jueves, 21 de febrero de 2019

how to explain a portrait


i made your portrait whilst
you were in the next room,
laughing at something 
your little sister had just told you
— i don’t rememberer what
was it about, but i
recall your real smile
when you told me about it, later on,
not very much alike
the one i had brushed up 
with ink and watercolour —,
i imagined your lips opening wide
and pictured them, considering your tongue,
its fleshy and wet outline, 
and concluding that i could never do 
justice to it with other than my tongue,
so just a bit of teeth, just the upper part
poking underneath the red, red lip, 
the same teeth that appear
in all your father’s nightmares
and which have cost you so,
                                                     so dearly, so much
in fright and money raised 
from will and many scratches 
and almost nothing more,
no past, no cushion, no interest,
                                                             no debt,
the spark of happiness 
at the narrow cornerstone of your eyelids,
broadening them to light, to catch it 
as soon as it will come up from the right-hand
frontier of the page with the thin air 
we both breathe at this high,
and your crazy hair playing with your ears
as a fabulous child of Dionysius 
and someone from the midst of the bacchantes, 
and it wasn’t unlike 
the arguments we're used to have — all context 
and jumping in the water without checking 
its latest infestation of piranhas,
just hoping for the best — and, in the end, 
just enacting the worstest case scenario
and damaging the goods, so we must pay back,
like when your play again the game of death,
of deceiving yourself
in a self-seeking-and-destroying circle,
a circus of your mind
crowded with hair-raising ghost-clowns,
whilst i seek the playfulness of life, 
the organism of joy in which we are
part of the code and part of the survival,
part of the wheel and vessel for the will
and where each game starts anew,
with no score left behind
nor any other kind of leverage or ballast,
while you feel and you sense
and refill and resent
and construct and adore
and revere and abuse
false idols of the truth,
whilst i just try to have
some new roots in the ground
without pretending all 
the minerals and water of the truth,
while you feel that my love is not right here 
just because i don’t love
like a depressed teenager, with the longing 
for your presence that mussels
have for the salty rock
against which they will stay 
forever or for death, which comes before,
whilst i try to say something, some old phrase, 
some same old, same old stuff
that i’ve told you before, for it's the only way, 
the simplest way i know: repeat the obvious,
the truth that my own eyes, 
as myopic as yours
as my epic unfolded down the lane
to several rock-bottoms, 
with the glasses of years 
of pain and talks about the costs of pain
in blood and tears and scars and hate,
are capable of grasping
without forgetting, though,
that it’s not the whole picture, but a dip in the spectrum,
and from that spectrum only
some rays are known to us,
like from the masses we 
run into on the streets
only a few will ever 
be tangible to us
— do you remember how
my heart came easy, slicker to your arms,
that you posed as repose,
but proposed other poisons?,
well, i’m afraid that, maybe,
that’s how i caught this fever, 
this transparent conundrum —, or reality 
as it presents itself 
to me and other sharers,
the dialoguing crew,
as a net of perspectives, 
a very knotty one
we snarl altogether and try to unsnarl together 
‘cause alone is a labyrinth 
of mirrors, fog and sorrow
from which a minotaur can’t scape
without the wax and feathers
and rope that someone else
already used to fly away and up,
and if the varmint flies low, 
it could even be able 
                                        to make it                                                                     out

                                      this time
                                                                            ,
but after all the measurements,
a book case a bit taller than myself 
brought on a small wheelbarrow 
from ikea 
to bus-stop, 
to bus,
to park, 
to gravel,
to street, 
to street, 
to street, 
to back-alley, 
to stairway, 
to elevator, 
to your tiny apartment
— that i tried to make into a nest
from the crumbling fortress of solitude it was,
a nest for you and me —, 
you’ve just called me a cuckoo
as you torn down to shreds 
the bamboo paper i had drawn you on
                and
                                 let

them

                          fall

                              down
on                the                   ground
just by opening     a bit     your  hands     so       slowly...
and i, that have been named
with many a heavy name,
like i was mythological,
a pants-on-fire liar, 
a mute, 
a ghost, 
a rabbit in the hole, 
a son of nothing good,
a father of depression,
a summoner of jinx,
a portrayer of guilty and nasty truths,
a conveyor of gloom
a plain and selfish boy
a fat-ass and a loooooooooooooser, 
after putting up for decades 
with words solid as punches,
with pain through meditation 
about suggested subjects, 
with this same stumping from different kinds of beasts, 
i get to the n indictment, 
lose my temper and hit you,                           and you hit back, 
and i've become the monstrous minotaur 
that i was while i grew
up in the web of shrinks, the womb of wounds, 
and then i become still, but there's no silence, 
for my breath-pray is blocking out 
whatever you are yelling, 
and whilst i run away 
to the kitchen, the balcony, 
a cigarette and these 
words forming in my mind, 
i remember the last time, 
and the time after that, 
and the other before
— and not because i'm somewhat saint, 
and not because i say so (so you say), 
but just because i've been there
and have done worse than you —,
and all the other times 
in dialogue and laughter, 
and that i’m worn from warning you away 
— as better as i could — the lonely way:
it's not the only way
and all the wounds of sunrise 
and all the sunset wounds
can blossom in new flesh, in almost renewed organs,
new tissues and new mountains 
and valleys without form 
other than those 
                                 of 
                                            our 
                                                         little
                                                                            footprints

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