farb3yond

[farb3yond]

I want to die from lack of love.

I want to die from lack of love. Which is to say that I want it to be possible to die from a lack of love. I want us all to be able to die from a lack of love.

I want them to read out the statistics on the nightly news "Tonight in Chicago, in Colombo, in Negombo, in Tokyo seven men were found dead, five women were found dead, the remains of another three were found inside their cats

I want to see the pundits come on screen and say a lot of meaningless things about the lack of love deaths. I want them to say the solution is getting a job, not getting a dog, or shopping more, or shopping less and drinking more or drinking less and running more, or eating more vegetables, or eating less overall.

I want the politicians to make their empty promises to end the 'death by lack of love crisis' I want to hear one promise family values, or forced matrimony, or forced military service, or prison pen pals, or the illegalization of teddy bears, or the extermination of cats and woman-sized pillows, or the banning of anime. I want to see them on a crusade for more education, or to protect children from poetry. I want to see one to declare a war on love, and another a war on death.

I want the experts to come on tv framed by their long little titles, Mrs. so and so and Dr. so and so on with PHDs in romantonomy or erotic homeopathy I want them to say the missing link was a rare Brazillian berry, or a remote African dance, that no one in this one isolated tribe of islanders has died from a lack of love in generations.

I want to see Instagram ads from the Romantologists selling little penis-shaped crystals, or body sprays, or five step skin care routines, or an app with exercises for your heart.

I want to see a roided rage machine call the loveless 'snowflakes'. I want to read an article six months later about how they found his wife's body sitting on a bench in the park, ducks swimming in the background, I want to see the leaked footage of him soliciting behind the bus station bathrooms.

I want to look at the face of this man falling asleep on the ferry, all fists and forearms, and know that it won't be long now, that he won't have to live out another three decades on bread and tea, untouched and unnoticed.

[farb3yond]

I am not a singer

My poet friends and I often talk about the difference between people's attitudes towards singing and poetry. The physical action of these two things are, in one sense, quite close, they are both the act of saying words out loud, however, people seem to love singers and hate poets. If a singer is sufficiently talented they might burst into song in public, and if they are not celebrated they are at least tolerated, no poet may ever randomly burst into poetry, amongst strangers in public, except as an act of protest. In fact, irrespective of the content of a poem, all poems delivered to an unconsenting audience are always received as an act of violence.

This poem is about being a poet in light of this.

_______________________ Were it that my voice was as mellifluous as this night then I might have sung to you in black honey

and you would love me easily

but this throat is a measure of mortality and I have naught but the shards of this heart with which to compose this melody

splintered by the distance between dreams and futures and goodbyes that came to early

by the daymares resolve and by the night's laying,

awake,

restless.

shards lined up like chessmen trading in street myths and subtleties, and other forgotten currencies, with which to weave the truth voiceless into symphonies.

and so it is that I destined to compose in tragedies.

And though I am lonely it suits me well and though I am unwelcome the streets are warm under my feet and I am replete in the glow of every star and every streetlight for I am freindless today and forgotten tomorrow but the night is mine, and I have wrapped myself in it.

And you will not love me until you have spat on the earth till you have cursed your birth till you have stood naked in front of the mirror searching for where it hurts, but fear not

for I wait for you beyond tomorrow's inevitability

In the place only one legged men stand I plant my flowers, in the garden you hope never to visit.

And there, I have composed a dream for you for no one in particular about the world as it is and as it might have been and the distance between

for I have spent my life in this distance and here my words have grown huge they cover the sky and I will lay them down for you as those before me like a cloth, that stretches from the shore to the horizon.

[farb3yond]

Summer in Colombo/The remains of the revolution.

I am moving through spaces through all things dead or dying or being broken to be made anew in the image of a stranger's dream

The city is like the last song of a party everyone who can has already left is drunkenly making love in a stranger's home giggling probably living in the luxury of nothing being as serious.

Lately I am dreaming of my father of manhood of the impossibility of us being men together of how hard it is to find people I enjoy being men with

and I dream of a woman who must have cared for me very little

but that is an enigma love dangling out of the universe like a loose thread that I am pulling and pulling till it unravels and lies limp on the floor like it was never anything at all.

In my waking life I think over and over again about this night from my teenage years when I saw this woman in the back of a three-wheeler in jeans that had never considered they ought to fit and an imitation of a t-shirt crying because her nokia fell out of the vehicle and into the canal.

So what is a country when it takes so much and gives so little? And what is the effect of poverty on the spirit?

Like that time that girl my friend loved would spend her nights sleeping in the next room refusing to touch her and spend her days dragging us to taco bell.

