Category: Literature

I bought your pain
long before you did,
my tears carved a path from my heart,
dry like sea salt.

Like a dove striving for a single grain of wheat, I wove you into my being.

Without your knowing

How could I pour out every piece of me, already yours,
while words and my mind were at zero

Without your knowing

Between a touch and a glance, with the fear of claiming you, an innocent kiss trembles on my lips,

lying lazily in life mixed with a naive longing, stretched out upon the clouds of my mind that smell of you.

Without your knowing

Was it really this hard to reach just a touch, in the slight breeze of my little finger

Look, I painted you on the walls again,
I poured my words into verses; novels, stories, and poems knelt before you in every language.

Without your knowing

You always saw me,
I always looked at you,
You only heard my voice,
I always listened to you,
My hands, my heart, always left outside in the winter frost of your absence.

My head spun from you, I was tossed into the wild green, against those lonely walls where no one passes, and I woke up to you once again with the winter sun of dawn.

Without your knowing

Whatever exists, I found you in everything that is and isn’t; I added their scents, colors, and sounds one by one.

Without your knowing

To flow heedlessly from the world right into your gaze and your skin, to feel you in me and me in you, becoming one simply in feeling, without naming it.

Without your knowing

As if we had met from the bottomless past of a dark star, galloping into its unknown, the only thing I knew was you.

I searched for your gaze in streets that defy description, I caught your breath in the footprints I saw, and I kissed them, kissed them over and over.

Without your knowing

I forgot my lonely cheek in the warmth of your palms, my soul’s willing fall into your sweet darkness, I wanted to erase whatever makes you sad.

Without your knowing

Like a elfish child, I rang every doorbell of unlocked doors, 

I asked the pessimist, suffering, homeless ones for the definition of love.

My emotions were utterly lost at wrong addresses, doors and windows had long since fallen to ruin before I even reached you.

Without your knowing

Yet the whole universe had long gone into mourning, while my supplications had somehow mingled with the clouds, weeping all along.

Without my knowing

written by Aşur Horoz

Not in Sartre’s existence,

Not in Nietzsche’s nothingness,

Not in the indescribable dreams through Freud’s lens,

Not in Rumi’s azure serenity,

Not in Kundera’s unbearable lightness,

Not in the mythalogical trial of the Odyssey cast by Homer,

Not even in the lexicon of artificial intelligence,

Yet a bit in Omar Khayyam’s black-grape drunkness,

Playing alone at the edge of a bottomless abyss,

In the blinking of ancient genes waiting for millions of years for their moment,

Like a weary earthly courier wandering through the wormholes of a dark star,

In an indescribable uncertainty, at the yet unnamed birth of a waiting synthesis.

written by Aşur Horoz

Is it your mothball-scented gaze,
burdened with the weight of years?

Is it the reckless touch of your hands,
daring to face crucifixion?

Is it the dance upon the shuddering skin,
of a delicate frequency flowing from your inner depths?

Or, is it to deny the entire universe,
and become imprisoned in an unlockable drunkness of the mind?

Is it to melt away from within,
behind unbidden, ill-fitting masks?

Is it to unleash your most ineffable screams of “enough,”
and retreat into your own obscurity?

Is it to exist with your true essence, if only briefly,
in a weary yet tranquil nothingness,
within the drunkness of a bottomless well?

Is it to cry out to the whole world,
spilling onto a poem or a canvas?

Is it to still endure among those who say “in vain, all in vain,”
and to scatter endlessly, even if reduced to ash?

Is it to cling, involuntarily, to undeserving flesh?

With every touch,
with every inhalation of a scent,
is it to search for age zero?

And when your existence departs into desolation one day,
is it the breath of the pavements you left behind in trust?

Written by Aşur Horoz

I saw her in my dream after so long. I begged to be loved. I fought to be chosen. Knowing full well she preferred another. Inherited minds. Wet earth that hardens as it is squeezed in a palm. Hopes. Aircraft carriers. Genetic memory. Weak bodies capable of nothing but the struggle to exist.

A river tainted with acid. My body dissolving within it. The sound of my bones snapping echoes in my ears. I hope that when I close my eyes, I might finally sleep. Drifting through a dream. Striving to be chosen. Loathing every facet of politics. Only to plunge into an acid-filled river. At the very first moment I am shed of unhappiness.

Machines of metal, built to kill. Dreams obliterated with every blast. The trigger is easy to pull. The moments are hard to forget. Machines trampling over a graveyard. Technological scraps crushed under the word “defense.”

I did not want to wake. I know that my dreams are the only moments I am free. There is no salvation. For the first time, I was this close to them. For the first time, I was rejected. For the first time, I was certain they had let me go. I questioned why I cared so much. Amidst all the people who have passed through my life.

I refused. I left a great regret behind. Life within a nutshell. Dozens of sentences destined to end with an ellipsis… In desperate need of a full stop.

Love. Humanity’s greatest downfall. Harboring possessiveness within, it sinks into the mire of habit. Making no difference at all, it flows down the waterfall of intoxication, creating the proof of existence and inspiring boundless trust.

Happy marriages. An extinguished candle. Selves clinging to an unclaimed life…

Love. The greatest enemy. The smell of spoiled cheese, and the pleasure derived from that stench. Selves shrinking ever smaller… An egg dropping to the floor. Inside, a dead chick that yearned to live. That is all love is. Lived merely for the sake of possession, and denied as if to deceive death itself.

Must one always remain a child? Or simply deceive oneself?

Foolish Romeo and pitiful Juliet. You taught us to perish from our own blindness, to murder the self for the sake of possessing. You taught us to spill the rice in our hands to the ground, grain by grain, the turning of the wheels, and the meaninglessness in the ticking of a clock.

Foolish me and pitiful you. Dragged along inside a circle…