Mineral Love

I love a cold and lifeless thing
Not messy flesh
A seed of truth in its mineral core
Its porous face
I take it will take long for it to fade
Dissolve, evolve

I love the weakness of its diamond-jealous sparks that blended with its gravelly mass to spice it up.
I love how in my pocket as I pass the trees and flowers and the grass
It gives mee weight,
A cold grey anchor for the shore.

I need no kiss and no caress, no touch
Than it to hold
It pulses in my hand, it breathes
I swear it does
We were reconciled through metaphor,
My dear, my rock

The plights of old age

I remember my grandmother in the big house, watching television all day long, shouting when she spoke because her hearing was bad, getting helped into the shower by the maid. There were shelves and shelves of neglected books on philosophy and literatura from her happy days as a profesor, now caked in dust. I don’t want to end up like this, I thought. My craft, after all, is not to dance ballet, I can do it for as long as the pen does not tremble too much in my wrinkled hand. I will do yoga all my life to be fit and flexible when I’m old, not like my grandmother who would take a cab to the café down the block. I will be successful, proud of all my published books and numerous recognitions, proud of having changed lives in the classroom, hand in hand with the love of my life and our beauiful offspring. But then again, when I was little, I imagined myself at the age of twenty already having published a novel, with an adorable boyfriend, having seen much more of the world than I have, studying at some university abroad. Life has a way of making distances in time toward your goals expand, expand, and expand through some circumstance or another. However, I have always thought of the time in a lifespan as ever different, always new, because never before were you thirty, or forty, or fifty-two, and I have always disagreed with my peers who want to die a spectacular death in their late twenties to never know the plights of old age. I want to know life, to know it to the fullest degree possible, I always thought. But there are some fears. Watching my mother age, and having aged myself a little, I wonder if life really is always new. With my mother it seems to be the same depression, the same traumas, the same resentment. The same unfulfilled dreams, only different television shows on primetime. It seems that life passes you by, whizzing past all those goals that kept getting farther and farther away from your reality, and on the other hand drones on, leaving you stuck in the same spot you’ve always been. Reflecting on these matters gives me a feeling of restlessness, of insatisfaction. The plights of old age is probably just a different version of the plights of youth and the plights of middle age. Except that on top of everything, you are wrinkled and practically deformed, you have no energy, you are invaded with disease, and nobody expects anything new from you. If it really is that bad, I guess I will submit to oblivion and smoke opium for the duration of my elder years for, after all, what is the emminence of death good for if not to enjoy all the pleasures that kill you softly?

Eulogy of the Muse

She would bleed out of me uncontrollably. She would shake the hand to stumble towards a pen or any type of keyboard and discern. She was a mistress that lived in wooden pipes and rolling papers, in starry skies and bus rides, in poetry classes and nature walks. She made kaleidoscope a verb. She took away sleep or else crept her way in, where even now she lives as a ghost, dictating flashes of magic. I thought that tree of life inside my head contained an elixir of boundless existence... it was sweet, a thick whaft of words. But she is dead now, limp and lifeless. The autopsy proves she drowned. The water of the ocean rotted her wood, dissolved her powers. An Icharus. With her I felt the sparks of the sun on my face, I grabbed the twigs that burned in the campfire and she sat on the burning branches as if she were made of air. I held her hand as we plunged towards the depths of dreams in that watery tempest. An ocean death, a death in the place of origin. Now her corpse is dry as stone, porous. All deserts were once oceans. All oceans have vague memories of incandescent volcano explosions, times of heat and destructive creation. What was there in the poetry, in the jumbled prose? A vomitive cry, an itch, a restless eye. But most of all a heart consumed by fire. That fire reached the brain and linked both organs. Now the heart beats like a clock, and the brain is only ego, uninspired. I must justify my absence, honor her life by reconigzing her death. I must speak of the emptiness, the silence of cave walls. Except that there is nothing really to say. Silence and emptiness speak for themselves. Contepmlation becomes passive, passion becomes contemplative. And there is nothing new under the sun.