Like all the overtures we all make to people we scarcely want to be around.

There is a howling hollowness to this city that was once ravenous but has since transitioned into defeat like the final pangs of hunger falling gently on a starving man who even if he were given food would not have the strength to eat.

Is beauty the first victim of poverty? or is it imagination? I cannot always make a distinction. Like these spirit-starved souls Born of loves neither beautiful nor imaginative.

The spirit is like a tree growing under the sunlight of love watered by the rains of our collective imagination its roots stretching deep into our histories personal and collective making no distinction

But spiritless we are floundering unable even to estimate how much has been robbed from us unable even to imagine what we might have been.

But who will cry for the dilapidation of a cafe? who will mourn for the fading of a spirit? who is left?

So now men sit across from men and have nothing new to say to each other

lovers pass each other in the street with mild disdain and never become lovers

And the loneliness slips into all things like smoke slips through the cracks and fills spaces, smothering the last suffocating breaths of these lives unlived

There is a desperation in the attempt to find words to fill the gaps that perhaps the loneliness may not seep into yet another conversation

two nights ago I dreamt of a city street cool in the shade and mild in the sun as vivid as a woman

But today this man is reaching across the table with his guessing at my being feeling for a foothold the words tumbling out of his mouth sounding like;

"I remember you said that love is important to you."

As if it is an eccentric hobby for the avant garde and I know now that I can no longer throw tantrums of outrage in the presence of those who have long since surrendered

still my body rejects the brief reliefs of beauty the city offers up the limited frames of magic I can no longer celebrate the flowers growing between the burning piles of refuse the singular wave breaking without any garbage on this beach that my hands have cleaned a dozen times.

I can no longer accept the spare change of the universe and call it a life.

I want to drown in beauty as if it is my right my right for loving it as much as I do for choosing it over and over for forsaking everything else, home, security, esteem, reverence, sleep.

I want to scream into myself.

I want to know strangers and have them call me by the anecdotes of our first meetings I want to die in a place Whose name I am yet to learn and I want to learn at least three-names for every place I am

I want to speak of the place of my birth as if it is a legend and then I will only talk of the ocean and the men who live in the mountains and the women who bathe in the rivers

And then all my desires will find space to take shape and grow like flowers in the sunlight courting the last generation of trees oblivious to the oblivion growing beyond the horizon

I want to fall out of love and walk through streets of mild sunlight in grief and know that it is a gift I want to know that it is all a gift always

I want to not belong, and be told that I am here instead of being here, and being told I don’t belong.

[farb3yond]

The Arcs of History

Recently, at a going away dinner for a friend who was about to leave for his mandatory military service, I was told by his mother that she never thought that he would have to do military service because by the time he was of-age war would have ended.

_

The night before the election another friend of mine told me that when he was a kid he thought that racism and nationalism would soon end with easier access to high speed internet and international travel. That now that people could see and learn about the world easily, the stupidity of nationalist and isolationist ideas would become self-evident.

_

This was the spirit of the age when I was in my late teens and early twenties.

It felt like humanity was making undeniable progress; technologically, socially, culturally and politically in terms of human-rights.

_

Broadband internet was new, and it was deeply democratic, it was a tool that allowed us, irrespective of where we were in the world, to have access to knowledge, and perspective, to learn and grow.

It really felt like it was the tool that would unlock humanity's progress.

_

I still remember when the US supreme court legalised gay marriage in 2015. I remember that feeling, none of us believed we would live to see this within our lifetimes.

(It is hard to maybe imagine this now but at that time the US was seen as a cultural leader, anything that happened in the US made it easier for the same to happen globally. The fact that the US was also so much more conservative and religious compared to its similarly developed peers only made the victory seem more powerful)

This then to us was evidence that the social progress of the world was undeniable; that we were right; despite everything that was wrong with the world we were making real progress.

_

We didn't know it yet, but this was the spring of the struggle. This was the easier time of the arc of history.

_

Today on the other hand, it feels like we are losing ground. As fascism is rising and democracy is faltering. As people are internalising the values of capitalism, as we are entering a new era of nationalism, misogyny and queer-phobia.

_

Precipitated by the tech companies who changed the internet into something which favours the extreme voices of conflict over the voices of subtle and nuanced truth. And who ultimately contributed to an era of even greater income inequality.

_

The struggle for progress is harder now, in fact holding a moderate position is hardest of all as we hear more extreme and absurd voices from both sides of every issue, as we go to the polls only to be presented with increasingly more imperfect candidates and choosing the lesser of two evils requires ever greater compromises.

