City Poem

I walk a city
Where my steps leave no trace,
A city whose nights are birds
Picking on the breadcrumbs of memory.

I walk by trees anointed
With smells heirs of amoniac and rain,
By obese nurses in pastel gowns
Vomited by glass doors of emergency rooms,
By produce stands
Suspended as minuscule tropical jungles
Above the asphalt,
By old widows
Who have replaced their dead soul-mates
With little curly-haired dogs,
By iron trees
With fruits of traffic lights,
By bums
With eyes withdrawn by meth and ancient sorrow,
By obsessive doves
As scavengers of any meager charity.

But my legs fall out of tune
And I stop and lean beneath
A hedge of tile
That lies as the toenail of a skyscraper,
But I don’t attempt to scrape the sky anymore,
For my reach has found
The same destiny as the Tower of Babel.
And the sun comes out
From behind a cloud
Shaped as a broken dragon
And I continue to chase my shadow
In a city
Where my steps
Leave no trace.

Enrique Pallares H.

NYC 2010

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before...

We sat facing each other, like lotuses, bare mind and bare feet. Every floating particle of dust gleamed its meager contour against the frugal sun, cocooning us in evident, candid air. Your mouth spoke silent words and grinned. Your eyes shone, quivered and shrank at their ends. You broke your bread and gave me the bigger half. A bee then ceased her quick flight on a flower-top and you took it by the wings with your swift and gentle hands. You put her beating body (too heavy for flight) against the sunlight, examined it with fisting eyes and glanced at me one more time. Your hand like a dove carried the bee to meet with your piece of bread. The bee stretched its convex black and yellow abdomen, reached (I don’t know if in fury, joy or resignation) and stung the bread, leaving her stinger buried in the dough and ripping her entrails with its hook. There was something very particular about this sacrifice, for instead of poison, it coated the bread with golden honey. You set the bee free and it flew to die alone, unseen. Immediately another bee hesitated on a white chrysanthemum, you took it by its wings and repeated the ritual with my bread. That bee too flew away to die in some distant hideout. We sat facing each other, holding our food with both hands, our eyes drifting from dilated pupil to dilated pupil, our golden bread anointed with the fresh sacrifice of the bees and their minuscule thorns still stabbing the dough as silver slivers. With your grace and your fingers, more immaculate and clever than those who didn’t know the spindle, you gently picked out both stingers. Your mouth with lips like two full slices of pomegranate opened and your teeth dug deep into the bread, and me, with my lips sliced by the crevices of memory followed your example. It was then, a second before the void conquered our bucolic empire that I closed my eyes at the image of your kind smile and your vulnerable glance, and all the tender delight of honey filled my mouth, one second before I awoke to the immeasurable weight of an empty bed and the sweetest aftertaste of the most tangible of premonitions.

Granada, March 23, 2010

On Beauty (beyond man´s finger)

And the entire world vibrates. The world behind the walls shakes emulating the heart of man (or the other way around). I cannot see or touch the fins of glory, yet glory shines its iridescence on the eyes of the young: Here is New York! Here is New York! The poet reaches for the unreachable sky and the idle wrestles a defeated romance in the lower shadows. And although the poet cannot say that a Technicolor leaf quivers its way down from the tree to the vibrations that flutter in the throat of the nightingale; and although they don’t let the muses in at the door and beauty is slapped around and whored; and although Christ is not born again for fear of a more brutal sentence; the world vibrates, indifferent to man.

Window like a Funnel on a Little House on the Hill

Barbados, February 2009

My window leads to one thousand flickering lights who vacillate like little fireflies on the verge of summer. The music comes up, from beach bars through the dark prairies full of sleeping monkeys and gloomy streets with weak light posts, to my retreat. The longing for the city whispers again to my solitude. The longing for my previous life comes galloping like a stampede through the glassless windows, invisibly breaching the mosquito nets and carelessly stabbing my pupils with one hundred neon daggers of excess. I sit on top of the island like some sort of ghostly control tower; and the Caribbean charges against the hotels and the rocks as young girls bounce in the distance from white rum, to rum rum, to laughter, to beauty dance, to explosion and to freedom. From my hermitage, I cynically grin at my reputation of party animal. Then I take a look at my naked body in the mirror, at that I grin again. I wonder over and over what do all those insignificant windows hide in them; and again, I come to a conclusion of some tragic, trivial or romantic scene, for the shuffle seems to draw its results towards those states more often than to any others.

