☼

the story of how

    You may not know this, or remember it, but there was a time when there were planets. There were grasshoppers too, but you wouldn't know about those. They were the first ones to go.

    Back then, nobody quite understood, but many theories have been written and many historians have debated since. Since it all went away. I have a theory myself but well, it's somewhat of my grandfather's really, or maybe his grandfather's dad. That's how most things are now, most of us only pick up on what our elders have to say.

    You see back then, according to grandfather that is, people had their own thoughts on things, such as planets and grasshoppers, and they made an effort to continuously investigate them. And because of that, things were still around, bound to each other, not by gravity, nor the food chain, no, nothing like that. Rather, because people would think to talk about them. It may sound too obvious for you now, but try and put yourself back at that time, they were oblivious to such knowledge. They were, as you'll find out, mostly distracted by less urgent things.

    It all started with the grasshoppers, and from there on things kept going away. At first, people noticed. They would ponder over it and make many estimates, graphs and opinions. But after a while it wasn't of much interest really, and that's when it really began. 

    The outer planets, they were the first to leave. Uranus, Neptune and even that dazzling Saturn made its way. Sure! We still had our eyes on Mars then, we just weren't paying enough attention to see that Venus had already slipped away. The moon kept creeping up and down, till nobody talked about it anymore. But we gotta give it to the Moon, it really tried its best. It ran full for many years, sometimes a pale red, sometimes a burning gold, but that just wasn't enough. Not for us. We grew accustomed, and one day it didn't rise at all.

     The asteroids, in an attempt to fetch our interest, past right by us in rocketing rage. They even chipped off parts of our mountains, scattered our lakes. But it only distracted us. To much of their disappointment, we quickly forgot about them.

     The frogs and the bees, those didn't last long. We started forgetting about birds, and nobody cared for their songs. Planes were the only things that flew, because we still talked and we complained about them. But only for a while. The sky and the clouds held for a bit, but left around the same time as the bears, we talked so much about buildings and cars that they all faded away. We talked about lines and about ourselves and how fat and how old we would get. Those were our favorite things. So they didn't go away. We kept growing older, we kept growing fatter.

    The sun, like the moon, made an effort to stay. It moved farther away when we were too hot and came back when we were too cold, until we forgot what it was there for. History, well, that went away as well. The sea, the ships, dead poets, the explorers and everything they wrote, simply evaporated. Gravity left at some point, though no one was quite sure where it was to begin with. Apparently even words started disappearing, as our thoughts began to narrow.

   And that's how all those things parted ways. Why you've never seen a bear, heard songs or ever danced. 

    My grandfather told me, how his grandfather's great grandfather told him, how interesting it was the day when dogs and cats and the people you knew, the last things we could talk about, just started flying away. How still we kept talking about ourselves in the hope that we wouldn't

º

Deep Cleansing Foreplay

The Sunlight gently massaged the sole of his feet. It licked his cheek and its saliva dripped from his chin. Sunlight is an insatiable beast, it leaves not a portion of the back, not a cut of the leg nor a palm of the neck untouched, everything must be sampled by its yellow tongue.

With its glistening fingers it presses onto the skin piercing the flesh, stirring the marrow of the bones. It stirs and stirs, oh it stirs until all is warm. And the heart, what it does to the heart is pornography for the pyromaniac. Eating away and slobbering its prey, the sunlight is a calm beast and with diligent patience it licks and burns its plate. It starts by the edges and works its way to the center of its dish.

This way it leaves its mark; on the shoulders and under the cavern of the eyes, brown and red finger marks. He gave his face to the sunlight and opened his mouth to eat the wind that cascaded from the corner of the trees.

≈

≈
daydreams and sweatstreams
.

We will hang our clothes in the backdoor of the bathroom so that the sweat may dry off.
Then we'll put on more clothes and drench in more sweat and hang those as well.

Outside there will be clothes hanging too. They will be hanging from the balcony and from the branches of the small trees. On the seat of the bicycle and from it's handles as well. Soon the house will be filled with our smell and when a summer breeze reaches our sweaty skin, we will be resting naked beside the open glass frames.
Only our skin will be left and it will not dry.
We will keep them moist always:

as we sweat ourselves into dreams of silence.

