Fragment #8

“Now, how do you tie together the pieces of your life that were torn up from the canvas? You can't. Thing is, as hard as you wish that to happen, your life, once fucked up, is fucked up until the very end, until God comes to clear the mess you've made shooting right in your face. Truth is, you've really messed things up, son. You had everything a man could ask for. But you lied and you threw everything to the devil who welcomed such impetuous acts, such blind rashness with open arms. Your lies more than anything brought misery down upon you. You were trying to flee, to get away from the consequences of your lies, but you were the source, giving birth to ever more lies, and in the end you had to live all by yourself, for within a prison of lies you had carefully woven you found yourself trapped. Like a spider. You yarned it up all around you. And when I say 'in the end', you're what now? 35? This is the end, son. This is the end. You'll have none other than the self-hatred, the regrets and the solitude, the interminable waiting for a message which will never come, and you know it will never come. You'll have your books, which you'll grow slowly to despise, the writing which you will learn to detest and day after day you won't do anything else but this, read and write, read and write. And what you will write will be good, but compared to what it could have been, well, that's the thing: they're incomparable. The mediocrity you've always tried to shun and ward off, you'll end up to your neck in it. This is where your intelligence is leading you. I don't deny you're an intelligent person, but you're socially awkward, have always been awkward. Pretended to be ok and smart, but the ill-at-easeness was gnawing at your guts each time you met someone nice. You'll never be the one you're pretending to be. And none of your friends should, upon your death, judge you for the lies and the pretence, for you never really got to know yourself. Deep down, you were fucked up from the very beginning. You had no chance. Also, your friends asked way too much from you, but they knew where you'd been, and back. You're good enough to empathise, to put yourself into people's shoes, yet and because you can't be in your own shoes, you can't know what you feel because you've never been shown how to listen, how to look, how to love. In essence you pay a total attention to the rest of the world, and keep none for yourself. The first one who dropped down on you is yourself. Your averageness couldn't save you: you had to be mediocre in order to survive, but now the mediocrity has caught up with you, and you're dying. Miserably, at that. Your hands hurt so bad you won't tell anyone. Your teeth are all crooked because you haven't got any money to fix them. You can barely pay off your debts. Your family hardly ever calls you. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying you're a failure. Some of what you wrote, and all of what you will pen in the few months before your death are going to mark this century. But you will leave your imprint as an inadequate, uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin man whose ambitions were always foiled, who always failed to make an impression deep enough to have someone stay by his side. A second-order mind in a third-rate world. You will be the last Romantic ever to roam this earth, with a splendid posthumous career. [...] Look at all those lies you said meaning to embellish your quotidian in people's eyes! Let me tell you: people are no fools. You're a see-through. Your life was sad enough as it was, there was no need to pour more syrupy schmaltz on top of it. But you didn't want to settle for anything less than pure, antique tragic. And some of the things that happened are nothing short of that – tragic – but the tinnitus rings on, son. You can pretend not to hear it, yet it echoes and vibrates and destroys. There, some unseen-before chaos inside of you, and I can tell, I've seen a few of those myself, within and without. There is no other way this can end up. You know it, son, I can see it in your eyes that you've known all along how it would end up. I'm not saying you won't need a great dose of liquid courage to achieve that, but it's all for the best. As much for you as for us. We can't spend whatever time we spend worrying about you, we have families to take care of, occupations to pursue, destinies to fulfil. Yours was a done deal a long, long time ago. You were not born to last. You've just kept on postponing it, even avoiding it, by some strange tweak of fate. But in the meantime you've written for the generations to come a simple message: don't waste your time on earth, just abre los ojos, hermanos, hermanas, and let the convoluted pseudo-Romantics perish in the flame of forgery, for there never was another Romantic after Keats but you. You know the world will be a better place without a tortured poet to heal and nurture. You're broken past mending, and we can't afford your breaking anyone else...you've already done enough damage as it is, haven't you. You know she could have remained at your side, she could have endured your whimpering had you not cast her away for the third time. You knew that, but you couldn't help, could you. You saw she suffered staying with you, and you couldn't stand it. Ultimately, you were right to break up, for she had had time to renew herself, to rebuild what you had unwittingly and unwillingly torn down. You're like a wrecking ball, son, like an asteroid. Poor girl. But you had the sense not to inflict your self upon anyone else, and you'll pull ourself out of harm's way. Hell is paved with good intentions, you'll soon realise that. Your pacing to and fro will cease, your whiling away the time will also come to an end, much to our benefit. Your watching other people having fun, moving on in their life, wondering when it'll happen to you, all this will stop. The questioning will stop. The longing, the pain too. And you know you'd make a bad monk, probably not the worst, for some have set precedents unlikely to be matched, but as you've been averagely bad at almost anything you've ever done...it stands to reason that you won't stand out being a bad monk. I wish you the best, son. This is going to be hard, let's face it, but you have the guts, you've always had the guts. You've shilly-shallied in your time, but not this once, and we both know you'll be brave facing the black one, and I don't know why, but you've never feared her, like you had come to terms with her before the terms were even defined. Perhaps that makes you the bravest of us, perhaps. Now come, it is time.”

 

The world burns

The world burns.

The man, on the doorstep to his house,

– one hand in his pocket –

– the other holding a cup of tea –

watches the writhing flames

dance in the pale segment

of grey dawn.

The world has been burning,

day and night,

for thirty years now.

There seems to be no end to it.

The inky carapace of clouds

has not yet been breached,

the sun deemed dead,

the moon, gone.

The world burns,

and the man, in the cool breeze,

– his jacket flaps to an unknown beat –

ticks off another day in his mental calendar

– the exact number him only knows –

until the end of the fire.

 

The longest night

In the dim nowhere we stand,

erect like rows of pickets

or like sunbleached obelisks

in Luxor,

our parched skins

speak for themselves.

We look for a sign, alert,

our gaze floating over the dunes.

The searing sun is still hung high.

And we think we hear a voice

but it is just the wind hissing

over the sands:

“I will open my hand and

I will show you man in a handful of dust.”

We watch our palms,

watch the dying man's rake

the dying man's claw

the last stand

there is bitterness and damnation

in those raking fingers

the minutest scratch carving doom

in the halest flesh.

We know full well that

the dyer's hand, congested, swollen

and puffed like a bloated drowned,

only the lines on the dyer's hand

can show the way there –

where we have need go –

tumefied as a dier's hand.

To hold

a dier's hand is

terrible

nothing has a stronger grip

and a sadder release.

Somewhere, far away and yet visible to us,

the summer deck chairs are being brought in.

The wind swirls the napkins,

shakes the flowers in their makeshift vases.

The storm is massing in the East,

the horizon billowy and swollen and

streaked with claw-like arcs.

The first raindrops bloat the tablecloth,

contort and contract in unshapely waves.

The party shall continue inside the grange.

We lost the pace of the longest night of the year

face buried in 'kerchiefs,

unable to see through tears,

adversity pushing our gaze clean to the horizon.

the warmth of a stranger's hand

glimpsed at a cashier

exchanging notes

surprises us

like painted players stuck in a

dumbfounded, ridiculous

rigor mortis

the feel and the dream long gone

of water and that of the sand

rubbed in the palm of the hands

begin to fade

the desert and the country

make one, in the dier's hand,

united for one second

of agony, of glory.

Now we feel on our skin,

prickling,

beginning, for us,

what we shall forever know

as the longest night

of our lives.