 It's been 11 years since I opened this YouTube channel, and 25 years since I have written my first article about narcissism, an article in which I coined the phrase, narcissistic abuse, among many others. And today what I would like to do is to take you on a magical mystery tour of one narcissism guess who? Me of course. And I'm going to do that in a bit of an unusual way. I'm going to do it through my poetry. I'm going to read to you my poems. Yes, he writes poetry, this thing. It speaks. I write poetry, I publish my poetry, and I won many international awards for my poetry. But today I'll try to minimize the bragging, it's not easy, still. I would like to take you on a tour of some highlights in my life, and much more importantly in my mind. To give you a greater insight than a greater understanding, I'm not talking about compassion, I'm not talking about pity, I'm not talking about empathizing. Just insight, understanding of what makes a narcissist tick. Many of my experiences are very typical of narcissists. And a warning, a lot of the imagery you may find disturbing, and some of it, perhaps the bulk of it, you may find triggering. This is a dark forest, we are about to enter together. So hold on to my hand, and never ever let go. They say with a knowing smile, if he is really a narcissist, how come he writes poetry? They say words are the sounds of emotions. He claims to have no emotions. They are smug, they are comfortable in their well classified world, my doubters and my haters. But I use words as other people use algebraic signs. Algebraic signs, with meticulousness, with caution, with the precision of an autism. I sculpt in words, I stop, I tilt my head, I listen to the echoes, to the music, the tables of emotional resonance, the fine tuned reverberations of pain, of love, of fear. Words are airwaves, they are photonic ricochets answered by chemicals secreted in my listeners and in my readers in you. I know beauty, I have always known beauty in the biblical sense, I could say. Beauty was my passionate mistress. We made love, we procreated the cold children of my texts. I measured its aesthetics admiringly. But you see this is the mathematics of syntax and grammar. It was merely the undulating geometry of syntax and grammar. Am I devoid of all emotions as I watch your reactions with a sated amusement of a Roman nobleman? Perhaps. Perhaps you are my gladiators in the coliseum of my construction. I once wrote, my world is painted in shadows of fear and sadness and perhaps they are related. I fear the sadness to avoid the over-winningcipia melancholia that lurks in the dark corners of my being. I deny my own emotions. And I deny them vehemently, thoroughly, with a single mindedness of a survivor. I persevere by dehumanizing myself, I automate my processes, gradually parts of my flesh turn into metal. I stand there, exposed to shearing winds as grandiose as my own disorder. I write poetry because I need to. I write poetry to gain attention, it's true, to secure adulation, to fasten on to the reflection in the eyes of others and to misconstrue of this as my ego. It's all very true. My words are pyrotechnics, fireworks, formulas of resonance, the periodic table of healing and abuse. But having said all this, in full view of this disclaimer, these are dark poems, penumbra poems, a wasted landscape of pain ossified, of scarred remnants of emotions. You see, there's no horror in abuse. The terror is in the endurance, in the dreamlike detachment from one's own existence that follows abuse. People around me feel my surrealism, they're back away from me as they would from a nightmare. They're alienated, they're disconfident by the limpid placenta of my virtual reality. And now I'm left alone, and now I write umbilical poems as other people would converse. You remember that the narcissists, that there are two developmental pathways to pathological narcissists. In early childhood, the narcissists can be idolized, put on a pedestal, instrumentalized, idealized, pampered, smothered, spoiled, can do no wrong. That's one pathway to narcissism. But there's another one, and that other pathway to narcissism involves life-threatening abuse, screams at night, involves breach of boundaries, involves the terror of a hostile parent, a parent who wishes you dead, psychologically dead, and sometimes, like in my case, physically dead. And this too is a developmental pathway to narcissism. This leads to my first poem of the day, in the concentration camp called home. In the concentration camp called home, we report in striped pajamas to the bare feet commandant. Our mother orchestrating, our mother orchestrating, our daily holocaust, borrowing her fingernails through my palms, a scream frozen between us, stalactite of terror in the green caves of her eyes, there sentenced to forced labor, to mine her veins of hatred, to shovel her contempt, to pile scorn upon scorn, beatings a path. And at noon, our mother leads us to the chambers, naked, ripples