in April

I am contaminated

with the pain and sorrow of this world.

I cannot be amongst the pure, and happy birds

except as an imposter.

An ocean of sin enclaved in my heart

would pour out and ruin their party.

the sins that I have seen

the sins that I have done

what I did

and to me what was done, are all the same.

One same ocean of sin,

contained in my heart

and I can’t fly.  

i write

I write again because I don’t dare to speak. There is a person across me, perhaps he is a man but I cannot speak. I cannot say I do not trust. I do not trust the look in your eyes when you look at me, when you touch me. I have no faith in your eyes. Sex is about trust. You need to trust and you need to be allowed to communicate, and trust that that love and care which you show with your body is real. I don’t trust.

I don’t want to have just sex anymore. Sex without trust: I am distant, and it is only good in a narcissistic way, in a fantastical way. You communicate only with your fantasy and not another person. This is damaging and harmful. I don’t want to hurt myself and the man any more. I don’t want to do that anymore. When I touch you I want to open up my heart and my mind and let you in, and let you get around and claim the space. I want to mean what I say.

I need to trust you. Would you say I am ethical, and tight, and that I miss the point of pleasure? I say I don’t want to hurt myself anymore. I don’t want to scrape my soul with a pocket knife anymore.

I want to ask you if you understand; and if you know; and if you can love; but I cannot speak. I write because you sit across me and I don’t trust you even to ask you. I don’t trust that you will not say I am prude and scared, and a waste of your time. So, I write to myself. I talk to my self. I have this dilemma. Should I speak and see if you hear me and treat you accordingly. Should I not. I feel I should not. I feel that it is embarrassing to say what I want and what I need. I feel it is uncool and oldschool to ask for love and trust and care and openness from you. To keep the sexual as an extension of communication. To have sex with you, in the best case would mean to me to be so open I could die from you. And I cannot trust you, nor your eyes nor and the way you look at me and touch me.

I know what I don’t want anymore. I know I don’t want to have bad hurtful sex anymore. I know I don’t want to add to the world’s pain anymore. But I don’t know how to seek a lover, how to reach the love in a man. How to ask for it. I don’t know how to find it. I know only how to withdraw and be distant and watch from afar and not be involved.

I don’t want to run away anymore. I don’t want to be here and not be here anymore, just to stay cool and keep safe. Why is it so frightening and embarrassing to ask for something real and good? Why is it so wrong, to seek something better in this pornorific culture of ours. Why am I ashamed to ask you for what I know we both need, what would be really joy. Why do I feel alone and rejected by this society when I seek love and sexual communication, when I wish to stop the masochism that pretends to be so liberating and modern, free and fun?

I don’t think this is fun. To hurt your self and a man you might love. Why do men accept that? Why do they seek it? How many times have I been disappointed, and hurt, by a man because he did not even realize when I withdrew from sex and was absent emotionally. How many times have I been let down that way? And hurt. I knew then that I had to leave this person. That they did not love me. and I stayed until I could leave.

Now I want to seek love, I want to open my self and have good sex. And I take my time to know you and see you and trust you. And I feel like the world is telling me I am frigid and weird and unacceptable, and I act like I have a learning disability. I don’t have the self-esteem to support myself in this attempt for something better because I feel alone. Because I feel you, the man, will reject me if I speak of love and if I reject this cold cruel sex that is laid out for us by this pornorific culture. Will you reject me because I deny you the gifts of free sex that patriarchy promised you? Will you look at me with disgust and withdraw on the inside and reject me, and turn your face downwards ever so slightly, and will I know in that second that you spat at me, that you saw me as a dirty outsider, an insolent anarchist who blasphemised against nature. Will you reject me the way a man rejects his son who is born disabled?

Will you hate me for making you reject me?

Why am I afraid to seek love and to stand up for myself? Who will support me. in that soft weak moment when I stop while we kiss. That moment when I want more and I feel ashamed to say it.

Though I know, I know in my heart that I am right, even if my heart is alone outside in the cold. I know deep in my heart that this here land is sick and dying. I know in my heart that I seek joy and love. Will I find a man who can love, who will support me and speak to me with his heart? Can that be you? Or are you bound to the beast and kissing his feet? Sucking on his toes.

You look at me and you say we need to take risks. And I would. I would jump off of this cliff with you if you thought you could fly. But I would not join a group on a burning boat. There is risk and there is stupidity. Time and experience can show. I am not prude. I just want to take the time to have good love with you, or if it is not you, then with someone else. But I don’t want to waste my soul and my body, or yours for that matter, not anymore, for some fantasy and a little physical mixed-pleasure. Just because we think this is all there is and think thus that we want it.