♦dirty laundry•

He was surprised how she exited the pile of old socks untarnished. 
Clean. 
Her back still exhaled spices, her shoulders were a garden of jasmine.

And how he savored jasmine. 

He was a smelly trap melded with the pile: a cavernous creature. 
With confident admiration he followed her every gesture. 
The articulation of her wrists and the bending of her elbows.  

Acute to obtuse, concave to convex,  metamorphic geometry for the ardent academic.

There she stood, at the edge of the room, dressed in light from the navel up, wearing shade as a clear skirt. 
Her body was a metaphor for his routine; the nights in trance and the mornings asleep. 

He stalked her with fierce curiosity.

From behind the lips of worn clothes,  naked as a tongue, his arms rolled out of the fabric lips like the tip of a reptile's tongue, 
welcoming the scent of his prey. 

Stood there seemingly untouched, the main course of the day. To dine twice and again.

The Hypocritical Chameleon and His Two Eyes

What is there in the neutral act of opening a door, scratching the head, cleaning the edges of the toilet after a piss? What is there in referring to your own thoughts, the deviations of a stomach fed? There is little. So you reach for nobility in the past. Or in somebody else's dreams. Somebody else's agony. You go from pale green to distorted violet.

Your egocentricity borders humane simply because humans are brought up to take care of themselves. If all is lost, all is done and all is broken, we trust no one and believe only in the reality of our minds. So you grew up trusting your mind ? Your television, your books, your philosophies, other egocentrics and your elder intellectuals. Reptiles among reptiles, you confuse the ability of dialogue with that of discourse. Your words are thin, unlike water and air, even piss has more to offer.

You pierce your own skin so you can pretend you know what it is like to be pierced by others. Your blood tastes like wine and chocolate: from all the alcohol you keep in your head and all the sugar you take in by the gulps. City child your empathy is wasted when your heart is a stone cold fortress. A fortress open for visitors, yet still in cold rooms you invite them for dinner, praising your barricaded dome. Your innocence yearns for oxygen, your mind is restless with the eternal hammering of your narrowed philosophies. 

You take a piece of your deliciously cheap bread and fantasize over the mansions you'll never have. A mansion that would look nice on your lawn. Not that you own a lawn. You are the king of left overs, you wear the shirt of higher middle class and the pants of the higher than that. Yet, you could have found them in the trash. Technology is a word derivative to magic and magic is derivative to diamonds. But all diamonds become dirty stones when you touch them. You rather wipe your ass with your hand than to deal with these burdens.

Your ignorance borders humility, two words often mistaken for one another.  How would you know? Words for you are too clumsy to handle. 

...

The Ghost From the Past You Never Had

It's been two years now and we haven't invaded a single house, but we've scavenged the premise for the possibilities. Empty parking lots and now that old bridge they showed us. But I guess we won't see that winter ever again or that autumn, or that spring. Maybe we'll revisit it again, with different branches in our hands, with different shoes on our feet. The same way we never did go back to that boat we found, on that old terrain. We never closed that hole and set sail through those canals, sabotaging the old folk and throwing rocks at the Hispanic bike gang. We never rode our bikes down that old street again, but we found new streets to lurk in. We never did have those water gun fights again, but we did manage to find some construction sites. 

Maybe it's just the way it is. We're always searching for somewhere to colonize, a new fortress to build, an empty shell to fill our souls with; or our empty souls to fill. We want to escape this suburb, but our escape is the suburb itself. A place we don't understand but we half grew up in. We want to reject it, not for what it is but for what everyone else wants it to be. So we make homes outside of our houses, on the empty streets, on the vacant houses, on these parking lots. 

That night, we picked the locks that had been left open. We brought the amplifiers and we set up a party. But it was only us. A farewell party that would last months. We baptized those streets and we called them our own, a resting place for ghosts. Our ghosts, and we sang it so loud, we sang nothing and everything at once. Our own, our ghost own. I pissed from the roof, and you understood what I meant when I said that was where we were and what we always had been. We wanted to leave something, something that no one else would ever know about, buried in the walls. 

