Saturn Devouring His Son

Beyond a shadow of doubt, he knew the moment when he started to walk after midnight along the Bosphorus shore, that the sound of his own footsteps would synchronize against the wallowing invisible light that came pouring down around his blood rushing brain. A strange and unexplainable moment would soon arrive, as he could barely absorb the infinite sky, a barrage of liquid bullets, gusting unmercifully against his eyes. A few steps later, he would arrive at the foot of the lighthouse that was spreading a strong and dimensionless wave of light towards the ferries, going up and down between East and West, the unending dilemma of two different songs.

He would pass one by one:

the patient immigrant pimps striding up and down in search of one last drunken tourist//
the beggars murmuring to themselves in the same spot night after night //
the young pop singers imitating American psychedelic bands in cheap nightclubs //
the gipsy women who has been selling the same kind of flowers for the past twenty years //
the sidewalks crowded with women lined up against the crumbling city walls //
the silent group of men //
frustrated students and bored husbands //
and old ladies watching them from balconies //
sipping their tea and showing their breasts spilling out of low-cut bras //
and he would pass them one by one //
dragging long shadows with him //
as if he was pulling the blanket of night over the entire city.

His battered and tired body would intertwine with the poverty of the city, and like most of the city dwellers, he would enter into a labyrinth of a bright daydream that would begin to blow through his head like a multicolored summer breeze. Beyond measure, his steps would lead him nowhere. He would curse to himself and the world he belonged to, for a while, with an incoherent babble, and it was then, approximately, when he would burn his cigarette between his second and third fingers of his left hand and disgorge a large puff towards the crumbled city walls and would glance his eyes over the same beggar. ′′At last,′′ he would think, ′′a genuine madman in the street, someone who doesn’t need a phone to talk to himself.′′

He couldn’t make out everything what he was saying. Thinking better of it at the last moment, he would put his other hand into his deep pocket, flung his half-eaten sandwich to the beggar. Without any acknowledge, instantly, the beggar would start to eat the sandwich with a ravenous anguish, ignoring the falling pieces. By the time he would arrive at the end of the street, he would catch the beggars’ eyes, and what he was seeing was nothing but a giant who was eating his son.

His steps would grant him into a dizzying freedom, a bright new world would open up before him. A strange comfort, a great drive into the cloaked pale lights of the streetlamps.