Quand J’étais le Flâneur

I was the man of leisure – the urban explorer and the connoisseur of the streets.  I was the “Jack of all Trades”; I was a young Flâneur.  The streets were my element – the energy of the crowds became my flesh, and the scenes of the city became my sight.  I was eloquently simple; I was the quiet observer.  I was the unit and the detached that played two roles – “The Man of the Crowd” who would adapt to the alienations of a busy conurbation, and “The Invisible Man” who would hide in plain sight.

How I came to escape my perfect romanticism and replaced it with the abstract expressionism of an indifferent angle is a fairytale mystery.

Mesmerized

Caught between the line of affection and logic,

I want to tell you the thoughts of my heart;

The ones my mind would dare not reveal.

I am mesmerized by her smile, and she does not know it.

I want to embrace your smile and be the cause of its resurface;

To be the reason of your laughter in the light of day,

And to drown your frowns under the covers of night;

Furthermore; and in my intrepid state,

I want to taste the frame of the curves on your lips,

To soothe its sorrows away,

To preserve the contours of your smirk.

I am mesmerized by her eyes, and she does not know it.

I want to stare at them without the bashfulness of my diffidence,

To glare at their green surface and understand their unspoken word;

I want to get lost in their colloquial translation,

So that I may learn of the language of origins

And see the soul that hides beneath the skin of your façade.

I am mesmerized by her thoughts, and she does not know it.

I want to peruse through your mind and interpret its creation

To understand the attraction that challenges my own

With every scripture, with every word;

I want to find the balance of the importance in your deliberation,

To unravel the value of your train of thought,

To enlighten perspectives; to add to your worth.

I am mesmerized by her presence, and she does not know it.

Would I betray my fragility for the cause and effect

Of clarity in confusion,

Or would I keep the silence vivid

As the songs of my intuition whisper gently

That my words should weigh upon the livid

And keep their secret strong?

I am mesmerized, in silence, though I think she already knows.

Quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas - by Federico Garcia Lorca

Quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas

alejarme del tumulto de los cementerios.

Quiero dormir el sueño de aquel niño

que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar. 

No quiero que me repitan que los muertos no pierden la sangre;

que la boca podrida sigue pidiendo agua.

No quiero enterarme de los martirios que da la hierba,

ni de la luna con boca de serpiente

que trabaja antes del amanecer. 

Quiero dormir un rato,

un rato, un minuto, un siglo;

pero que todos sepan que no he muerto;

que haya un establo de oro en mis labios;

que soy un pequeño amigo del viento Oeste;

que soy la sombra inmensa de mis lágrimas. 

Cúbreme por la aurora con un velo,

porque me arrojará puñados de hormigas,

y moja con agua dura mis zapatos

para que resbale la pinza de su alacrán. 

Porque quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas

para aprender un llanto que me limpie de tierra;

porque quiero vivir con aquel niño oscuro

que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar.

GARCIA LORCA

The Request

The night was as hollow as the opaqueness of the moonless sky.  Not even the cold tears that poked whatever skin he exposed could awaken his desire to write what he felt.  He was lacking inspiration and the burden of abandonment wore him down.
It was at this point that he thought of a plan.  His instincts told him that it would be an impossible request to make, but he dared for the sake of creativity.

"You must be outta your mind!" she exclaimed.  It was clear to him that she did not like the request, though it was also evident that she was not bothered by the ridiculousness of his demand.
"No," he began, "I've never been more in my mind as I am now."

He stood there in silence, waiting for her eyes to divert from his - they did not.  And he waited like this for what seemed to be an hour of a speechless tableaux.  If her body language could scream it would yell of confusion but it also let him realize that she was thinking, decoding, and formulating.  She was torn between wanting to help him and wanting to run away.

"If you're so IN your mind," she answered finally breaking the silence, "then this should be easier than what you think."
"Yes, it should be," he replied, "but I am in there alone with nothing to provoke me."
Not surprisingly, her facial expression showed a mild level of perplexity to his words.  Before she could continue he interrupted her by insisting on his request.  "Just do it."
"You know I can't," she answered in shame.  She was not shy about the request, but felt ashamed that she would be unable to help him as she had in the past.
"Then I shall wait until you can," he replied with a tone of voice that signalled the end to the exchange of their thoughts.

Silence -
Even the crickets of the night succumbed to their words and listened intently to the white noise that filled the room.

"No man can walk out on their own story."

Time is distant and brief; it waits for noone.

Whoever said that "it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" has not truly felt the weight of brevity, nor has reasoning captured the essence of distance as a loop that comes and goes.

So, how do you say good bye to a ghost that refuses to make an appearance?

Telepathy.

With the nature of words, the mind can learn to defy the physics of origin. Space does not belong to the theory of particles, and matter is but a fragment of various shared instances that come into play as six-degrees of separation. Gravity; therefore, is playful and non-existent.

