“She inspired you, you loved her and sang of her; her task was done.” – Franz Liszt in a letter to Hector Berlioz, 1854 The give of a soft pear surrendering to my teeth. The burst of plum in my mouth; juice dribbling down my chin onto my helpless blue shirt. The tickle of…
Category: MentalExpose
What else I do when I’m not writing.
Postcards from Istanbul /4
“When I met you, you were both for me: the sensual and the spiritual. The two can never separate…” – Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann Paris, 31 Oct 1957 Precious, precious one. The day closes on me again. I am left wondering just how little life is and how fleeting our time on earth….
Postcards from Istanbul /3
“When I feel like being with her I almost prefer not being with her So as not to have to leave her afterwards.” – Fernando Pessoa My precious one, Today my heart has been with only you. I miss you more. All this beauty I see fades before the way your face glows in my…
Postcards from Istanbul /2
“To write words I put a symbol in place of an absent sound. To write the words ‘I love you’ requires a further, analogous replacement, one that is much more painful in its implication. Your absence from the syntax of my life is not a fact to be changed by written words.” – Anne Carson…
Postcards from Istanbul /1
“What impels me to write you all the time? Before I can even turn around to look, from the unique destination, unique you understand me, unnameable and invisible, that bears your name and has no other face than your own, before I can even turn around for a question, at every moment the order to…
Home: Memory falls silent
The looms have fallen silent. You couldn’t imagine the stillness of the lake behind the house with its handloom factory. Men and women often on their second jobs, second shifts. The mills worked day and night and were filled to capacity, bench against bench. The local municipality even offered electricity cheaper at off peak hours…
What does it take to be yourself?
Who you are in the virtual world says a lot about who you’d like to be in real life. I’ve come to realise that Twitter isn’t about being who you really are but who you really wish you were. And this is true of many I follow. I grow weary of the incessant smart-assed tweets…
The opposite of love is not hate.
Don’t you dare ignore me. Not after you have drawn me in fingered my feathers and asked to be mine. Choose to forget me, and I will shower you with abject petals of indifference. Oh you will know what you have missed. I will make it so.
Neruda. What’s not to love?
‘And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us. … and so beneath my mouth you see again the unfulfilled plant of your life putting out its roots toward my heart that was waiting for you.’ *Images Copyright Mahinn Ali Khan
part-broken, part-whole 