everyone's been quiet ...

.

.

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The cigarette smoke was like praise

a musty offering of incense from my lungs.

Its scent, inextricably bound to my origins

growing out like braided hair to the scalp.

The roots were the erected foundations of a house

where I live my days like an offering

to a congregation of silent enlistments.

.

.

The holy water was what I drank

thirsty like a heretic on the verge of believing;

I made believe it cleansed me of my cleanliness,

having denounced my longing to the scent of egregiousness.

The scent, I thought, coming from an erected strand of incese.

.

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This was a new religion to explore

the pungent smoke leaking the breath of lighted ends,

a praise for the gods, a seething of wisdom

buried under a bed of prayers and burdens;

their advice that went past the theory of solutions.

.

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Unfortunately, I am unmistakably deterministic

a man without a philosophy on his adventures.

.

.

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my hands are tied

.
.
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I'm busy playing hide and seek. Shoo!!!
.
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Hide and Seek

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Would it spell danger to travel
the land of young trees?
A child without its teeth
gnawing on the virile branches rich with sap;
Her little chest barely covering
the carvings of names on a peeling bark.
She would never know her name
nor the extent of her generosity.
Her hands would grasp the end of the branch
like the hollow opening on a conch,
her eyes would close, full of curiosity
enamored by the scent of grass and seas.
.
.
Beyond the grasslands are the plains,
a place where the wind had sown her impurities.
It reminds her of a young boy,
the earth as flat and as smooth as his own abdomen.
Not so much as a tongue can distinguish its graininess,

nor the creatures that come out in the evenings
once the heat of the soils lose their intimacy.
.
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Something had grown here once before.
An ocean perhaps, with creatures as silent and frisky
as the children who played hide and seek
far beyond the shadow of the growing trees.
She used to love and used to get hurt, playing and losing
and finding each other in the wilderness of water.
Their names had been etched by other lost children

on the shores sifted by the anxious tides.
.
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Each game is playing and losing and finding each other.

At the time the boy becomes a young man,

he discovers something that grows within himself

the need to hide and seek for the young woman.

And at the time the girl becomes a young woman,
she discovers something that grows within herself
a gnawing distaste for awareness.

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The Future's Overrated

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.
.
like in a prophecy the day before
the future had been revealed on a Sunday evening.
where the church had been silent
the bells toll, ringing into my deafness
an explicit tongue borne without words.
my words spread like tapered fire
across the emaciated body of sacred literature.
i read it well with all those years of learning
doing me good like a young messenger's sermon.
.
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the parsonage had dealt with famine
there were no people, the hallways were dark.
the candlelight escaped the corners
where on its walls crawled the earthly creatures.
.
one of them was me.
.
i had banished myself from yearning
and my punishment? the future.
the future had been revealed to me
and i thought i could not deal well.
what had i to do with the knowledge
of the world's destruction? the many souls
that would heave in purgatory?
the prophecy of my own death?
.
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i kept what i knew, deep in my lungs
for speech would do no good.
everyone would be sensitive,
everyone would deny the consequence
of god's amusement with wrath:
the ignorance, the guilt, the pleasures.
.
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the future was overrated.
the past had existed, the present exists.
the future will forever be a concept.
.
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in silence, i awaited the second coming
my arms draped around the messenger's words.
but here i found myself to be in control.
i was not afraid of my own death
nor the death of the present.
i held the truth in my own hands
and silently repeated the last 7 words.
.
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Prophecy Fulfilled

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.
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According to Holiday Mathis ...
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August 7 (Sunday)
.
You're in the mood for lots of diversity, and you'll find what you seek. You'll be enticed by intellectually challenging and artistically daring company. Casual conversations lead to romance.
.
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August 9 (Tuesday)
.
It's easy to get caught up in the superficiality of a person, and it takes a view from the distance to really understand who you are dealing with. So put some space and time between you and the object of your infatuation.
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.
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If we don't stand for something, we'll fall for anything

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Perhaps I was deaf in my former life, a silent traveler and chronicler who endured the noiseless journey by focusing attention to visual details. A traveler who found allure in seeing new places and encountering people from different walks of life, not knowing the variations in their voices, male or female, child or adult, angry or happy, sincere or selling a pitch. Perhaps I never knew music except those thoughts I'd conjured imagining more of the air that comes out of mouths as having more than just the scent of a previous meal. No wonder now that I surround myself with melodies, recordings, lyrics, conversations, accents ... all those things I never got to hear before.

.

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Perhaps I was deaf in my former life, with the me having no such interest in television or reality, unless they reminded me of things I'd long forgotten across many deaths, past many relationships and accidents. Perhaps only had I been a husband, a wife, a son or daughter, an illegitimate sibling; maybe I had been a house or scenes in my life then that had been buried in monticules or underscored like errors in a manuscript.

.

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Perhaps I had been deaf before, my eloquence only surfacing in the written language where I refused to speak up and defend my opinions. I speak in symbols, in metaphors that only a few understand, for where I grew up in silence, I had been accustomed to knowing that there was never a need to be heard even if I held the truth at the tip of my tongue. It should be a discovery free of passion or bias.

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And now that I have been reborn with the ability to hear arguments, decipher inflections and pauses, or contribute to these misunderstandings with my own voice, I'm afraid I'm not used to it yet. I'm gradually adjusting to the misgivings and taunts, for a first-timer, having to suffer my own judgments and/or insecurities where these were once measures of beating.

.

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Perhaps now is the time to be heard. The illusion of longevity or youth I hastily recast through a new medium.

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