I know there is more and I told myself I will seek it. So now, since I feel so alone against the Porn, I will stand for myself and support myself and if you choose to support me I will be glad to see that. And if you don’t, you don’t. Man.

dolphin

You are an open window

You are a breath of fresh air

You are a hope for happiness

A hope for fulfillment.

If you are lost

And if the hope dies

My home with its people will feel like noise.

I will have to bear.

I will have to endure.

I know that you might be lost,

I know that hope may die.

I stand at the edge of a cliff,

And I will watch it falling.

If it does, I will endure, I will bear.

Elena, Helen and Eleni

‘You’

‘Me?’

‘You’

‘What? Me?’

‘You’

Frossa put down the shirt she was holding – she had taken it off together with the scarf because it had gotten rather warm – and went over to the young woman that was calling her. The woman sat on a tree branch, almost three meters off the ground, and was half hidden by the leaves around her. Her face was in full view though, and she looked strait over at Frossa. Frossa stood near the base of the tree and looked up. The sunlight blinded her a little and she squinted to see, but what was clear was the full broad teasing smile across the woman’s face. A smile that looked like a laugh.

‘Hey you’, the woman said more kindly this time. She wasn’t meaning to stop Frossa in her tracks and pull her over, as she had before. Since Frossa had come over, the woman’s voice became now rather welcoming. And you might say she sounded a bit cheery that her call had actually worked out.

‘Hello’, Frossa returned the friendly intent. In the young woman’s voice Frossa could hear, toned down, the happy surprise of a child, when an uncle does agree to their plea to go for icecream. Also, in her nibble movements, and in the playful way her gaze engaged you immediately into a personal engagement, Frossa thought she saw evidence of lineage from the Goat People. She stood a bit back to see better.

The woman swiftly switched her position and came over to the right of the tree, where the sun would not be behind her, and on to a branch that was about a meter lower. She dropped her self into a sitting position in the middle of the branch, just about at the point after which it wouldn’t have held up her weight. Her feet hung down and swung freely. She had a big scruffy head of hair, some blue trousers that looked as if they lived on her, and a white top.

Noticing that the woman had no intention of coming down Frossa looked at the tree to figure how easy it would be to climb up. It wouldn’t be easy. Feeling uncertain about if it was worth hanging about, Frossa looked up at the woman – whom as you looked at looked more and more like a girl – and with a slight tilt of the head gestured that she had her attention, and that she ought to say whatever it was that she wanted.

The woman just beamed her wide grin and her smiling eyes. You would have thought that she was happy just for her and Frossa to look at one another, as if that was engaging enough. Frossa relaxed and put her little annoyance away. I suppose it was enough, she noticed.

‘Come down from there’, she said, in agreeable response to the woman’s obvious request to be friends, and the woman – the child – hopped to the ground, put her one arm around Frossa in a hug, and they walked like that, side by side, away from the tree.

‘You look rather serious’, she said.

‘I am rather serious’, Frossa answered, ‘what is wrong with that?’

‘What is wrong with playing?’ she answered.

‘I play’, Frossa answered

‘You don’t play’, she said

‘I have fun with serious things’, Frossa answered. ‘I have fun with them’.

‘Do you know what a game is?’, she said

‘I know what a game is’, Frossa answered

‘Do you?’, she responded. ‘Do you know what a game is’, she teased.

‘A game is an activity where the formal outcome has no moral relevance’, Frossa answered.

‘Life is a game’, she said.

‘No its not’, Frosso answered. ‘Life is not a game.’

‘Play a little’, she said

‘I can’t play with my life’, said Frossa

‘Play with me a little’, she said

‘What do you want to play?’ Frossa asked.

Hearing the acceptance of the challenge in Frossa’s tone, the girl yupied around a bit. But she didn’t know yet what it was she wanted to play.     

‘My name is Eleni, but it is Elena too, but it may well be Helen of Troy.’

‘Tell me,’ she said ‘I saw you come, this way from far away. I saw you turn around the bend the way this road is turning. Did you pass by the village that sleeps at the forest’s feet?’

‘I did’.

‘And tell me, who was there and what do they do, did you find them or did they find you?’

‘My memory fades the further I walk, what I have left from there are their gifts, close to my heart, that I hold.’

