Poetry - From Houston to Holy Land: An Oleh's Journeys

The Portrait and the Void/הדיוקן והריקנות

Within an hour she manifests in twain.
By sunset, she is indescribable, uncapturable, unparalleled beauty.
Painted in hues only conceivable by the eyes,
and unable to be imitated by the hands.
All we can do is create facsimiles of her glory, the sun setting along her horizon.
In her, we see the awesomeness of G-d Hands, the boldness of His works,
the ultimate power of Creation.
As the sun’s rays bounce on our skin, we stare off into her distances and see
blues of every palette; our dyes could never begin to reflect this spectrum.
We hear the waves crashing, the tide ebbing and flowing, the power of the sea unbound.
Magnificence in reality, divinity captured in a moment.
The sun’s setting fills our bosoms with awe.

By night, she becomes an entirely different entity.
Gone is light’s warmth, gone is the pomp of the sunset, gone is the majesty.
All that is left is the darkness and the feeling of endless space;
and the sound, the sound and the feeling of the ocean’s endless depth.
You can stare into the void, never seeing the horizon, but feel the strength surrounding you.
It is not magnificent, it is humbling. It is calm in it’s power, but is unending.
This is the place where nightmares come from,
the unknowable mere feet below the surface.
Will something peer back at you from the pale, or will the emptiness
swallow you whole?

The sea is both beautiful and mysterious,
both life-giving and life-taking,
both magnificent and dreadful.
She is our eternal mother, and she always calls out to us through the waves.
We cannot help but stare and hope to see something on her horizon,
but what it brings we shall never know.

The things I cannot say have become more powerful than what I can/אני לא יכול לדבר עליהם

Secret, defined as something that is kept or meant to be kept unknown or unseen by others.
We do not speak of them, lest we betray their very essence;
but sometimes the invisible makes up the foundation of how we live our lives.
The history we do not tell to others, the things we hide behind smiles,
behind reassuring eyes,
behind the great lie that everything is ok.
They say that the truth will set you free,
but it is our secrets that define us.
We all wear costumes in this performance of life, hiding what we really think and feel.

I have a secret, or at least one of many.
I cannot tell another living soul about it, but it burns inside of me.
It tears at my heart, thrashing about in my chest, screaming from inside
to be set free.
It is a secret from everyone close to me, shared with only those bound to it.
It is something that I want to build an edifice to, because it is a secret that I built my foundation upon.
There is no physical monument, save the scars that will slowly fade with time;
but my memory of it will never fade.
So I must write it here, even if I am writing about nothing that exists past my own walls.
I must make a mark of it somewhere, I must at least acknowledge its existence,
even if I can never let it see the sun.

I would walk to the middle of the forest,
find a tree that reaches to heaven,
and carve this secret into the bark.
Leave it somewhere I would never visit again,
let it be marked somewhere else forever so I can leave my own behind.
Perhaps one day someone would come upon it and share in it with me anonymously, never knowing its source.
An eternal bond made between strangers to cement one long gone.

Not a day goes by that I do not look down at them,
these remnants of a memory forever etched into my flesh.
I run my fingertips over the scars,
transport myself to the moment of their genesis,
and the moments that they capture.
I am addicted to my past, this stumbling block to my own progress,
I cannot leave them to whither, I cannot countenance their fading.

But I must leave it here, lest further temptation lead me to the deluge.
Life must be lived with things unsaid, actions untaken, feelings never shared,
but they must not turn into regrets.
It is the way of life to have secrets.
Everything cannot be shared, to do so only leaves the ground beneath your feet exposed.
May I always remember, even when they fade away, because I never want the memories to leave my recollection.
It is too precious to part with, to intimate to share, but I must say that they exist; these secrets we build our lives on.

I do not understand/אני לא מבין

I do not understand.
Surrounded by a sea of words, sounds familiar, meanings hidden behind the mist.
Matters and subjects I know intimately made foreign by ignorance.
I miss punchlines, shared understandings, the feeling of
being part of something greater than oneself.
Eyes, mouths, and sounds blanket me in alienation.
I pick up a word, a morsel, only to have the slice taken from beneath my tongue.
Why do I subject myself to this?
This continued exercise in my general separation from society?
Must I bang my head against the wall again and again
until the words finally seep between the cracks in my skull?
I want to speak, to laugh, to express, to share, to love;
I want this probationary period of ignorance to end.
I almost hate that I heeded the call to return,
for it was spoken to me in a language unspoken here.
Am I doomed to slowly slowly?
Slowly slowly I am losing my will.
Slowly slowly I wish my ears did not hear.
Slowly slowly I am losing my connection to humanity.
I will do anything, slowly slowly, to end this partial existence.

