There is no self, she says. It’s all fragmented. I’m quite aware of this, and where I see myself shaping and shifting–that specific, vicious place–is the subject of my whole suffering. I know what I can offer and what I can provide to you–yet here I am, without a self. I have been thinking for a long time, trying to find the moment I arrived. I know I arrived here one day. I can no longer remember which day it was. I met him in a dream. We met at a bridge, he asked me which road we should take further, the more I arrived, the further he went. I realized we could only be together for a short period of time. I was desperate to find another soul like mine. He shared his dreams with me. I asked for another year.

He looks at me, and remembers how much he once loved this city – how excited his soul was, how ambitious his plans were. I look at him and I see a fragment of me from the future. I would never be cynical about a place I call home. The very first thing he asked me was whether I ever try to step outside of my mind, whether I ever try to be someone I am not. I know I was destined to find another soul like mine. 

It must have been lonely for him. Darkness had always intimidated his soul. It is quite an uncanny experience to speak with him. There are some feelings he is not yet able to recognize. He says to me he no longer reaches his emotions from a distance. I say the word reach already indicates a distance. He and I merged after a moment of terror. But if I remember correctly, we must have first met in one of my dreams. I found myself in an antique bookstore—an old, high-ceilinged, 19th-century-style place, where everything was made of wood, with two rooms next to each other. I walked barefoot into the first room and started to scream my dreams to him, who was in the next room. Then I saw cockroaches on the floor, and I accidentally stepped on one with my right foot. I ran into the room where he was and asked him to help me. He said he couldn’t touch my skin because he was too afraid, but he handed me napkins to clean with. However, the mark wouldn’t go away—the body of the cockroach was infused into my skin. I asked him, “Will this mess ever be clean?” He answered, “No. The cockroach will move and travel inside your body.”

Later, he would leave me in the room and ask me to wait for him until he came back. He would return shortly, and we would talk about the very nature of desire and obsession. Fear would finally arrive at us in the figure of movement, and he would leave the room again, but the door would remain half-open. His fears would occupy me, and I wouldn’t leave. At first, he would go far away, to isolate himself and breathe elsewhere. He would finally return, and there would be no sound – everything would be silent. He would gaze into the room to see if I was still there. He wouldn’t enter. He would watch me from a distance until I started dreaming again.

I eventually left the room. I continued to live the life that was assigned to me. The next thing I remember is being a character without a story. I returned to my solitude. I returned to the invisible life that is only accessible to me – a life in the form of dreams. 

I asked for a cigarette from the woman I was sitting next to. She had revealed herself to be Frau Sonntag. I found it ironic. Later, Frau Sonntag confessed to me that she lost the love of her life right after he proposed to her, and that to this day, she still loves him. At that moment, she clarified something for me–what it means to love someone who does not exist, but can be found in places connected to the accumulation of memories. He was a well-known photographer who left her many of his artworks. One night, she had a prophetic dream that compelled her to publish his photographs in a book and organize an exhibition under his name. There must have been a way to ask him my questions, she thought. She found the solution in dreams. As she sat beside me, telling the story of her and her invisible husband meeting in dreamscapes, I looked across and saw our reflection in the bar mirror. She then looked like me. She looked like another version of me, someone who had lived in another time—desperate enough to love the absence of a soul with no visible body. I: Do you ever dream about your invisible husband? F: There is a person who deletes my dreams every day just before I wake up. I: You search for sentences. Every word you speak searches for you in your body. F: Who are you and what do you like? I: I go around the city and I collect ghosts. F: I like talking to you, it gives me a world. Do you ever talk to your own self?

I: The self is a human-made device integrated into my body. I am afraid I won’t find anything if I go there. F: You carefully dissect people. I: What is it that you stop yourself from doing?

F: I had been avoiding the moment when I would figure out what I have been carrying inside of me, that specific moment might consume me, and I would be far removed from reality. Or worse, I would be replaced with an ordinary shape. I surely don’t want to be replaced with an ordinary shape. I want to appear indescribably. I want to be heard and I want to be seen. I am here today because I can’t be anywhere else. I am alone, and I am suffering for every moment in my life I haven’t spoken yet. I must speak until every word leaves my body. I must speak until the ghosts disappear and I become free. I must speak until I see her again, this time as an integrated part of me. I am proud of who I am, and I carry the urge to exist that way. I have much to say, and I won’t be muted until I express every tiny fragment of it.

The great curiosity that was born between us helped me to see something beyond our power. After all, there is no return if you have forgotten the place you had begun. Perhaps this city is already exhausted because of all the mortal dreams. Perhaps I was determined to find the only voice that has liberated itself from the seductive emptiness. Or perhaps, when I just arrived, she was about to leave, but we walked together for some time.

published in: living language e-merging poets zine

The spoken voice is soft – I barely hear it. I could have
shredded myself and placed it in there
or replaced it. Something escapes me
before I am awakened in the morning.
I am now willing to feel I once had unwilled.
“She wonders if she is late
and what if no one cares.” Resolving too quickly –
surrendered to a world apart from who they began with. Her wrinkled eyes
match with outspoken thoughts – for how long I be here,
who do I carry with me. All that was familiar –
I might have been stealing silence inexorably

an instant future in the form of moonlight appeared while I was lying on my bed, senseless; she seemed noble for a while with all discomforting distance – look – they will now put the human sound on, and the unmoved reality will begin to strip – she says – this god or another one; all reminds me an unsmiling, monotonous rhythm

published in Poetry Trapper Keeper

egg-stained door knob
arm between panes
she opened herself naked
replied to life
“you would be
chewing hands
I would be
rushing
infuriatingly in between”
as a large scissor
would make a heart contract
poor little thing is
already moving