‘Did you see a river, did you see any fish?’

‘I read about it’, she went on to say. That there is a river and creatures too, and if you speak to them from the bank they will carry messages for you. They can travel to any house, to any person you seek, and that without words, to him, your message they speak.’

Frossa considered this. ‘No,’ she said ‘I really don’t think so.’ ‘But why would I want that? Why would we need such a thing?’. ‘Messages are not secret in our world, they are not hidden. Anyone who wants to know a thing, can look and find it out. If I wanted to say something to any one, why wouldn’t I say it to them myself directly. I lift up my heart, I open my arms, and I speak what I want, where I am. One can lift up their hearts, they can open their arms, they can listen out loud, and can hear it.’

‘And besides’, Frossa added, ‘I don’t seek anyone. I long for them, and I wait. Sometimes I look up and I call to them, I yell out to them, and I wait.’  

Maybe as Frossa spoke, her tone had been antagonistic, because Helen withdrew a bit, and as her happiness had shone on her face as uninhibited as a child’s, now her mood changed to an easy complaint.

‘Why do you speak so quickly,’ she asked, ‘why do you say only so little.’ ‘Why do you tell me what you think, and not what you saw’.

‘My life is my own,’ Frosso said, ‘and only I can live it. Ideas, they are for everyone. As they were given to me, so I also can pass them.’

‘You needn’t be so cryptic’ the girl said. ‘You see those tall cherry trees?’ she asked, ‘I live there.’ ‘From the people who pass by here, who walk, with stories, I walk with them.’

Frossa was silent and she thought. ‘I am sorry, she answered, I hadn’t thought of it that way.’

Dawn

Oh morning light of dawn, how I love the colors you give,

the cold still in my back, the scent of God as clear as the day, the first sounds morning.

Morning light,

you can only be the work of love,

only the kindest embrace. 

strength

God, your hand is so soft, so kind, so steady

that it can only be strong, stronger than the strongest strength.

So certain, so gentle is it, that it can only be Yours.

peace

quiet the noise in my heart that I may hear You pass

silence the noise in my heart that I may hear Your footsteps.

For a moment, my heart will have peace.

The perfect woman is like a lamborghini

If you don't know how to drive it,
then it's just an over-priced car.
But if you do,
it's a lamborghini

waiting, a little chat

 Mary said

sitting on a chair

waiting, waiting.

looking at the walls,

waiting, waiting.

Why must you always let men go at their own pace?

You can receive and respond and play

but sit and wait

It is not so much a dialogue

Men must go at their own pace.

Outside, running, jumping, reading, swimming, doing

and waiting, waiting

You can prepare and be ready to give if he comes

But you must be waiting.

Why is it that I can change pace and walk alongside another?

just because I know, and I can see, that it is their speed?

As a human we should not just react but act.

I can step back, and evaluate, and see and say,

‘this is fast for me but I’ll go a little faster since another person has a need.’

Why must I always wait for a man to go at his own pace?

Is it because women are trained in the tasks of love

and men just learn to take?

Do I sit, do I sit, do I wait?

And Mary answers

I understand your frustration, oh friend, I do.

But it is not like that.

Sometimes men wait

The person who is gong faster is the one who has to wait

The person who is slow cannot go faster, but the person who is faster could slow down. It is kindness.

Like walking with a child whose legs are shorter.

And if you are worried that at this pace you never will get there, then you know that he cannot get there, and so either you forget about Ithaki or your paths must part.

And Mary says

I hear you sister but you are wrong.

Wrong wrong wrong

I would slow down to help a limping man,

I would stop to sit by a man on the side of the road resting.

But a communion is between two people, and together they have their own pace.

Together we can have our own pace, but I cannot wait for his.

If the equation does not include me, then I am the zero.


But Mary said
Our problem is unsolved indeed,
but if you are in a rush, why should the other person rush with you?


Mary, oh mary, you just don't understand! 
I don't want to rush him, I don't want to drag him to Ithaki over night. 
I want to express myself and say hello, to share my happiness, to let my joy show. I want to say 'hey, so and so', and not worry, that I've said to much. 
that i broke the ice that he was standing on
that all is now gone.
I want to show my joy.
Can't he handle that? 

the work of God

The wind is blowing hard!
This way and that
but we must keep to the road.


Do not be fooled by all the phenomena
Disturbed by all the shouting
Shocked by all the drama
Taken with all the spectacular.


