What if they cook me?

original artwork

The entire house was open to me, laid bare and naked. Except for the kitchen. The kitchen was dangerous. It had gas cylinders, knives, and hot pans. Entering it during the day, when my parents were at work, was like entering a tomb. The dry sink, the shut cabinets and closed lids, the black iron of the stove like a fire-breathing dragon asleep after a hearty meal, it all seemed…dead. But it was a living death – more like sleep.

I would wander into the kitchen in the evenings and watch my mom run around the kitchen trying to make food for all of us. I had been there hours before and the tiles had stared back at me. The squares had heaved like the chest of a sleeping monster. And here she was, moving, unaware of it quiet and submissive under her swift feet.

I would look on, from the threshold. My entry into this world of fire and sweat was only possible if she acknowledged me – only if I had the right things to say, the right things to ask. The kitchen is off-limits. To distract her would be criminal, to interact disastrous. My father would come and leave. He did not need her to be a part of this space that breathed like a boxer after 10 rounds. He was an adult.

Walking in, proceeding with caution, my arms and legs telling her that I knew that I must enter this space with great care, I was like Lazarus coming out of the tomb wrapped in cloth – slow, scared, and bound at the mouth of a tomb. I was screaming to be reborn, to become what my parents were. I ask her something in my best voice, I put my choice warrior to task. I find the rhythm of the kitchen in the sound of the metal hitting the cast iron pan. My words fit right into the spaces. They cut through the mix the way incisors cut into cheese and cake.

But she ignores me

In that moment, I am in the void. Lost, in a space where I do not belong. The chimney is old, struggling to swallow the heat. The fires blaze and I bake next to the stove. I can’t scream. I become lifeless like vegetables before they are washed. I become meat prepped for the grill. I become food.

What if I can’t leave the kitchen? What if the door is shut?

What if I can’t run away like I always do?

Am I to bake in this heat?

I need to grow. Faster.

I need to be able to go in and out as I please.

Panicking, I grab an apron. I extend my limbs, stretch out the straps and cry out – “I am not a child. Please don’t cook me”

Hour(izon)glass

Original artwork

Sucked into the narrow middle at the last hour, the horizon where we will meet, surrounded by death, with one foot in the door to infinity. The sand will fall through into dead space and if we join hands and hold them out into the void, the dirt of our grave will graze our pale skin. There, you will hand me the pen and I will write on the door, frantically scribble the only things that matter, poems for those who come after, who dare to see death within the face. Creak, creak goes the hinge, grace our shoes with crusted paint that falls but never fell. There is no time at the door to infinity, in the middle of the glass that contains the hour.

original artwork

If you want to know more about what I’m trying to say, read this post: https://thefourthdimensionoflife.wordpress.com/2021/09/05/things-are-falling-apart/

A Fire

Original Artwork

There is a fire in my heart.

But it will not spread.

It is a low flame gathering at the base,

burning the roof of my heart to a crisp.

The life of my flesh, the only river that returns,

burnt into the ceiling, like meat forgotten on the grill.

But in this the pulse remains,

That when I die and you think my soul at peace,

You’ll reach into me with blunt knives you bought for cheap

And find inside a piece of me

burning over a fire that won’t recede

Cold Morning Showers

Original artwork

Pitter-patter on ripple’s clock

Paralyzed, wet, in a concrete fold

Waters tango the arc of back

Of divided mind over matter whole

---

Cold morning showers after staying up all night depressed and anxious are quite an experience. I hop into the icy stream every morning. Shivering, my bloodshot eyes staring at the square patterns on the bathroom tiles, I go through a playlist of Argentine tango tunes. Everything is so angular; responsible and ready to take on life. I’m not. I’m a coward shivering in the darkness, showering with an open door because I like light without the source. My mind is racing at a speed I’ve probably tried to figure out five times just in the last ten seconds. I’m confused, divided, in a bathroom that’s got its shit together.

Pain Is Peace

Pain Is Peace (original artwork)

Every pain is a new day. It washes itself in Lethe and comes to me in twilight wearing the clothes of yesterday. Like a baby, it falls into my arms, wraps its hand around my finger and squeezes it until white starts to show. And I…ah…I squirm like a boy because I can’t father it. And yet, peace is with me; in the way it drools, twitches and turns, in how its eyes never look at the same things I do because it has no notion of betrayal or death. It will never question my arms. It looks at me and for a vicarious moment, the world becomes my oyster. I sigh, reassured.

---

This piece is about how pain feels new every time. It’s so easy for me to find security in this self-destructive low that I’m going through by devaluing life and finding peace in not caring about my existence here.

This is so because it brings me down to a place where all the lights go out and I’m allowed to be truly myself, or rather forced to be so. My pain gives me the luxury of not caring about anything else. I don’t have to worry about what people are going to think of me if I am who I really am because life’s not that great anyway. And in facilitating this perspective, the dark thoughts become my greatest ally as an artist.

This piece is basically about how I’m like the father before I allow myself to feel the pain and how I turn into the baby after I do. And I always choose to feel. Because just like a baby inspires a father through an effortless expression of near-perfect isolation from all that is so wrong about this world, my painful self like a babe in “yesterday’s clothes” reminds me that if I allow myself to feel pain, I can get to a place where I only need to be seen and not complimented, where I can be myself without worrying about what other people are going to think. It enhances the need to express and brings out the artist in me. It gives me purpose and peace. That’s why I never hold back. I feel it all.

Pain/ my painful self will torture me, make me create things that are honest to my experience, and then it bathes in Lethe and forgets all about what it did to me. The creation of art is where that baptism takes place. That’s what puts the face of a babe on pain. I’ve always said that the art I make does not necessarily heal me, that it solely arises out of a necessity to express. Maybe it does heal. Maybe it’s just that I go through the cycle way too fast. This could be because of many reasons. Like how little rational thought is involved in these escapades down rabbit holes that lead straight into hell or the abundance of new associations and pathways that I create every day, new ways to get to the same bottomless pit. Same liver, new eagles.