Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Two. The Glacier and the Jungle.

And Alex was standing at the door, half torn off its hinges. His summer blue eyes were locked on me, transfixed by this wild beast of dark and dreams and nightmares.

Blue cold eyes.
Distant planets in their orbs,
Or satellites in space
Watching everything unseen,
Clutched in place by those
Talon-like eyebrows.
Admiring,
Yet questioning.
Eyes too sharp,
Trained on reading
The blank eternities of space and meaning
That lay between the lines
Of the printed page.

I hated the gall of him. His questioning stare that seemed to lay me bare and dig claws and talons deep into my flesh and pull out my innards in some sort of grotesque pagan ritual sacrifice. The cold neutrality of the hard altar stone. Would just have walked over to him and pummelled his head so hard, all that would be left would be a cracked bone bowl of thick lukewarm porridge.
But those eyes knew too much. And beneath the self-controlled serenity those eyes knew what I was doing. They burnt with the same blue heat of the Bunsen burner and the alpine glacier.

I dropped that ragdoll of a head. Stamped the light out of it with one languid step of my heavy foot and felt the crunching sureness of dislocated teeth and pulverised bones. Reached out for the beer bottle on the table and walked over to Alex, meeting the icy glacier stare of his with the warm fetid swampy jungle of mine.

What followed, as they say, was the history of man.

Remembering Macedonia. Chapter One. The Colosseum of Dirt.

Still remember the day I first met Alex. My eyes were blurred by the sweat dripping off my brow... The warmth of fresh blood as it spilt down the side of my face... The very exuberant vivacity of life and living - sweat and blood. I was chewing my moustache - a thick black caterpillar - my mind locked in contemplation. Locked in my vice of a palm, Fernand-o-whatever-fucker, his head look small, inconspicuous, unimportant. He was knocked out already. But that greasy-with-sweat unimportant head of his posed a very important question - as important as life itself, to take the next breath or not. Bar table or beer bottle?

Chewing moustache, contemplating this vehement question, my eyes - blurred with sweat and blood and life - were scanning the wreckage I had left behind. A dozen broken tables and upturned chairs. Half a dozen or so slumped bodies, with faces blotched an shirts in shreds. Beer bottles lay shattered on the floor, blood mixing freely with alcohol and flowing down in dirty veins of grime. The lighting was dusky and the creaky fans croaked in a cacophony of applause.

I was the Roman gladiator striding over this Colosseum of dirt. I was Jimi-fucking-Hendrix smashing his guitar on the amps. . I was the stench of sweat wafting up in the tropical sun. I was the taste of mud spiked with cashew liquor.
Bucephalus (Bu, as they called me). Ox-headed. Obstinate. Black-maned. I was whatever the fuck you called life.

I am what i was

I was Nature.
Air, Water and Earth, wafted and baked under the fiery sun.
I was the primeval sea.
Pangaea.
I was the mucky gene pool where life took form.
I was life.
I was the Primordial Sin.
I was the 160 ton sandstone boulder that crowned the Pyramid.
I was also the slave who dragged it and the mason who chiseled it into shape.
I was gunpowder.
I was fireworks, and so was i cannon-fuel.
I was the besieged.
I was the battering ram that broke through the ramparted gateway.
I was the river.
And the sea, and the ships that sailed across them,
Unfurling their sails to catch the wisps of air
That I breathed out.
I was the gentle summer rain.
And the scorched plain that begged for salvation.
I was salvation.
I never knew who I was.

Anyway, leaving behind the cliched rhetoric, here's what I know what i really was.
I was born in 1947 (No... this has nothing to do with "Midnight's Children"... i consider it a grossly overrated book).
I was 16 when they napalmed Vietnam.
I was 20, when it was the Summer of Love.
"If you are going to San Fransisceo... Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair..."
I was a hippie.
I was living-in, being-in during the Second Summer of Love.
I was arrested during the Emergency.
I was silenced.
I died in 1988 in a freak accident involving a stationary car, a sinking freight train and a ship that derailed at the docks.
And i was reborn.
I am what I was.

I am the wind. I am the rain. I am the silence of the sun that leaves your shadow on the plain.