They say that sound waves never dissipate, so they're like ghosts from the past, but that you'll never feel are haunting you. So we decided to leave our ghosts there, trapped in that house, a song that will be played forever, but that no one will ever hear.

That year I wandered searching for faint voices from my past, voices that crossed the corners and pierced my mind at night. I drew their stories in my head. And in winter, we left our present in somebody else's past. The past they never had. 

We are the ghosts. 

The ghosts from the past you never had.

Coherence

Nothingness.
No memories, no certainty.
Everything is foggy and desperation slowly slips away.
As it slips away, clarity begins to whisper things:

the ceiling, the light

It says.
I don’t understand, but I listen anyway.

corners, air, pictures, saliva, swallowing...taste.

I sit up, now it’s starting to make sense, these words seem to connect.
They form a line, I can pinpoint and locate them.

This isn't where I was, this is somewhere else.
Here words follow their predecessors and so do memories.
I wake up where I slept, and the empty spot beside me stays empty.
Water runs down the sink, this way cold, that way warm.
It washes my eyes. Doors open. Closet has clothes.
Nose smells armpit.

Cold, need sunlight.
Hungry, need food.
Plants, need water.

I remember these things.
What it is like when they are all out of place.
And then back again. Without meaning, then with meaning again.
Temporarily forgotten, temporarily remembered.


Dream you are awake, and awaken to memory.
When you are remembering, you are dreaming.

Living in dreams. Forgetting reality.

Oxygen

It was the nightmare inside of a dream inside of a dream of a nightmare, so that by the time you woke up, you were alien to reality. Entirely confused. Grappling at the edges of the ceiling, trying to make sense of the corners. Had you woken up in another dream? You were amnesiac for minutes.

These dreams that question your identity, not as a person, but as how and when you exist. Where do you exist? In these moments of forgetfulness you try and find some thing to cling on to. The wall, the frames, the pain on your back, the taste on your mouth, memories, sounds...coherence. Coherence. Is that what's keeping this reality separate from the other? So you find your safety vest, what will keep you floating with your head above the surface and your body sunken: coherence. Never mind the uncertainty that's beneath you, the other reality, the one you'll drown in, your head's at the surface and the oxygen now fills your lungs with security. The security that you exist, that you are you and everything else around works with you as a part of it. You are safe from the intangible reality, where your mind is scattered and your soul unprotected.

But there are those few minutes of tension, where your head is still wet, your lungs are gasping, your arms pushing down and your legs jolting. That's where we are staying for a while, because it is the most interesting place to be.

...

Potassium Permanganate


Please, come to us.
Oh show us your skin, please, please show us your skin.
Let us pick on it with our teeth, as they call it, nibble nibble just a bit.

Show us please, show us your wounds,
let us suck the blood out of your ego.

Oh let us bathe,
our hair is filled with dirt and our scalp wet with oil,
let us bathe in your warm knowledge and cleanse every pore of our body.

Yes, let your knowledge pour, pour like purple water, like in our youth we would bathe. To sooth our itch, to wash away the disease. For our ignorance is a disease and your knowledge the remedy. But your wounds are our sustenance, we will pick at them always. Even from your dried bones, we will savor the marrow. Oh and it tastes so good, like salt, like seasoning from the dishes of our mothers. We will devour your arrogance, you will fill up our bellies.

On the night of your departure

    'At Last' by Etta James played on the way back home, as if by irony.  I folded your towel neatly and tucked it in the back of my closet. I kind of like this tradition we seem to be making, so I also took the shirt you wore and all the things with your scent and placed them in a zip lock bag, then tucked it in to a small drawer as well.

    I ate a tangerine without listening to the images on TV, just how I showed you I did. I stood in front of the left over ruins of our fortress, I breathed in it's last remains and thought of the movie we made. The one that nobody filmed, and nobody wrote, nobody understood the plot and no critics are raving for. That film where you slept under stars and I slept beside them.
   I put the bed back together, mounted what some call a frame but looked more like a cage......The night you departed, I went back to sleeping on the floor again.  But this time there's a mattress, and I wonder if temporarily.

