Poems for All Seasons

Winter

Winter has arrived

She gave me a call a week ago

I was not home

I thought to call her back

Is she awake now, I thought

Perhaps I might call her in the morning

By then I could come up

With a funny story

How I missed the train and a cow

Was staring at me

From the other side of the railway track

I overslept

And now

Like the rest of the city

I am lounging under a blue fog

Of desolate memories

Spring

There is no nice hotel in this town,

Said Spring and turned into a hospital bed

I was lying about my sickness for a long time

I never felt better in months

Perhaps I needed attention

Perhaps

Songs that make us happy are always shorter

Than those which make us sad

I realize this and get up in the darkness

Of my own reflection 

Spring has nowhere to stay

Her bags are still unpacked

And yet the town has no plan

To build a hotel which won’t look like a sanatorium

Summer

Everything including shame and the last week of April

Is now on bet

The forest that leads to the mountain is so deep

That one can pretend to take rest without stopping

I was walking all morning

My shirt is wet with perspiration and doubt

Shall I ever reach the point from

Where I started my journey?

Will I?

The point is not missing

It has just gone out to collect an old debt

I shall let you know if it returns anytime soon

Then the world will see

And talk about us in whispers till June

Monsoon

The act of disappearing is the easiest

Said the man in black cloak

And disappeared

I sit at the corner of the bar

Holding his hat

Waiting for the rabbit to come

Out anytime soon

It seems the man was lying

Disappearing is difficult when you

Want to do it in the dark

There needs to be some light

Some recognition

That people at least knew

You were here

Otherwise it's too painful

Too stupid

Like announcing your death in advance

And living to see how

A premature monsoon washes off

Your footsteps in the hills

Autumn

The inglorious autumn

Appears in your letters

Like a ship without cabins

Like a soap without foam

Like a face without wrinkles

Like a death without mourning

The inglorious letter

Appears in chapters

Like a house without rooms

Like a dream without reference

Like a storm without centre

Like a story without beginning  

It is official now

Delusions are different from dreams

Fall

We were leaning on the railing

And expecting

It was I who told you about the city of Baghdad

How the streets there woke up one morning

And swallowed the caliph like a half-boiled egg

Later they died of indigestion

We were leaning and looking

We were looking beyond our city; our streets

Were supple and hungry

They grew around our legs and started

To tickle our darkness

Later they died of indigestion

We drew a straight line thereafter

And never tried to cross it

Lest we fell 

    

The Door

We got up early in the morning. We brushed our teeth. There was little blood in the basin after we gurgled and spat the water out. We were not sure whether the blood came from our gum or the chicken we had last night. It tasted suspiciously succulent was all what we could remember.

We had to report to the counsellor in five minutes. So there was no time for breakfast. In any case, after last night, we wouldn’t think about food for a long time.

The counsellor was his usual self, grumpy and continuously staring at his secretary’s cleavage. The secretary (actually a fembot) presented us a file. The file had ‘confidential’ written on its cover. We opened it. It had a picture of a beautiful girl standing next to a blue door. The door looked quite normal, but we felt a little uncomfortable. There was something unusual about the door. Perhaps it was the girl. We looked at her face and other body parts closely. She looked like a college kid separated from her friends on an excursion. Now she had discovered this door and was thinking about knocking on it. The friends must be waiting for her on the other side of the door. The thought made us even more uncomfortable. What if there was a wild animal on the other side? Or worse, nothing?

‘Do you find anything out of place in this picture?’ The counsellor patted the secretary on her ass and looked at us with a mischievous smile. We were confused. Should we connect the smile with the question or the pat? We got nervous and remained silent.

The fembot left the room. We tried to imagine what she would have been thinking if it was fifty years ago or if she was an actual woman. The counsellor must have been sued for sexual harassment. Fembots were introduced few years back precisely to avoid the pile of lawsuits that were cumulating after the invention of Viagra. Now with the fembot subordinates, there was no tension or fear. The only frustrating thing was these faux-femmes were given tentacles instead of legs to enhance mobility and speed. Some men, however, were still indomitable.

The counsellor, now fully concentrating on us, repeated the question, this time without the smile. We took a sigh of relief. There was no confusion anymore. He was indeed thinking about the pleasure of molesting a six-legged feminine robot, and neither the girl nor the door, when he was smiling like the gatekeeper of a whorehouse, a man who pretends to know your secret.

We sat straight in our chair and cleared our throat, ‘We think there is something wrong with the picture but we can’t put our finger on it. The door looks normal. So does the girl. But....’

‘Let me tell you what’s wrong. The girl or the door in isolation is perfect. Nothing amiss about them. But when you put them together, it becomes a problem. It’s not the objects themselves, but the relationship between them, which calls for our attention,’ the counsellor tapped his finger on the picture.

‘That sounds interesting,’ we said in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘I have a job for you. I specially recommended your name to the Chairperson and she agreed. We both think you will be perfect for this job.’

‘What kind of job?’

‘It’s not very difficult, to begin with. But it’s a lifelong responsibility. Are you up for that?’ The counsellor seemed a little tense. Perhaps he was aging too quickly.

‘That we can tell you only after hearing about the job in more detail.’

‘Fare enough,’ the counsellor leaned towards me, ‘I knew I could trust you. What I am going to tell you is a secret of supreme order. You have looked at the picture carefully, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, we did.’

‘Look at it once again. Take it home. We want you to locate this girl,’ the counsellor stopped abruptly and swallowed the words that were about to come out of his mouth. We looked at him with curiosity. What wasn’t he telling us?

He continued, ‘Your job doesn’t end there.’ Once again he stopped and looked at his nails. They were carefully trimmed.

