Bogert Made
For Pan Opium, whom I have yet to meet.
Pomegranate. Pan Opium.
A real pomegranate in Siberian winter is such that it has inside each seed a clear crack branching out like a crystal. I call those cracks ‘damages’. A damaged body of a pomegranate. My migraines look similar – as though a crystal crack in a sickly, frosty pomegranate of my brain. This is a crack that continues to grow further and blossom into the right side of the head.
The migraine painfully releases me from the rest of the world – from dish washing, from any plans or responsibilities of love. Every time, I enter the migraine grove quietly, with a pinch of carefulness. After having stepped into it with one foot, I immediately end up there fully, and soon after. This pain started about fourteen years ago and since then I have grown akin to it. She is a nurse that comes to spare you from your anxiety, dreams, anticipation, because there are too many of them, and they get in a way of living well.
She is a nurse that chops off your leg so you don’t suffer. In my case, it is not a leg, but rather the whole ability to function. Every time the nurse leaves, I am happy to observe the emptiness that she leaves behind the shut door.
I then convert the emptiness into the soil for something new. Into some premature happiness of new anticipation, hopes,
frustration,
and hopes.
We live in blizzards and circles.
In this liquid world, nerves shimmer in the sunlight. In this liquid world, Pan Opium, my friend, is born. An unsleeping creature. A creature that understands through all languages in the world and all substances. A creature flowing in the immaterial translations of perception. The vagabond of our mind.
Vain asshole,
mind glowing,
a gentle son.
May burst into tears
with no evident reason, but just because of how beautiful music is.
With purple eyes.
Pan Opium lives in the migraine groves.
Outcomes
The worst thing is to come from fear. When the fear has sealed up your testicles and yet, you know you must move on. Start from the point of mortification. Same thing with my writing. I am roughly thirty, and now is the first time when I begin to emerge from a new genre. To soften the stone balls, let’s call this a diary. Diary means nobody is going to read this. And thus, I can write anything I please, and thus, I can spread into any direction on the paper and not be punished for it.
Paper or a laptop? Pen or pencil? Tea or water, to be or not to be? If this is a diary, the writing could be messy, or vice versa, too clean, sterile, or pompous.
Or nothingness.
I am slowly walking around in the room thinking about how to start the census. Let’s begin with the redhead. He is naked and red skinned because he has just had a shower. He is redheaded and a touch suffocating in all his red fullness. As though he has strangled me with his unquestionable love, and there is nowhere to escape. Two lazy bells are hanging between his legs, the legs are those of a cougar. My perception of him changes a few times a day, depending on whether I have had any food in my stomach, or if he has smiled to me or, depending on what he has said, or what others have told me today about life. Depending on whether I am irritated or calm, what kind of music I am listening to and what kind of fate I choose for myself – a fate of evergreen gentle overgrown by beautiful children; or a fate rushing through fiercely, burning and nearly imperceptible.
Fate, even, and calm means the cougar is good, appeasable, controllable and, perhaps, a friend. If Fate is fast and insane, the cougar will one day gnaw through my throat, and blood will franticly and violently burst out of my neck. I haven’t yet decided which cougar is mine, and which fate is mine. The cougar has no idea, of course, about any of my thoughts.
He, my beloved R., is my creation from start to finish, a creation of imagination, desires, fears, daring.
He doesn’t know that the image of him is the leaves whirling in the spring wind. Right now, you are so young and look like an 18-year-old. Wait, but now, if you dip your face into the shade - you are old. You have so many wrinkles.
You are getting old again.
Next is Y., my son. Checkmate. When giving birth to a human, you create one life and one death.
I have inspected my household: the goo has moved and began to creep away, the balls have softened up and become long wings, and are now carrying me lightly around the world, and into prose, with the stunnedeness within limits, measured anticipation and somewhat hidden curiosity.
I tend to want to start with a conclusion. Imagine writing about yourself in a summary: you have done this and this in your life, wrote this and that, and acquired this and that. You have concluded what your life is like, and now you can live through the whole scenario that you have made up for yourself. This would be great, but unfortunately conclusions only emerge postmortem.
I, however, have always wanted to have a known outcome in the beginning, for safety and confidence. Then I would unfold the outcome, as though an onion, as though I start and live from a complete deadness. This is how I begin here, from and out of a headache on a Saturday, and roll out my life again, from flat land and into the clouds.
​
A man without a calling
When ideas and plots are finished, then (!) life for oneself begins. A man without a calling is the happiest man.
I walked out of my apartment in the middle of the day today and had no idea what I was going to do. There was a text without a calling, too – wallowing afoot in a puddle. A man around the corner was dripping down the street. A needless crack\woman swooped me up
towards
ran downwind.
I died and was born again – tired, not knowing why,
without a calling, nice and languidly. A train was looking at me
as though a shady\dim dog. Indecisively.
Under the window rain poured
behind the window a blob of a person of another
on a blob of a bicycle.
On the windowsill in a plant pot,
from inside the window
draft, breeze.
Having examined everyone from any possible angle and now satisfied, having galloped all over the edges. Yet to fall asleep and sleep – life is beautiful and versatile. Fair head in soft gloves fingers. Smoldered and smoldered - snowstorm.
Short thoughts of a Siberian as though short winter days. The treasure chest has shut down. I have a task to write something but cannot give birth - everybody is hiding. Looking through the skinny hole (at the world outside?). Not able to turn in any direction, stuck. Will harbor here for a while.
However.
Story of life
There are some very generous people in the world, they waste themselves on life, they do a lot and give a lot. I, however, am short and scarce (very rare). And in all honesty, there is not much content in life that’s left after you carve out all the lavish words and descriptions.
I was born very soft. In curls and skin. Mother <–> father.
Then I stiffened a little because I got rubbed against other people, too, growing and stiffening. And then there were rains in California, and I softened again. From my son. My son liquified me. Life, come mold me.
Got softer out of despair. While nobody could see. And honestly, I do not need to understand what’s what.
It is possible that I am just too lazy.
People around are walking their dogs and kids.
Good morning and have a good day