stuck between
the abstract lines
of art gone awry
and cityscapes afloat on a dream
she hides behind the smile
of a thousand lies
she hides inside
of a coffee cup
she hides
she hides
she hides
from my prying eyes
An Ode to the Girl Who I Could Never Write
I found the girl between abstract art and cityscapes. She surrounded my prying eyes with here beautiful smile which she tried to hide. But I could see it from a thousand miles away, with the sparkling in her eyes, the very pair that tries to look away.
I could smell the coffee she drank from a distance, and her eyes looked at me with a strange anticipation, one I did not expect. The white of her eyes played tricks on my mind, was she that pure?
Her breath tasted like the lonely and awake nights that I spent trying to write poems of a girl I could never write, and her touch reminded me of the feeling of the paper between my fingertips. The white - innocent - paper, the dark words dancing over its surface with a life of their own.
I could not help the creations once they escaped my fingertips.
I drowned in her coffee-stained lips. I swam inside of her dark brown eyes. And I could not tell truth from falsity, as I tried to run through the corridors of her mind. I was trapped inside of the labyrinth of my own making; was it her plan to lure me deeper into the abyss?
Mechanistic thought patterns, ratchets and gears turning in seemingly all directions. The creative moment becomes one of paralysis, a deep and incapacitating turning and grinding. A steampunk moment.
She seamlessly moves from abstract art to cityscapes and back. Never a moment of immobility except for my own stunted movements between the future and the past.
In the dark, I see her hand coming towards my face. I try to move away, but as soon as the palm strikes my face, I am dunked into a world not of my own making - one in which she yields all the power.
Again, the faint smell of coffee that drifts through the air, but this time the smell is not coming from her lips, but rather the very darkness that encapsulates (envelopes) us both.
For a moment, there is some consolation, poetic beauty, and art in the darkness that smells of her breath, but as soon as some meaning springs forth it is pulled from the soil it tried to grow in. She did not want the meaning to flow (grow) - she wanted the abstract nothingness to take over, to throw everything into a form of chaotic disorder that continues to expand just like the universe itself.
In fact, she became the void, the endless darkness growing bigger with every passing second.
She became the universe itself, sucking the earth and stars into itself, like a type of ouroboros.
And then she disappeared again, into seemingly nowhere, behind abstract art and strange formations. Then she disappeared into a chaotic mismatching of meaning and falsity, truth and decay, and nothingness that took the shape of something tangible.
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My mind disappeared with her inside of it.
I closed my eyes on the world and she dissipated like mist evaporating in the presence of the sun.
She was banished back into the corners of my page where the ideas were still left brewing, becoming something larger, something more tangible.
Yet slivers and reminders of her presence remained and my fingers could not stop with the process.
I started something and now I must finish it, at least, that is what the empty spaces on the blank page are dictating to me to do. For I cannot leave the image half-written in a format that might suggest something more to come, yet with nothing to show for its appearance.
For the girl who I could never write seems to jump from page to page, leaving behind only traces of herself.
Traces that when put together begin to allude to the bigger scheme...
Life has a mind of its own. When you leave things to grow into the magical form of its own, it becomes poetically beautiful to see the strange formations.
When left alone, things grow into unthinkable and unpredictable shapes.
But this is exactly the beauty of nature, of the world, of things, of relationships. If left alone to grow, it usually yields something spectacular and strange, yet beautiful and going beyond the graspable nature.
I find myself in this position, where I leave things alone to see how it grow, where it might lead me, even if only in strange corners and beautiful detours.
I hope that you enjoyed this instalment of the girl I could never write. Since she entered my life, the poem is continually writing itself, I am merely pointing the camera to document the journey.
For now, happy photographing and keep well.
All of the musings, meanderings, and writings are my own, albeit inspired by the abstract art, cityscapes and the girl who walked through the streets of Cape Town. All of the photographs are also my own, taken with my Nikon D300 and the 50mm Nikkor Lens.