Visions of Jahanna
By Sean Rice

Eyes like a lighthouse guiding ships to slip on by
A sigh.
The questions gathered in to lie like broken souls
The Blues shutter inward to invite me in
to crash among the shoals
Such a siren she can be
in silent misery
I do not move a muscle, now;
Gaze through the dirty glass
And then she's back with smiles
thanks my patience for the while
as the moment is allowed to pass.

Her neck against my nose is a warm perfume.
Hairs tickle against my cheek in the room
breasts press against me and I...
I do not move a muscle, now.
Let this moment go away some other day
not now not now not again I want to say
Parting is such sweet misery this way
My fingers stray to graze upon unseen fruit and arms and side and then reach up to grab a strand of hair or two and

"until" her lips mouth to me and the motion is a mistake.
It's the mistake that prey always make: To move
And there I am: Hungry against and burning -- with my beard. With a fire.

I wake without a motion and see her lying
I'm dying
not to move a muscle lest the spell is broken
with my eyes to trace the length of her
the open blouse a token
of soft feminity my hands remember
gifts not time yet to tender.
I am the child on christmas eve to peek
but it is the strand of hair my hand finally seeks
From her face I brush it away
the tiredness from the day
I love you, I finally say
and then fall back asleep

Walking under the sun, sweaty palms glued together
I look over as she gazes both ahead and at her thoughts
I see now the pictures there.
Her eyes flick over them and not over the cars that pass
Her mouth work over some problem

A fierce stance. I love her poise.
Balanced tension for flight at a noise
the boys
they'd never see the beauty there.
Right before their eyes she bears
the wear of a daily fight
The courage of non-flight
the love of life an ember barely burning in the light
the smile slight
as she recognizes my unconcious stare

Hips sway upon the steps and I walk behind
the shape of her motion I want to find
I wish to reach out and lay my hands upon her ass as she walks
just to feel the muscles move
just to feel the realness of it soothe
Just to end the hunger of my eyes.
A painting for the louvre
I don't mind

I don't mind at all.
Visions of Johanna play before my eyes
Summer will turn to Fall
Tomorrow maybe this is it and then the long good-byes.

The river had so many colors and I saw them only as one normally sees a river in the setting sun with colors that were merely "pleasant" to look at. Under the touch of her soft voice, the water became transformed before my very eyes: I learned and saw cotton candy. The blacks became the green of trees. The blues. I became, because of her presence, a man that could see the very river I had already thought beautiful.

It was the very river and spot along the river that she, too, knew and loved. Learning that she and I shared yet another thing in common became just one more chip that could not stack up among big, single difference? Maybe. I don't know.

For the first time since I woke up, I experienced a night that was one of the most beautiful that I can imagine. The kind of night you don't want to end... and it didn't. For one night, I know that she had the courage to shed her "Fear of Walking Forward." For one night, everything snapped into place for me and I knew exactly what and who I wanted, what had to happen, what I valued, what compromises I would NEVER make.

Leviathon and stonehenge dreams
by Sean Rice

There's a power in the tower newly crowned and robed in gray.
There's a flower growing upside down. it's petals have all blown away.
A teardrop sinks forgotten, now, in soil parched and starved.
The footsteps in the garden from a ghost that cannot say

Why you dream in color when your world is black and white?
Why your love has endings with the Summer's fading light?
When you hold a hand... do you feel lonely in the night?
It is only morning yet and evenings are still bright!

Leviathon and stonehenge dreams and murals on a church wall.
"what is love?" is written in a notebook where you stall
the question will be answered when you dare to fear the fall
Your questions will be answered when you dare not fear to fall

Tags: poem
Current Mood: enthralled

So near and so far. You work inside and I work out. You blush when our eyes meet. You worried when I didn't show all morning. All day, I felt far away from you as I plowed through my morning errands as quickly as I could. I felt myself rushing to see you.

I love you.

DC is quiet in its hangover morning. The streets are littered with the corpses of yesterdays festivities: spent firecrackers, empty beer cans, the wrappers of salted and sweetened foods which blow their way against fences and curbs. The street sweepers will catch them all tomorrow in the early morning hours as they quietly work their brooms... all wondering if they didn't maybe spend their rent money a little too quickly.

Len texts his angry texts, thumbs flying over the keys in his many reconsiderations. Stephanie wonders where tonights bed is going to be. Derek is sitting at a table in the day room of the hospital spinning out words in poems crafted like bombs. Cindy sits back to relax and listens to music, most likely Iron Maiden. A heavy-set man grabs his 4-year-old, overly excited daughter roughly around her arm in his meaty fist to drag her to a cafe table and food. He looks up to see my frown and loosens his grip. She is silent, looking at him, also. Fingermarks are red on ivory flesh. She eats quietly, head bowed. No complaints. Someone laughs. Another person swears.

