Karl is pleased this morning.  His thoughts are visible, clear on his face but the light crouched under his eyelids scares him every time he tries to open his eyes and stand up.  It is because he always suspected reality to be like a boring novel.  Like an obsolete, archaic novel with all the buried boring details.

A slumber for motivation and rationale!  Yes, the night is not out of him yet.  He is in an unstable equilibrium mode.  Every affirmation will find its denial in the end but the way to balance seems unclear in his mind right now.

The morning light trickles through the cracked window and along the surrounding porous walls like the music of a magic violin.  Below his room, breathing people marching on the streets.  Air .Silence.

The rattled world streams everywhere, there is nothing left unreal around him.

The room smells like ashes, kneaded bodies, vodka, and the simple gesture of raising tires him.  Light, like a fine thread of wax slides across the dusty books!

“Today it will be different!”  He promises himself as he splashes cold water on his face...

Yesterday he wrote poetry, smoked too much and liked women who agreed quickly.  Dawdled time in predefined theatrical scenes of life and love.  Today, with Isolda’s legendary time expired, he’s much more fascinated by the kind of new life, left unhindered, bearing a different name, a different mask.

With no clothes on, he sat at the writing table and naked started writing Verlaine.  Think Verlaine could accuse me of plagiarism.  He smiled.

All the transformations, coming or going were easy and comfortable in his youth but now change scares him...

Yeah ... I want stillness.  Motionlessness is what I prefer! 
Tomorrow, he writes only tomorrow!  Eternal delay! 
The spring aroma of the Sycamores crawls on the walls everywhere but his room.  This remains the same, dark, saturated in the smell of moldy books.

He lives in a condemned building but is not bothered by it.  He is naturally part of the body of this community of artists where everyone has clearly defined positions.  Of course, intimacy is collective and dependencies are like morphine addiction.

Karl manifests indifference in all circumstances.

Ulm is his neighbor, a painter, wearing the same black poncho, too long, a black hat and shortsighted, round glasses.  Karl has no need to hear him or feel his presence, he knows and builds his image without looking directly at him, like a true artist’s imagination, bearing footprint of a world bathed in various shades.

“I am impressed with your hands” Karl told Ulm one day .referring mostly to his paintings but the words fell inwards like a spring rain on red tiles.  They both had Lascia’s portrait dividing dark corners in their minds.

“I know how to reach every woman, and to outline her forms, to give her volume, finesse, that unmistakable triumphant lasciviousness! “  Ulm proclaimed

To paint on a piece of canvas is subtle!  To paint on the body of a woman with teeth, with wild, hungry wolf teeth, seems to be the conquest and triumph over life.  Thought Karl as a response but remained quiet. There was no realistic motivation in hating Ulm for seducing Lascia.

Fortunately, his love for Lascia seemed just a thought now, an illusion.  They met in parks, sometimes he walked her home, and other times they stopped at the restaurant where he gulped his vodka.  He was delighted, and her eyes were alive, large, green, and wild.  He milled his heart, triumphed, wrote her letters every day but he never mailed them instead he handed them faithful, in a Chekhovian way (here is the seagull, I killed my heart, it is bleeding, take it with you, it does not belong to me anymore.).  He hoped one day she would say yes, and love him.

Instead he will take it alone from the beginning now, life and devastation together.  The ocean as a heavy blanket under the sky, clouds with healthy winds above.

Spring is dwelling in me even if this could be the end of the world!  Our love was so naive.

2

Lately Karl slept with the lights on and with a finger sticking between the pages of his book.  Yes, he returned to the old habit of spending the night alone.  This way, in the morning there was no white leg over his leg sticking out from under the rough blanket.

He still woke up every morning thinking he was a Kafkian characters, created out of the stale air in the morning .Felt constantly dumbfound, suffocated by its power.  His faith that one day he will experience a weird metamorphosis occupied his every conscious moment, bothering him every morning now, as he felt rugged, rigid, and dry as chalk dust!

Occurrences, it seemed, have no logic but instead happened by default.  Looking for a fulcrum in his fast passing thoughts and recollections, Karl felt how thin the memory of the many women passing through his life, remained on his cornea.

15 years ago, he was in Switzerland  ... a kind of self-imposed exile.  In the central park of the castle, lying stretched on a blanket white as a cloud he was dreaming of naked women coming out of the gardens or the stones of the sidewalks, their slender shadows lingering graceful on the wall of the palace.

He noticed her ankles first, and long legs left naked often with each breeze. 
What to say?

“Wie heißt du?”

She smiled lame, retractile but did not answer with her name.