of flesh, and she turns on the gas, and watches our hunger as her food devours us. And of course, when you grow in such an environment together with siblings, and you're the eldest, you're the firstborn, and some of them are considerably younger than you, you develop protective instincts when your parents are predators, when they are psychotic, where they are dangerous, insane. You develop protective instincts. And this is a poem I wrote about my brother, cutting to existence. My little brother cuts himself into existence. With razor tongue, I tried to shave his pain. He wouldn't listen. His ears are woollen screams, the wrath of harbids breaking to the surface, his own red art. When he cups his bleeding hands, the sea of our childhood wells in my eyes, wells in his veins like common salt. Sometimes when the abuse gets too much, when you can't cope anymore, as a child, remember, my abuse lasted from age 4 to age 16. When you can't cope anymore and so on, you develop your own private religion. The false self is a kind of godlike figure. The false self is supposed to protect you, to isolate you, to fend off the pain, to firewall you, to pain proof you. And in those times, religious metaphors come very handy. And it was during one of these episodes that I wrote the miracle of the kisses. That night, the cock denied him thrice. His mother and the whore downloaded him, nails etched into his palms, his thorny forehead glistening, his body spared. He wanted to revive unto their moisture, but the nosiating sense of vinegar and Roman legionnaires, the dampness of the cave, and then that final stone, his brain wide open, supper digested, that was to have been his last. He missed so his disciples, the miracle of their kisses, and he was determined to not decompose. And then I grew up, and at a very late age, I discovered women, and I craved, I craved their company, their intimacy, their smells, their warmth, their acceptance, possibly as the mother I never had. Possibly just because, after all, I'm a man, believe it or not. And so here are a few poems about my experience with women, prowling. The little things we do together to give up life, the percolating coffee, your aromatic breath, the dream that glues your eyelids to my cheek. We both relent relentlessly. Your hair flows to its end, a natural cascade, a velvet avalanche, it buries my hands. In motion paralyzed, we prowl each other's hunting grounds. Daybreak, day breaks, our backs turn to the light in dark refusal. I need to know you, even as I never know myself, that phantom ache of amputated innocence, you, the stirrings of a curtain, dust settling on sepia hukuklocks. And perhaps one day you will become a benign sentence, an agency through which to be, when you wake the morning. When you wake the morning, red-headed children shimmer in your eyes, the vainest map of sun-drenched eyelids flutters, throbbing topography. Your muscles ripple, scared animals burrow under your dewy skin. Frozen light sculptures, where wrinkles dwell, embroidered shades in thick main tapestry. Your lips depart in scarlet, flesh to withering flesh, and breath in curved tranquility escapes the flaring nostrils. Your warmth invades my sweat, your lips leave skin regards on my humidity. Eyelashes clash, snowflake haiku. Where I begin, your end, snowflake haiku is melt into crystalline awareness. I guard your quivered slip, your skin beats moisture. The beckoning jugular that is your mind, my pointing teeth, a universe of frozen sharp relief, the icy darts your voice in my inebriated veins in yours. The motif of children keeps cropping up in my poetry, possibly because I have none. I never had the chance, despite appearances never had a willing part. So here's another of these child-infused poems, A Hundred Children. Tell me about your sunshine and the sounds of coffee and of bare feet pounding the earthen floor, the creaking trees and the skinned memory of hugs that you gave and you received. Sit down, yes here, the intermittent sobbing of the shades slit by your golden face. Now listen to the hundred children that are your womb, I am among them, in moist propinquity. Hemmed in our bed, in moist propinquity, tis night, and starry, and the neighborhood inebriated in the vomit area of our street. A woman, a woman, my stone-faced lover, a woman and her smells, the yellow haze of melancholy lamposts. Your hair consumes you, so I am getting to terms with my age. I know that soon it will be time to say goodbye. I have accomplished what I could, despite my handicaps and disabilities, and there are many, and they are not small, but I fought them as valiantly as I could. So now I am a bladed stalactite. Time has arrived, time is here, oh Sam. But the snow is great, and you, bladed stalactite, shredded your loved ones into a ticker-tape parade confetted aftermath of distant glories. Sick transit. Now that you are melting, there is no one left to gather your holy water and to exercise the demons in