Words

What I have for you are words.  They are subtle hints at what I want to say, small mirrors that seduce, that count and respect the spaces between the lines.  The love affair we created sleeps alone waiting for its faint wings to fly with the air of another world.  I know your secrets and I adore them.  They are mine like nothing has ever been mine with a repetitive possession that entangles my lips with yours in a multi-dimensional kiss of hope.  I strike my pen with my amber thoughts and I turn the page with the rage of a million snakes but your thought remains.  It parses the ceiling while I stare, while I transfer the light from side to side.  And so the words come crashing down that stream of passion that one day you will recognize as your own with the violence that only a mad man in love can control.  For you, these are the words I have.

On Her

Strangers in a night of passion, I stare at the white while she smiles and pleases with her long pencils and sharp scissors.  While I write, she plays and drips and intercedes for goddesses that one day will reclaim her charms, one day in eight years, when her twos  become threes and her curls sinister and gray.  We are strangers that were once lovers, once accustomed to the sweet word and the standing orgasm, once happy together and altogether, now invalid and immaculate waiting for the end of the stars and for the end of the shift.  Now sad and lonely simply because the sad and lonely must remain sad and lonely, simply because red lips don’t just go away with a lie and an apology.  I still love her beyond all that I ever understood as love, above the waters of that beach where I now leave her body married with the sand and dressed in the prickly foam of my regrets.  In a minute the sun will take her through my words and my deceptions, to the light where she lives free, unpolluted, with the others, the others of the past, the others of the money and the shows, the others, those who will never make her whole.

After the Snow Storm

We write after we suffer.  I see a song with brown Bahamian symbols and Rastafarian colors and flavors but I don’t understand the idea of the artist.  I spend my days and nights thinking about the elusive quality of the writer who, much like the painter learns to describe the minutia of life in a high definition palette of words and blood.  Passion and red go together the same as the story that made me happy and depressive; that story about the bull and the fighter when the fighter lost by barely winning.  The same story continued in my past when the bike rider never did catch up to the front runners while trying harder and harder.  He fell behind and even more so because his effort could not matter more than each second that went by with the wind in that cold mountain.  So we write to express what the painter feels and although the systems are different and the streets full of wandering comics trying to find a syllable and a period of insufferable finality, the goal is the same: to live through the abstract creation of a reality based on art.  Art, after all, is just what the artists understand feelings should look like or sound like or be.

When you are on the edge

The summer has come with tan lines and young women, it is a feeling of beauty and impassioned claims of water filling the minds and ears of the poet.  Since the law ended and little remains unsaid there is a subtle mystery in the humid air of the beach, it is a mystery of sand and silence.  The question in his mind is the same as the one in his heart.  Will she ever be again the one to bring those cold useless thrills of passion.  Will she ever be again the inspiration to the lips that kissed her many times while she slept on top of the four and five dimes of pixelated madness.  Will she come back to the place where she belongs, where the songs remind her of the lights she wants to light up and imagine with gratitude and rare admiration.  These questions fly over the sea of caution where the poet has sunk his boat of hope and is waiting with a principled pen and a blue fishing rod stepping on his warm and very public happiness.  There are some summers that make me want to live, like this one, when you are on the edge, looking down at the supernatural sentiment of uniqueness that lies in this earth, where as always she reigns with the smile and the silhouette of energy and greatness.

Introduction

For Leonidas, the morning was dormant.  The spiraling mist disappeared behind the last of the school boys and the fuming vapors of the sun.  His was a synthetic apartment facing the ocean with a calm sand-bathed northern window.  In the horizon, the mast clock announced the morning just as well as his weary open eyes and blasted hair.  The result of the quasi sinking of a pirate ship, the mast offered a good-enough estimation of the time by marking the levels of the tides during the day.  Leonidas was bored.  He could not remember when the switch was flipped, when he had stopped being a decent man.  Maybe it had been a year ago when he started his work or maybe he had been one all along and it had taken time and disappointment to bring the shadows to the surface.  It didn’t matter anymore.  Sitting on the balcony, outstretched as he believed he should always be, he reflected upon what had been a notorious life.  He had everything he needed and more and yet at any time someone could come and take it all away from him.  In fact he had many times imagined his own demise but never quite been able to imagine the ultimate end perhaps because he was too much of a coward to see himself dead.  He had fought all his life to become who he was but it all seemed empty to him.  The money, the women, the praise; they all had taken more than they had given.  In the light of that balcony where he spent his afternoons along with that faithful glass of gin, he painted a scene of unfulfilled every-things.  His essence was complaining in the mirror and looking out to that blue horizon of all the hope he had already lost.  Several years before this afternoon, Leonidas had been influenced by what is commonly known as ambition.  He had looked around him and he had decided to make a change.

