A quick glance
Stolen breath
A chill fingers down the nape of my neck
I bite my lower lip
A new fixation
His lips taunt mine
As each word projects from his tongue
My heart grows weaker
A throbbing pain consumes my chest
My knuckles whiten
I am ravished
I am shaken
I am wanted
I’m not mistaken
But he does not move
He does not take me
He rests alone in the shadows
Untouchable
A mind retreated into uncharted waters
And those eyes reveal the mind within
Muddy water
Unclear thoughts
Unknown depths
A haunting fog of possibilities
Intrigue grips me
I tilt my head for a better view
One
Singular
Overwhelming
Peek
A knowing grin
A quiet nod
Unspoken words whisper in the air like smoke
They curl between my fingers and through my hair
Faint murmurs I don’t quite hear
Stoically he sits
Stiff yet slouched
He paws his beard and ponders
Nostrils flaring
Those knowing eyes wide
His world escapes me, and yet I rest
My head in my hand
Warmly watching
As distant worlds unravel like wire
Splaying out in every direction
Rocking back and forth
He collects them all
Polishes and intertwines his fantasies
Into a reality that he evades
While I sit there still
And wait
And wait
And watch
30 January 2008
29 January 2008
I could see Kana's head bobbing up and down as she paced outside my classroom. She's one of my students. She's always early. Occasionally she peeked above the horizon where the frosted glass becomes clear.
"Open the do-or, 1-2-3." Class ended, and Kana appeared in the doorway. I cocked my head to the side, questioningly.
She smiled. "Teacher. Blue marker, please."
I pointed to my basket in the corner, and she rushed to it and disappeared to the other classroom down the hall.
There are three girls in this class: Kana, Kanako, and Koko. They are all aspiring artists, specializing in the erasable marker medium. And since I like to consider myself a laid back teacher, I let them explore their art to its fullest.
The first three minutes of class are spent solely writing names on the board. The girls take full advantage. They each have their preferred color: Kana, blue; Kanako, orange; and Koko, green.
Koko almost always draws a palm tree with her name written on its leaves. Kanako prefers to draw a giant sunflower, the seeds spelling her name. And Kana's tends to change according to season: a Santa Clause in December; and most recently, a rat in lieu of 2008, the year of the rat.
And so it was no surprise when I walked into the classroom, I found Kana finalizing her furry friend. I explained to Kana that I was born in 1984--also the year of the rat--so 2008 should be a lucky year for me.
Kanako and Koko arrived shortly and drew their respective sunflower and palm tree. They sketched precisely six petals for the flower and six lines on the trunk of the tree for the six activities we would do in class.
I like to break up the monotony of class with games, partly for my own amusement in watching them play dirty and partly for their own benefit to learn while having fun. As an incentive, I give one point to the winner of each activity, who then has the privilege to add the point to her name.
The girls like to incorporate their points to their pictures, thus the strategically drawn petals and lines. Kana had spent so much time designing her picture that she had not premeditated a point system to her rat. So when she won the first game, she paused momentarily to consider precisely where the point should go.
She had written her name on its belly, which left the only blank space on the animal wedged between its head and her name. She promptly drew a 1 with the only marker left at the board, my red one.
Giggles spouted from Kanako and Koko. Now Kana's blue rat had red pouring from its mouth like blood. Kana looked at me confused, and I, too, couldn't help but laugh.
"Kana," I said. "It's a zombie rat."
A continued blank stare.
I smiled devilishly, raised my arms, and staggered toward her, licking my lips. I grabbed her arm and--"Ar rar raar ra arar!"--faked gnawing it.
She squealed and we all erupted with laughter. As the games progressed, Kana continued to win. With each additional point dripping blood from her rat's mouth, the class chanted, "Zombie rat! Zombie rat! Zombie rat!"
From then on, anything red was instantly zombified. Zombie boots. Zombie eraser. Zombie dice.
And then suddenly, Kanako jutted her finger at me. "Look!" They looked.
An exaggerated "Ehhhhhhhhhhhh!" that only the Japanese can pull off emitted from their tiny mouths.