Day in and day out
our task is the same.
Steady your foot,
keep to the road.
Day in and day out,
our task is the same.

thank you letters

Freire,

You had such a fertile mind

You cared.

A little seed was dropped,

and a flower grew.

The wind blew in pollen,

and a field of flowers grew.

You had no hardness in your mind

no cement

no rocky ground

no untilled earth

Because you cared,

And your heart was well kept.

something new, something old

Everything I had before died because it was dying
and I don't want something dead.
I don't want a barnyard of dying animals,
a kitchen of rotting fruit.
I want you
alive and awake
healthy and strong
happy,
and to belong.

I'll sing you a song

Love, love, love, you open the heart

You make way for things to come

You make soil for things to grow

You open the doors and let life in.

Love love

You are living

and you are strong.

You lift carcasses, broken buildings and dead dogs,

you make space, for new air,

for life, for more.

Love, love, I’ll sing you a song.

Be in my life, make me yours.

Make me for you a home.

Love, you are the light and the air

the water the sun 

the soil.

You take dead things apart, and from their parts you make more.

Life is because of you.

How I hate death, how it oppresses me

Love, make me yours.

a lady in waiting.

I.

If you are summoned you appear right away. So, I put down my book in mid-sentence. I shed the cloth I wore where I had been sitting, by the open window. I dove strait into the bath and swam across to its other end. A bowl of soap was brought over and placed beside me, and quickly I washed myself all over, particularly scrubbing behind my ears, along the back of my neck under my hair, the front of my neck, and then the rest of me. My auntie is correct in what she told me – that cleanliness is half one’s beauty.

Soon after, I appeared before the queen. I walked towards her keeping my back strait and my head up, until I came close, where I knelt and bowed down before her. While she spoke I faced the floor, my left cheek touching my left knee.

We did not say hellos and goodbyes. In such situations we acknowledge one another with a pause of silence before she speaks, and another pause of silence, after she has spoken, before I get up to leave.

This is what she told me: she said the prince will come to meet me now. She said: ten men will come to see you, and if you recognize the prince he shall reveal himself and his kindness to you. If you do not, you shall be expelled from the state for thirty years.

When she had finished speaking, she glanced for a moment down at me, and then strait ahead again. I stayed bowed on the floor.  This is the way I showed her my gratitude, and my appreciation of the honor that was being done me. I left without looking at her again.

II.

Going back to my apartment, I took off the celebratory dress and wore another more simple cloth, so light and so flimsy that the breeze touched my skin again as if I were naked.

I ordered somewhat my books along the windowsill, as I did not have time to do that when I left, and, stepping out from the camara into the garden, I went down towards the beach.

The sun was hot, and rising, but the breeze was cool, and the shades wide. I walked down amongst the trees, down the 200 steps, through the cold stream, and down to the beach. The rising sun had not fully reached here yet, and the beach pebbles rested cheerfully in the shade of the boulders. I walked across them and round to the lagoon. My walking disturbed the stones under my feet and little crabs shuffled about me. I mean tiny little crabs, about the size of a fingernail. I reached the sand, and sunk my feet into its body. The coolness of the wet sand bellow the surface layer stimulated my feet. I twisted about, digging my feet a little deeper in, and enjoying the grainy texture.

The sun began to show above the cliff. The soft waves breaking along the beach began to lessen, subdued by the growing heat, and the sea was becoming more serious. I dropped my cloth and ran in.

I felt anxiety and fear. The woman who had the home before me had failed. And the woman before her. Women everywhere were often leaving.

The first thing I decided is that I would not be afraid. There is no usefulness in being afraid.

In fact, fear has one value. It indicated to me that this is an important task, a significant one – and that it is difficult.

But I knew that. Otherwise, fear could only get in my way. I would do everything that I could, anything that I could, and then I would have to let things be and become what they will. It would be ok, as, having done what I could, there would have been nothing I could have done about it, were I to choose badly.

How would I know the prince? I thought, I wouldn’t look to recognize him, I would wait for him to recognize me. I thought, that a normal man usually cannot see you. He looks at you, and he sees only what he already has in his heart. So I would wait to see what he had in his heart in this way. Also, I thought, only a man who can love can see another person as they are. I would wait to see who would recognize me, and I would choose him for a prince.

I lay on the water floating with my eyes closed. So vast is the sea, and so open a space, and still, you can be there and trust that you are alone. You can relax, and open you mind and your heart, let them unfold and spread to fill the whole area – as if there is no one there to confine you by observing you. With this vast expanse about you, you can trust that you are alone there.

