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.