This night never ends

All of these nights just blend together, and they’re killing me slowly,

Each and every night never seems to end,
blending together in a maelstrom of insomnia, rumination,
and endless loneliness.
1 am, 2 am, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am,
meaningless demarcations in an experience that is truly marked by descent into
the void, the emptiness, the staring at the ceiling wondering when this will all finally be over with.

I stopped praying to G-d long ago for any kind of solace,
now I pray to Him only for an end; or I pray to the pills to take me anywhere but here.
When I walk the streets to escape from the sleeplessness, I only encounter the piercing feeling of loneliness.
Calling numbers that will never pick up, having conversations to fill the emptiness, desperately clawing at anything that will make a dent in all this pain I feel.
How do you tell someone that I am talking because the silence draws me deeper into madness?

Nights turn into weeks, weeks into months, and soon,
living becomes a plod to oblivion to the slow cadence of a death march.
Days don’t seem like days, they are a blur, all time becomes a binary experience:
with people and feeling alive enough to live or being alone enough to feel like you’re not alive.
I close my eyes for the few hours rest I can wrestle from the heavens, and when I awaken,
I feel alone with nothing but the remnants of nightmares and alarm clocks to wish me good morning.

Even a nap is dangerous.
Night terrors rob me of any relief, waking to an altered reality, caught in the dreamscape, panicked, and feeling like I can still hear the screams and violence inches from my face.
Uncontrollable sobbing, gasping for air, feeling life strangling me, why would I ever want to wake up?
Caught between the horrors of what my sleep brings and the reality that never seems to really exist,
why wouldn’t I choose the devil I know over whatever unknown this world brings?

But these nights, these damn nights, they kill me over and over again.
Restless, waiting, disappointed, fearful, and all so alone.
The loneliness is the true torture, the real demon that haunts these sleepless evenings.
In prison, in your cell, at least you have someone to talk to.
In this prison of mine, I have to make up all of the voices.
I hate what they say to me, and I hate myself for talking back to them.

So I call, and I call, and I call the list.
Every name a possibility, someone to give me a break from the yoke of this loneliness.
Ten minutes, thirty minutes, anything I can take to make me feel less utterly alone in this pain.
I hate myself for needing them so much, almost as much as I hate hearing the silence when no one answers.
I have friends around the world, or so I think, but it is hard to reach out, to grab hold of some kind of hope
when multiple time zones keep you away from the vast majority of people that ever cared about you.

Maybe tonight will be different, I have been blessed with a new pill to try.
Will it give me rest? Will it silence the nightmares? Will it finally make the voices stop?
I can only pray to whatever is up there that this night will be different;
but I don’t have much hope.
Too many nights have been fed to the hell that I am living, the fires that devour me every night,
the same fire that fills my veins with flames, my mind with a swirling inferno, and turns my soul to embers.

This has all been one long night without end, days are merely punctuation.
Loneliness while awake, horrors in my sleep, over and over and over.
The fire feeds itself and propels my body even though I try and will it all to just stop.
1 am, 2 am, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am,
meaningless numbers that mark nothing but the time left before I have to suffer vertically.
These nights are killing me slowly, lonely, one sleepless hour at a time.

Why do I do this?

Why do I write?
To confess?
To unburden myself?
To leave a record of my trials, of my tribulations, of my slow and inescapable descent into madness?
Do I simply write because I cannot speak all of the words racing in my thoughts?
That even my mother tongue cannot capture the words aloud?

Is it because I live in a world where my truth is too much?
Too powerful?
Too graphic?
Too real?
Too undesired?
Too unwanted?

Am I lying when I speak?
Do I bear false witness to the world?
Why must I always hide behind this mask?
Behind the greatest lie of all, “I am all right.”

I smile in despair.
I laugh while choking down tears.
I write self-affirming words when I am filled with self-hatred.
I am okay, my guiding deception.