It is illogical and senseless to believe that time could be fast-forwarded when the physicality of our being is stuck re-living and re-inventing the past.

And just like that, Time is Gone.

Midnight conversations bathed in Tequila

If a drink was meant to blurr the speech of memory, then the written word was meant to revive the metaphors of midnight conversations - when night becomes day and noon becomes a ghost of hidden intents.

The confessions are traced to the boldness of their flow and he is entertained by her sudden disposition.

"None that is said here tonight can be blamed on my own intent," she began to excuse her direct discourse, hoping that he'd believe her liberal remarks.  "I blame it on the tequila."

But as he struggled to keep his eyes focused on her, movement within his thoughts kept his instability at a slower pace.

"By this time tomorrow," he began, "I will have forgotten it all."
"Then we shall await the moment when The Eye blinks," she said.
"No proof," he interrupted, "as if it never happened."

I sat at the edge of the old bridge, awaiting the unobtainable.

I looked past the layer of smoke that escaped my breath and stared at the Moon in its fullness - and its greatest light instilled in me a recollection of fond memories and the sudden realization that fantasy could not cope with the most ideal of my realities.  Never again would the Sun rise from its chilly horizon.

Perhaps in another lifetime, I thought.

The sudden desire to scream the magic of the unimaginative blurred my instinct and the vision of the unamused.  Sitting alone, I heard the prayers of an old religion - it revealed my daily sins to the hearts of the unattainable, ( and soon after they became 'the unworthy').  Only the Moon hid my pain with great illusion and kept the fidelity of my imbalanced sensibility, while the common rhythms of my fragile nature skipped the sense to maintain the white noises of my darkness in the night.

Yes, I thought to myself once more, perhaps in another lifetime.

All split personalities reveal the same truths in different manners.

"I can see you having a split personality," she said
We all do, I argued.
"One minute you're drawing comics and the next you pour your soul into words."
That's still the same person, I smiled back. Comics are masked feelings; words are the make-up that melts away to reveal the truth.

She smiled as she took in my words before I continued.

All reveal the same disturbances.
"Ok, you're a writer; point made," she said as she took a sip of her tea. "You're a disturbed writer."
I wouldn't disagree, I smiled back, looking into her eyes for a response to my dialogue.
"Be proud of that," she continued, "now I understand why you wither away at nights while I get my beauty sleep."

That moment when you see the photo pop out of nowhere

You seek to move on, so you do - and it is grand!
Yet a part of your memory retains what little could be salvaged, though not ever by choice.
The breaths of fresh air are healthier, and night has found a way to tuck you in before dawn.
Then you stumble upon a photo of your past and realize the changes were mutual - though if not emotional, they are certainly physical.

The bright red strands of hair now turned to an opaque black, as dead as the crows, are suitable for the condition - and the memory once cherished has moved on (though oddly enough, it has moved backwards from where it once came).
Yes, it is in that moment when your eyes meet the sparkling greens that once glared at your own mysteries;  though they seem to stare no further than their reflection - shoukran! And cheers is heard all inside the room, toasting with a glass of red that will most certainly end in a night of drunken touch.
How one image can impose a step, when all that is recalled by stranger presences is the hatred of intrusions that arrived from its neighbouring province - the instant reaction is but a blur.

But then the image is closed and you smile because your gut feeling never betrayed you - always trust your instincts! It was in the smile of the prettiest of faces that your discomfort awoke.
So you disconnect and spread the sheets to be filled by dreams, because it is in that moment, when you stumble upon that photo, that you receive your closure and you no longer care to hold on.

El escondite no tiene sentido cuando el escondido no tiene razón

"Mi corazón, como una sierpe,

se ha desprendido de su piel,

y aquí la miro entre mis dedos

llena de heridas y de miel."

 -GARCIA LORCA

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Fue así que su piel se desprendió de mis caricias; 
y mis suspiros, aniquilados por sus tentaciones nocturnas,
ya no sufren por el reconocimiento de sus falsos sentimientos.
Las heridas diarias de sus contra-ofertas quedan solo como manchas
entre las huellas de mis manos.

El recuerdo de ella, cómo se desvanece en el tiempo,
ya ni me abstiene de los rencores que he guardado desde aquellos sueños olvidados.
Mi corazón siempre será un desarreglo a su imagen, pero nunca más va a sangrar por su desgraciada ausencia.

¡Qué dulce es saborear la libertad impuesta que me he ganado a través de las cicatrices con las que me abandonó!. Si realmente se trataba de un juego que jugamos para herir el uno al otro, entonces nuestros ojos fueron cegados a la búsqueda de la verdad de nuestra existencia.

El escondite no tiene sentido cuando el escondido no tiene razón.