About a Song

An unforgettable “trobador cubano” wrote like a miracle:

De que callada manera se me adentra usted sonriendo

Como si fuera la primavera, yo muriendo, yo muriendo

Quien le dijo que yo era risa siempre nunca llanto

Como si fuera la primavera no soy tanto

I tried to translate them, explain them and even draw them on a sad piece of paper but nothing worked.  I accepted the fact that I would never be able to fully communicate the feeling behind these lines to the person I loved at the time.  The song that carries these lines, like many poems of my youth, ended up buried and forgotten in my memory for the best part of twenty years until one night not long ago it reappeared inside a train car in Berlin.  What strange twist of fate put me inside a train in Berlin of all places where the music system was playing the song I will never know.  Abruptly I went back in time, much like Proust and his “madelaine”; hearing those lines I could only think of one person from my past, the same person with the dark eyes of emotion, the one I know understands them.  The heart is a strange friend because it doesn’t let us lie to ourselves but it lets us lie to others.  The places where the lines are sung and read remain vast in the world and the poet should know that there are people like this humble writer who are still in love with these few words and that there are still women who are worthy of them, who become them, who fill the spaces between them and who give meaning to their beautiful gathering.

Black Secrets

Someone hides, lies, cheats.  Someone loves, lives and trusts. The path is thin and the streets are black.  The clouds compound the fear and the summer goes by with green marbles and baked bread.  The illusion of a city combs the steps of destiny and the smiles of others punctuate the despair.  The one who hides confronts his sadness by looking for a door, a way out of the massive gray wall of life that he has built for himself one cowardly step at a time.  The one who loves is happy, frantically absorbing life with her young mouth. dreaming with all her senses and words.  The one who lies wishes and waits thinking, as the dark-minded do, that the world will adapt and his ultimate desire will come true.  He thinks he will be pushed to be happy because his soul is old and battered and unable to move.  The one who lives is and does not apologize for being.  She steps on the stage and makes sure all around know she has arrived.  She shines and conquers all with truthfulness and a blind commitment to her instincts.  The one who cheats loses himself in those fantastic circles of untruth pleading and begging to be forgiven when forgiveness is impossible.  He turns and comments on his own smallness and foolishness.  The one who trusts is the perfect woman with the dark eyes of passion.  She inspires greatness, she gives him hope.  She doesn’t know it.  They never meet, they never touch, they sleep behind a cloud that carries a storm.  They care and they fall but they are apart, they always were, they slip through the invisible crowd unnoticed and hurt.

Web Flower

Doubt is a sensible adviser I find.  The voice of a conspicuously soft-spoken conscience can, at times, make one think twice before acting.  So is the case of the Web Flower.  Her name is Alexandra, she comes from an Eastern Europe consumed in consumerism and struggling to step forward in a continent of aging powers and murmuring dissatisfaction.  She lives in a country politically aligned with America but socially aligned with an amalgam of nineteenth and twentieth century decadence.  Her life is, as can be expected, a sensational party of innocence, drama, self-doubt and optimism.  Her dream is to be an actress, her reality is driven by an insatiable desire to be relevant, to become less anonymous and more complete.  In that sense, her life is no different than the life of an American woman coming of age in the Midwest; in fact I imagine they would have the same smile, the same intonations and cadences as they move towards their lives’ achievements.  Alexandra, however, is unconventional; her nature is not artistic or symbolic but real, a mixture of simplification and seduction.  Her days are hidden fantasy and emotional tranquility and the people who discover her feel the draw of the mysterious and irrepressible.  Some women are born with the curse of being muses to men who are not capable of appreciating their talents because they are blinded by their captivating beauty.  Alexandra smiles and moves on after burying a lie with regret and sorrow.  She moves on by being real and impenetrable, like flowers and doubts.

Hearts Escalating Notes

When I think in music I think in hearts escalating notes.  I think in scales embracing black clues of endearment and love.  I see pictures of harmonious synonyms and inspiring subjectivities, phrases and dots with ice cream.  I imagine sweet whistles of pursed lips, hands of rhymes ashore.  I see a sail of marble in the pentagram of the last remaining island.  I see and I feel the tepid taps of the timid arrangements of flowers in the fainting voices of my impatient women.  Those sounds and glows are in the distance where they finally belong to her, where destruction is certain by the hand of noise, by the loud and proud color of mediocrity.  I see a river of truth in her eyes of melody, encounters of nostalgia and emotion, pauses and tones of survival and struggle, those piercing murmurs of infinite happiness and torture.