silent night

Christmas day,

Contentious numbing hangover, scented candles filling the home and an overflowing bubble bath where I placidly read a novel start to finish.
A slow cooking recipe, adding cool water to the initially relaxing soon suffocating bath, later, around page 86 running hot water to compensate for the dropping temperature.
Jacuzzi jets roar and words elevate in the burgeoning bubbles.

Herman Hesse's, Demian (1919) is a novel of equal delicacy and strength. Among other things about embracing duality and spiritual enlightenment. It moved me as I imagine a religious text does others. Beautifully crafted, short and sweet it brought tears to my eyes and earned a place among my favourites. I only wish I read this book when I was younger, it would have inspired me and it might have had an impression on my disconcerted self.

Pleasant Christmas day spent, I'm looking forward to bringing in a new year filled with growth.

Without Beata's Ears

the stars shine as always through
the window that divides the night
as always into a sublime symmetry
of dreams, is division our unequal half?
that which at once grants the wait and
the law, to conceal that future memory:
the event, still, lies beside our many fragmented a body.

could we perhaps deny a nod? if only
we could reward nothing, and play
down the impotence of its language; an item more
is less in our grocery list, a red rose
to lure the shame out in matching symmetry
with the shade that resurfaces as my fingertips
are led very astray

it's hard to mime the detective in remembering
the unseen which makes your total beauty
a totality, on your face often is a blind foreseer
who dances around the remnants of an ancient game,
the body language of loss, the mother tongue of all
the thought of touching you
a reminder of the impossibility to touch

my joy, dig deeper still, dig together apart
rewind the excursion to the mother who once
again pays you a visit, in the space of time
outside the division, remaining in
her favorite seat, a frame you hammered in
to all your hidden ears, I bow as to all lost shrines
where each visit awakens something of exile, mine, miraculously
untouched within, just as did I not remember ever leaving,
the stars that shine, and are seemingly lost, as we
blindly seem fit to praise the symmetry

Sina Fazelpour