_

But the arcs of history are long

_

Progress isn't linear. It isn't steady.

The fact that decades may go by in which no progress is made or in which progress is lost does not definitively mean that the future is lost.

_

The 1980s too were an immensely dark period in our history, in my country, in yours too probably, certainly in the world at large.

And yet they too surrendered to the spring of the struggle.

_

Battles that sometimes seem lost are reinvigorated again; like the struggle for freedom over psychadelics or against the harassment of women in the workplace.

Progress is made, and lost and made again.

_

That we have lived for the greater part of this decade in the bad times, that we will likely live at least another decade in the bad times, that we will have to struggle with everything we have to make a life for ourselves, and to turn the tide of regression, that we may not live long enough to see the world as it might have been if the tide of progress had never turned; is the great burden that our generation will bear.

_

Still, though a decade is a long time for a human, and a lifetime is longer still, they are not long for the arcs of time.

And the tide of regress is no more certain or irreversible than the tide of progress.

_

What is left for us now is to take up positions in the struggle: each to their strengths and their abilities.

_

I think mine will be with history, drawing lines between events and outcomes, and with mythology, drawing lines between dreams and the world.

_

I wish you the clarity to see what your place might be, the strength and good fortune to find your way there, and the perseverance to remain working there, in that pocket, until the tide of history turns again.

[farb3yond]

The Looping Arcs of Time

The threads of all things, The looping arcs of time, Here, at the beginning of one, the middle of another; a finite expanse of consciousness, a tenuous expanse of what we are, an infinite expanse of everything else; all objects approach and relent all in motion.

You and I with but a little energy, like the sail of a ship in a storm, to guide our trajectory or to fool ourselves into believing that we might. What do we hold on to? And how do we position the sail? What risks sinking the ship? And what risks making the journey meaningless?

Your face, and the way you smell the transmission from your palms your fingertips and my mouth on your neck and all the beginnings of poems I cannot complete.

There are maybe seven shades of blue and purple in the night sky. One shade of amber in the city streets at night like a weak, steady fire like a cold candle like a hue on your skin a mood on a moment to vanish with the sunrise and the rush of everything we do to leave home. There are maybe four deep feelings in the dwindling of my youth. There are less than three reasons to get out of bed, but even fewer to stay in it when you aren’t there and I am in the middle of deferring this adventure.

Somewhere, the winter is ending, and perhaps soon it will end here too. Though I am rich, my hands are empty. I cannot give to you the wisdom of a decade of famine, of a river that has almost run dry, of a hundred miles of forest lined with barren trees, of the years that pass without saying goodbye.

The sun is still weak in the South, and the hills are still littered with empty white promises waiting to be fulfilled. Home is all around me but sleep is a thousand miles away. I am at the place I predicted but couldn’t plan for and I am exhausted from all these beginnings, injured from stretching my hands.

The birds who came to this place too early are singing a song that only I will hear. Soon they will surrender, and all things will wait for this season to be born in its perfection.

April 2023, in Bodrum.

[farb3yond]

No Foundations

We simply haven’t shorn up the foundations of our world. At every turn we have become weaker, fatter, more decadent, more distracted. 

Everytime we had the chance to either invest in our infrastructure or in new toys we chose the toys. 

Not foundations for safety, or hospitals for when we are sick, not schools so the future can be wiser than the present, not in democracy, not in politicians that care, not in lawyers that can take capitalists to court, not in homes or care for those who are suffering. 

We wanted more, more and more of the less and less, more ways to be fed, more ways to cum, more ways to be distracted, more ways not to care, more ways to say:

“Here are my children, I must invest in distractions for them. I must buy them clothes that they need not have self-esteem, and technology with a screen that they will never wake up screaming from this half-dream. And I can say ‘Look they are I and I am they.’ But they are the me that is beautiful they are the me that is innocent, they are me but they cannot be blamed for this mess and I must not be blamed for this mess because I made it for them, that they would have toys over a future, hypnosis over a dream and I would be blameless. 

And when they say ‘Why have you burned the home you brought me into?’ I will say have I not always bought your self esteem? Have I not given you the distractions you wanted? Did you not live under my roof in the half-sleep? Did you not cum to the people you will never meet? Did you not get to show the strangers what you eat?

What are these values? What is a value to one who has never made a choice? Who has never stared into the maw of the machine? Who hasn’t sat in a room and pretended to work, who hasn’t made a man rich so you can hear about how his fresh new shiny toy will change the world he is paying you to burn?

