Memoirs of a Cipher | Africa | Art | Music | Poetry | True Stories

“Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Once I saw the world through the cataract of delusion.
A string of dazzling cubic zirconium promises,
each packaged in a succession of men and exotic destinations.

From the shimmering blue of the Miami Beach ocean front,
to the white washed walls and red awnings of Andalusia,
to the evergreen carpet blanketing a snow capped
Mont Blanc, straddled between France and Switzerland.

I always ended close to goal; but it eluded me cyclically.
Crushed beneath the weight of my deceits,
ensconced within the walls of my history; secrets deep.
Stories untold, personalities forsaken,
half finished and nascent, my truest self imprisoned.

I reached a point of necessary revelation,
and failed time and again to relinquish my deceptions.
First with an Israeli husband, who was really second,
I began the journey away from self into purpose.

It should have been at this point that I completed my conversion,
for it seemed Hashem was calling, but earthly pleasures beckoned.
In pursuit of wealth, stature and acclaim, I
succumbed to the reinvention of plastic surgery.

Masochistic, solipsistic, narcissistic.
I was the epitome of the “me-gen”.
Found reason soon enough
to cast away this husband.

Thus ended the 1st call and response.
I moved away from introspection or analysis,
and cast my net again upon the seas of morass.
I wandered blindly through the desert of my life,
until a beautiful, beguiling creation infused and enticed.

His siren song called me to destruction,
and I, a willing supplicant, dashed myself
upon the rocky shores of his deception.
We walked down the aisle of unholy matrimony.

An outrageous affair of grandiose proportions.
My short con a $50K Biltmore wedding, $15k ring,
beach front penthouse, Porsche 911 and Mercedes S600.
His long con, a cool quarter of a million dollars,
absconded from the best man less than two weeks after.

I had bared my inner most secrets to his surgical caresses.
He cut deeply into my soul, trying, I imagine
to expiate the stains upon his own.
Perhaps, he intended to excise my necrosis,
But Klein soon realized the limits of his finesse.
He left the operating theater, his cancer still in him.

Leaving a part of himself impregnated in me;
our son came soon after.

I realized later through the blinding pain of
betrayal, abandonment and shame
that half of my natural life had been consumed
by false starts and dead deeds.

Disassembled by others and myself,
I finally embarked upon the quest to reclaim,
that spark, that gift, that thing which is uniquely
me.

It required several painful procedures
to peel away false personalities, which had been successively
engrafted during my worldly peregrinations.

A consummate actress, I adopted personae to fit the situations,
But soon lost in the illusion, forgot to remove them.
In the beginning, it was for our son’s sake,
that I stepped into the paradigm shift.

First, in removing the cataracts.
Next in knitting back, that which had been
stripped, flayed, and dessicated.

It was not an easy task, to arise
and step into a life mid-stream.

Seven years of extricating the truth
from the raw earth of my soul,
my cadaver splayed on the cold, stainless
steel of the remainders of the day.

I saw in this moment, a past tarnished
but not broken.

It is through wisdom, writing, telling, and truthing,
that I can finally be free of the affliction of reinvention.
With each successive peel, I became awash in revelation,
that the only thing the past is good for is mining.

Extricating from the detritus of experiences,
nuggets of truth that once polished,
can light the path from this moment to the next.
Shifted onto an alternate trajectory,
where the miraculous occurs daily,
the song of my soul is answered
by the joy of authenticity.

I am a sojourner with a one way ticket for
a journey half completed.
Not with lament do I pen these words,
because the sweetness of wisdom
has liberated me.

Light is the load and quick the journey,
as I traverse the universe
from birth to death,
in this grandest adventure.