TALKING TO MYSELVES
by
Shawn Edrei
Copyright Shawn Edrei 2012
Smashwords Edition
Cover by Maayan Haim and Shira Kaplan
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
This book would never have seen the light of day without the help and support of the following people:
My dear colleagues at StanzAviv, especially Daniel Savery Raz, Sabine Huynh, Michal Pirani, Wendy Mesguich and Mike Stone: you gave me the courage to step up to the plate, and here I am.
Omri Luzon, Adam Fisher and Yafit Shachar of the Tel-Aviv University Mad Poets: you kept the fires burning and the wheels turning when I needed them most.
Meyrav Koren-Kuik: When we’re old and grey, I’ll remind you that this was all your fault. You’ve stuck by me through Dutch invasions and bouts of hyperactive insecurity, and I wouldn’t be half the writer I am without you.
And finally, this book is dedicated to the mighty Karen Alkalay-Gut. Nine years ago a wide-eyed freshman walked into Poetry Analysis, not knowing what to expect. He emerged with the realization that poetry could be more, do more and say more than he’d ever imagined.
Introduction
Here’s the truth: I don’t have Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Here’s another truth: the concept of multiple personalities has fascinated me for years. I grew up in the pre-Internet age, when identity seemed so much more stable. You could add a few years with fake ID, dress in drag, or pay some doctor to hack off pieces of your face… but on some level, you could never really escape who you were or the world in which you were living.
Things are a bit different now. We make up names online, choose our sex and ethnicity, play roles. Maybe those roles are only a degree away from your “real” self; maybe you use the anonymity to become your own polar opposite. Either way, it’s a pretense – but when you spend so much time wearing a mask, immersed in one façade or another, it’s easy for the lines to blur. Mike Carey refers to this as a “familiar twenty-first century dilemma”: in navigating our lives, we assume whatever aspect is needed, and discard that persona when we’re done. Or, as Carey puts it, “we’ve all got at least one other face.”
And that was the idea that led me to start working on this collection of poems: what if the roles I play – teacher, jester, addict, artist, victim, chessmaster – are all as real as I am? What if they have names, functions, and the desire to express themselves?
It’s not that I wish I had DID; life is complicated enough without having my body hijacked at random intervals, to say nothing of the trauma it would take to develop that kind of splintered mind in the first place. But if those masks I wear wouldn’t come off, if I couldn’t control what persona I’d assume at any given time… well, I imagine it would look something like this.
So without further ado, allow me to introduce Jonathan, Shane and Lenore. In many ways, they’re just like me. In some ways… maybe they’re more.
JONATHAN
Jonathan was the first of my alters to emerge. A consummate romantic, he sees himself as an artist in the medium of nostalgia. He holds onto every memory of sibling rivalry, lost love and parental neglect, and dredges it up to fuel his poetry. Everything is magnified: discomfort becomes agonizing pain, momentary distraction becomes an endless drifting in the Void, love becomes an all-consuming inferno. And yet I sometimes think that of all my alters, he is the most honest.
The Invisible Man
His knees ache
and
his jaw is sore
but he continues
to service her
with furious
passion.
She just stares
into
the distance,
hands at her side,
face blank,
utterly silent.
He pauses
momentarily,
if only to verify
that he’s actually there
in
the room with her.
Remnants
I envy the Great
Turtle
who carries his home
wherever he goes.
So fortunate
no
part of him
is ever left behind.
No memories
of
other homes
troubling his mind.
Rainwalking
I have to force
myself
not to raise my arms
like the guy in that movie.
You
remember, the one
who broke out of jail
and got his whole
past
washed away.
I used to walk
the
streets of Manhattan
with you around me,
inside me, enveloping
me
in your cold indifference.
You smell the
same
after all these years
and so far away
but now you only
come
in moments, here-and-gone
before I even realize
you’d
stopped by.
Satanism
I left you
because
you demanded
to be Worshipped
like the living heart
of a
religion.
If you were any
religion
you would be Satanism:
demanding blood and
pain
declaring every day The End of Days
expecting
sacrifice
and promising nothing in return.
But if the world
converts to Satanism
and hellfire burns in every window,
in
every house, in every corner
of the Earth,
even then, I won’t
kneel at your altar.
Suzanne’s Diner
I am dreaming
of
a morning
when I wake up
in a diner
and the
waitress
whispers to me:
“I am here
to take your
order.”
So I tell her
“Nice to see you”
and I go up
to
the counter
and I order
cake and coffee
but she doesn’t
hear
me scream.
I’m remembering
an
evening
(though it did not
really happen)
when I stood
in
the cathedral
and I watched as
she approached me
and
her dress was
white as milk
and the church bells rang
so
loudly
and she smiled as
she walked past me
to the altar
and
the groom.
Now I’m
writing
someone’s story
and I’m working
on the
ending
It’s the tale of
a young poet
who is sitting
at
his table
and he’s searching
for the right words
and he
strokes his
long, hot pencil
and he comes
up with the
answer
writes it down
and goes to sleep.
Pandora’s Box
You stab me with
keys,
and turn them, yet you’re surprised
when the demons
come.