How can you talk to me about a future when I am approaching the end, and looking back on it all can never find the moment where I had the choice, when I wasn’t the one in the half-dream, when I wasn’t distracted?

I wasn’t at the table where the choices were made.

None of us were there in the beginning, our histories are a summer catalogue of lies for election campaigns. There are no stories of the slow loss of consciousness, of the steady extinction of agency.”

And now the hard times are here, and we must face them with a handful of trinkets and a pocket full of paper. 

The children of the half-sleep who never woke up, led by a flock of salesmen. With a grand abstraction’s worth of useless skills, and a history of lies and weapons that we can only turn on each other, or on ourselves.

[farb3yond]

gül

In the park a young boy puts a rose in my face and he can’t speak English and I can’t speak Turkish But I am trying to tell him that I can’t buy roses when I have no one to love within the distance of a wilting flower.

And he reaches out his hand and says, “money”. in English this time and I see he is already a man he stands like a man, wears his jacket like a man, he is proud like a man he is carrying a man’s burden and he betrays no shame. Not in his hands not in his stance maybe not anywhere maybe the shame comes later

Maybe it’s only ever an edge, a sharpened space where a softer way of standing might have grown.

But instead we are here and I am watching them walk away, Two boys becoming men before their time in the park selling flowers to a man with no one to love.

[farb3yond]

Two Sri Lankas

For as long as I have been looking I have seen two Sri Lankas

There is the larger Sri Lanka, made up of most of the people. And there is the other Sri Lanka, the one that consists of a fraction of the country.

The first Sri Lanka is like a kite. It is blown by the wind to the west, or the east, or the North or the South. It buys into dreams about 'vistas of prosperity and splendour'. And I don't mean that it believes such things will come true, I mean it wishes that such things might come true.

That we might be the 'next Dubai' or the 'next Singapore'. It dreams that we might be an urban monument to success measured in the rate of consumerism. It believes in the nuclear middle class, the car it is rushing to buy while it says things like 'oh you have never even taken a bus', the house, the corporate ladder, the capitalist mantras, the dog with a breed you can name. Most of its members don't have this of course, but they believe in it.

It believes in things it calls culture, or heritage. It is not clear what these things are, if you try to find out it will insist it is you who don't know what they are. It is vaguely buddhist, but mostly it concerns kings; mythology posing as history.  It believes that our value is in our past, it believes that the past is always under threat.

It believes that a Sri Lankan is a second class citizen everywhere else in the world. It believes that a Sri Lankan is not a second class citizen in Sri Lanka.

It lives on bravado, even as it allows itself to be led by fear.

Its greatest fear is fear of the other. Who the other is always changes, but they are always trying to drive it to the sea.

There is no doubt in its mind that it is the true Sri Lanka. In fact the question has never even occurred to it.

The other Sri Lanka's members have their own visions for what this place is supposed to be. In that sense it isn't a monolith but an overlapping multitude, but it has no problem with this because the other Sri Lanka believes in pluralism.

It is still trying to understand what Sri Lankan identity is, but it knows it is Tamil, and Muslim and Sinhalese, and Burgher and Sindi, and Kaffir and Vaddha, and first generation Sri Lankan, and cosmopolitan. It knows that a whole can be its swirling sum, it knows that identities are never fixed.

It knows that peace is harder won than war. For war is made in the jungles, and cities and streets of our land but peace is made in the privacy of our hearts, in our willingness to forgive, in our desire to be whole again. It isn't afraid of words like 'reconciliation'. It mourns all the dead.

It believes in things unseen but felt. And it knows that the nature of this land is at the source of it, even as it fails to explain it. Sometimes it is buddhist, and sometimes it is hindu and sometimes it is daoist, and sometimes it is vipassana or ayurveda but it is always the trees, and the rivers and the mountains and the rainforest, the wetlands, the dry zone, the sea. It believes in a tourism that works with this, and does not require its destruction. It believes that neighborhoods like slave island can be preserved, developed rejuvenated like Sienna, or Prague, or Venice or any city in the world whose people are in love with its uniqueness, and dream of doing more with it than paving it over with a mall.

I am afraid you will think there is pretension in this, I am afraid that your guilt will call this privilege. If it is privilege, then it is the privilege of perspective, of time to think, and time to dream, and time to do nothing, and to do nothing here. Right here. In the long sigh of the world.

My family comes from a desert flanked by the sea. When the tide is low they say that you can walk to India from here. They say this is how we came to this place. I came to this place from my mother, my father is the final memory of my youth. In my adolescence, they told me stories of the man I would never meet. I keep the stories of the father they never knew to myself. I keep all my secrets like this, I don't speak of the things that cannot be heard.

