dirt

I hold the pencil and it seems to grow in my hand as though it were made of cells, spontaneously regenerating. Alive.
It seems to grow, I seem to be able to make it grow, now, for there are so many things coming to the fore of my mind.

The words are blooming like graphite flowers on the page. Now in that empty space between sleeping and waking. free like a rock floating around in the Universe. And so I can write. I can remember.

I remember it like it was a dream.

Mother. Lying in the dirt. Wilfully mourning a bloody bundle. Wilfully mourning, rubbing the apertures of the bloody baby-sized bundle with an enriching humble dirt, so warm from the sun, so brown. Merging minerals, elements, with the not-quite daughter. Rejuvenation from the outer of the womb.

She is not repulsed. I understand that she wants to reclaim her.

My sister.

I can understand that she wants to reclaim her, for I remember wanting her too, but she was never ours to begin with. She left us before she came to us.

Mother. Approaching me. I see that she is approaching me, bringing with her a small piece of gelatinous flesh, dripped with red like a flower losing its petals. She goes quiet, her sobs and harsher, more animal cries dropping to a calm inner cry.
Her eyes stare. They are glass balls. Her eyes stare ahead. And then she brings a wobbling but perfect piece of flesh to her face. I think to myself right then that she will rub it against her face like she does with soft leaves when she walks amongst nature.
She brings the flesh to her face, testing it. on the point of her tongue. Testing it.
She tests it, earnestly, like probing with her tongue.

I quiver, externally, body vibrating. I quiver, whimper, 'you're eating my sister. Earnestly.'

She howls. A wolf will howl at night. This was the middle of the day, mother and son out on the green prickly lawn surrounded by gum trees like a fence. This was more urgent than time would ever permit, and so she howls, without the presence of the dark and the full moon.
She howls and her teeth stick out of her red and bloated face, face as emotive and decorated as a baboon's. She sees young Adrian standing there, she sees me watching her like she is a scene. 'I've imbibed her,' she says, 'but I don't feel her.' And her throat is choking on tears and foetus, choking, pipes clogging and choking, and she still gets out the words: 'you try'.

That Adrian of the past is a lot more 'normal'. Or so you could say. He hasn't had time to reflect on this incident, he hasn't had time to develop. You could say he is waiting for this experience to happen to him and change him forever.
He stands there, a bodily image of a child. He stands there, and does nothing but stand. Sometimes doing nothing means doing something more than doing something.

Her fish's eyes, they fix on me. Cold and fixed like fish's eyes. Cold and blue, and not sad, not pained. Cold and fixed, complementing the red background of her face, blue and fishy and swooping down upon me, sweeping towards me like a multitude of pens, their graphite nibs irascible, petulant, and stabbing the page as my own does, now, in haste. They say that fish are not sentient in the way that humans are, or not in the same way, not in the way that we would ever understand. And they will never understand us.

Cold and fixed and unrelenting, superglued to the bodily image of me.
My face and hair become painted with the blood of a piece of my sister, as mother's arm reaches out and daubs me desperately. Her breath is hot and smells of the iron of blood, like the smell of money, of fish. She lifts her arms to push the foetal 'cake' into my mouth and the rasp of her past-shaven underarms grates on my vision as though she were rubbing her underarms on my eyeballs. Clutching me by the hair, the shirt, my arms, she shakes wetness, tears saliva and blood, onto me.

I feel like i am the spattered drops i have on me, now. Torn apart and not whole. I have become my sister, but I do not think right then to tell her. I do not think right then to stop her.

It is emotion. It is mixed and raw emotion, as raw and infused with potential, as a barrel of yeast and sugar. This is what I wanted, right? To relive this?

To be able to write?

Act

In my velvet mahogany seat, and I am surrounded left and right by other spectators. No one sits in front. No one sits in front because I am in the front, the front row, so close that I am blessed, by the light spattering of their spit.

The actors' spit. I can see the grease and sweat balling on their foreheads, bubbling to the fore from behind their beautiful and thick makeup, which they wear like second skins. Dressage for the face.

They rejoice, in their feathers and their magenta-and-lime suits, and look at us as much in the front as we look up at them.

We examine their bodies, their screw-up faces and expressions, their magnificant voices which burst forth, in auditorial blooms, and we find it disconcerting, that they can look at us, stare at us, perhaps more than we can look at them for any period of time, almost like we are the real ones on show, we are just as capable of feeling intimidated and that the construction of the stage is nothing more than that - a construct.

Staring at someone is like staring at someone with your guts. Pushing through your skin, visceral, the kind of thing that we tend to keep to ourselves, the kind of thing we tend to keep on the inside. But they stare, they stare with such confidence, and they do not feel ashamed.

Cinderella in a dream, a dream in cinderella

Weaving a large arc through the air with my index finger, I disrupt the curtain.
That people behind the curtain can see this disruption, is obvious. I hear them talking about the curtain and the way it is moving, the way there must be someone behind there.

They are so slow in finding me.

I try to stand straight, try to not move the curtain, so that my existence will just be, what it is, behind the curtain, and not exposed furthermore.

I chased a butterfly behind here. I think it was in my mind.

I saw it flying, spreading its wings, not with a usually-repugnant weakness - so characteristic of fellow 'flutter-bys' - those childish, flitting phantoms - but with the strength, the muscle, of a bird. I guess it gave me hope, here behind this curtain.

And now they're giggling. A posse of people, genders indeterminate at this stage, like my own, ethereal because of their being on the other side of the curtain. Unknown.
Genders indeterminate, giggling, threatening, wanting to pull me from behind the curtain, pull me, a person, a person who only wants to chase butterflies and not grow up and not have to go hunting for a prince. (Or princess... but in their society, they haven't come across that situation before.)

