There is always a vicarious pleasure in being in the familiar. It might
hide, melt away, steal in passages in old books, or torn magazines, it
might get lost in poems of years forgotten but the rupture in the
familiar never allows it to disappear completely. Its somewhere there in
the smells of a towel, in the memories of old worn out clothes, in
stains on coffee mugs, in a face which we never saw, on a tree where we
refused to etch its muse. It is always at hand, waiting to lay its
grips, like a scorpion, like a death which repeats itself after every
beginning, after every closure, after every opening. It just takes you
in its arms when you had thought you left it far behind, when you
thought that for once you won the game of hide and seek. Yet the torment
of hiding, the torment of never being able to be found, the blackness
of getting lost, the tower of silence weighs heavily on you, it starts
from the eyes, then you hear its voice closing down, speaking of a
forked tongue chiding you for getting lost in the wilderness away from
the home you built, it settles on the skin, slowly carving its way to
the nerves through the very sinews you had hardened in the
unfamiliar...it settles as a foreign taste on the tongue, but slowly as
the saliva gathers around it, it starts caressing itself and suddenly
you feel the hunger in the bowels, the same bowels which had refused
it...it cracks open the skull, teasing you for reasons for denying it
all this while, it chides you, scoffs at you, uses expletives unknown
for not letting it in...it has been waiting for you to come out of the
door, the moment your feet discards the soil on the door mat it sticks
to your shoes and stealthily enters into the bed, it discards its
clothes in the shower and from the foam of the soap it rubs your body
clean of the unfamiliar....it touches all those parts where the
unfamiliar had settled, fights its memory, accepts its own lost friends
in the unfamiliar, signs a truce with some and then finally enters into
your nightmare. words after words you deny them, long running the
struggle against memory, but now the familiar settles with the
unfamiliar, both biding their time, to come to you, slowly entering your
words, your verses, your poems, which no stranger can see....
