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where are you my mind
This text was produced as a miniature sized artist's book and distributed at Levent Duran's solo exhibition of the same name, held at Gergedan Gallery (Istanbul) from November 28 to December 19, 2014.
I opened the door and stepped out
Out there a vast meditation must have been prepared for me
I will erase, one by one, everything they said
From all the chaos we've lived through
I will take the change
I want to pass through
We must steal back our sainted orgasms locked in their holy chests!
Then
Let's meet here again
The great, closed-off view Third bunk from the left, bottom
Only a flood of intuition and I've had enough
No man keeps spitting on me
Endlessly loving himself through me
My visitor who wants to smear the eggs of his own state onto mine just came all over me and left
I rubbed it into my flesh
And on his way out he complained about how I sexualize everything!
He flinched from me as he left
I prayed he'd find what he was looking for The dark woman inside wants to cry on my knees I'll let her, too But give the master his reason back I will truly be passive
Utterly passive
I will stop longing for either death or life
To truly take everything in
When I manage to say yes to all of it, I'll be finished
Or I'll have started, all at the same time
Praise be to the thousand tons of poison gas spreading through the air
Praise be to the millions of tons of animal corpses released onto the market
Praise be to their smell
To the smell of festivities that keep endlessly dying
Praise be to the smell of a united madness
To the closeness that scrapes my heart when he takes my hand
May my mother's menopausal energy be blessed
I swear by her sorrowful prayers
I will accept all of it
The weepy haikus of the man who only watches, and only watches
The moment I manage to believe this is the real revolution
I'll take it all back
Dear neighbors, into whose gardens I've sent bulldozers — my screaming songs
The activist louse in my throat
The passive parasite in my gut
These are the most rational parts of the woman-man
It just arrived and it's burning
I will love the fire
I'll throw the headache back at the parapsychological devil
Something twists inside me
A drill turning inside me
Praise be to the nauseating speed of the orbit that keeps spinning
I will not watch the shadows making love on television
Let me go make love myself instead
But praise be to those who attack me
Believe that I see the truth from the places you'd rather not see it from
To the man who doesn't even want me to know what I want
To my analyst
I mean to say: you're a fool, brother
There, I said it
I will set a box down inside the cosmic energy
No, not my sinful ass
I'll build the rain into my wishes, broken into pieces
Not one drop touching another
And no one will question my wisdom there
We all know it now, you bastards of our nothing
There's nothing hanging around here calling itself poetry
There's nothing hanging around here calling itself great
They'll gather, broken into pieces, in my box
Celebrated, indecent
Then sent off to their absolute presidency
Praise be to the great war strategy
Of the system that contains its opposite
Of the opposite that contains its system
Praise be to the reflection that keeps swapping its mirrors without end
I'll give everything to those who go around plucking at flowers
Soon I'll have given away everything
My style will resemble an expensive perfume smuggled out of Egypt
My work will resemble a prophet's robe seized by force from Arabia
I'll lightly rub the perfume onto the robe and
In my dream I will see hatred turned into a lover, that far gone
Let me also see the hatred of the men who sit in cafés all day cursing their bad luck
You know the type — men who love nothing except big dogs and
footballers who run hard and pass well
I will vomit from how much they love their country
I'll steal the pacifiers from the mouths of men who so easily kill trees, animals, people, and
who love God so very much
I'll tell them about Marduk
About the unhurried, overflowing love of the great reorganization on the other side
Against those like me who stick Buddha under their own chins
I'll land pretty little blows with dream-kicks
I don't actually like hitting people
That's why this is only a dream
But I'll keep hitting anyway
Against these men who sink their teeth into my wings the closer I get
Their sharp stares, their sharp nails, their teeth
Brutish
From constantly testing my strength
Then getting stuck between my strengths and my weaknesses
From losing each other by devouring each other while stuck together
Even if they'd give it up
I was cast out of waiting for the short, tight passes in a cramped field to turn into hair dancing in harmony
But no
Those who can't help but rage
Who can't eat without biting
Who can't sense their own wings
Who can't sense the punishment for clawing at those thin wings
This ward of wear and tear
Will fly on my many discursive carpets