I know that I can point to a place on a map. I know I can show you pictures of a mountain. But there is no record of what happened inside of me when I was there.

This is the true political struggle of my people: Between the seen and unseen. We cannot give you a handful of everything that has changed within us, we cannot point to everything we are afraid we are already losing.

Every time I see you all I have a compulsion to tell you I love you. I want to tell you that I see the fragile thing you are carrying behind your eyes. I want to tell you I know that you are falling. I want to tell you I too am afraid of disappearing. _____________________ 2022, Probably August. 

[farb3yond]

Do you hear it? The great metronome of the spheres? Do you watch the setting sun-rise and set? Do you watch the azure yield to the stars?

As the crows retire to their secret places to sleep, As the cats grow restless and the bats come out, Do you see us light our lights? Attempt to wash the world off our bodies?

Do you see us make a home of what we can And a life of what we must? Do you smile when you can? Do you cry when you must?

Do you fight? Do you rise? Do you fall? Do you fall in love? Do you fallout?

Do you sleep, And dream a thousand lives, And wake to the dream of a thousand yesterdays And resume your part?

Can you feel this world breathing? Breathe in, Deep, Deeper Deeper Still… I could ask you how deep it goes, But we both know it goes on forever.

The true question is: How much can you hold?

In this time of contradiction and convalescence I have held so little And ached so much for all the songs sung in-between the bars of the metronome That couldn’t reach my deaf ears.  

_______________

I have no memory of writing this poem, I imagine it must have been written long ago, in the time when I was watching that boy in the anime play the piano underwater and starting to understand what was happening to me. 

[farb3yond]

A man went to the forest one late autumn day While the leaves were still turning And the sky was still grey Went searching for a maiden He'd seen once before Sitting in a night meadow Bathed in the moon-glow Sitting in a night meadow Bathed in the moon-glow As he stared at the maiden Through the thick canopy She began to dance To her own Melody The sins of the many Weigh heavy on the few She sang as she danced Through the thick forest dew She sang as she danced Through the thick forest dew The birds bees and trees Know nothing of men Nothing of heaven Nothing of hell Naught of the stories We tell to our young They dream of the fresh rain And live by the sun They dream of the fresh rain And live by the sun As she kept dancing Her sweet song grew dire One day we'll kill you Or burn you with fire Just for not knowing Or speaking our ways Our ears cannot hear The words you can't say Our ears cannot hear The words you can't say As she kept singing His eyes filled with tears He thought of the forest He'd walked through for years For the moon-maiden's song Brought him to the brink He said the hour is later Later than you think the hour is later Later than you think I once knew a man Who walked through the woods Who knew of its ways Knew they did good Knew the peace that they brought Far from the mad throng But now he lives among men Who have lost all their songs He lives among men And they've lost all their songs

[farb3yond]

2016-2020

Last night I had a dream. I was in a home, where lovers sit together on couches and you call them mom and dad. One they built, and share with the prodigy of their love. A home with inhabitants you’d swear were living together just because they all decided they love each other. It was a place people go, to spend time with the people they love. Nothing like the two-bedroom box I store my stuff in.

I woke up to find that my cousin will be staying with me for a few days.

My cousin’s son is a marshmallow soft and slow and fat and sweet. Well-mannered and always laughing, he’s too scared to run on the stairs or swim in the sea. I don’t think he plays with matches. He has these big beautiful blue eyes though, like cloudless skies, like If you look carefully enough, they hold a meadow sitting under a soft, warm, early spring sun.

Nothing like the sun under which I was born. When I look into them… I see the absence of fear.

If we were ever attacked by wolves, they’d eat him first.

Somewhere there is already a wolf, who howls at the moon and runs through the night. Packless and tireless, with a heart that beats like steady, quiet, thunder and footfalls that sound like distant rain. Untamed and apathetic, he makes his home under the uncaring sky. Here he lives lean and detached, on a razor’s edge, Spending an uncertain lifetime two missed meals away from certain death.

He visits me in my dreams sometimes, on nights when I sleep alone.

I am sitting under that same sky tonight. On the edge of a field, hidden in the shadow of a kottan tree, I watch a man and his son sneak a motorbike onto the grass. The man is teaching his son how to ride; He is confident, sitting in front, with his son behind, showing him where the clutch is and how to change gears. Then his son tries; He is slow, he accelerates irregularly, his clutch balance is bad and the engine nearly stalls every few seconds. Then it stalls completely, and the bike stops. So his father walks across the field to take his time explaining what happened, before he restarts the engine.

