Saturday, December 29, 2012



The Sun and Man’s Labor force

When people are no longer just possible metaphors,
countable hours of work to be capitalized on, punched on a card or recorded on a badge at the end of a day.
When God really stays up all night like my mom when I had my first teenage parties intoxicated only by the indelible instincts of Youth.
Yes when Be’elzebub shits his pants and really becomes the Lord of the Flies
when bugs pest around his face tortured by the infinite hole of doubt,
when I stare again at the infinite hole of the girl I love and dive into her…whole again;
then I’ll have something inspired to write.

But for now it just seems logical that a young man waiting for the bus
can’t beat the end of a cold afternoon, staring at the curb of the sidewalk
with glazed sad eyes and his patient limbs anchored in the cold,
his back against the stone that ain’t really stone but building blocks of Man,
it just seems logical that construction workers in the old mall’s dust eat with hunger out of non-recyclable plastic bags, their feet firmly fixed on the damp ground where their steel-toed shoes broke the thin ice.
They talk loud over the noises of engines and excavators.


                                    Logical that when I choose to lay down words in a quiet place my ears won’t stop buzzing from tinnitus and some 14 years of punk rock and other rocks,
                                    logical that destitute men and women wait for the bus, that an old unshaven man
holding a plastic bag that he’s had for 10 years –says the logo– also holds craziness and sickness in both of his eyes. I let him stare, why should I mind? It’s attention given, free, reckless and unchained and he gives it unlike
all the young chicks I try to get with, he breaks some sort of silence here, makes some sort of pact here, for me to share his misery. For me to share
                                                            at least
                                                                          something.
A gorgeous black chick and her friend giggle and make me forget the stare of the old man,
                                    logical that nerdy teenagers waddle like birds, that their heads oscillate at every step taken in immaculate tennis shoes,
that young girls get rowdy waiting for the bus that also goes to the projects,
that a dude who joined us here in Duct-taped shoes sits on the plastic bench, spits on the black ground, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, combs his greasy red hair with short beat-up fingers, bitten nails, scratches his tired neck, looks in my direction but not at me.

A longhaired scruffy man pisses behind the bus stop, bent back like he’s gonna fall. He defies me with his chin.

A couple of young alcoholics walk by. At first, I thought the women had a limp leg but when they come back with more beer from the corner store, I notice they’re drunk as hell and also their smell.
            It’s logical that she has scars on her face, a big one on her eyebrow; she’s probably fallen in the stairs…

The young dude’s still riveted here, still waiting with quiet innocent eyes still cemented to the curb.
                                    He looks at nothing
                                                    at the thawed frost with thawed irises.
                                    He looks worried and alert in the buzz of the city streets, like a swan’s spine, now slightly                                    bent
                                    He looks perfect

but I don’t think I ever believed so strongly in Man’s destruction of Man’s World.

I see Manuel, he greets me, tells me the bus drivers are on strike today so we decide to walk together leaving the young dude standing there, waiting some more for the buses but the buses won’t come.

            We talk about painting, dark-haired girls, he tells that he likes how I radiate passion when I try to explain something. I change the subject and compliment him on some of his silk screening but he continues :
            “How can you maintain this confident walk even in this cold?”
            “That’s only cause I got hemorrhoids…”

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