Momento

(I've been having trouble putting something into words. For months now, whenever I tried to describe what this year has felt like in coherent sentences I get stuck. And I just realized it's because Ive been limiting the theme of my words, and in doing so failing to accurately express a very long and colorful year.

So here it is I guess, it it's least compressed form)

1. This year has been a cut-me heal-me, a kiss me tender then leave me. This year's been a bipolar girlfriend with fuck-me-harder bedroom eyes. With days like blades and weeks like being lost in a vast ocean of lukewarm bath water.

2. This year I found the silent meadow at the center of the storm, the pebble at the centre the pond. It wanders my chest like an air pocket through waterlogged corridors.

3. It's like a toke held too long in the lungs, a cascade of sensations like dominoes from thundering pain to lightheaded euphoria, but always leaving a sore burning hole in your chest later.

4. It's the mixture of righteous purpose and fear stained guilt, like a holy man with his knife at the throat of an apostate.

5. A year of being lost. Of a long searching hand finding a ledge. Of a quartz crystal growing roots, and germinating in a dark cave at the heart of the planet. It's knowing that the universe takes an allmighty breath, and being allowed to share in it. This year is a tightly held breath, released in small bursts to last the week till payday.

6. It's been a year of light. All consuming and life renewing light. Light that bouces and spins and shimmers across the palaces of sleeping kings. Light that turns green after dancing through the branches of a mangrove swamp. I was blinded when I discovered and embraced the ever-present luminescence of all things, glowing phosphorescent blue like the cold-body radiation of a dead star.

7. It's knowing that when the hair and meat and humanity has been seared off your bones, what's left will walk to the volcano's edge and throws that goddamn ring into the fiery pit from once it came.

8. It's been a year of constantly knowing that I am loved, and knowing that what love I have to give is enough for now.

Yea, it's been that kinda year. Now onto the next one.

Massive

I think there's a special kind of visual largeness, a unique sense of condensed mass reserved for the larger men of Central Asian descent.

Could it be the colors our bodies wear, that meaty washed out brown sitting next to dark eyes and lips and night-black hair.

We grow larger again, sitting inside the tents of our large billowy jubahs, linen cloth to crease and add lines and definition to this unseemly mass. 

Hair, hair could be the cause. Curly, omnipresent, indomitable, always either too short or a raging growth of indecipherable locks.
Tangled shrubs of arm and back hairs add to that i think, extending, growing the edge of our silhouettes so that we may stand larger than we are.

Could it be that lumbering, swaying gait of a man walking off a heaily spiced meal ?

Maybe it's skin after all, not the color, but the texture.
Slathered in coconut oil perfume, rose water or sweat from the humid asian air.
That shine, that slightly awkward wetness may be that last little something that completes this picture, this image, this reflection, this moment of being obsessed with aesthetic massiveness.

Micro 1 + 2 + 3 + 4

1.
His head tumbled
heavy and low
A pendulum
between swaying shoulder blades
like twin scythes 

His eyes were dark
and lost
and wild
with the color,
of living, aching,
saffron

2.
His heart is dancing 
it’s doing little jumps and flips
on the upturned palm
of his out-stretched hand

It had walked out there to look at the stars
The stars make his heart dance in his hands
And so do you.

3.
There is a new stillness,
taken root within him
like an air pocket
wandering the corridors
of a submerged catacomb

4.
He pulls you closer
eye to eye with his humid scent
Find the path from his shoulder
through this grove of hair
to the place under his neck 
and his other teeth.

Teeth that are sharp and black
to leave a taste in your mouth
like old blood, chalk-dust
lavender and thyme

Teeth to excavate the pit
to forge the trail
between his rib-cages,
to discover the lost empire
of all his mornings

Cahaya

I have a declaration to make, and it's a sort of a personal revelation.
Though probably an obvious one, if you know me.

I love light. I adore photons. Glow-sticks, Ikea lamps, fireflies, matchsticks, I adore it in all it's moods and colors, from the soft diffused glow of a rainy Sunday morning to the room filling summer sun bouncing across floor and hair and sleeping faces.

I guess it started one day when I was younger, and I woke up from an afternoon nap to find myself trapped in a shaft of sun and about a billion dust motes. I was trapped because I could not pull my focus away from the dance of the particles and the smallest shadows they cast underneath them, like tiny pillars in this cathedral shining through my polka-dotted curtains.

One night when I was eleven I probably caused permanent ocular damage to myself by shining a hand-held laser pointer directly into my left eye. I had to see what it looked like up close, and laser light up close looks like an uncountable, wondrous mass of shooting stars are flying by your head all at once. You try to follow the path of each one with your eye, for naught.