Hall of Mirrors
We drifted
apart
because I only look good
when seen from certain angles
in
light refracted
off polished glass.
While she is
content
to watch from afar,
her gaze bouncing
from one end
of eternity
to the other.
Brotherhood
I am
a better
man
than Cain
who struck
his brother down
because
the
love
that was not his
to give
he lost
to jealousy
and
spite
and he
would never feel
remorse
and I
will never
feel
like him.
Fires in the Night
I watch from my
window
as they build the bonfires again.
This high up they all
look like ants,
dragging scavenged debris behind them.
It’s the same
boast every year:
“This time we’ll make the biggest
bonfire
the world has ever seen.
We’ll darken the sky for a
hundred years.”
They pile the planks
against each other,
little triangle-shapes cropping up
everywhere.
Soon they’ll burn, and light up the field
all
through the night.
They don’t notice
the wood taking strange shapes:
here a woman bound to a
stake,
there a prone body wrapped in Grecian cloth,
here a
mountain of forbidden books.
They dance around
the fires,
these pagans pretending to be atheists pretending to be
Jewish,
obeying traditions for reasons they have never known,
for
reasons their ancestors have forgotten.
Tomorrow the sky
will be grey and stained
but tonight only wood burns.
Pillar
Sisyphus never had a
friend like you
to help him push that rock up the hill
to give
him the strength to endure
to cheer him up when it rolled back.
Juliet never had a
friend like you
to slap some sense into her
to let her vent
about her crazy family
to tell her no boy’s worth dying for.
Adam and Eve never
had a friend like you
to warn them that some things aren’t worth
knowing
to remind them that you can’t trust snakes, ever
to
ask them if the prize is worth the price.
And because I have
a friend like you
I’m going to be okay.
Nostalgic Pyromaniac
He likes to burn his
bridges
as soon as he’s crossed them,
putting chasms and
ravines
between origin and destination.
It’s not that he
enjoys it,
or fears being followed.
It’s so he won’t be
tempted
to ever turn back.
The Six-Sin Haiku
You go through the
day
without feeling my desire,
my hunger for you.
I want
everything
you could ever offer me
and I’ll have it all.
But it’s not
enough,
there must be some part of you
I’ve not yet consumed.
You should be
honored
to be the cherished victim
of someone like me.
Stop smiling at
him.
What’s he got that I don’t have?
Why do you want him?
My fury
unleashed
you spin away, a comet
and I watch you burn.
Singularity
You tell me
that
we’re approaching Singularity,
ascending to Point Zenith,
the
highest room in the tallest tower
in the largest city in the
world.
You say
we are
becoming something
other than what we are
and there is no more
room
for throwbacks and relics.
You insist
that
it’s already started,
that we have set our feet
upon the
path
and there’s no turning back.
I call your
name,
reach out for you one last time
but you turn to face the
dawn
and slip through my fingers
dissolving into light.
Holding Me Back (A Response To Singularity)
Finally.
After
all the broken promises
we are here, at the threshold
of
perfection.
We will be
immortal:
not just words but voices,
not just voices but
bodies,
beautiful and perfect and powerful forever.
And if there is some
whisper,
some nagging plea,
from someone I loved once upon a
time…
No matter.
I have the rest of eternity to forget it.
SHANE
Shane is bulletproof. A chaotic, irreverent 15-year-old, he’s secure in the knowledge that no power in this world can touch him, so he’s free to mock and jeer and verbally bruise anyone around him. Shane has no interest in politics, religion, ideology or love: he gets his kicks where he can and is quick to move on when the novelty’s worn off. When I apologize to someone, odds are it was Shane who offended them.
On The Bus
My poem is
strong,
made of steel and fire,
dipped in a toxin
of my own
making.
My poem stands
firm
and can survive the shock
of you plopping your fat
ass
down on it like a cartoon anvil.
If my poem knows
fear,
it’s that your sweat,
seeping into the page,
will
transform it
melting the
words
into shapeless black stains
until it no longer
remembers
what it used to be.
Reflection
He folds his
arms
and glares at me disapprovingly
and says: “You are not
the man I wanted to be.”
I stick my jaw out and
respond:
“Neither are you.”
Nine Lives
Which death do you
think
cats remember best?
Their first, when mortality was
still
a new concept, fresh as the blood
that spilled into the
gutter?
Their second, still tentative,
unsure if resurrection
really works
as advertised?
Their fifth, when they’re
spending lives
like tissue paper,
dying to escape the
consequences
of their actions
and vowing they’ll do better
next time?
Or is it their last, when they breathe
a great sigh
of relief
and thank their gods
that it’s finally over?
The Truth
We might have been
better off
without your lies, all those
deceptions you fed us
each night
before tucking us in.
Maybe instead of
filling our heads
with stories of hope and trust and idealism,
you
should’ve told us
the truth:
Sometimes
Cinderella’s slipper
fits another woman’s foot.
Sometimes
Robin Hood
keeps what he steals.
Sometimes Prince Charming
has
morning breath and herpes.
Sometimes the Little Engine
just
can’t.