Oblivion Trauma

The soft voluptuous opiate shades
The sun just gone, the eager light dispell’d-
I too will soon be gone dispell’d,
A haze-nirwana-rest and night-oblivion.
Walt Witman

Oblivion Trauma

[Feasible not it is,
Nor can I ever have the relentless strikes
Of the ominous time disposed, I entangled
Widely in the bitter spear sores of the initial thought
That resorted in me as a poem
For the first time in one of my friend’s den
In a chilly winter night of 1989. ]

*

Here come the dizzy waves;
They roll and roll,
And down a remote corner
Approach a shore.
They keep rolling, hauling
But never touch these thirsty pebbles
Spread here, beneath my fatigue feet.
They just lash the last remnants of the lark’s bewildered wail,
Over the crooked rocks of the treacherous time.
I can behold the roaring
And the foamy commotions of the sea,
I can inhale the lethal fragrance,
Carried on the prudent wings of the breeze,
Treading heavily through the narrow fissures of my helpless mind.

The sudden reverberations of the dove’s solemn flight
Over the purple night, pictured on the firmament,
Quote an exotic tale, scarcely any soul wishes to care
A queer tale upon the shadowing nebula of the bygones, that
Takes the faded breath of my hopes away.
It reminds me
Of the thousand unmatured tunes,
Nipped in the bud.
The massacred voices
Of my childhood rise as smoke
Ejaculated out of the heap of ash-like pieces of the cracked mirror
Flame within the projected shadow of a coil,
Still seems that walks behind it.
Casting the stretches of the desirous sight
Upon the corpse of the vague roads,
How can I hope to turn again?
These are the tokens.
Wandering over the paths, I saw,
Through the haze, a minute figure ran away
Up the hill, ran away up the hill.
The sight was lost in the mist,
Turned into a few agitated footsteps
Winding up the hill into an ever known unknown.
The image was mine, or it could be mine.
The footsteps of my own; the very early ones.
I do not want to crucify myself.
To let my body burn.
I have walked up to believe; to find.
No purgation I seek, on
No salvation I trust,
But at length up the Hill.
I have risen the dagger, these are the tokens.
Tonight I am all alone.
I sit here, down
In depths of the dank crypt
Of my solitude, beside my yellow dreams.
The transparent wall of my eyes has crystallized
The flames of the yesterday’s fragile brightness.
I have reached myself
The pinnacle of mind.
It is too deep.
I go down.
I ascend tonight
To take the carious layers of my soul away.
I am the abandoned prisoner
In the dungeons of the ages,
Being left alone to melt away
Down to the guilty bones
By the icy syllables
Of the undulating reminiscence;
Beyond the evanescent reality of each swell,
Beyond the melancholy gray of all regretful shingles,
Beyond the motionless dance of the sea shells,
Enduring silent fly of stress,
Avalanche of meteors, bearing confusion,
Into white sky of the brain,
Along the unfound paths of the spirit.
My hatched subjectivity still breathes,
Gropingly, and the only evidence of my oblivion
Lies there; somewhere beneath the deep spacious dark,
Panting on the current vessels of the salty air.
These are the tokens;
Once I was paddling, gently sailing my way into a sea cave,
Floating on the shining crystals of thought
I heard the cries of the bottoms;
Saw the dusty looks of the shadows,
All engraved upon the flabbergasted rocks,
Staring at me deplorably.
Onward I rowed and felt the bland flow
Of the suspicious air passing me by.
A yellow mass of a mysterious haze
Stretched the angles of its torn corpse
Over the innocent space.
The punic sense of time once again befell me.
The phantoms of fierce and fear haunted me.
This was an unnatural unfortunate unforeseen
I was heir to.
The despondent volume of the milieu seemed to have
No inclination to desert.
All the swinging particles of the space burdened on me.

Along the farthest hopes of the heart, a slight beam trusted in.
The enthusiast of the paddling grew more and more.
It didn’t knock at all.
The glow got through and became the sole lead
That seemed to have started to animate the deceased
Ambitions already buried down.
When at length, the obscuring slurs of conception
Were all ripped off, a suspicious delusion
Awarded the mind with the apparition of a stranger;
The bow was not alone anymore.
An ethereal body had perched voicelessly down on the bow
In the dark, like a bird, calm.
She had her back on me.
Locks of her dark colored tresses
Time and then dipped into the water,
Touched the rolling waves.
The frustration’s aurora invaded the essence of
Thought’s enormity and sat on the transient flakes of
The moment bearing the abysmal legend of the eternal ach of being.
There could be no reason to be astonished
Why she wouldn’t turn back to me.
I know she must have been ordained not to do so.
It must have been divinely forbidden.
And your back bone cracks in pain
When you see you can never ask why?
Can a sentenced to death guilty, just hanged on the gallows,
Plead for one more breath,
While the wrath of the rope is squeezing
The slightest bit of life out of your neck veins?
She was sitting beside me, but not turning to me.
The reflection of the elusive gleams
Evinced the blue memory of the briny.
At the other end of the cave
Morning was seen to be slyly crawling in,
On the twilit track of the dawn.
There seemed to be no might
To cease the assailing emotion overflowed.
Yet, dark and silence were the only rulers over the hours.
Eventually, I ventured to utter the word.
With the upsurge of the sun, she
Jerked her back, as out of chill.
Hesitated for a while,
Before she astonishingly turned to me.
The noose of the tresses coiled round her neck.
A couple of dazzling eyes on a long face
Reflected the downcast spirit of the sea.
No more than a lifeless taciturnity was exchanged,
And before any word could be forged,
Her dove like image flapped away,
And abandoned the lagoon of my perplexity.
She flew too far away from my floating land.
And vanished into the distant horizons of my gloomy sight.
The scintillations of a blazing illusion
Were burning my sinful eyes,
And an intolerable agony of repentance was
Tearing my parts away.
I was left again to paddle my bow into the dawn of
The maniac fog.

Here rolls the morning,
And walks away my life.

I hear the autumnal cadence of my chest
That sets in the rise of the sun.
Deprivation.
The sarcastic deserts of destitution
Are warmly waiting for me .
I am openly bloomed for another season.
I can behold my shattered image wandering along
The desert, pushing his way through
The heap of the bones of the dead.
Whose ominous ends depict the endless exasperation of the trauma
Destined for the despaired man to perish the strife of the heart
And spare the existing.

Never complain, never ask,
What this chill is running slowly down my back.
Adam could not bear it either.
Though upon the divine court,
Where you are absolutely compelled
Not to put up a foot,
When you hesitantly move to start
Setting fire the hazy edge of your mind,
You have trodden on the brown soil of the heath,
Thousands of quivering silhouettes, haggard upon yelling,
Roaming around.
And all in all, pushed to find their constrained ways
Through the deprivations heaped,
Originated from the Hill.

Man possesses wings,
Flapping them ascends him,
Onto the precincts unseen.
Those who are gone will never return.
Wins occult, concealed under the spell of coil
Iced up with the corroded layers in the mind.
But who can fly?
Is it worth?
Though you are nor satirized with a never ending anxiety
Within the agony firing the generations,
The ancestors behind.
Now, I am sitting lonely here,
On a gray trite rock,
And looking through the stretched horizons;
Beneath the arch of the firmament, the azures of the sky,
Wait either for another morning wave,
Or a bird’s wail.
Vague it must be, anyway, I wait.

Seyed Esmaeil Arib
1989