I will wear the prophet's underwear
And the flyers will always be racing one another in their ears
I will ride the prophet's camel
Do you know the air has been collecting our voices, hoarding them
Give me the prophet's patience
Then they'll be sorry
But my god can't stand the sight of blood
Would you donate your sacrificial hides to the exposed flesh of a poet
Would you even carve up the livers of your own babies
Madness and so-called virtue —
virtue being a learned skill kept in reserve to be used as a weapon when needed —
The bristles of a beard that wound my face when I lean in to kiss it
Would you, too, put down your little cats when it's called for
Would you clean the bugs out of your kitchens with nuclear chemistry
I was growing tired of being one of them
What should I do with these feet of mine that they'd throw themselves on the ground to love once I've done what's required, these feet they'd line up to touch
I'll stretch them out
I'm noticing that I'm raising the same disgust in myself as well
That if I don't do this, accepting life will only get more impossible
The smallest dialogue with a doctor
A nurse's bittersweet sympathy for me and my songs
Why do I become the hell of their day
Here I'm tasting how jealousy organizes every other weakness
So I'll show them the man I love, then
He came again today
With his eggs, no less
He'd drawn eleven more pictures in his notebook, I saw
In every one, I saw his face dreaming of selling paintings of us making love, at a high price
Secretly
I saw the look of someone discovering, at his age, that he grows lighter as he loses his soul
I saw the aura of his desires jammed in filth
The dark woman inside broke away from him
She went "ugh" at the disgust
I will steal all his paintings
I'll throw every one of them off the overpasses onto expensive cars
Do you know I hate cars
They all keep hitting me, you understand
They steal our wings, our feet
I love the forests so much, are you listening
Like every other poet I want horses making love in my eyes
But damn the word love
Damn that soft feeling right there in my heart
Because it can never decide what it will merge with and become
To my rage, a passive canvas
I'll give the boomerang lodged in my inspiration back to myself
Love to the urge to weep that grows with an ever-hardening disbelief
To the fiery poems I hear spreading out from my own voice in crises
To my miracle words getting lost in the ears of the dim-witted attendants trying to tie me down
Love to the world's most fogged-up threads of expression, losing their direction in a director's orders
And to the hopeless itch I imagine they're expressing
To the bond I broke
To discord
To those blessed threads of feeling that keep playing around inside my thought and
that keep making sure I lose the great race outside
And curses, truly, on every orifice of the attendants
On the Friday sermons they take in with such reverence
On the sacrificial-feast revelations
On the merit of trying to grab a spot up front — I just remembered
I laughed
My breast itched, I slipped my hand under my shirt and scratched it
Carob-horn did the very same thing at that exact moment
He's such a lovable madman
The man who watches me while I write
He's very arousing, but
Is he the only one who might carry even a crumb of love for me?
I asked
He asked back whether I could write a prayer for his discharge
I will
I'll throw him to the other end of the world
There he goes already
But he might be too shallow a coward to bear being on the other end of his own world
He's come back, little madman
Only very brave when he's beside me
Because I revealed my sexual identity to him and told him about the man I love
So when he comes to me, then
You understand why now, he feels so powerful
He keeps talking backwards nonsense to me in electronic rhythms
I swear by the thyme sold to the thyme-seller
I'll do him a great cruelty and understand his condition, then
I'll send him away from here
But first I want to tell him, in broken pieces, too
Want to leap him past the walls of singularized perception
Want to make it secrete, spreading from his hypothalamus to his frontal lobe
Anarchy
I think right now I'm too full of meaning to be protected by god
Even so
There's no one here I could entrust my emptiness to, in their cupboards
Not a single cell of whiteness I could take shelter in
And let me tell you, for someone shut away, there's no such thing as "there is none"
Still, everywhere and always, a human being needs energy like every other living thing
But here there isn't a single healed particle of energy that could support anything besides its own malfunction
In their doctors, no cure
In their medicines, no music
In their music, no food for the soul
Not even one swing where I could put my children on for a moment and make those poor babies laugh a little
Only a world of weapons stays faithful to its own claim
And fine, let it have the top rung of the evolutionary chain