I always thought everyone learned to ride alone, on the street, nearly dying.

There is a rosary wrapped around the handlebars of the bike, And my cousin carries a photo of Jesus in her bra, But when I look down at my hands, they are empty. So I close the right one and make a fist. I once learned that fists are the best things to make with empty hands. …Or was it that empty hands make the best fists? Now that I think about it I can’t remember which. I open the right and make a fist with the left, and then I open the left and make a fist with the right. I have made my home with the one and put my faith in the other but now that I think about it I can’t remember which.

Tonight under the same sky I will run further than I have ever run before. I will run so far my lungs and legs will start plotting ways to kill me, but I’ll keep them in line. Staring at this sky though, I begin to wonder if the wolf ever dreams of another life? Perhaps in this dream he is a Labrador, spending his nights sleeping in homes with people who you’d swear decided to live together just because they love each other. But with my feet in the sand, and cold air in my lungs, I see only the miles in front of me, and the miles I’ve left behind.

...And remember that I don’t believe in such things. Every morning I make my way to the eastern edge of my fifth story office, and stare out of the glass wall.

First at the train tracks that cut across the street by the bank where the young men used to sit on the concrete benches that no longer sit under the trees that line the canal across which the mosque begins the archipelago of Slave Island's tenements that tightly pack and stack lives around shaded narrow capillary streets sitting under the white clouds that paint the ever-changing mosaic of the sky only to be interrupted by yellow cranes that construct the cement skeletons that measure our progress along with our progressing disregard for uninterrupted skylines... Till I finally reach the late morning sun. Rapidly approaching its apex, adding sweat to the struggle, to harmonize the heat, with the harsh hands dealt, to the men and women, who deal in difficult decisions, covering everything, as far as my eyes can see but not me...

My skin stays cool and dry in this little-too-temperature-controlled-environment I feel cold.

So, Every morning I make my way to the eastern edge of my fifth story office, and put my hands on the glass wall. Just to let the searing seeping sun soaked heat, warm me a little, and burn me a little, with a story of ten years spent, crossing half an inch of glass.

The rain that knows nothing of the names of streets or the cares of men, has stranded me in a part of the city that I scarcely pass through And have never had a reason to visit.

A place that stands to deny that the last 20 years happened

Where people look the same as they did when I was a child, and sell the same things in the same ramshackle shops to the same tired faces, that have the same tired worries.

I am drinking a Nescafe standing next to a lady who looks and smells and dresses exactly like my father’s sisters.

And though I have not seen them in years, I am transported to a time when breakfast and lunch was the same meal prepared at 5AM every day and dinner was leftovers eaten after long train rides that allowed for ample time to discuss the fridge there won’t be enough money to buy.

And tomorrow will come and go innumerable times, before there will be even a single day that can be lived differently.

And here I thought that we all carved out a piece of the progress that the world’s exponential technological wizardry has created.

But perhaps It isn’t how much has changed But how much I have left behind. I am standing in a cemetery with wooden markers for tombstones and leafy plants for flowers, not far from the nescafés and my father’s sisters’ ghosts.

Watching my friend take off his shoes get into a grave and raise his hands towards the heavens.

Till the men standing around him hand him his father.

At the end of the paved road we watch him approach. On the edges of his fore-arms the hems of his trousers and the tops of his feet he wears the drying clay of his father’s grave. On his face he wears his father. In his eyes he wears the weight of all mankind.

For today, He is a mirror of the first man, and every man that came after him. Today, he has done what all men must do. Today, if only for today, he is a son of eternity. And we are children, draped in our own time, fumbling platitudes from adolescent mouths.

Today he is the prophet, And we are all witnesses to our future… or our past. When a singer dies does he take his voice with him? When a dream dies does it take its poet with it?

Sailing semiconscious seas, my subconscious whispers secrets into the wrong side of my ear. "A man isn't afraid of death," he says. "A man is afraid he is already dead."

When a man dies do you bury him with his dreams? When a man dies does he... bury his own dreams?

While halfheartedly crafting compromises, my consciousness makes plans for a younger man. Somewhere between the beginning and the end Something will be lost, but who will you blame? "But he was afraid," you'll say. "But it all hurt so much." you'll tell yourself.

When a family member dies, do you bring open bibles or open hands? When a family dies, where do you put your Christmas? Contemplating all this death, A memory echoes from long ago. It reaches through time like an arm that reverberates from everything I have been to everything I am. "This is how it is, remember?" it asks. "The living bury the dead," it says. "Life is a parade of deaths that end with your own. That is how you know you more than exist." "You are alive," I whisper back.

