Talmud

Will Smart

Hail and Hale

rain is the sign of fall

we take from solemn

heights, holy heights

of the skies you can't

see but merely feel in

the faint throbbing of

your precarious heart 

laughter and lies go hand in hand

in the nights, the nights that have

become long and wet and there's

this sense of longing I haled into

me from the scent of a stranger's

body sleeping on my floor a few

days ago, though I am not sure if

I should use the word stranger to

describe him because there is got

to be something I don't quite get

about him nor myself because as 

I asked him to light my spliff on

the rainy street I saw behind his 

eyes a familiar flare greeting me 

from the distant past, a flare that 

turned my being into a flickering

sign of total and acute lunacy in
kissing a face never seen before

you see it had been just that morning that I stood

in the elevator staring at my eyes from the mirror

and thinking, too bad I never talk about the time

I spent in italy, too bad I never talk italian these

days, too bad, too bad... a sigh, and I left the lift 

and vanished into the rhythm of commuting with

my thoughts anew, completely oblivious of there

being someone behind the veils of time pulling a

trigger or two in order to get my mind scrambled

there should not be a possibility

for two men to have scents that

alike, like there should not be a

possibility for such resemblance
between the face of an irishman

who briefed a sex scene from a

novel of hemingway's, to a face
of someone I saw last over two

years ago in the marble hallway

of the house on via dandolo 24

Unflung

Linna

Ja-far

fresh rain sweeps the damp stones of the windy streets of old tallinn. sipping wine, a flash from the past diverts my perception of space onto the square of hospital san camillo - the sunset. the garden glimmers fluorescent and the sky rising above the tangerine apartment buildings across the street has a depth of gray I love. the details of the conversation I had there with U are muddied under the sense of relief and content I felt for knowing I'd have an MRI. 

which, I never did. the contentment still reigns in those colors though. that fluorescence, that deep gray... 

another sip, and I focus myself on the pavement again. raindrops dance, and the moist in the air twists itself around other associations in italy, the varieties of my mind. in some of them I am on a street of a small village somewhere in northern sardegna. 

the fog around is amazing, the thickest I've ever seen around habitation. I walked slowly on the damp streets, never seeing a soul. I knew where the tiny bar where my friends were was though, constantly, because my mind always draws a map with which it's hard to get lost. I don't know why I wanted to spend time on the streets instead of the bar. I was in a weird space within my mind - there was something with me there that night that never spoke a word.

after some time I found myself in the gta mode, and sat into a fancy dark blue bmw sports car parked not too far from the bar. it had the keys in the ignition. I don't know how to drive a car. the point of entry was just to get my heart beating. I needed warmth as I do now as the fall sweeps over the baltic. 

the warmth lasted for quite some time, with all the pleasures it brought. I wrote some, yet mostly by hand for the road is something I am on whenever I am free. some weeks back I was sitting in the corner table, writing. I was within a bar crowded by middle aged men and a high density of smoke. I had no money, just the ticket back home, so writing came at ease.

after some time, a man took the seat across from me. it turned out he is one of those born again muslims who bow down five times a day while listening to the same mumble, each day. he told me about having a relationship with god who seemed selfish and weird between the lines, and over and over again I helped him cross the border of laughter by showing him how that relationship manifests in everything. you know the feeling when someone else's god sounds more pleasing...

as I lit an incense made in a monastery in india, leaning onto the ashtray of that bar within a small neighborhood declaring itself separate of the european union yet hopelessly within a nato country, he became confused - we burn them only on sundays. I told him I clear the air when I feel to.

there is no guiding principle behind any of this. random ramble is all it is. in the winter of rome, years ago, I wrote a note -  

the future will not match my idyl

I see where I am headed and it is nothing here

I mediated a promise to the world, last summer

I said I'd do something I probably have no guts to do

and now I'm in the train, triggering, ra-in-man

I can't back off

it had no meaning back then yet now I know it has. yet, alas, as you can guess, a meaning that takes years to formulate is very difficult to turn to words.  

so you get ramble. and shots. I truly wish I could offer more, because life is epic. I can nearly remember the night we had there in the aether, a drunken, long night, at the end of which I made the foolish promise to live once again. waking up in a delivery room in f-land was the beginning of a delirium tremens unlike any other.