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 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 stabbing my pupils with one hundred neon daggers of excess. I sit on top of the island like a 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 dance, to explosion. From my hermitage, I cynically grin at my "reputation as a ladies man." 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 the skin of some petty intimacy again palpitates.

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 woman. I am trapped between the crepuscular silence and a broken bone. I took of my shoes and ran away, through hallways of dust, through massive stands of dour judgments, through unconsciousness, through bitter words of wisdom, and through a long gravel road. I ran away to beauty. Then in beauty I found all the same deception condensed into ancient maroon stalactites, with serpentines of black humor surrounding some of them. I found, in beauty, very much and very little. But I do feel restless, for I forget these 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.