I put my ears inside bellow the surface and I listened. I sought advice, and hope.

The other thing I decided was this: that I would give time. Time, I thought, is like a dimension, and it lets you see the shape of a person well. From where we stand, without it, we cannot see.

on the way to Troy, for Eleni

Standing firm, stiff.

Waiting to see what will happen here.

Will it go good, can I feel?

Or will it go bad, and I will need to retract all emotion-in-waiting, suck it up?

I don’t spill, I don’t just spill,

I don’t just feel feel feel anyway

I know what I want, but I am not swept away by passion.

I keep my feet together, my hands in my pockets, so that I can go either way.

If the situation has space for my feelings, I will feel.

I am effective

Efficient.

(I shall be happy anyway. I needn’t get too excited about what I want.

God knows better than I what I need.

Either way I will be happy.)

If you don’t know if you are going to buy a house

you are not going to move into it are you?

You see if you will get it first, otherwise

you leave your furniture where it is.

My emotions are like kids in the car.

They are so excited that we are going to the sea

They laugh, they play, they fight.

They are eager, they know what they want.

But I won’t let them out on the highway.

Not until we get there.

My emotions, do I suppress you too much?

Do I not let you dance in public?

Do I not let you sing too loud?

no thank you, i rather be free

What a horrible feeling, how unhappy

how oppressive

to have spent the day wanting a love you will never have

and to be left exhausted, and with discomfort in your chest.

Pain! Go away, leave me. Pain, don’t oppress me.

During the day, it is like a classroom out of control, a

room without a teacher, raising havoc.

The evening, is like pain coming in, closing the windows,

sweeping everything away. All of the noise and games.

What sort of education is that?

What is good about it?

What is good about a day without you, a day that will

last and be vast?

Today I took the seeds of my love for you and I tossed

them on hard ground.

And the crows came in afterwards and ate them all away.

What a sad day without you.

Knowing we will never be

Drowning all the little bits of joy we started.

Oh sad day, let your grip of me!

Sad day, I am not yours! I am free and I will be happy.

I wish to forget

Today is your last day

I only have to wait today one day

walk around

not call you

not fantasize too much

lounge about

not call you

just this one day

and then you will go, and I can start to forget.

The time passes so slowly

but it will pass.

And if you want to see me again

if you really do,

you will.

I hope that you will.

But hope, you are like a colonizer.

You rape a country,

you let nothing grow

I wish to forget.  

without shelter again.

Loving, being in communion with another,

Opening your heart, both of you, and loving,

Is so wonderful.

It is so exhilarating

Joyful. Lovely

But this waiting, this burning, this fantasizing

I hate it.

It drains me

It tires me

It leaves me with nothing, and hungry.

Wave, pass over me as gently as possible

Pass by and leave me unharmed.

Desire, pass and let me be free.

Let me love from my heart and be free.

Wave, you tire me

You drain me

Pass and leave me

Lay me gently on the beach

Let me eat pomegranates

Let me lift my face up

Let me see my Lover

Let me be.

evening

She sat sitting on the porch, to be alone from her parents, alone with her desire. Her desire to be with someone. She looked at dark fields, some trees, stars and the moon. Overwhelming open space so boring and frustrating, trivial, because it promised no chance for excitement, interaction enhanced with sexual tension, mental stimulation, or spiritual fulfillment.

She wondered if this burning she felt, that she contained, that made her present insufficient and boring, was a need felt by all people. And if this need, the boredom, exploding in her, this wanting, to move, to meet people, consume stimulation, have the environment that realizes her sexual playful intelligent self and feed her hungry self, is the need that makes people seek change and action. A force that invented the light bulb and the night club.

What is this yearning that she feels? To go out, find others, find fun, be part of the fun, eat it, so that it reaches down and punches this strain in her chest.

What do we need?

Can we ever be satisfied or is this a force that urges consumption and movement that will never be satisfied?

She didn’t sit there desiring a man of this sort or that. Yes, sometimes she does. But really, this feeling is so familiar and experimented with, that she can feel it like a concept, stripped of its particular object of desire.

2005

morning

I am mourning

the morning

I saw the light come out from

behind the mountains

A bastard light

that came to life

from whatever went on back

there in the dark

a bastard light

that came to life, from God

I mourn the morning

until we are well into the day

for what is here is here to stay

I take off the black

and I sit naked in the shade

1999