Praise be to the weight they try to soothe with the scent of holy oil
Submission
Dignity
Rumor
If it weren't for this schizophrenic partnership held up by these three things
protected by a socialized depth of personal belief —
To the books
The morals
The interests
of these other people who keep the hearts of these people in this state
To the crack in the mirror of this man who presents himself as post-dolphin
Let it be right, this shapelessness that curses him out at epic length
Let it be right
Fitting the mathematics of a fully automatic weapon to their rifles
Counting the ways they cannot manage to laugh at me
Getting angrier and angrier, over and over
And striking their bones in the ease of "yes sir"
Erasing my harmless madnesses to suit market sensitivities
Even wanting to tear up my rabbit-patterned slippers, out of pure selfishness
I'm eating it now, all of it, into my head
My head
Ah but aaaaah
Between the bread and the plate
A timid current stretched taut
Build it
It's your salvation
Once you pass the infertility test, to the left
Hand me my dystopia
Glory to this closed point we've arrived at in the new age
Of the minimalist strokes descending from hours down to seconds
The ones and negative ones, one by one
Where everyone goes mad turning inward against themselves
And where a technique growing ever more limitless in the outside world perverts production
Of a pharmaceutical anarchy
A weapons anarchy
A god anarchy scattering itself into formlessness
Where reality mistakes itself for a child
Where the food-pastes of life's paradigm
strategically choose indifference, as a matter of relatively heavy values
A lie
Not one particle of softness, of slowness, of acceptance, or
of respect
And whatever there is of it gets cleaned out, like some microbial element blocking life,
by special disposal units, during the formative period after fertilization,
through an operation called "desensitized DNA"
Into this simple
black
Time
I, who rub the roughened tongue of my seclusion against this and flee
When I get up from here I will test my existence with the most animal roar in my belly
Once more
Let me feed them all a little sonic trick and tie manic strings to their hands
The crowded, variously mustachioed
thug-built, coarse men of this street
Mad
And they're always shouting nonsense beside me
I understand nothing
But praise be that I was born into the middle of a war like this
And I am its servant and its messenger
Now someone's screaming badly
Let it be considered perfectly normal for someone to scream here, then
Is it Carob-horn screaming
They've cornered Carob-horn and are beating him, in theory and in practice
He must have said he loves me
He's shouting that I'm a higher human
that I'm a true ascetic
Now he's repeating a line from my poem in a magic whisper, his voice filthy
"Give the master his reason back give the master his reason back reason..."
Look at these
Nine spoiled fruits in pajamas
Cornering my messenger with animal snarls
Every time they hit him, Carob-horn screams my name and hurls poetic threats
into their emptiness
Only my birds, he says, can call their nightmares down from paradise forests
I'm going to bring them into my transcendental zen games, he says
I say tsk to my prophet's camel
I'm drawing them shirts, right here
I'll bind them with the love they feel for great men
I'll grin at their statues, their flags, their books
I'll abandon my country to the treacherous enemy and go soft
I won't even do my military service
What!
Who was it that said the world only has a few years left?
Here I am turning myself into a country
I'll offer them all the lands of my country
My soul and my body are an indivisible whole
My generosity and my love will put them to shame
Take my country, you great heroes of war
Tear it to pieces and eat until you're full
Then, while you snarl at each other to divide your shares more heroically
I'll be off somewhere purring after love and music
But children are born soldiers
Uniform
Epaulet
Even a few sentry-duties written in for that month
Ha ha ha
They're not crying, they're singing the anthem, would you believe it, dears
Tickle me right there
My furry shoulders itched for a moment
I scratched them
They let Carob-horn go
One of them is shouting:
— To hell with postmodernism, let deconstruction get it up the ass, let's connect to the center, to the cen..
Sociology will look into the organizational model of the rage coming out of his mouth
Are you going to bill philosophy for my lack of a gaze, sweetheart
He's lining up traitors on the rosary of his amnesia
Teaching his own blood samples to his own switchblade
The forward tilt of his mouth is announcing a wretchedness stretching into infinity
He's one of my madmen too
I remember my own Rumi just now
I stroke his turban in my lap
For the thousand-and-first time, before breaking my repentance
I convince myself, one last time, that life is a celebration
A sheep jumps the fence
They scatter in reverence
I sleep a little.
L. Duran -Istanbul 2014