Yours

The whole world belongs to you.
The other side of your forehead
is wrinkled because you wept
but mountains rose and valleys ran
over them anyway,
because; and the sun was sweeping
heroes off their hooves,
so they could taste the ground
with their shoulders.

What it is like to walk in their wings;
hanging from their halos
are carrions, playthings with insight,
spent on purpose; its
going spreads kindles under winds;
they pretend to run through forests.

Into you they go, 
swallowing into your poem,
your horse tinseled and parrot-heavy,
frosted by the glaze of your belonging,
taking it by you, to you; it's God
ranging from sweeping to slight,
scratching at the keys in delight
at his prodigy.

(The world is yours, final son,
missing no marks,
tampered with by no one else.)

The Borders of our Lives

There was a ring, I took
photos
of it being there being used
by men with big hands
and laughter.
It was a safe distance away,
until I was in it,
coiled having not read the signs
that never marked my way.
Didst thou know,
thy feature be thy hanging.

It's me, that man with the nose and yes, I happen to look like Mr. Bean and my dad like Dr Phil. Yeah, I walk faster towards the ground because I hunch, out of habit. Yeah, I talk with an accent. I'm like Gaviscon. I see people drinking in the laughter while I just ain't noticing it all happen. I used to think this was me needing to be with my little boy finger on ctrl, but something about the night that passed gave me another idea.

Fitting a circle in a square may not work or may leave gaps. Can't ultimately shape the circle into a perfect square, nor the square into a perfect circle. So now to scrunch up and dispose of that stock metaphor, I actually feel like there isn't a point to this fitting. Actually, what is the point? It's not that there's always going to be someone that doesn't like me. Rather, I feel like there is far too much I am unconscious of, and remain so, when I try to change one thing, that I can never really change all of it. It's not enough, because it can't be.

So, well... it's still going to get laughter, and oddreactions. What can I do? Rien. Non, rien de rien, je ne regrette rien. And who knows, maybe, maybe it's worth it somehow, that it happens. At least for me, I can now stop watching myself, and start watching myself for when I watch myself, and then remind myself that I'm looking at a film.

Shout Out to Ghost

With these words of art,
I write now
instead of calling out;
read hear that
if you need something 
that your eye can feather on,
feather on this field
of flowers
that you choose.
Pick one, give it to me,
tell me you love me,
I'll say it back
and we'll forever grow
apart.
The sky is empty
between us, there's
hands running through weeds
and a harp by an ocean,
but I'd like something other than
sunshine;
I'd like something else,
to remind me.
When we spoke -
my feet have sunk,
shadows of clouds have moved
across the earth.
I turned away
and then you reached out your hand
and I felt the distance between
my shoulder and your touch
and when I looked back
it was summer still,
but you were wearing a hat,
the wind in your black hair
caught and it dotted
my horizon.
I shouted out
I love you
and I caught a whiff of your thanks
when the ocean parted.

For My Boy

If you can hear the door creaking, that's me entering, and this is you reading while I stand here and act all of this out with my props, courtesy of your imagination. So what I've barged in today for - notice how I didn't knock - is a conversation, a versation con migo but that you can listen in on for the benefit of possibility. You might learn something. Back to me. I came here because I wanted to talk about things being wrong, in the way they feel, in the way the sets of dentures chomp analysis in between chewing on my cortex.

You see, dear imagination, I'm frustrated. Not in the sense that the moon is out and it's 14% bigger than any full moon this year and I'm sitting here and not watching it alight in the firmament. I'm frustrated because I'm frustrated. This is a mirror show, yeah. Since I came back from Romania I've had a period of relative bliss because I wasn't being hard on myself for things that weren't occurring to the norms established by Father Ego. Somehow, being out of my normal routine for three weeks reset some of the tumblers and they hadn't quite finished spinning from all that flying above clouds I was doing. I came back and didn't really absorb much, because normally absorption for me requires a passing through gates, kind of like those at the airport, except I tend to be much much stricter in my patdowns and x-raying. Flying in to my mental territory requires me to be scrutinous, but like immigration security systems in airports around the world, things slip through. And then they start rioting on my streets and I send out the riot police to calm things down and create order. Sometimes I'm harsh and destroy buildings. But this dandy process was turned on ??? mode and confused when I reset time zones. It made me feel more peaceful, and it was rare for the barriers to be down and for things to just pass on through. So I say I didn't absorb them because I don't know how much of them I did eventuate to process and hold as my own. Things just went on in and out somewhere else presumably - I wasn't watching the CCTV. I didn't feel the need to be self-conscious, because I felt somehow that it didn't matter if I didn't act a certain way here. The opinions the people I met in Romania formed would disappear soon enough after I left. They'd have no use for them when we were gone. 

Then when I came back to New Zealand, there was the resetting period, as I mentioned. Though soon enough, with my friends' attitudes and ways of being flickering once more on my screens, I felt the security system boot back up. Some of the parametres may have changed, but overall it was still shotgun-ready. I got the sense that whatever I do here matters more, and should be under more control, because I cannot simply escape from it as before. No wonder the boy in me feels alienated. It doesn't get to roam much anymore on streets with curfews and barricades in place.