Many things have been mine. I have tried to posses experiences like precious stones, and all that is really left is a perception, certainly affected by all those nights, dives and scents, but no touch from them I have tonight.It is three twenty two in the morning and a very eloquent cello sings lazily in the arms of some dead French man. I am trapped between the crepuscular silence and a broken bone. I ran away, through hallways of dust, through massive stands of dour judgments, through unconsciousness, through bitter words of wisdom, and through a long road of gravel and contempt. I ran away to art. Then in art I found all the same deception condensed into ancient maroon stalactites with serpentines of black humor vaguely surrounding some of them. I found, in art, the spitting essence of the human condition. But I do feel restless, for I forget these primal truths at times. I hesitate. At this time of night, when the brutal lawn mower sleeps like a child, it all seems clear. This cosmic silence is sung by jazz crickets, whose scale sounds so infinite now for my meager human ears. And all the spiders respect my solitude like no brilliant man ever has before. And all concepts are entwined in mere acceptance. As the day comes though, and an insolent sun comes barking at the choir of creatures of the night, I again hesitate.

A Pleasant Stroll

New York, October, 2009

The subway wails under the asphalt
pushing out all the rancid air of the underground
through the metal grates.

Outside, lovers,
taut with their limbs and organs,
velvet each other under the vigilance of a lamppost.

The city
fumes everyone’s vehemence and loneliness
into the high gray infinite.

Skyscrapers aim sharp hornets
at the same constant, unreachable sky,
who hangs heavy like a manatee.

The lion licks his paw
and the pigeon punk-dances in frenetic semicircles
pretending to be a dove.

My entrails as an empty commercial tumble dryer,
and I walk carefully on the checkered patterns, too carefully...

Petrified angels watch the city from the tips of fancy buildings with no balconies,
and ships vomit the smoke
that unused fireplaces long to flutter in their throat.

A carnal doubt pinches my fathom
and millions of empty suits dance the grind.

I look at my selfish clock and time rolls steady:
My cave is darker, my retreat sharper
and I hide in a third floor,
behind a windowpane and a wooden door,
between the pigeons, the angels and the lions.

On Vulnerability

Okotoks, Canada, June 2009

Remember you were always most beautiful when vulnerable. And I don’t just say it for the green eyes, like once upon a time in a little attic with a little French lamp. Neither do I say it for the veil or for the Yellow Flowered Dress, who ended up impregnating all of my life with yellow. Neither do I say it for the rope marks on your wrists, or for the decadent afternoon chasing us all the way into your room. I say it because you were simply more beautiful and powerful when you wore your debility so blatantly. When you could paint the whole room of scarlet and silver with just a twitch of your weakest finger. There, given, surrendered to nothing but the tide of my meager mood, which you thought so mighty. When I was both a child and your master… There, given, with three thorns and a little drop of poison…

I am lost. I am lost, yet I am still vulnerable. I wonder if you are too or if the idle has taken command of you. I hear many have taken pleasure in your erratic search; you go dropping gifts like breadcrumbs, and then you sit on your window scrubbing tongue-strokes from your skin with a silver sponge, and you look outside, into the mirage of some garden of some Eden. And you moisten your lips obsessively as your flesh turns to stone. And you coil around the comfort of vanity and pride. Remember you? So beautiful when vulnerable, and so vulnerable the way I remember you…

Suburbia Sinfonica: Ode to Wellington, Florida

...and our twenty first century sits there, in front of the mirror, baffled at it's phony gleam.

I feel no inspiration in this horrid town. Everything is made out of plastic, and I am not very fond of that material. Palm trees have a certain gay hue of light blue or pink to them, and sprinklers rise from the depths of the green leaves of grass like nipples vomiting swamp water, like some sort of zit erecting from the earth to exhale sulphuric flatulence with the sole purpose of keeping the lawn greener. There is the worse demonic plague of police officers ever seen in humanity; it might even exceed the Key Biscayne plague in the turn of the century. In fact in just one block you are in the grave risk of getting several tickets for your mere existence, and Fun lays behind the cells of some damp dungeon for attempting to be free. For instance, Flamenco singing is absolutely prohibited, especially after two. There is nothing interesting, funny or even sexy in this forsaken town. I have resolved for not leaving my bunker. I will stay indoors to avoid the pernicious existence of my surroundings; I will apply all the immeasurable weight of my indifference to this despicable place. I do not even have money for cigarettes, so that takes all the romance away from any trace of nostalgia that might be left. Last night I realized that I have a hair stuck to my throat, a long woman’s hair; a never-ending hair, that if I pull out, it keeps extending and teasing my throat like a battalion of ants. So I have resolved for trying to swallow it, and I keep it back there and pretend it does not exist, but I know it is there, I can feel it slightly caressing my throat every time I breathe. My balls truly bother my existence these days. I have thought about cutting them off, in fact at times I feel that they have already been cut off; they have gone away without honor. This is the kind of thing that must be done blatantly. If they are going to leave me, they should leave me for good to let me rest in peace on top of my ball-less throne, but they go and then they strike back from ambush when I least expect it. They grab my entrails and shake me to dementia. Then I wonder if there could ever be a castrated bullfighter. Not that I plan to become one, but I like to think of myself as one. I like to stare at my dark ceiling at night and think I am a great bullfighter, a legend, and that instead of sitting among these cardboard walls, the burning sand lays under my thin canvas shoes and that blood and art are my everyday meal.