A firework cracks in the distance.

Dear Nino:

I've lost a lot of friends because I woke up in a hospital. I know that I cared for you (as a friend) very deeply. Even Stephanie did not dare cross that with her jealousy and I wrote about that to myself.

I think you know that I did photography in the civil war in Beirut. I'll tell you the story of it all. I know that you thought "Lucyna" was a ghost to me and told me so... I wrote often about that night and that conversation.

Here is the story:

There was a woman that I thought was named Anahita. She and her family were posing as Bahai'i in Lebanon and she had a "job" with the maids at the hotel we were staying in.... trapped in.

I used to tease her during the 2 1/2 months we knew each other by pretending to shoot things either directly in front of her, or directly behind. She, at first, used to run from my camera and I, being only 18 - 19 at the time, did not understand the consequences of my "flirting."

After a while, she and her friends (other "maids") ignored me.

One day, I had access to a field Development kit and was able to develop several of my rolls of film and print more than a few. I laid them on the table in the lobby of the hotel every day and every day, they were ignored by Anahita as far as I could tell. They were ignored by her friends. Everybody ignored my work.

One day, I walked into the lift -- the elevator -- and there was no bellhop to bring the lift down to the lobby. On that same day, Anahita also got into the lift from a different floor. It was the ONLY time we were ever alone, together.

She said her name -- her real one -- for the first and only time: Elzbeta. She showed me a Star of David that she had (STUPIDLY!!!!!) hidden in her head scarf that showed that she was a Jew.

When I tried to say her name back to her, she grasped my lips in her fist so tightly that I would have a bruise around all of my mouth for nearly a month, after.

"Elzbeta!" She hissed at me. "Sh. Sh. Sh."

I nodded. She let go of my lips, but stared at me so fiercely! Not sure if she had just made a mistake....

A week and a half later, Anahita (There WAS no Elzbeta!!!!) looked through my photographs and took only one of them: A photograph of a man named Mustafah who would be my truest friend and who saved my life and who killed a man to save me.

I saw that she was walking out the door of the hotel with my photograph in her hand. I was happy. Breakthrough!! This woman that I had fallen in love with.... my first adult love. She had taken my photograph with her out the door.

But, I was still an American and still a child: I saw that she had "forgotten" all the pics of HER. I grabbed them and chased her out the door only maybe a minute after she had walked out. Maybe two.

I saw her up the very straight road. She walked in a very slow and measured way and her hips as she walked away from me always drew my eyes as only a child that was fascinated by a woman could be drawn. The wrap around her head was purple and green and stood out against other women, most of whom didn't even bother to wear one.

"Anahita!" I yelled down the road and she turned only the top part of her body to look back.

One never knows what an explosion is when it is happening. It is not a sound, but rather the feeling of a sound. It is a low, very soft bump as a sound, but it goes through your chest.

The eyes see things normally and in normal time, but the mind will replay it in a very slow motion for you so that is how you remember it: Slow.

I cannot understand why she died. She was so far away from the center of the dust and surely the dust couldn't kill her: It didn't kill me when it reached me.

The sun was behind her and the dust glowed from the back light so that solid objects like her became shadows. Figures.

She stood for so long that she was still standing when the dust reached me and I had to look away. Cover my eyes and my mouth.

When I looked back, she was not a figure or a shadow in the back-lit dust.

Her head scarf was NOT gone when the dust hit her. It was not on her head, though, when I finally reached her. She lay there and as soon as I touched her, .... that feel of a body. That roll of the head. The eyes that were open. It is an electric shock to touch a person and realize that they are not there in that body, anymore. One recoils away from such an empty body and then one feels ashamed at falling away from something that was once loved.

I KNEW that if anybody found her Star of David before I did, her whole family was in danger. I looked for it. I searched. I found it nearly where I was standing before the blast right in front of the hotel.

I took the star, walked back to put the cloth back over her head and.... when Mustafah finally found me, it was an American boy with a handful of photographs in EAST Beirut looking for her family. How he knew to look for me, I never knew.

When I buried the Star of David and tried to say Kaddish, I found that I could not remember Anahita's real name. It was Elzbeta. I would not remember the name for 22 years.

It was a thunderstorm in DC and three women -- Arabic and in Arabic clothing -- and the drop of a piece of paper that one of the women was carrying when the thunder struck overhead. It was that. It was on a Wednesday.

It was on a Friday, following, that the name hit me: Elzbeta.

It was on a Saturday, following, that I woke in the hospital and I knew nothing at all. Not Stephanie. Not my friend Josh. Not you. Not 22 years.