Trivia: I sometimes sneeze when I look at bright lights/the sun. I always thought that was cool.

I guess it's fitting now that I work behind a camera. It's just an extension of my lifelong need to understand and capture something that is larger than me. Something that always made my heart beat faster, and has given me so much.

The calm ocean on a full moon, a paddy field draped in the perfect diffusion of sunset, there is music there for those who listen.

a moment below sea level

Elena Kalis Photography

It starts in a deep and profound silence
knees clenched to my chest
ear-flaps bending water
to spin me slowly
in a grove of half-chewed seaweed
and curly black hair

There is an early morning sun
coloured gold by eyelids
and the blue of a reflected sky
there is the sound of a child
footsteps like muted fingers
touching the bone in my ear
breaking through sand and form and salt
louder than my rip-tide heart-beat
brighter than a song

an explosion arrives
a wave-front of laughter from blushing cheeks
oscillating violin chords playing from smiling eyes
the smell of spray-paint used to share secrets
the touch of morning sex

it passes over me
leaving behind restless molecules
that have come alive
never to sleep again

Suddenly, I am breathless
heart-sounds like lonely gunshots
air escaping from pores like bullet-holes
lungs like the twin furnaces of an old steam engine
arteries and airways collapsing from the vacuum

I become empty so I may be refilled
by this midday sun, and the child and the ocean
by the nuclear fallout of two colliding hearts
by the living water around me
and the living water inside me

Put your lips around mine
steal my last breath
compress my chest
let it cry out like an accordion
and save me from this silence

I summon the memory of cello music
to colour the ocean wood-brown and twilight-red
to dull this knife-edge moment
that I might keep it safe
in the soft, forgotten places
of my torn flesh

Remembrance

Walk silently through my doors and reminisce with me
We once glowed brightly under the midnight sky, you and I
We sat on benches and our mouths kept time with our hearts
Words flowing from ear canal, to heart, to mind and out through the nose.
We drowned in a mess of freshman philosophy and sickly sweet high school romance poetry
Mixing the liquids of our fear and joy we let it fluoresce in the space above our heads
We stood against the light to cast shadows upwards; we carved the sky into shapes and figures more beautiful than ourselves.
At the edge of morning you handed me one last secret
Standing on my toes I hid it behind the sun because you couldn't reach

I lost you in a field one evening because the cows and snails wouldn't tell me where you went
The moon turned to reflect not the sun, but a thousand street-lights into the tall grass so I could find you
At the edge of the water I caught you dancing, and found your hand in mid-sway
we fell over the side and sat where we could see our reflection
you asked me about death, and I told you a lie
In my memory there was firefly music and violin light
and you cast a spell to slow down time
We greeted the dew half in dreams and blushing
and couldn't find our way home till it was too late.

When it came time to forget you showed me how,
 twist grab pull and it was done
You gave me a bottle of words
and a notebook with our minutes pressed delicately between the pages

At the end it read
"We once glowed brightly under the midnight sky, you and I. We will grow eyes and ears like branches reaching out from our chests till we can see the rest of this story carved out in giant silver cursive across time and space."

My finger finds the edge of the page and stops there, a chubby semi-colon..
The blood drains from my nail-beds as I rest my head on the crook of my elbow
to remember your face, and finally sleep softly.

At the end.

Stand with me at the end of the world. Stand beside me and let me feel your warmth and hold your hand.
We will see space collapse in on itself as our holographic universe compacts and shrinks until we are back at  the beginning. Back at the point where we were everything, and everything was yet to be.

Sit with me in the light of the dying stars. I will shield your eyes with my hand as the suns consume each other. We will swallow the last breath of this universe together.

Listen to the secrets I let loose, and keep them for me. See the light in my chest when I look into your eyes, and know that I treasure your secrets as well.

Here, in the darkness, at the end of things, allow me to touch your face as our forms shiver and shake, as our atoms and spaces in-between retreat to the centre, let me see you with the very last light of my eyes. Feel the vibrations of my voice when I say your name, I will them to pass through my hand into your bones, to pierce this silent vacuum.

I am content to have lived the last of the days and nights. Content to have seen the last dust mote trapped in light and to taste the scent of a full-moon, to chase the wind and get lost and to have heard the final lament of the unwashed masses.

But now as we dance a slow sway at the edge, I am happy. As we dip into absolute entropy, I am joyous; and I allow myself to engulf you, to steal your smile, to keep it safe from the nothingness.

So that it can keep me safe from the nothingness.