When love dies does it take the poetry with it? When visiting the home of a friend's recently deceased love, is it polite to bring extra poems? Lamenting the last time I was here, I'm thinking of packing a suitcase. I will fill it with everything that is important; The words that stitch a man together, The pen that composes dreams. The hands that shame gods, The sea that scores sadness. The unflickering fire of the streetlight, The unwavering will of wolves. The memories of every you, you have ever been. And with all my vital elements stashed away, I will cut myself open along my middle and walk the streets feeding my organs to the crows. "There he goes," you'll all say. "The man who wanders naked and destitute." "For he locked all his wealth away and has forgotten."

But if a man finds his reflection, does he find his home? Or does he find himself? Is there a difference? Fuck, sing us a song while your voice is still with us, we have time enough to hear it. Sing us a song while you are still with us, for our lives are too short, we will not be here again. I can't keep holding onto this dream. The one where we become a people. The one where I open my door and walk out into my home. The one where the tired men and women of paradise become naked again And start fucking under the full moon.

I am searching for a fertile field where new beginnings grow Like a ceiling I don't know A bed that smells like something familiar, but different with real music playing from your neighbors house but my neighbors don't play music. Why don't my neighbors play music?

A field where strangers may be compelled to say something true At least to each other like A lie falling apart A secret coming to light A fight... After midnight A man who sings without singing A song that makes the bumps on the ceiling come to life A song to drive the cynicism away or a book written by a man like me A man I could like a me I could like and everything he might write instead of this fucking poem. A place at the end of that long journey you can no longer pretend you intend to make or a journey you take without intending to. A place waiting to be anointed A place perhaps adjacent to a place you might know But A place uncursed by a name An innocent place

or A woman a woman writing about how everything you believe is a lie who you have never seen dreaming of going to the same place neither of you have ever been who doesn't know that lies are born from names names that put static frames on changing scenes names that shatter into a mess of expectations carried in the minds of everyone who heard the same story of the same place with different ears.

The fucking tragedy of it all.

Maybe in this place a new poem could be born A real poem, not like this poem. A poem that isn't about writing poems. or Maybe love, maybe a nation, maybe a better understanding of nations maybe a better understanding of what I'm supposed to do with 10 years. I hope I find it. Fuck, I hope you find it. I hope you know I love you. I hope I never see you again. _______________ This poem is stitched together from many poems written over a four year period. It was an experiment in length, in the way the passing of time can help you forget that you are listening to a poem. I wish it was longer. 

[farb3yond]

I can't keep holding onto this dream. The one where we become a people. The one where I open my door and walk out into my home. The one where the tired men and women of paradise become naked again And start fucking under the full moon.

I am searching for a fertile field where new beginnings grow Like a ceiling I don't know A bed that smells like something familiar, but different with real music playing from your neighbors house but my neighbors don't play music. Why don't my neighbors play music?

A field where strangers may be compelled to say something true At least to each other like A lie falling apart A secret coming to light A fight... After midnight A man who sings without singing A song that makes the bumps on the ceiling come to life A song to drive the cynicism away or a book written by a man like me A man I could like a me I could like and everything he might write instead of this fucking poem.

A place at the end of that long journey you can no longer pretend you intend to make or a journey you take without intending to. A place waiting to be anointed A place adjacent to a place you might know A place uncursed by a name An innocent place

or A woman a woman writing about how everything you believe is a lie who you have never seen dreaming of going to the same place neither of you have ever been

who doesn't know that lies are born from names names that put static frames on changing scenes names that shatter into a mess of expectations carried in the minds of everyone who heard the same story of the same place with different ears. The fucking tragedy of it all.

Maybe in this place a new poem could be born A real poem, not like this poem. A poem that isn't about writing poems. or Maybe love, maybe a nation, maybe a better understanding of nations maybe a better understanding of what I'm supposed to do with 10 years.

I hope I find it. Fuck, I hope you find it. I hope you know I love you. I hope I never see you again.

[farb3yond]

Swimming in the Ocean, after swimming in the Ocean on acid.

It is as if there is a beautiful woman you see from time to time in passing, who you know only by the memory of how beautiful she is and speak to only accidentally, through the coincidences you share.

But one night, you are alone, feeling beautiful and melancholic, And She, mysterious and lonely from having no one to share Her mystery with; meet, perhaps accidentally or through your shared, unspoken desire to be met.

And as you speak to Her this time She stands ever so slightly closer to you. As you touch Her hand at the end of your sentence, She does not pull away. And as the silences between you grow longer She does not look away

you both, drenched in the nowness of the new and the familiar, in knowledge and mystery, make this love; the one that was never made before and does not need to be made again.