My only love that I remember as an experience -- not as something I read about in e-mails -- is that woman who turned only with the top part of her body.

I've been trying to "live" for the very first time ever since.

Lucyna was never the ghost.

Sean

Funny how we can, no matter the promises to ourselves, still allow ourselves the little hopes to insinuate themselves into our hearts. We KNOW that it will end in disappointment (again) but can't help but to think we're invited into a world that never existed.

Joel.

C'mon, Sean! That life is OVER. Get it through your stupid-assed head! Find your own fun. Tonight! Say "yes" finally. Why do you keep saying "no?"

'Round and around we go: Souls that circle like binary stars. Trapped in eccentric orbits, we find ourselves past the aphelion and struggling against the inevitable perihelion in paths we follow down.

The Μοῖραι have such this humor. Κλωθώ, Λάχεσις Ἄτροπος weave our threads so that we so often wish for the abhorred shears to finally set us free. They weave us into others only to take them away and weave us back together in new patterns and with curious embroidery: Lovers. Friends. Enemies feared or respected or mad with blood lust.

Freedom is the distance between the hunter and the hunted when it turns to look back.

It is the one with the bow and the arrows that runs away and not in pursuit; The moon, chased by the sun, both run toward and away and are surprised that their touch should only be an eclipse; Their kiss, the darkening of the sky.

How do you prescribe for fate? Where in DSM-IV is there the diagnosis for that experience of "fitting" with the person we run away from? Will Pfizer develope a little yellow pill that will make a walk down the streets to buy a pack of cigs not so much the highpoint of disparate lives?

I bring the smoke into my mouth and feel the sharpness of the first drag against my tongue before inhaling. The cigarette is held straight up with my middle and index finger and my thumb feels the moisture from my lips on the filter. The tip is grey ash with the angry ember red from within, glowing like a mini-volcano. Blue-gray smoke rises before being caught by the breeze.

It's real.

I consider this. Long after I smoke it and flick its corpse out into the parking lot to be stepped on, rained on and, eventually swept up and carried to the dump... it's real and always will have been real. This moment of smoking it existed. Long after I forget this one cigarette and move on to another in my addicted serial-monogamous habit, this one affair with this one cigarette is real.

This cigarette is more real than the last two years of my life.

Nobody will tell me that it was a fake cigarette and that it never was meant to be smoked. Nobody will tell me that it's relationship with my lips was merely an effort to keep me as a smoker because it was afraid of being alone and unsmoked. The cigarette will never pretend to enjoy being smoked, all the while looking for a better smoker. I did not share this cig with another, letting him take a drag only to receive back a cigarette that secretly wished to be inserted back into the other's lips.

This cigarette is real.

I flick it away with the thought that this one cigarette is the best lover I've had in two years.

I light another.

I think I'll name it Martha. :D

Current Mood: amused

Karami was dead some weeks, already. Everybody was wondering what would happen.

-----------------------------

When the woman would come downstairs into the lobby, they would sit huddled in the corner, talking. The rest of us were either on the other side of what would, here, be a bar, or in the chairs near the windows. Nobody was too worried about the wondows.

There was the girl with eyes of pure white except the slightest, slightest shade of green. They were warmest ice when they smiled. She did not look like the rest and, dressed more poorly than all the others, still she was regal and held court and the women around her, old and young, did not know why she was always in the middle and they all faced her.

They protected her.

The Troll had a camera. He photographed everything but her and she would run from the gaze of his camera.... until she grew bored of that game and simply ignored.

When he laid the photographs out for her (everyone) to see. She ignored them all and only took the one photograph of a man named Mustafah.

In an elevator, once, she was trapped with the Troll and she would whisper to him only that one time: Elzbeta. She showed him her Star of David. She shut his mouth with her fist.

He forgot, for her. The name was locked away where even HE could not reach.

When she was blown up, the troll looked and looked for the star of David so that nobody would ever find it. If anybody found it, her whole family would have been killed. She was NOT Jew. She was Anahita from Iran. That was the secret. That was the truth.

When the Troll tried to bury the Star, he found that he could not find her name, Elzbeta, anymore. It was locked away too deep.

Kaddish? Yes. He said. But, .... good-bye? He could not. To whom to say good-bye to? He searched for her family, but her family was gone. Nobody knew. He carried the name locked away for 22 years.

When the Troll became king of under the bridge, it was merely a place to wait. He met The Princess.

The princess was sick and The Troll king healed.... in return, the Princess gave back a gift. She gave him a key. She unlocked the name. Elzbeta.

Princess Left to marry prince.

Troll said good-bye to Elzbeta.

That's it. It's not the end.

It's not even the story as told as a story. It just is.