On an airplane. [Viajeros y Suicidas III....maybe]

Did an eskimo family build their home out of my mistakes?
Out of those tears that mixed with sweat on summer nights
When we would fight about the heat, about the fights?
Or did my failures trap the children in the school
And force them to become more than they should
When all they wanted was to feel inside their palms

The cold levity I lost
And let it go?

And in what famous lake did all my friends' funerals drown?
Or are they bathing in that pond behind your house
Giving life to all the fishes you would count?
Did they carry us that day inside the raft? In that
Thundering white water symphony
That could have once been dead silence
In a levitating dream
Turned into disease.

And is the difference between layered and convective clouds
Just the difference between our sadness and our joy?
Does nostalgia form cirrostratus and dejection stratocumulus?
And in what type of cloud are all the miles down the road,
Away from home and away from love,
Away into the shattering stones of maturity's song
Whose rhythm we could follow
But never found?

And why does the sun dissolve our pain
Just to let it fall on us again?

Into the ocean of my parents' suffering and release
I swim,
I live.

Before You Begin

Again and again the same thumb,
Again and again the same circle,
The same infinite path that
My skin enters and escapes
Trying to find that old Bob Dylan song
My mother would play when she did chores
Waiting for my father.

The song I would sing along with
Before I learned to speak its language,
Before I knew that he sang about me,
But not me then, and not me now.

Everything continues to escape me
In its eternally ephemeral way,
But this song remains somewhere
In this same infinite path,
Waiting for me to find it and to sing it,
Again and again contemplating
How long it will have to spend
Waiting for my father.

If tomorrow wasn't such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all.

London [Viajeros y Suicidas II]

The night was slowly dying. After a long walk I found the right bus stop to get back to the hostel for the night. There, the tall buses swept past formidably close to the edge of the road, so close you could almost feel the cold on the Plexiglas, the breath of your darkened reflection.

The bar I was coming from had at some point been a church. I was unaware of the reason it had been converted but I remember thinking about faith, about endurance, about how seemingly nothing ends up how it begins. I thought about futility, about premeditated futility. I thought mostly about failure.
I walked to the back row of the bus and sat against the window. The man sitting in front of me turned around and smiled. He must have been in his late 20's. A dark red splattered violently on the whites of his eyes, yet his pupils glistened innocently like a child's.
"Bus at night is free," he said with a complacent smile "and I can drink here too." Having said this, he pulled out a half-empty glass of beer from inside his shirt and showed it to me, careful not to place it in sight of the driver's mirror. His immediate honesty did not bother me but initially amused me.
He told me he was from Liberia. He had just come back from Tokyo, where he had gone to visit his girlfriend. I wondered what had landed him here, what role this place had in his triangular travel.
"I came here for woman. She was my teacher, in Liberia," he said with a chuckle, looking down at the bulge his glass made under his shirt. "She was really in love with me, man." His story began to intrigue me more. I asked about the teacher but he would only respond vaguely and ambiguously. The only thing I knew was that she was not the woman in Tokyo and that she somehow had splayed that red on his eyes. They looked like a Pollock painting, more sullen.
He talked about his family. His father had gone blind at the age of 12 and of his life after that I only know that he had two sons, that he endured. His brother (i.e. the brother of the man on the bus) was still with him and helped him move from place to place to maintain his current relationship with the absent Japanese woman. For this the man exuded shameful gratitude, appearing embarrassed by his own lack of independence.
"I am a teacher now," he then said. He became silent, staring out into the street as it passed us, his eyes not focusing on anything, motionless, as if focused on the glass and not the muted exterior of this (his) momentary self-awareness.
At my stop I got up and the man again smiled at me.
"No hard feelings, man," he said, calmly, as if speaking to someone else.
The bus drove off, its headlights forming translucent triangles in the night's visible darkness.

Soyons Spirales

The past bleeds the present
Into seashells;
Monocarpic moments breeding
Blue flowers of solitude.

Soyons. Soyons. Soyons.

Between the howling nymph that echoes in the cavern
And the immortal gasp of the whirling water
I will drown my senses.

The small hand plucked the petals off my tongue.

Soyons!

The present drinks the past
From my hands.
My quiet hands on the sand beneath the water.

Fénix

En estas noches olvidadas
De cenizas y cascaras de huevo
Esparcidas como estrellas
Solo existe la paciencia.

Vuelve el Recuerdo, ineluctable,
En sombra de girasol,
En ave de arena y sangre.

The Automated Poet

I don't know how to feel about this. Today I discovered a "Dada Poetry Generator" which basically asks you to write a small piece of text, then it scrambles all your words and gives them the appearance of a poem. I tried it with the last sentence from yesterday's post and added my own punctuation. The whole thing is pretty pathetic and counterproductive, but it's pretty entertaining.

Streets made of water.
Water streets of silence, empty.
The empty me, water like
empty streets, me of water.
Streets empty, falling like silence.
Streets empty, like silence, me.

Viajeros y Suicidas

Last time I saw her she was leaning on the windowsill smoking a cigarette, her dark eyes observing the silent night askance. Her hair hanged disheveled as she told me about some Buñuel movie about a nun. Had to do with a game of cards and the crown of Christ in the fire. Something about an old man using a jump rope. Brother used a belt. Images sprung to my mind in a sudden flash of nauseating light. Numb heat under the eyelids. Open, close, open, close. Still there, humid.

"I leave tomorrow." I told her as I noticed a silent crane resting over white buildings.

Her eyes remained fixed on the darkness outside as she asked where I was going.

"I don't know yet."

Italy came to my mind. Leaves splayed in the narrow, barren streets; behind a small door, under a dim light, a swart man whispers in a vapid voice to the rhythm of the crackling leaves.

I ricordi saranno dei grumi d'ombra
appiattati così come vecchia brace
nel camino. Il ricordo sarà la vampa
che ancor ieri mordeva negli occhi spenti.

When I left I paused in the corridor and listened but heard nothing. The empty streets made me think of water, falling like silence.

Cela ne veut rien dire.

Something about the French language. I can't stop buying books in French that I am in no way prepared to read. I pick them up flip through them read random sentences. Aloud. Something so natural about reading those sentences. Maybe it's some kind of nostalgia. Being lost in language. Grew into it. Lost. There was always that barrier. A puzzle. It's always there. Even now, in my native country, I feel apart. Distant from its language; inept; closer to that which was acquired than to that into which I was born. Yet I feel it is a good thing. To be able to choose your bounds, to the extent in which you can. English or Spanish; seems the or is what matters. Maybe not mutually exclusive either. Peut-être... peut-être. It was sudden then. Sundered from the sounds that brought me forth, thrown into a sea of incomprehensible voices, a vociferous void. Grew into it. Became part of it. Then, just like that, I wanted to come back. An impulse, maybe. Wanderlust. I was aware that I wanted to do something, and it felt right to come here. Helped my Spanish but deprived me of English in its natural tumultuous state. Just a tacit taste; intangible. So is it water or land? Something about the French language.

Europe.

We are what we, as beings, are;
Becoming:
Innocuous shadows
on a silver screen;
Sibilant movements:
static;
statues:
perpetual passing of the flame
to that stagnant horseman
covered by a present not his own,
the one without pupils.