    I clipped my toe nails and those of my left hand. I didn't take a shower, and wondered if I should ever again. I wrote to my father just like you reminded me to. I didn't make anything in particular, but started practicing the act of doing so. I stared at the fan and listened to it's humming, maybe it's just another ritual in the making. And to tell you the truth I didn't look back, but I'm sure the sky was still violet, just like we left it.

Prone to Disinfecting

The tissue was stained with bits of dark red, almost brown. 

Flooding the alcohol, as the alcohol flooded the red.

Then back into the wound.

" Fffffffffffffffffffhhhh......"

His head flung back, his nostrils widened. 

'What stings the most isn't the wound, it's disinfecting it. Cleaning it.'

He got another piece of tissue, soaked it in more alcohol.

As if an invisible current pierced through the tip of his chin into his nose and through his forehead; tilting his skull with precise motion. The air kidnapped through the fence holes of his teeth.

" hfffffffffffffffhhhh..."

Sighed in relief.

Threw the tissue away. 

...

It wasn't the fall, it wasn't when the asphalt burnt through the shirt, ripping off layers of his skin. It wasn't the burning, it wasn't the fall. Not when it turned from pink to red. Not when the cold air kissed the surfaced flesh. Not when the adrenaline sank.

It was the soap, then the alcohol. From washing to disinfecting. From bad to worst.

Just like life.

What hurts isn't the moment you fall, not when you notice the wound, not when the adrenaline sinks.

The disinfecting, that's when you really test your nerves. 

And after that, it's just minor discomfort until it heals. 

• Estimulando Eureka •

A cama é o casulo do homem. O asfalto, o trilho por onde os discos rusticos de seus pensamentos deslizam.

   Chacoalhando os vagões de sua conciencia a cada pedregulho a cada pequeno salto entre a rua e o meio fio. Escapam os passageiros, por entre as janelas de seu nariz, escorregando pela geléia de seus olhos. Saltam sem destino como esperma sem domicilio, que igualmente de um saculejo vazio, de saudades, desejo e solidão, desliza por um cano de esgoto, ao esquecimento.

Passageiros dos vagões sem numero.

A cama é o casulo do homem. O asfalto, trilho do seus pensamentos.

   Saculejando os vagões até que sóbre poucos passageiros. Escolhidos à sorte, remanescentes do subconsciente. Esses chegam ao destino, e chegando la, grudam um no outro, braço, perna, pescoço; boca no queixo, mão no peito, saco no ombro, ouvido no olho. Num orgasmo metamórfico nasce uma entidade. Entidade deformada, cinzenta e rosa. Essa entidade se divide em duas: a cinza e a rosa.

   Duas possibilidades coexistindo no mesmo lugar, na estação de trem. Rosa como carne, cinza como vestimentas. Uma prosseguirá  até o casulo, outra morrerá, seus restos mortais serão usados - farão parte de novos vagões sem numero. Deslizando pelo asfalto, saltando pedregulho.

Reptilian Arithmetic

★

You have three cups,

I have four.

Make sure you count.

You have three.

I have four.

I punch you in the face.

Now I have seven cups altogether.

★

Untitled 1A

If only Joseph could sing opera.

He would fill the empty chambers of his soul.

sigh.

An abandoned theater. Sales didn't go well. Joseph's marketing strategy wasn't the best in the biz. He never filled those seats. Never had regulars.

And now it had all lost it's meaning. 

Dusty, grey, soft chalk.

Time to throw it all away.

Malnutrition ll ( or yellow school bus )

|

Mole Wars

The empty street. He was daydreaming, or barely awake. At that age there wasn't a difference, if there ever is. Something about the moles, their small corpses, such distinctive bones. They floated from the grassy ocean onto the asphalt shore. Soldiers from a secret war raging in the empty field. He could smell them from many feet away. Their flesh must have been evaporating, even in the winter's sun. Some say smells are stronger when it's colder. But maybe they were like the marine animals caught on shore...the stench so strong not just from decay; death outside of your salty homeland, outside of a grave. Their sorrow evaporating alongside their flesh.

||

Green Igloo

There was this enormous bush tree. 

He calls it bush tree cause it looks like a bush but may actually be a tree. It sat there at an empty house's  yard. Right at the corner of the street. 

