized. With Afari it was close. She was with me there, lying on the table, watching my crucifixion. She gave me all of love. It overspilled around my heart. So much so, I took it for granted. I forgot to pay it back. I kept it all for me. We were so close. Yet I loved her from distance. I could never give myself over to someone. But somehow she always felt like home to me. She even offered to pick me up after the operation. That broke my heart. Not even the perfect girl could pull me away from myself, from this wretched freedom I’d cultivated over the years, that amounts to little more than dull thrills and uncertainty. So far from the quiet idyl of the bohemian-in-the-wilderness kind of freedom that was the original seed of all this. At some point I gave up on life. All I know is anguish. Now there’s no thing and no one I want or need. Nothing I’d like to see or do, I’d just as gladly not see or do. Instead I’m holed up in this halfway house of hedonism, biting my nails, waiting around to die, fanning myself and my vanity. In the end Afari came to see me after the operation. We went to the cinema, and she held my hand. The next day I sold my cat and slept with a girl I hardly even liked. |
AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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