I don't know what it is, exactly. But it scares me what people think. Not all people, just people in my life. Especially those I hold close. I try to be authentic towards them but somehow even that seems like it could be just a mask sometimes. What does authentic even mean. With the security system back up, it seems like authentic is a certain version of diplomatic immunity, or like a pass card. There's a certain amount of 'crazy' or 'awkward' I can be - a tolerable amount - before I feel critical and self-conscious about my fibrous body and behavior. 

Hmm this puts me back to that mind frame when it started. Looking at that picture, I was feeling low self-esteemed, and defined by what others thought of me. I acted a certain way, they reacted, I reacted to their reactions by making different chips, here there everywhere, to change the sculpture of me to something different - something acceptable. This was adolescence. Once that beautiful period of art was over, if I can even say it was over, I came to uni to learn and things. And the world grew bigger suddenly. The pressure got more intense and then less intense and then more intense and now I don't know. To change, I mean. To change, to be accepted.

Schtick: I'm not sure what is accepted, but the version of that concept that is plugged into my mainframe is virusing. I say that because I feel it changes. There are days when I feel whole, undefined, at peace, and I go to university and feel very free of being critical. Then there's days when I walk with my shadow on my back, it afraid to touch the ground behind me lest it burn on the concrete for not being good enough, acceptable enough. This comes from me, this criticism, this fire, starting in my heart, reaching a fever pitch, bringing me out the dark. The eccentrism and the uncontrolled qualities of hyperness and crazy and reactivity, these the security system doesn't want to identify as mine, to own them, even though I do them.

I do them unconsciously, those things. Sometimes it's funny. And it's funny how most people who know me can identify me by those traits. Those traits that I don't want to own. Those traits that make the riot police in my mind come out to water gun bitching out of office building windows. The riot police are, of course, a defense mechanism. I'm pinning me against other sides of me that the initial me doesn't like, the initial me having an idealistic picture of "Cris" that doesn't align with the trajectory of the Sun. That's why when it gets closer, it burns the image. 

Now it could be that I have sent the riot police police to crush the riot police. Otherwords, I'm being critical of being critical. Because I've been critical too much and I already know it makes me feel analysed, scrutinised, patted-down and emotionally injured. So now this is an interesting turn of events. The police gets policed. I wonder why I am being so critical about myself.

I don't let loose. I've been asked what I want for my birthday, for example. I don't really want things, nothing I desperately need that I can think of at this stage. I don't want something I don't need, though. Who makes that call though. Anyway. I don't like this question because the way I have thought about it is that I don't often let go enough to feel birthday-associated emotions like surprise. I don't deal well with it, not because I can't be surprised, but because it heavily, in my mind, implies expectation. If I'm to be surprised, I have to have a certain reaction according the surprise-givers. And, from the way my mind and emotions work, I don't get surprised easily, nor do I have outpourings of affection at those times. I have my affection-floods at other, perhaps more arbitrary/PMS-variant times. So it worries me, this, because I feel expectation to act a certain way I don't necessarily feel. It's not like I don't want to be surprised, I just don't want to be made to react surprised. Because I can do it. I can fake it. But at this stage of growth, I kind of want it to be real, and that implies not thinking about it anymore, i.e. letting go.

To let loose and act how I really feel... don't think it'd always line up with the way society leans. I'm probably quite conformist on the outside, but on the inside, I realise a) I cannot force myself to be and b) I have absolutely no need to be. The boy inside me, the boy being one of my 'selves', needs love, love that he still seeks from someone else but I know I have to give, because I was the one that deprived him of it when I was younger. He doesn't need skin, or squeezing, he needs affection. Forgiveness. Allowing. Words that in the outside world can cause friction.

Courage. That is then what it takes, to be. To actually just be. Because it implies not playing the game, not having police or immigration staff, whether in my mind or outwardly. Life guides everything. Why is it that we think. Why is it that we can. It seems to get us confused. But it's cool nonetheless. So it boils down to vulnerability, and trust. Trusting that it's okay to be and acting silly and however, and not being scared it is tarnishing the image which critical-me wants to become but won't because it's paperthin and unwhole and a lie, because it is limited. Or maybe being scared is fine. It's emotion. So trusting life that I can act however and even though I feel scared that it might be affecting what others think of me, to know that that is not my concern to manipulate. Isn't that a thought! Here, I'm going to act this way, and it's going to contradict ideas and things. I don't know who you think I am, but you're going to think up something about me. And then I'm going to meet you another day and perhaps reinforce that idea, or maybe challenge it, chip at it with how I behave. Maybe I'll act different. And instead of me going home and wondering, Jesus, did I just act that way, what will he she they think about me, and sending out the police to crush the thoughts who were committing the crime of existing and manifesting outside of the nebulae/passing through immigration, I'll actually have the courage to leave it to you, if you want to think something about me.

