Victor Ray

EXILE.

My Morocco is a place I’ve never been. I envision it as my homeland, something I must return to, without knowing if it still exists. I cannot be disappointed for I have no expectations, what once was my home can never be lost anymore.

            There is no disillusionment creeping into the small bubble I live in, upon a small cloud, upon an even smaller breeze. My home is something to be, I’m always in the process of reaching out, throwing anchor.

            I can hear its huffing hustle and bustling beat, guzzling gaslights and shrieking shouts. I can hear its cries lost in time, between moments and generations.

            I can smell the humidity of the air, sniff out the colours of action, they hang interwoven with its shadows, it smells quixotic. I smile – the people smile, too. They smile in my dream, which is a world, which becomes engraved in the world.

            The heart that is not mine is theirs, but their heart birthed mine and its propulsion. Most of this vision seems somewhat fantastic, it feels worthy and right, I win in anticipation. This Marocco o‘ mine is also yours.

            Now I have no trees, there is no crib nor clothesline, writes Patti Smith. A friend of mine uttered: Why do I need roots when I have wings? And I see where they’re coming from – we’re congregating in the intrinsic realms of Vagabondia, we have lost our identities and are creating them within.

            We’re steady in the process, ever opting and letting go, ever building and hoping, never idle. We don’t turn into anything we aren’t already. The mutilation of our inscribed bodies, our original condition, hindered by words and hindsight, is exhaustive, exhausting.

            Immersion comes with movement: As I travel the globe, trot and scrape and meander over its gentle, womanly crescent, I feel a certain satisfaction, a crepuscular arrival – I belong. All further truth is superficial, a mere form, texture, metaphor, barren and flat.

            Experience contains emotional percipience of immeasurable gravity at its own atonement, a return to the womb, the warm, the round, the holy number O, Genesis.

            I thought the quest was about realizing the place where one wants to stay forever. Yet I’ve found calming challenge in restlessness, comforting immediacy in the nervous leg.  A weird, whisky parrot sitting on my shoulder blabbering on about some renitent patchwork-wonderwall.

            Identity is incorporation. Who are my forebearers? Who are my aunts and uncles of the mind?

            There’s a celestial connection between the horizon and me, I am obliged to envision myself as self-sufficient while embedded into a whole. It works – the gears turn, the fuel propels, the cogs clank, the compass prepares.

            Even a ghost imbibes identity and it lets everything pass through, it can’t hinder anyone from passing. Still it is bound, as I am bound, driven.

            Some wanderers prefer to wander solitarily, yet even this stretched diaspora of nomads resembles a swarm of flashing minnows, cast into a grand miniature. All of us wander solitarily, together.

            We search for home, home is the horizon, we get sick of home, we turn around, we return, we fix the next horizon, we come to, we get by, we belong. All the while home and never there.

            My Nirvana, my Byzantium, my Morocco. It’s a mission, a belonging, caused by fatuitous demons and blessed by roadside angels.

Leipzig, 2020.

I believe my home to be
at the bottom of a sea
	which is a well
	which is a tree
	which is a wish
	when all is well.

down south I go with might.

I follow a feeling
that is fleeting
of which is know nothing.

the inner echelon ticks like a clock
	it mocks
me for I have not heard it before.

stupefied and in a trance
	I advance
left at barbarous chance’s best
that quaks like a homey monster
but is a bird on the wing
	of a fish.

I know him – the Depth!
I've fallen for him already
but that was long ago.

since then it's been
more of an idle sing-along
	and as you please
	and as you can.

but I accepted their invitation
and came for present company
	that I need.

where am I?
where I'm supposed to be
	muffled in
	layers & skins
at a party I don't fit in.

	my forebearers-
they seem to be dreary shadows
in a forest full of corners
where their slim voices converge
	and multiply
	and destruct
	and remain.

remain like a sweet, clean dream
	-the cleanest.

	one
	with
	clairvoyance.

I know nothing about this.

this I know and cannot seem
	to escape
its' roots and youthfulness.

below the real expectations
	of being real
	and confounds
of an arrival in full bloom
waiting for the let-go.

this is alot about something
that shouldn't be a film
	or written
down on smitten paper's walls.

	I fall---
	down
	down
	below.

	South
is the way to go and leave
	behind.

it burns like a hell-hole
inside a leftist quagmire
of which the late overseer
is buried under a trombone.

I try to record the undone
and possibly impossible-
	words
	suffocating.

the lid of the wonder is ajar
in a world full of wonders
and without worth or try
	happily.

	and die alone.

in a mist of moving clouds
	ever steady.



Leipzig, 2020.