The arrogant Teutonic woman unveiled her legs by mistake, and the green grass framed her fecund thighs.  Karl imagined her vagina, a slot splitting the heavens, holding the nativity and disintegration of the world.

The woman is an extended God we follow!  He thought back then.

Usually the male is the dominant, confident, proud, and gallant one, but in Karl’s life, everything is reversed.  Every woman he addressed became abusive, showed her forms, the game leading every time to his broken ego and indecency.

The beautiful Amazon on the grounds of the old castle caught him in her webs ... He crawled like a snake into her blood, his troubled mind melting under her gaze!

One sticky night, he saw her on the street holding another man’s arm.  That night he stayed alone in his room worrying about every time his imagination, his dreams, losing one more battle and hindering his heart in return.

He later got drunk and sad .She had promised him nothing, never told him anything, and not even rejected him!

Ich liebe dich ganz Leben fur he remembers whispering but his words became lost in nature!

Liandra

Regular days seem to pinch Karl not an enticing way, but rather in an annoying, good for nothing way. 

He lies  in his bed every morning and wishes  for the benevolence of his muse but ends up soon feeling like a fool, trying to move  a blunt pencil on a piece of paper and realizing he cannot connect two words.

I am not sleeping, I am dreaming, he thinks to himself.

For example last night’s dream had something to do with his hands and shoulders growing ostrich feathers, morphing in some homemade, primitive, and rather underachieving brand of the proverbial Icarus.  There was no sun in his dream; instead, he felt rapid drops of rain, similar to the ones following a big ocean wave, on his skin.  Stimulated by this dream, most of his inadequacies, memories, and insecurities became clear suddenly.  He expected to be wet, but instead was as dry as usual, with eyes hung off the white ceiling and the morning breeze lifting a blank piece of paper on his writing desk. 

Awake now and tormented or rather challenged by the need to link words in sentences and rhymes, Karl remembered Liandra instead.  She had borrowed his thoughts a while ago and never returned them.

Passive, looking him impertinent in the eyes Liandra!

Liandra is that you?

Usually she did not reply!  Some days she came naturally like the morning light, other days she found a reason, like picking up something belonging to her, an object she left deliberately behind.  One day she left a simple hair clip on the bedside table.  Other day her silk stockings and cutout gloves of her stepmother's mother.  These odd habits together with her love for Karl were equally part of her anxiety and comfort.

She walked often in Karl’s room, naked, wearing only a scent of apples, oblivious to anything resembling reality.  She floated like a blaze through the rooms, bringing all the light around herself.

Karl asked nothing, watching her for as long as he could until the door closed behind her young shadow.  He watched her fire passing first through his space and later felt it burning his flesh.

“As of today I have no need for myself, I am all yours, living through you, do not forget!”  She whispered.

Liandra had three sisters.  Matia, the oldest one, committed suicide.  It is said they came from a dysfunctional family.  Alcoholic father, mother abandoned them when they were very young.  The girls were helped by men who wanted a woman for the night, one-week, one year.

Karl felt overwhelmed and afraid in her presence.  The fervent fear that reality could be but a dream, only a fantasy of women who teased him and wrecked his life so he made love to her as if she were a virgin and an angel, fragile and with a pure soul...

She left him one hot summer day but Karl remembers how the room walls felt suddenly frozen and the windows icy like his memories Ever since Liandra, he always leaves the door open to his room.  A table in the middle of the room, two chairs with three legs carved from linden wood and a huge chest where he keeps his clothes.  In the other room, the bed and the mountain of moldy books.

He later tried to find Liandra, so he wrote her a letter.  Her husband sent him a message back:

Liandra hung herself last spring, God rest her soul.

End

Karl hated the uncertainty of his past, present and future, even though he was used to its presence.  Life, lately, felt like a finicky concubine starting to ignore him.

In the days to come, he sold or gave away most of his furniture.  Every time he looked at his writing table, a feeling of exhaustion took over him, as a gourmand after a big meal; drowsy, drained and with a misshapen stomach.

I want to stop, He wrote, I do not want to take another fake step.  I am afraid to move the air in the room.  It is like the celestial poker game is over and now God collects his winnings carefully placing the cards in their package and throwing them in the drawer until the next game.

The sight of his books choked him.  For the first, time the moldy paper smelled terrible.

Air, more air, absorbing the stale odor of his writing, cramped in a past time constantly.  The past intruded on his words without his knowledge and it resulted in a delayed disruption of his inner self making him feel caged, the same way every woman made him feel in his youth.

Shy and lonely within his memories, tired of the wide spaces, Karl searched for each past moment with a clear mind and closed it in his own defined space.  There was nothing to write about anymore.

Write about what?