And if you, you who is close to me, no longer love that which I act to be, and you no longer want to be in my vicinity and instead in my outskirts, you can go.

That is the courage. Not to be sculpted, be changed, but to let go and evolve. And yeah I'm a silly sausage. I act weird and paradoxically, sometimes questioningly, sometimes hurtfully, sometimes self-destructively, too-often judgmentally. The moon still orbits elliptically. I have these thoughts about myself trying to fit into the world. I don't quite know why I have the desire to belong, but it's there and I feel it. Love me! I say, but I really really need to be saying it to myself. To forgive that which I don't love, accept it. Maybe I shall grow to love it. Only, only because it is. Because it is. Because I can't run from it or throw it out of the imaginary office window to its death, because its death can only be my death. Because it is, and I am all that there is. This comes back to trust, so here I go, letting the nebula speak.

Imagine the People and the Places

The pipe that carries gas 
le long de la rue was repainted
five years ago
- now is brown
rusty and orange - 
I do not remember what colour it was at first

- it doesn't matter.
There's the storehouse,
and our little cabin
repainted the same shade of 
green as the steel fence next to
the apartment block,
went inside
caught a whiff of nostalgia
then left to where I was,
on the uneven concrete
1,81 man
on holiday

- met with memories to the nostril,
but no eyes, no face,
an eyelash, freckles maybe,
lips and taxidermy.

Non-Morse Tapping

tHey picked this day to light the sun. Here I go, I am sitting on a bus room full of people and just time away from taking the train in the sky. My parentals are with me. I am to write, I am to read and do exercises so that blood can travel where/while I travel. It is a go, and it is breathing; where I sit and when I stand. There aren't thoughts I give away just ones that are beginning and then stopping. It is a Friday, a Friday of emotion. A Friday where I just felt love. A Friday where I just sat and felt.

This is me talking about my feelings. This is me going on about my freedoms. The sun is shining through the steel sponging outside the window. I have forgotten about me. My right wrist suddenly pains a dull, gravity pain. And I am still typing out these words.

Packing is a deal, because it has to be done right and mama will ensure it is done so. I imagine that on the yondering train I will be wandering about in my memories, a boy with a ball, a boy with a turtle on a string, a boy with building blocks, a boy pretending he is a mode of transportation up a mountain during winter. In the background will be Sarah McLaughlin. In the background will be André with "Lasa-ma papa la mare"

vreau distractie si soare
m-am indragostit lulea
am aflat ce-i dragostea.

Then in an inbetween, perhaps on the flight from KL to Schiphol, where I will be drafting an essay on Kipling's Stalky & Co. Maybe I will watch a movie.

The other person next to me has a slide open that is titled Degradation of amino acids. I hope the food on the plane is good. Probably will be in compartmentalised containers, airtight so that when I pull the lid off and it is quiet enough I can hear the food sighing its no-longer-asphyxiated sigh.

Today I say goodbye for a month to mattering people. Many arms around my back, many of mine around many of their backs. And squeezing, then releasing our no-longer-asphyxiated sighs. I want it to be a necessary air that I breathe, a shared air, an air of dawn during a crepuscule.

I am aware that this too shall pass, and it is with that awareness that I yearn to catch the train. There are these words that I have written, and they point. I have forgiven them, so I think them not rude anymore. I have let them keep pointing. Right now, they are pointing at somebody. I don't know where he is. I don't know who he is, if he was the same he that wrote this or another he that just pointed and another he carried over his pointing into this retina-hitting hieroglyph accumulation. Ordures ou trésor (trés or, ha).

I am waiting for the final words, so I can end. Though I can end here. Or here. Or here.

(Or, ici) Where?! Where?! On Earth. In New Zealand. In Auckland. On Symonds Street. At IC2. At computer 2C07. On the keyboard. On the J key, or the F key.

_

and then

In less than twenty-four hours I will be in an airport, perhaps waiting in a queue, waiting to check in for a flight that will take me 17,000 kms to Romania. This past over-a-week has been the feelground for a confluence of emotions nostalgiques, all previously-tied memories that have been opened up by the possibility of their reexperiencing. These emotions have been shadows, grass blade ticklings on a farm scale - I have felt the wind move them as it moved through me. This is a wind that will carry me in a plane to visit again the land I was born in, the streets I frequented as a child, the asphalts and gaps I stepped in as a boy.

It feels as if now the memories are soluble in the present, and remnants are revived. I do not want to have expectations as to what I will see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel, in the Romania of April 2012. Having spent about nine and a half years away from the land I called acasa, the prospect of going back is enticing and tempting to the mind, bringing to attention all these things that I have forgotten. 

But I know I am not going back as a child. I am not really going 'back', just... going. It is not a trip through memory lanes, though I feel at times it will definitely feel like that. I do not want to reexperience, to reimmerse myself in the nostalgic memories as I once did, partly because I want to leave the memories as they are, protect them, and partly because I know the memories for what they are, appearances, once-is-now-gone. Instead, I want to live and be there as the place is now, as the people are, as I am, and then