He stood there at the bus stop wearing a huge coat looking at the tree.

Bush.

Tree.

Looking. 

Now it sort of looks more like an igloo. Maybe he could fit inside of it. He could stand there and nobody would see him. At least not clearly. 

He stood staring. 

Staring at the green igloo, staring at a tree.
Bush...tree.

frog

I went to get myself a cup of water.
Through the transparent surface,
framed by the muted glow of the night,
was a pitch dark silhouette.
I was going to capture it's soul.
Come to me silhouette,
darker than the dark I know.
I went back to retrieve my capturing device,
But tripped by time,  I arrived to late.
You skipped away. You knew my love for your silhouette.
You knew your soul I'd take.
So you skipped away,
out of this frame.
And the glow became darkness again.

Malnutrition

It was a permanent sunset.
A permanent sunset.
A permanent sunset.

A locked room. In permanent sunset.
Permanent sunset.
Permanent sunset.

A glass window with microscopic people.
Transparent figures, flickering and dancing, and floating on sunset.

Sunset. Sunset.

     He laid there. But also he stood. The walls were ocher and the floor was dust. Dust of years alone. He was locked. For how long? He tried to scream but barely whimpered. There was hunger, or thirst, or fear, starvation.

     There were words decorating the walls, but decorating is a kind word. They were raping the walls. Written in charcoal, they scrambled and moved. Raping the ochre which was almost mud, if it weren't for the cracks, they raped those too. There was no safe haven, the words covered them all.

     Yet he couldn't read them. They were still for a moment then scrambled again. As if it were an obscenity to stare at them. He hurried to a corner, was there someone outside? The words kept scrambling. Then the letters became eyes. Looking at him, craving his legs.

     There was dust on his shoulders and arms; suddenly he was outside. Looking at this house dipped in the yellow sunlight, everything was quiet for a moment.

A hand shook behind a wall.

Then he was inside.

He knocked at a door, knocked is so kind, he plunged his bones. Not remembering if there was even a door there to begin with. Desperate and scared like any other child would be. Haunted by the ochre and the dust chanting at him.

There was someone behind the door.
He stayed locked forever until he woke.
                                                               ...and it was time to go to school.

♪

You kill me so gently

oh oh oh oh oh oh

Honey

You kill me so softly

oh oh oh oh oh oh

When you lay me in my grave so gently

Oh honey

With your saber so smoothly

Piercing so easily

You killed me so gently

♪

tv pirata

Won’t you come with me?
Let’s break into an old lighthouse,
invade an abandoned lot.
Let’s regain consciousness,
and delete our social lives.

Come on, let’s start a pirate broadcasting station.

Play loops of old musicals, those 80’s cartoons,
japanese horror films to keep the old folk aloof.
We should staple some flyers around the neighborhood:
“past 12 or past 9, set up your device.
Between 27 and 38.
Turn off your lights.”

Over and over and over again.
Every Tuesday night or every Saturday.
Let’s play those loops and watch the windows a blaze,
are they tuning into our ballerina dance?
She dances over and over again.

We won’t need any sound, leave it all mute,
let the kids and the lovers choose their own tunes.
Or no tunes, we don’t care. We just want to play.
Play vhs tapes that we’ve cut up all day.

They’ll forget the internet and remember those days.
Resurrect old antennas and start dreaming again.
Nobody will know, we’ll keep it down low.
In the morning we will be normal, 
yawning and all.

Let’s break into an old lighthouse,
or from your basement, I don’t care.
Let’s destroy all the evidence
of our lives before this.

Let's start broadcasting our silent remains.

^^^

Once there was a king.

     He ruled over a small kingdom with only as much gold as the kingdom needed.The columns that held the roof, entrance to his kingdom, reached higher than giraffes but were no more than a stack of rocks. The garden had only the most common flora, but in their roots were the most sincere caring. So humble were the attributes of this kingdom but so bold it's structure, that it reflected the effort and passion of it's ruler. One that had both his hands take part in it's rise, wiping his sweat with the dirt and dust that built it's walls. The king made no little of his kingdom and was always filled with pride in his heart.

Yet with all this, some evil would still manifest.