Tehvitan Ibele

What You Know

Take a pen my boy and sit, right here, sit, and write what you know.
Now, don't be silent and still, write, write!
Write of your life and your love, your experiences, your thoughts and dreams and hopes and all that you wish to reveal! Write of your sorrows and happinesses, let them flow through and through, through the ball of your pen. Let the ink sing your spirit and mirror your soul, write, write! Every feeling, every emotion, let it freely splay on the pages--sink your heart and all your memories, your woes and all, write write! Summon your fears and anxieties, your utmost dreads and desires, lay them bare for the world to see and you shall overcome them! Let me feel your being and your character--let the world feel your being and your character, write write! Write with wit! Write with glory! Write with passion and knowledge! Write with the full force of history and all those that came before, but always write, always, what you know.

The now breathless man panted below the dim light in the wine cellar, spent of energy and patience, turned and walked wistfully up the cedar stairs.

Once out of sight, the boy picked up the pen and carefully began to write.

Fear

There lives a fear, many-faced, multi-formed within us all that feeds on all fears we possess--a fear that we may become, against our judgment and control, what we fear most.

It may behoove us to desperately wall our experience against our shores, or take our fear as a safeguard, or become it altogether.

However, the sea is wide, coercion is better put to other uses, and becoming it teaches us little of difficulty.

Carefully, we may accept our wickednesses, and choose those which we cannot live without.

Echo

And as I take the steps two by two up the gray walled staircase, walls upon walls of porous gray, plastic to the accidental brush, my echo behind me sounds a chariot's wheels, chasing quicker than I run, walling me in to where I myself confine.

Why Do The Stars And Moon

The little boy of six or seven held
His father's hand, half past eleven,
Beneath the moonlit eucalyptus trees,
A man and son, small boy of six or seven.

Why do the stars and moon, began the boy,
Hang up there for so long without them resting,
And it must be cold--the night was getting colder--
I'll tell you son, said a man, when you are older.

The boy of six or seven, shot right past nine, eleven,
Would see his father every year
Just once or twice, but every time,
When he would leave, the boy would fall to crying.

Why do the stars and moon, whispered the boy,
Appear at different times, in different places,
Forcing those with such lengthy spaces in between
To suffer, unable to see such sights, together.

I'll tell you son, thought a man, when you are older.

He held his dying father in his arms,
Crying in his father's empty home,
As he always did when he knew that they were parting.

Why do the stars and moon?, guessed a man,
Watching his son cry for the first time,
Jubilate in the dark--such graceful tiny dancers--
I thought you knew, when you were young;
I never had an answer.

Lost

When walking through the cornfields one afternoon he felt a pair of plastic eyes watching.
He sighed and with melodic practiced notes, said, Don't tell me you've never been lost.
The figure shifted with the wind.
Don't patronize me with your silence.
The silence deepened.
As the wind shook loose some few dozen golden hairs, his hands found his knife.
In his dull gray pools that were his eyes, lay the lonely hours, the anxiety of atrophy, and the fear and desperation left to those who once knew their way through the infinite cornstalks.
He sank his blade into the bosom of his accuser.
Producing a match from his back pocket, he lit his tormentor.
He turned and walked slowly away as the fields and its scarecrow burned.

Sight

He woke up late one morning into an unfamiliar darkness. The sun had left him the dusk before, but neither he nor she knew it would be for ever. The moon never brought such solace, holding darkly in the black sky, a hollow brightness, one that, now, he searched for frantically. He breathed. Bringing his hands to his eyes, he softly touched his right pupil, making sure they were bare. Moving his hands, he tried to clear the darkness around him, and when it was no use, lay back down to sleep.

That night, he sprouted plants, all along his body, and became a large caterpillar, several thousands of stories tall. A fire approached. As it spread to his roots, he felt the flame's touch, licking his petals, igniting his nerves, calmly burning and consuming. From his ashes, he rose as a bird (za za za), a blue-green sparrow, with feathers the color of ocean waves--its eyes the color of rolling foam. He flew toward the sun, pruning himself with anticipation when he stopped to rest, racing for where the ocean met the sky, where he would meet the sun. His wings caught fire. As his roasted corpse fell into the sea, he became a single seed. For years and years, he lay in wait at the bottom of the ocean, catching the faintest rays of light, building, growing. He was a great tree, living on brine and sunlight, and the day he touched the sun, he died.