Just when I am beginning to feel accustomed to the dark of the space enshrouded by this curtain, the curtain parts, lets in light, and I see that it is actually a harsh red of woven red thread, splitting the comforting black. A reptilian, feathered hand slithers in - red in a reflection of the curtain - and an image as sharp as murder comes to mind as it snatches. Snatches for a person, a person behind the curtain, snatching for me. Nails affix to my shirt, and nails clutch at the folds of my belly, scratching for something human, scratching for what I know I can't give, clasping around me, my flesh, my hair.

Suddenly I am in the light. It is like being evacuated prematurely from the womb. I look up at my tormentors, my friends, my people wanting to find me a mate. So that I do not have to be alone. So that I do not have to remain uncontrolled. They are looking for a prince for me, to 'help' me out from behind my curtain.
They are each masked, with feathers, glue, and a white-speckling paint. Masquerade. Concealing their identities, conveniently. They cannot be real, or real in themselves, because they strive to find complementarity in people, others, like fleshy mirrors. They are not naked, as I am, having been drawn from Curtain, prematurely.They do not react to this obscure nakedness, they just measure it with their judgment, their rulers, their perceptive and observant eyes. They actually hold measuring tape around me and do the equations, calculating the likelihood of my beauty.

Conclusion: this will not do. I am not good enough.
I have to go back behind the curtain, I should, but they need me to fill this space, they need the marriages to ensue, so that everyone can live 'happily ever after'. Only I know.

That deep down they're jealous of my nakedness.

I am dabbed, viciously, with a surplus of glue. Handfuls of feathers find their way to my eyebrows, my neck, chest, legs, and reptilian, feathered hands, go into a frenzy, like chickens pecking for the last morsel of grain.

'You'll look passable', they say, they chant. (They have ways of chanting in unison; the meaning of this chorus I am not privy to.) They laugh, they giggle, speaking at me, teeth flashing red and white like poisonous insects, hovering all around me.

The masquerade ball, does not exist for me as it does for every other person there. In a dream-like illogicality I close my eyes, and nothing exists, any longer. Nothing exists but butterflies behind my eyelids, flashing like the after-images of lights. I squeeze my eyes so tight, I can feel and hear and see the purple blood pushing through the vessels of my eyelids. I hold my eyes so tight I think I will stop seeing.

But it is another curtain.

Clock. Strikes 'twelve'. Home is barren. A once-peopled landscape rots in destitution, and rots with a peacefulness I know will not last. They will return, and there will be more masquerade balls. I haven't found my prince. And, as they say, I haven't found my validity in this world, validity in the reflection of another's eyes. According to them: I have not discovered that I am human.

Ezra Pound.
I like the name.
I don't know why.
It could be a girl, and a boy, both poured into the one person. A mixed-gender pancake. A fictional character who hasn't yet been shoved into an identity or a plot; the seams of his/her confines remain unstitched.
My Ezra Pound.
A pseudonym for an anonymous writer, who writes from the perspective of both a man and a woman, equally well, a social degenerate, and a skilled superior, a primally organic being, as well as a prude, and a vegetable.

My name, is Ezra Pound.
I don't know if it is a good thing or an interesting thing.

I am not here to confess anything at all. I just have a disorder. That's it. An identity disorder. I am different things to different people. Depending on their needs. Needs which come crawling out of their heads, and are shadowy behind the irises of their eyes, transportable through their pupils. I don't think I am the only one who can see them.

Wants come to all people like inevitable dreams, touching you softly in the night like clouds' fingers on the heads of mountains. They haunt you when you wake, they make you thirsty for their fulfilment. They make you thirsty for water, too, should you resort to panting in anticipation of the fulfilment of your dreams.

If you're silent, people talk. The space lets them open their mouths, gives them room to enter into the air around them their needs, their wants. No one who is alone will sit there and stare, relaxed, doing nothing. They feel uncomfortable, because they see in full bloom their wants, spiralling open to meet and fill the vacant spaces like flowers facing the growing sun. They play with papers, read, write, talk, concentrate on their food, fiddle with their watch, and examine the clogged pores in their forearms.

The boy. Ezra Pound asked the boy, Josiah, to write his own piece.
On the manuscript, methodically, he wrote the notes out c, d, e, f, g, g, g, f, e, d, c, c, c. He is correct in where he puts the notes on the staff, making a small mound out of crotchets.
We talk about the other students, flirting with life. I make the lessons into so much more than centred around black and white keys, naturals and sharps; I like to teach people about the spaces between the tones.
'Promise you won't tell,' Josiah says, 'but me and Emily are in love.'
A child, confessing to an adult. Magic.

I like to suck on other people's dreams.
'That's fantastic,' I say, my eyes blooming wide like flowers to the sun.

bus

He sits before me. Head twisted, directed left. His clothing is the colour, the texture, of old paper, greyed in the creases and cracks, fibrous to the touch. Large earlobes, he has, they say that earlobes keep growing when the substance behind them has ceased to grow, when the growth of the bones has slowed to a halt. When a person must continue to live with what they have, skin starting to deviate, sagging outward, for want of something else.
His head is twisted to what is behind the glass of the window, and the afternoon sun pierces his translucent iris, revealing an outer layer of light blue, surrounding the warm brown inner layer, like a strongly-brewed straight tea.

I swear I've seen him before.
Slicing fruit, depositing portions into short plastic bags, his stall vying for attention next to the mamak places which are bunched up around the corner. I've seen him before, he slices, he dices, he stares ahead, but he doesn't see the people, he sees his thoughts, his boredom, and the milky haze of the sky which slows all work in the afternoon and inspires nostalgia.

His papery clothes shake like sheets around his thin frame as he steps off the bus, into the dusk.