THE BATS OF BETHESDA

THE BATS

They have been there for a while. They hang like black fruits on the flawless ivory trunk. Considered as vile creatures like the rowdy assembly on the poolside of bethesda: cripples, lepers, blind men, everyone under the marble shade, including their specie are outcasts. They have automata tracking lens as eyes. It glares with burning pupils searing through the desperation that rises from unspoken sufferings. Every night since they've haunted Bethesda they would scatter sonar on the skies of the horizon as if calling someone from the void of the sea and the dessert.

They are on a mission.

BETHESDA AND ITS POOL

It is Jerusalem's welcoming committee. It perfumes the foul morning breath of its all-day-half-asleep citizens. Though clad by colorful stones and metals of pride, its stairs stinks an array of ill-forgotten unfortunates - the outcasts. Behind its quintuple pink porches is a gift and a curse, the famous Pool of Bethesda. Long ago there was an angel that popped from the clouds and stirred the tap waters of the pool and it never was the same for the outcasts.

Or was/is it?

HEALING 101

Anytime bubbles appear on the pool's surface, whoever dives in first will be washed away from his suffering, healed from infirmity, welcomed to the tiled roads of the city, received again by the family, cleared from the damnation of the eyes of a self-righteous religion. Healed.

But when did illness become a debasing factor for persecution? When did healing become a sorrowful conditional embrace of reality that is acceptance?

THE SUBJECT

What if you were a paraplegic? When the bubbles appear who would carry you if your family rejected you the burdensome vegetable? Paralysis is always an either way affliction.

The bats are on pry. Sonars rippling. Isolation is already a ripped-off curtain.

HEALING 102

..."I can't, sir," the sick man said, "for I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred up. While I am trying to get there, someone else always gets in ahead of me."

..."Stand up, pick up your sleeping mat, and walk!"

THERE WERE NO BATS IN BETHESDA EVERSINCE

MORE SAND

not all that glitters is gold.

The wild sunshine danced on the floor of his misty eyes. The songs of the birds are perching on his ears, they sound like roars of the indescribables, later on it will sound like the wooing of a static frequency, on electricution.

giving theory a feet.

"Scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes with a lot of butter will do". The next and only loud spoken words after whispers of confession on an altar of piled up rocks. At least, they listen better compared to Father Vergara who never even bothered to drop by again after he gave him cold splash of unkind, insane verbal assaults coupled with a foul spit on his purple robes.

masked purpose.

Clasping these hands together and forming a sanctuaryof fingers are a sign of despair. The mouth speaks insurgency. Rubbed knees sinking in waxed floor. In the night. In the cold. In the darkness... which was never made in the first place. Let me hear you say again, "Let there be light".

easy on the carpet.

You were like a blanket. You embraced my vision with blinding white. You covered me while i was sleeping. You rolled warmth through my feet. Am I like the coal beneath your icy crest?

happy as december.

The future is a broken eyeglass that have finely drawn cracked lines, securing an unclear path, it is like a picture of roots spread to the ground. All we see on the broken lens is hundreds of reflections of our own eyes. Then shall we take off the broken eyeglass to see what lays on the path. See the present to avoid future tense.

i bear a resemblance of what i've been through.

BEYOND AND BENEATH SOCIAL NORMS

Be quiet deepest secret

simmer me sin
simmer within

the tundra of your whispers
the field of aborted dreams

when can it be real?
if truth be as lies
if lies be as truth

the countless efforts for sanity
are persistent assaults to rationality

vanity's lullabies
has been singing

i have been done
i am none
too late for rescue

simmer me sin
simmer within

Be quiet deepest secret

life is a sleep


What could not be sin? That which cannot be seen?

Downward thrust to the heart's deepest dungeons of pleasure. Pounding and pounding desires with aggression like powdering stolen wheat. Stolen from the truth. Stolen bread is sweet. Stolen water is sweeter.

All these speak from the back of every mind. Hidden from the innocent.

to hell has gone
my thoughts are one
with heaven
but in this world
my heart has bled
for the decision
that i have to think
with the back of my mind
that looks at tears
as a drivel of pleasure

PAINTED

I am a portrait of anguish. Conceived by the images of the deceased. Glossed with a dark ink of torment. My face is screaming silently of agony; a protruding skull on canvass, wrapped in pale skin. I could have fallen out of the frame if not for these dead veins that embrace my bloodless chest.

Then Death came and signed a contract of life for me. Pulled out from the painting, I walk this afterlife of black and gray.

I am now in this opera where the stage is a throne of bone. I entertain condemned souls with surreal imitations of the living. Though this existence is short of reality, I relish every breath. I embrace every sound of apathetic clapping and lifeless laughing from an audience of degenerates. I savor every sensation of this animated body.

Just as I somehow started to appreciate living, Death came back to end my contract.

I ran through the crowd of shadows. I hid in the midst of dead vests. But, with only a tragic stare from his hollow eyes, I felt the air seized from me. I am weakened. And as I tremble, this body is turning to mist. The canvass is sucking me back. And I cease to live.

Death is my artist. Life is what i am deprived of, and it is what the living can't see... in this horrid masterpiece that is me.

#21 E KENT, SE ENGLAND, CINQUE PORT

John doesn't enjoy his daily half past eight dinner. He thinks sandwiches are boring. What he looks forward to is dessert.

Every night, when the clock hits nine John is pressed against the wall of his room, under the darkness, his looks, through the wooden jalousie. His nightly dessert is to let his eyes crawl on her soft skin, up to the curve of her shoulders, to her firm breasts. He can taste her sweetness from his room. His delectation is to see her take off every cover that she wore during the day, may it be orange, red, purple or white. He can even guess how she matches her bra to her skirt, to her blouse and to all her silky underwears.

Tonight is different.

Though pressed against the wall and eyes through the wooden jalousie. He didn't gaze through her dimly lit room. He even forgot the pleasure of voyeurism.

It's past nine and she wasn't there. Dessert wasn't served.

John walks towards the bed and in the darkness of his room, in the mist of his eyes, he can still see her purple bra, her smooth arms, the glimmer of light on her legs. And as his right hand is pressed on the cushion of the mattress, his left hand spreads her legs apart.

This is the first time he enjoyed dinner. Twice in one night. A different sandwich.

THE PARABLE OF ZEBEDEE

The faces of clouds have decided to frown today. Their stares mimic the waves of the sea.

(Forgetting is a way of turning from a crumpled memory. Hope as a blue sky is like reading blank pages; nothing to read is as to a cloudless sky.)

Nimbus inhales and holds his breath. He assembles a revelry committed to his vanishing. His purpose, a phoenix of the sky.

Engrossment. Momentary adherence. Letting go. The unavoidable cycle.

I am the clouds. You are the sea. You keep on coming back to me. I keep on letting go.

Mark 1 :19

...He called out to them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat and went off after Him