‘What should we do next?’ We had to ask.

‘Never let this girl go near this door. By any means. That’s your job.’

‘Where is this door?’ We were getting a faint idea of the importance of this job.

‘You don’t need to know. Just keep the door and the girl separated. Stop her from finding the door.’ The way he spoke, it sounded like a metaphor. But we knew very well that was not the case. There was something horribly unmetaphorical about the whole situation.

Homecoming

I had always observed the man from a distance. He was sad like a ship alone on a voyage to New Zealand. His eyes matched the dim light of the lantern that hung over his head. The bar we both visited too often had a charm of its own. Sometimes I mistook it for the back office of a closed radio station. If you stayed there for long, melancholy dripped on your head in the form of Morse codes.

One day I went to him for a light. My matchbox was empty and the barman was nowhere in sight. I tried to remember whether I had ever seen him smoke. At his age, people do not trust the government, so my guess was he must be unmoved by the propaganda against tobacco consumption. To my surprise, he was not. He made a negative grunt, without even trying to hide his disgust. I felt like a fool and went out to buy a fresh box of matches.

When I came back, the bar was darker and gloomier. The barman had come back and was wiping the counter with a towel that resembled my mother’s wrinkled face. The old man finished his drink and asked for another one.

“It’s your fourth. Are you sure about the next?” The barman asked him, his hands still moving.

“You don’t worry. Give me my drink,” the old man knocked on the counter with his glass.

“And who’s going to pay for it? Do you have money?”

The old man looked a little restless, “You give me my drink now. I’ll pay you later.”

The barman didn’t reply. He wore an expression that could mean “Fuck off!” in Chinese. I got curious. I waved at him. When he came close, I asked him about the man. The man was a regular customer like me, but his tab was cleared by his son. He gave them strict instruction: in no situation he should be allowed to have more than four drinks a night.

I felt bad for the man. From his appearance it was clear that once he bought many people, known and unknown, their favorite drinks. Perhaps some of them were close to me. Perhaps I made love to them, or had a brawl with, in another life. Now was the time to pay my debt. I asked the barman to pour him another drink. He stared at me for a second but acted all professional at the end of the stare.

We finished our drinks without saying a word. Finally I got up and paid my bill. I felt that the old man had also gotten up. I came out. The man was behind me. I could almost feel his breath on my neck. I got alarmed. I didn’t want to be hugged by an unknown person for a simple act of generosity. Anyone in my situation would have done the same.

I was wrong. The man didn’t want to thank me. He was just standing behind me, motionless, still, fixed like a nail on the wall. I don’t know what got into me, but I also could not move my legs. Few seconds passed. I was expecting something to happen any moment. Nothing happened. The breath on my neck stopped at one point. I turned back and there was nobody.

I did not visit the bar for a couple of months. I was busy with my work. I went out on a tour and came back with a fever. I often dreamt about that man in my feverish frenzy, trapped in the twilight of medicated drowse, hanging from the strings of depleted consciousness. I saw him washing his hands in blood and whiskey, arguing with a street vendor on the price of cabbages, riding on a merry-go-round with a toothless prostitute – the usual Freudian imageries. When I started to feel better, an irrational desire took control of my mind. I wanted to meet the man once again, possibly for a chat, more possibly for the silence that he always wore like a cloak.        

I entered the bar on a late winter evening. I ordered my usual and the barman complied without a word. I noticed that the bar had changed a little in my absence. The sitting arrangements seemed different; the lights were brighter; and more importantly, the old man was not there.

“What happened to the old man?” I asked the barman. He was still wiping the counter. He looked up and said coldly, “Don’t you know?”

“No. What?”

“His son doesn’t let him come here anymore.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because you bought him that extra drink, that’s why.”

“So what? I thought it was a nice gesture.”

“Well,” the barman shrugged like a monk on vacation, “his son didn’t.”

I took the address of the man from the barman. At first he was reluctant. Then I offered him some cash and a sob story. My own father, I told him, had died of cirrhosis of liver and he used to look exactly like that man. Perhaps the story was unnecessary. He would have given me the address simply for the money.

It took me some time to find the address. The man lived in an alley behind a deserted shoe factory. As I marched to his house – an old, peculiar, damp building – I stumbled on few half-finished shoes lying around like dead soldiers. I could see from a distance that the door was open, slightly. A slim ray of light was beckoning me from inside. I shuddered and contemplated turning back. It was too late. I walked up to the door and pushed it open. I thought the door would make a screeching sound. It didn’t.

The door opened to a corridor that did not seem to end. I stepped in and gave a holler, “Is anybody home?” Obviously, there was no reply. Suddenly, I realized, the floor of the building was softening. As I was falling on the ground, I tried to count the doors on both sides of the corridor. There was none.    

When my senses came back, I discovered that I was lying on a bed. A familiar face was leaning on me, but I couldn’t recognize where I had seen it before. Then it occurred to me. I had seen an older version of the same face. This must be the son, I thought.

“Are you feeling well now?” The voice sounded disgruntled, but it could have been a bout of cold as well. I got up and extended my hand, “You may not know me. I am a friend of your father.”

“A friend of my father! What are you talking about?” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“Yes. We met at the bar. I once bought him a drink,” I folded back my hand and tried to explain. My head was throbbing with a headache.

“But…but,” the son stared at me with as much disbelief as possible for a college-educated TV repairman, “you are my father. Don’t you remember?”

My headache reached a point of no return. The clock was ticking. My head would explode any moment now. I went to a mirror at the corner of the room and looked at myself. The old man was there alright. I smiled at him and he nodded. I turned to my son and asked, “Where is my glass?”