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Sometimes from here and there, from within the everyday humiliations, from within the buried memories, certain images appear.

Somehow, I feel like I can make a sentence with them, but they are only simple words, each one with different meanings. All these images point to the same direction of issues which I, most of the time like to deal with and use. Only a few meaningless notes next to each other.

 They could be elements of a short poem or of a novel, and they come in my way.

This selection of images and thoughts directly and sometimes with slight changes lay themselves on the surface of the story that is supposed to be written.

Then, the struggle begins. Then the foundation of the mental relationship between these elements is shaped by the opening and dilation of the retina, the enduring look, and the everyday struggle and angst.

The look, the look into the cloudy space surrounding us.

But for the spark to be there, an incident or a change has to take place in the mind or in life.

The result of which are the lows of linguistics that guide me and allows the elements in my mind to take the form of a verb or a subject.

Sometimes there is no verb, nor a subject - almost all of the time.

But a verb can exist and remain unknown as to who has actually over done it.

And sometimes To go further, or to put it in another way, a certain curiosity is created in an image which makes one question the necessity of the verb. And the question of the existence of such a verb comes first.

And the action or event is forgotten.

And I search for causes, random causes that lead into a secret.

And the space of cube becomes foggy.

The elements reach a harmony, and in a spit of contrast and unfamiliarity, they create a poem or a piece of music.

Sometimes the elements that constitute an image, instead of expressing an event or the time of the event or the aftermath of a catastrophe, focus on the time or space that precedes or follows the event.

To put it in simple terms, the story does not exist in the first cry after birth, nor the first scream after death. An event takes place at ordinary times. At times when you do not wish to hear anyone sneeze. In the other hands, an event takes place in a future which will consists of a series of known present times.

When half sleep, half awake; after work on the bus, in these moments, I think of my faithful old, faithful dog; How long does it has to show its teeth to you or sit in a squat position?

 The air that bears the rain today, tomorrow will no longer have the same zest.

With the passage of time, the sorrows that accumulate on the bottom of the river of life, revolt.

Knowing that people excel one another adds to the joy of the day; The old experience of finding something good or the pleasant touch of something distant, ahead of someone else.

The reflection of crows flight on the glass of a frame with the picture of an eagle,

In the cloudiness of today’s sunset,

I don’t remember the cloudiness of yesterday’s sunset,

And I don’t know the future cloudiness of tomorrow’s.

Anxious dreams, distant longings, and the feeble wings whose height of flight is below the horizon of my eyes.

The dream of a world made of glass.

The stone in my hands.

The passing through the rooms, the roads, the trains, and the hearts. The repeated sound of shattering, and mother calls. The sounds of rapid breathing is heard from a throat suffocated by smoke.

The small space of a room in the shaky continuation of life.

But I won’t tell anyone when I am going to die. I will not speak of conversations of death with my laughter. You might ask why I speak of it, because it is sunset and blueness has turned everything in the room the color of lead. The individual and peaceful color of the piano, and the peaceful dust of the cello.

The abstract puzzle in the infinite, thirsty desert with its colored and dotted lines, whose submergence in the sky and earth should be a warning. Or it wants to stay until a passenger is not astonished by its unnamed ambience, by my love for unfinished stories; I do not want to say that bewilderment is the fruit of our being.

I have also made a big decision as to the end of the world, not by the measure of lock, a key, a road, or my aching joints from past years of agony.

I want to go as far as the limit that the mind can achieve, and take with me a kite, a swallow, a box full of silence, and the color of the dry fields of my drawings.

In short, all my personal attachments.

I want to take my mother with me.

Nothing visits me: no hallucination, no poem, no word.

I sit uselessly, wanting to darken your time and my time.

I don’t know much about rhymes and grammar, only poems and simple sentences. I do know that reading this won’t be easy for you if you are snacking, or taking a break, or at those times when the world is easy and beautiful.

I want to speak of things that will enhance my chronic bitter taste.

When the people scare the birds in the sky.

When the sky of this world is cloudy with no rain.

When stranger sounds are heard.

When the children don’t laugh or dance.

When interests are not shared.

The stone in my chest is melted by looking at this scarred world.

It’s like the pointless counting of numbers, days, hours - from one to infinity.

I just count them.

It’s not even the rehearsal for death nor its reception.

It’s what comes after that: The truth is I no longer wish to give a sacred title to a simple fact.

                                                                             Mohsen Khalili 2000