He died one foggy summer night, hands grasping molded sheets, for what he saw and felt and heard were only in his dreams. Yet I will ever remember him as that salt-fed ocean tree, for though he lost his vision, he never ceased to see.

The Mountain

There is a great mountain in the land of winds; stoic, foreboding, draped in dancing, billowy clouds and sweet Spring mists. And at its base lies a village. A quiet, uneventful village, in which its persons live equally quiet, uneventful lives, beneath the shadow of a seemingly quiet and uneventful colossus.

Though much of the lower areas of the mountain have been explored by the village's inhabitants, few have dared traverse the upper reaches, and fewer have returned. Yet people still thirst. The only villager alive who still knows what sits atop the towering monolith is the village elder.

To all who ask, the elder repeats:
There, above, is what the greatest warriors fear,
What the wisest men wish for,
And the true meaning of life.

I have scaled this wondrous mountain, through the mist and fog, softly nudging clouds with my deliberate ascent, moving, moving, moving. I have echoed within my mind, the words of the elder, feeding curiosity to my tired, worn body. I have sat atop this great mountain, its vicious summit, and, my friends, I have found absolutely nothing.

"Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining" (Improvisational Speech Contest, revisited)

I have seen many clouds in my day. In San Francisco, the clouds seem to surround you, inextricable from the fog that that settles, blending and mixing, and behind it all comes a faint glow, a warm illumination. In Shanghai, the clouds stand alone, and on rare nights, you can see the hot sun, burning behind, outlining the edges of the few lonely clouds above the busy cityscape. What is true of clouds both real and metaphorical is that there is a sun behind them.

We often view failure as unwanted, undesired, and by all measures necessary, avoided. When I was a junior in high school, I stopped at nothing to achieve all I could, and I collapsed under all I tried to achieve. What we gain, from failure, is not as glamorous as success, but it is needed and necessary. Failure is a sort of currency, afforded by experience, so that in the future, our mind knows where to step, and how to move. Human beings are generally forgetful creatures, though I may speak for only myself.

What one gains through time and effort is the further knowledge that there is a sun, a goal, a possibility hidden behind the billowy folds. With each new cloud, backlit by possibility and destiny, we plow ahead, hoping, knowing, that the future holds new light, and new suns.

At The Train Station

It is most bittersweet to sit next to my cousin with whom I have no complete common language, hours before we depart for Shanghai, unable to tell her (for so many reasons) that she has grown. No matter who she is becoming, or who she thinks she is at/in this turbulent age, I trust she will do great things. There are so many possibilities and pitfalls, I cannot bring myself to say goodbye here. Though I am such a small and distant part of her life, I care about her immensely. And since I am such a part in her life, I cannot tell her that I do. I have recently gleaned in conversation with my other, older cousin that I often give advice. And sometimes it is not welcome. On the whole I have decided what I promised to decide many times before: to speak less. So I sit here, hoping to tell her things she won't understand (for many reasons), knowing that she will grow even more, knowing that I can only sit and, every few years, watch.

On Vacationing in Cheng De

They turned on us those fucking bastard men.
We clamored through those godless painted halls,
Painted red as hot as the streets of Old Beijing
Humoring them with polite and meaningless smiles,
Along those walls that ran and ran for miles—
Much further than that flatfoot smugly Empress
Who eyed us from her dirt, cracked, crumbling wall,
With cheeks that, lightly powdered by crushed pearls,
Wanly burned against that dirt, cracked, crumbling wall.

We even saw their dusty city moan
Against the din of five-cent-memories,
Strewn across the terrain like a tired whore,
Of scorched lands where sterile seeds were sown.

Even when we rode on ancient dragons, plastic,
As our reflections tortured, withered, plastic,
Across the glassy sea-green waves, sat plastic
Arhythm possessing careless rolling bottles,
We laughed along with their terrible misery,
Soothing their insanity,
        Discomfort,
                Eternally self inflicted
                                       pain
Until it became ours to bear as well.

They fucking turned on us those fucking bastards,
Feeding us to merchants worse than beggars,
Squeezing from us life and love and money,
Until we, bleeding from our mouths, sweating from our throats,
Gasped and swallowed those final rays of sun,
Sparing them from the black mouths of this forsaken city,
This poor limbless city, sprawled against the thirsting desert,
Selling its history to feed its history
So they may live and others will look and say:
(They seem less wretched than they have become.)

And this is not a poem. Not for them.