the empty cave that you had become. Oh Sam, oh Sam, it is time already. Getting old. The saging flesh, a wrinkled vice-dome, the veined reverberation of a life-consumed. On corneas imprinted with a thousand rings, now stage the number of plays directed by your sight receding and a brain enraged. To fall, as curtains call, to bow the last. Rendered a CPI image in a camera obscured, a line of credits fully exhausted, fully endured. In my narcissism, the toxic waste of bottled anger venomized, life belly-up, the reeds. The wind is hissing death downstream, a river holds its vapor breath, and leaves, black lips of tar and fish, a blotted shore, strolling in the boneyard of my life, bleached dreams, mementoed ossuary of my insights. On flaking fence posts impaled the child that I had been, peering from desiccated sockets, the plague that's me, dust irrigated, arid tombstones, a being eclipsed. Stage one, receding, jettisoned. Stage two, exiled velocity. Stage three, stage three, the armoured carapace. In glinted envelope, pulsating, rarified, a fiery launch that crumbles into velvety silence. No comb, no comb, on impact, just a star rush. Pure-lating milky veins, expired, crater-ridden scars. What's in your call sign? Freedom? Friendship? Faith? None, I think. I am over. I'm out, an iron shell, tons in a matchbox, frenetic revolutions, rapers, the stellar remnant of collapse. I tend my woods, part shadow, part man that I am, the textured leaves. Narcissus' existence is very dreamlike, not marriage in a way. It's like he is trapped in kind of jelly amber and is trying to break loose, get in touch with what? Who knows? He definitely doesn't. So I wrote self-dream. At times I dream myself besieged, I rebel with the cunning of the weak, I walk the shortcuts, tormentors clad in blood-soaked black, salute as I manipulate them into realizing their abyss. Some weep their sockets hollow, or wave their thorns, much pain negotiated, a trading of the wounds, my chains carved metal, and I am branded. I wrote an apology to the woman who shared my life and her life with me, and I wrote to her years ago. Sometimes I watch you from behind, your shoulders avian, a flutter, your ruby hands, the feet that carry you to me, and then away. I know I wrong you. Your eyes black pools, your skin eruptions of what is and could have been. I vow to make you happy, but my hutchback self just tolls the bells and guards you from afar. In the wasteland that is me, you flower. Your eyes black petals strewn across the tumbling masonry. Your stem resists my winds, your roots deep in my soil, toiled in murk to feed both you and me to nurture us, and every day a spring, and every morning a sunshine. You are in my garden, you blossom day and night, your sculpted daint fills in my hands like oneness. So much is left unsaid between us, your crests of silence fallen on my shores of pain. And this is where I live. The city laces its inhabitants in shades of grey, oppressively close to the surface. Some of us duck, others simply walk carefully, our shoulders tooed, trying to avoid the monochrome rainbow, somewhere over at the end of the hesitant drizzle. The city rains itself on us, impaled on one hundred towers on a thousand emulated golden domes, and we pretend to not see as it bleeds into the river. We just cross each other in ornate street corners ambushed from behind, dilapidated structures. We don't nod our heads politely anymore, we are not sure whether they will stay connected to our lowling bodies if we did. It is at such times that I remember an especially sad song interlaced with wailing, and so all after war, turret after turret, I revisit her. It is there in that city, which is not muslim, not jewish, or christian, not entirely modern, nor decidedly antique, that I met her, and I met the pain. And so we are ships that pass in pitch darkness, blowing horns of despair and need, trying to avoid the inevitable collision of intimacy, the lifeboats of cheating and emotional absenteeism at the ready. There is no moon on our ocean, just the churning waves of loneliness, the froth of our relationship, sprayed thin across our lives, as insubstantial as the dream world that we call our mind. Lone seagulls of pity oversee us, necklaced albatrosses of empathy and love, phosphorus fish gaze up, the mouths agape at our oddness, and at times we shipwreck, outcast on our islands, and we wander at the exoticism of ourselves, the hopelessness of memory, such strange beasts we are, such miracles, once in our lifetimes, a roll of DNA, or an experiment gun or eye. And so we set sail into penumbral seas, in a doomed quest for sun, for flowers, and yet it is our forlorness that renders us so painfully beautiful to behold, even in the absence of any light. Thank you for listening and for joining the tour. I apologize for my accent, I placed the link to my poetry in the description, just in case you want to understand what the hell was I talking about. See you next time. Stay tuned.