"Zombie sensei!" yelled Kanako.
I had worn my red ribbon in my hair that day.
17 January 2008
Nuchida Takara
Limbo
The inevitability of life generates on the pulsing mystery in which it is shrouded. I could elaborate on this issue. Tell you there is no God. No salvation. But then what is the point of that? Existence is a grain of sand churning in the belly of an oyster. And, like humans, it demands to be recognized as more than merely a grain of sand. We all view ourselves as pearls in the making.
Only sometimes, life intervenes with our plans. We are pried open and sucked into the sagging jowls of death, only to be spat out as nothing more than a slightly larger, and somewhat misshaped, grain of sand. And there we rest at the foot of the endless sea of death, nothing more than a spec of sand among infinite others. We glide this way and that in sync to the rhythmic ebb and flow of life continuing without us.
There is no remorse, though I’m not sure if there would be had I been able to hold on to lifely matters like emotion. Unfortunately, it drained out with every other conceivable liquid from the crevices of my body when I died. Perhaps Death itself soaked it up with bread and savored its volatile relish. I wouldn’t put it past the beast. It’s been known to do much worse, or so I’ve heard.
It’s interesting the things you hear when you die. I don’t know whether it was my body going into shock or massive loss of blood; but I heard many things. The secrets of life whispered to friends, priests, the night, were screaming into my ears. It was like the sudden gales of of a hurricane whipping through the canyons of my ear canal. A most horrible sound, it was nothing more than the pains of life in its unspoken purity.
The shrieks scratched at my eardrums until I’m pretty sure they burst. I lost all sense of equilibrium and fell into a vortex of voices. They spoke of the beast in many tones. Its fur matted with the sticky sweat beading on the brows the nearly still-living. A belly so swollen that not even the sun rises above its horizon. It walks in a permanent shadow bleeding from its heels.
Though it is most vicious, always victorious, Death should not be feared. It creeps slowly, silently, and it has no face. It’s the chilling darkness that curls around you tight, tight, tighter until you are helplessly paralyzed. It swallows you whole, wrapping its thick lips around you and devouring you sometimes more slowly than others.
Here is my limbo, my fear. I wait attoseconds, eons, in the vacuum of emptiness for my fate to unravel itself. Death could care less if you are Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Atheist. Not time, not gravity, not pi, and certainly not faith can survive Death. There is only myself and what I discern to be the heavy breathing of the beast now digesting what’s left of me.
I fade in and out of what I can only perceive to be reality.
A stray cat shrieking in the night, a coastline devoured by the persistence of the tide, the sands of time fed by our own rotting corpses as we are each claimed by the insatiate appetite of decay.
For reasons such as these, there rests Aguni Jima. Perched on the edge of the Pacific, the sprouting land bears the scars of its time. Neither the savagery of the sea nor the gnawing jaws of death of conquered the crags cutting defiantly into the winds above.
They whip sharply in and out of the rugged coastline, screaming tales of those who refuse to be forgotten. They are plagued with the knowledge of things unspoken--the secrets whispered by the reeds, sung by the crickets, and seen in the eyes of the beast called death. They sleep in warm blood, prisoners to the hearts of the living, until that singularly final croaking breath taken in vain hopes to seal one’s fate.
These secrets are the very fibers of the first apple eaten upon birth. They are parasites meant to carve holes into our hearts, and they plunge from our throats and eyes as they burst open in horrific recognition the moment we die--the moment when time stands still and we can no longer deny our destiny, sealed in eternity before our failing vision. It is then we stare into the face of the demons who haunted our dreams.
Its eyes watch us, bemused; its nostrils curled as it hungrily awaits our souls. Drool bleeds from its oozing mouth, baptizing us into our damnation.
We are, at this point, helpless. We watch with inanimate eyes as our yellowed limbs are engulfed into flames. Those we once loved before emotion drained away with every other fluid from the crevices of our bodies wail in despair of our passed lives, in knowledge of what was to come. The last beams of light we’d every feast upon fingered their way through the smoke of incense and the dust of bones we lie in, crippled.