The many nights he loved?  Those memories were arranged, in time, on the side, on a path alongside his lifelong resignation and surrender to women.

When Ulm knocked at his door, of course they deflowered a few bottles and emptied them faster than the night.

Now the empty bottles, lined up as if naked courtesans bodies in front of the Athenians, gave Karl a feeling of terrible anguish.

Ulm, good old Ulm next to him looks towards the windows and Karl is suddenly expecting the glass to shatter from the intensity of his stare but instead silence takes a sit between them, legs crossed like a well-behaved woman.

Finally, when morning light slithered wet underneath the door, Karl decided to grab an old notebook.  He wrote:

Today, Karl, the great writer, is holding on the edge of the past because he is afraid he will collapse numb into the future!

Yeah, he was pleased with how graceful, soft as cotton candy, his words sat on the page.

Unique poetry is drawn from the soul, and prose from experience he continued to scribble on the notebook and then looked quickly at Ulm.

“Did you know this my dear old friend?”  He asked as if his thoughts were out loud and the painter heard them.

“Liandra, 10 years ago (before she hung herself) gave birth to a child “ Karl continued unrelated, “ But the child came out purple like an eggplant, a soft indigo colored piece of flesh.  They wrapped him quickly and buried him in a lonely wooden white box.”

The baby looked like Karl, they say, and every time Karl thought about him, he dreamed how this child could have written poetry, so well that any other words written by any other poets struggled unsuccessful to get out of the chambers of their minds like sparrows captured in a cage.  Maybe God hears the child breathing in the labyrinth of the past as his father did not know when he came or where he went, and now feared the child was asking his mother, Liandra:

“Where's my father, damn it? “

*

Crazy women, eager to see him blurry and in a haze, are now coming fresh in Karl mind each with the smell of their past.  Never understood them, but started anyway to peel each image from his memory, overlapping often one with another, until they all appeared clear in his mind.

He looked for peace all the time but the last couple of years peace felt like a deep hole he sat in while at his writing table, spinning tales and talking to pagan women ghosts buried in the walls of his room.  These spirits were accepting, deep embracing creatures, only concerned with their shadows.  Only they knew how to proceed so as not to disturb the quivering harmony Karl locked in his vertical fortifications.

Even so, just like the times when he was drunk on their aroma, the gray women hidden in his erect walls run off often to the harboring ships to welcome the sailors.  Loving them desperately, seeing them so perfect, past their lack of sophistication made it easy to restore and repair, upon their return, their virginal integrity, their light within, like a freshly dressed-undressed shape of an undine !

They intruded.  Lived everywhere.  From the tip of his tongue buried deep in the night between their thighs, to his feelings, thoughts, and sensory trances through the salty taste of blood hidden in his rough beard.  His hair grew wild on his face, ever since!

Staring at a silk stocking with a rip in it, suddenly replaced an entire philosophy.  A painstakingly and intricately developed thinking around wonderful faces became madness, restlessness, ugliness of today, tomorrow and forever.

Liandra left before he knew her so he must forget her. 

Lascia’s painted face on a small canvas, he dared not to touch.  Placed it instead between books and inevitably on his memories sill.

Penelope, Greek woman, as he imagined she was, never protested, was only slightly amused by him instead.  Maybe a little nervous.  A delicate redness was noticed on her olive skin and prominent cheekbones.  Almond-shaped eyes, irises like two huge black cherries, focused on him and a smile like a child is receiving a desired toy.

She seemed a lot like one of those desperate women ready to seize anyone only to prove themselves’ they had full control of their enticement.  The kind of woman mentally unbalanced, the one that offers herself quiet and unconditional only to watch the energy evade men’s bodies, completing an express desire to dominate and trample men under their feet.

From the first night, they fit together well, so well that for the very few times in his life he felt relaxed.  An unusual thing for him.  He discovered and experienced all sorts of things next to Penelope.  For example, in one of the clubs they found a room called simply The Dark Room.  A special place for those who just wanted to fuck, no strings attached.  Dark inside, no one talked or knew who their partner was.  For him and Penelope however, The Dark Room meant something else.  A method of recognition.  In complete dark, finding each other.  It was very exciting.  And the most amazing fact was that they always found each other.

Maybe destiny is a wine that you fill a glass, you drink one and then another, until you are drunk and fall sleep in a ditch.  A ditch that if you look down from afar you see it is a line in the palm of someone greater than you are.  One that you never knew the correct name.

Sure, memory is like a vortex, trying to suck his life while he looks for meanings.  He is awake now to the foreign eye.  Enjoys a cigarette with greed and remembers fondly his old neighborhood with streets shaded by linden trees in the summer.  Poets of yesteryear are still here but what about him, what about the new ones?