I am a liar, a fake, a fraud, an impostor.
I am a fox clothed in wool,
lying in wait to take advantage of the best intentions of those around me.
I am an emotional sponge, a succubus of the heart.
I absorb everything around me:
emotions, experiences, traumas, and the suffering of everyone around me.
I anguish over their pain, I cry over their sorrows.

I am the demon in their nightmares, I pine for death over their lamentations.
I cannot escape this misery, this overwhelming and all-encompassing agony.
It tempers every happiness, every moment of joy; it never fails to to extinguish the flame within me.

Sometimes that pain is the only fire I have left, the only truth I can cling to.
The memories and regrets, forever carved into my flesh, stand as a monument to the only past I can remember.
I look at the them, I think of those moments, I think of the look on her face, I think of the hate and anger and utter desire to make myself feel pain.
My greatest work, written in blood, forearms as pages, lines fading like an old book.

I do not know why I do this, why I break open my chest to let the world see my aching heart, my bleeding soul.
It is a compulsion, an obsession, an unquenchable desire to scream somewhere that everyone can hear me and no one can mute me.
I must write this all down, either by ink, in ones and zeroes, or in blood.
I cannot keep this in.
The truth does not flow out of me, it breaks itself out of my breast, clawing it’s way to the freedom of the ether.
Why do I write?
Because I cannot stop, no matter how hard I try.

I cannot stop thinking about them

Another sleepless night, thinking of the people that left my life behind

Another sleepless night, thinking of the people that left my life
while I still had to march on.
The people who left over ignorance and lack of understanding,
the people who left because they made a choice to leave me behind,
the people who left because I let them drift away,
and the people who are divided by the eternal barrier between this world and the next.

How do I forget them?
How do I make their faces leave my vision?
How do I fill the holes in my heart they left?
How do I live without their love?
What do I do with my love for them?

On quiet nights, like this one, they appear in front of me,
sitting beside me,
leaning on my shoulder,
embraced in my arms.

I pick up my phone to make that call I know I shouldn’t make,
or that will never be answered.
I pick up my phone and see the conversations we had,
knowing that every message sent again will never be replied to.

I am never alone, they are always with me.
They come to me in a phrase,
in the way that the breeze touches my skin,
in the way that a love once forged never truly disappears.

So, I spend another night restless,
thinking of these long gone loves and connections.
I wonder whether they look at the night sky as I do and
miss me as I miss them.
Was I a blip?
Was I important?
Will they remember me?
Do they hurt like I do?

My life is full of too many memories,
too many people loved too deeply,
overexposed and overly emotional.
I cannot turn it off, this overwhelming desire to connect,
I cannot turn it off, this overwhelming fear and pain from abandonment.

I just want them to know.
I just want them to know that I miss them.
I just want them to know that I miss them and I still love them.
I just want them to know that I miss them and I still love them so much it hurts.

Sleep, please take me soon, these longings and desires are too overwhelming.
I can only find solace in my nightmares and the constant distraction of other people.
To be alone is to remember their absence.
Every one of them took a piece of my heart, and there is nothing to fill the holes.
Love just bleeds out onto the pavement as I walk at night, wondering where they are.
Sleep, please take me soon, there is not enough in me to keep going.

I cannot stop thinking about them with such intensity.
I cannot stop thinking about them achingly.
I cannot stop thinking about them.
I cannot stop thinking.
I cannot stop.

I cannot say goodbye.

The Hit

Like the open sea, there will always be moments of calm, but a torrent is always on the horizon.

It hits like a tidal wave,
like a heavyweight’s punch to the chest,
like a sledgehammer to the heart
this feeling.

No, it’s more than a feeling;
feels like sadness,
aching,
despair,
depression,
a cocktail that burns to the pit of my soul.

It feels like every breakup,
every family death,
every self-disappointment,
every moment of shame,
every cut I ever made,
every time I thought about the end,
all balled up and shoved into the hole where my heart should be.

Tears well,
it takes everything to hold them back.
Thoughts swirl,
it takes everything to hold myself to the ground.

These times
losing composure,
losing control,
losing my mind,
losing my self.
They come again and again.

This beast, this demon will plague me
for the rest of my life.
Like the open sea,
there will always be moments of calm,
but a torrent is always on the horizon.

G-d, please let these waters be calm,
I cannot weather another storm.
G-d, please let these times pass,
and fill the hole in my soul.

I cannot take another night
dominated by the hit of it all.
I cannot lose hope another night,
please give me back my control.