Tomorrow, you will return to being mutual beauty in passing. The Man. The Ocean.

Only, when your eyes catch each others’ you will look away a little too slowly and smile to yourselves... about knowledge and about mystery.

[farb3yond]

Today’s Prophet

I am standing in a cemetery with wooden markers for tombstones and leafy plants for flowers, not far from the nescafés and my father’s sisters’ ghosts. Watching my friend take off his shoes get into a grave and raise his hands towards the heavens.

Till the men standing around him hand him his father.

At the end of the paved road we watch him approach. On the edges of his fore-arms the hems of his trousers and the tops of his feet he wears the drying clay of his father’s grave. On his face he wears his father. In his eyes he wears the weight of all mankind.

For today, He is a mirror of the first man, and every man that came after him. Today, he has done what all men must do.

Today, if only for today, he is a son of eternity. And we are children, draped in our own time, fumbling platitudes from adolescent mouths.

Today he is the prophet, And we are all witnesses to our future… or our past.

[farb3yond]

Death?

When a singer dies does he take his voice with him? When a dream dies does it take its poet with it?

Sailing semiconscious seas, my subconscious whispers secrets into the wrong side of my ear.               "A man isn't afraid of death," he says. "A man is afraid he is already dead."

When a man dies do you bury him with his dreams? When a man dies does he... bury his own dreams?

While halfheartedly crafting compromises, my consciousness makes plans for a younger man. Somewhere between the beginning and the end Something will be lost, but who will you blame?               "But he was afraid," you'll say. "But it all hurt so much." you'll tell yourself.

When a family member dies, do you bring open bibles or open hands? When a family dies, where do you put your Christmas?

Contemplating all this death, A memory echoes from long ago. It reaches through time like an arm that reverberates from everything I have been to everything I am.               "This is how it is, remember?" He asks. "The living bury the dead," he says. "Life is a parade of deaths that end with your own. That is how you know you more than exist."               "You are alive," I whisper back.

When love dies does it take the poetry with it? When visiting the home of a friend's recently deceased love, is it polite to bring extra poems?

Lamenting the last time I was here, I'm thinking of packing a suitcase. I will fill it with everything that is important; The words that stitch a man together, The pen that composes dreams. The hands that shame gods, The sea that scores sadness. The unflickering fire of the streetlight, The unwavering will of wolves. The memories of every you, you have ever been. And with all my vital elements stashed away, I will cut myself open along my middle and walk the streets feeding my organs to the crows.               "There he goes," you'll all say. "The man who wanders naked and destitute." "For he locked all his wealth away and has forgotten."

But if a man finds his reflection, does he find his home? Or does he find himself? Is there a difference?

Fuck, sing us a song while your voice is still with us, we have time enough to hear it. Sing us a song while you are still with us, for our lives are too short, we will not be here again.

[farb3yond]

I don’t believe that beggars don’t have good days.

I don’t believe in monks that don’t masturbate.

I don’t believe that cigarettes aren’t worth looking forward to.

I don’t believe in a natural state of man.

I don’t believe that helping a man feed a habit is a sin.

I don’t believe in sins.

I don’t believe in legalized drugs because I don’t believe anyone has legal authority over my consciousness.

I don’t believe in immaculate conception,
immaculate lives or immaculate people.

I don’t believe that you need to be miserable to create but creating is a great past time for miserable people.

I don’t believe that I can make you happy...

But I can show up at eight o’clock like you said and remind you that you are beautiful and say alot about the way shadows dance under street lights.

I believe that all prophets are women.

[farb3yond]

A sweetly sad poem.

I read a poem today the sad kind. Something about synapses tangled like bodies, and bodies tangled like origami.

A poem about absence about loss, about not being there, never being there, though you could.

And I am sweetly sad again. Like the reflection of the moon. Like the sound of waves that crash unseen, just inches away in the black starless night. Like humming a new, but somehow familiar song, wordlessly.

And all I want to do is share this with you.

Because if not you, then who else? No one else has walked the grey-day nights with me or fucked the deep nights, deeper. No one’s sweet saddness is as unacademic as yours.

But we don’t tangle our bodies anymore, so our sadness has lost its taste. It tastes like bland dissapointment. Or it is bland and therefore, disappointing. Or I am bland and you are disappointing, and we are both tired from too much disappointment.

The first goodbye feels like the truth. The second goodbye feels like a lie. But after the fifth or the sixth they become life threatening, And I am not gambling my life over a sweetly sad poem.

Shame though… you would have liked it.