Here, then, in these last fleeting moments of solitude, the hunger sets in.
The inevitability of life generates on the pulsing mystery in which it is shrouded. I could elaborate on this issue. Tell you there is no God. No salvation. But then what is the point of that? Existence is a grain of sand churning in the belly of an oyster. And, like humans, it demands to be recognized as more than merely a grain of sand. We all view ourselves as pearls in the making.
Only sometimes, life intervenes with our plans. We are pried open and sucked into the sagging jowls of death, only to be spat out as nothing more than a slightly larger, and somewhat misshaped, grain of sand. And there we rest at the foot of the endless sea of death, nothing more than a spec of sand among infinite others. We glide this way and that in sync to the rhythmic ebb and flow of life continuing without us.
There is no remorse, though I’m not sure if there would be had I been able to hold on to lifely matters like emotion. Unfortunately, it drained out with every other conceivable liquid from the crevices of my body when I died. Perhaps Death itself soaked it up with bread and savored its volatile relish. I wouldn’t put it past the beast. It’s been known to do much worse, or so I’ve heard.
It’s interesting the things you hear when you die. I don’t know whether it was my body going into shock or massive loss of blood; but I heard many things. The secrets of life whispered to friends, priests, the night, were screaming into my ears. It was like the sudden gales of of a hurricane whipping through the canyons of my ear canal. A most horrible sound, it was nothing more than the pains of life in its unspoken purity.
The shrieks scratched at my eardrums until I’m pretty sure they burst. I lost all sense of equilibrium and fell into a vortex of voices. They spoke of the beast in many tones. Its fur matted with the sticky sweat beading on the brows the nearly still-living. A belly so swollen that not even the sun rises above its horizon. It walks in a permanent shadow bleeding from its heels.
Though it is most vicious, always victorious, Death should not be feared. It creeps slowly, silently, and it has no face. It’s the chilling darkness that curls around you tight, tight, tighter until you are helplessly paralyzed. It swallows you whole, wrapping its thick lips around you and devouring you sometimes more slowly than others.
Here is my limbo, my fear. I wait attoseconds, eons, in the vacuum of emptiness for my fate to unravel itself. Death could care less if you are Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Atheist. Not time, not gravity, not pi, and certainly not faith can survive Death. There is only myself and what I discern to be the heavy breathing of the beast now digesting what’s left of me.
I fade in and out of what I can only perceive to be reality.
A stray cat shrieking in the night, a coastline devoured by the persistence of the tide, the sands of time fed by our own rotting corpses as we are each claimed by the insatiate appetite of decay.
For reasons such as these, there rests Aguni Jima. Perched on the edge of the Pacific, the sprouting land bears the scars of its time. Neither the savagery of the sea nor the gnawing jaws of death of conquered the crags cutting defiantly into the winds above.
They whip sharply in and out of the rugged coastline, screaming tales of those who refuse to be forgotten. They are plagued with the knowledge of things unspoken--the secrets whispered by the reeds, sung by the crickets, and seen in the eyes of the beast called death. They sleep in warm blood, prisoners to the hearts of the living, until that singularly final croaking breath taken in vain hopes to seal one’s fate.
These secrets are the very fibers of the first apple eaten upon birth. They are parasites meant to carve holes into our hearts, and they plunge from our throats and eyes as they burst open in horrific recognition the moment we die--the moment when time stands still and we can no longer deny our destiny, sealed in eternity before our failing vision. It is then we stare into the face of the demons who haunted our dreams.
Its eyes watch us, bemused; its nostrils curled as it hungrily awaits our souls. Drool bleeds from its oozing mouth, baptizing us into our damnation.
We are, at this point, helpless. We watch with inanimate eyes as our yellowed limbs are engulfed into flames. Those we once loved before emotion drained away with every other fluid from the crevices of our bodies wail in despair of our passed lives, in knowledge of what was to come. The last beams of light we’d every feast upon fingered their way through the smoke of incense and the dust of bones we lie in, crippled.
Here, then, in these last fleeting moments of solitude, the hunger sets in.
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