#prose lit

[jmsapphire]

Everyone agrees upon a smile. But do dare to laugh.

- for everything versus this happiness

[birdsongsofpersia]

skin flees,

I want to unfold / let no place in me hold itself closed / for where I am closed I am false / I want to stay clear in your sight/ - Rilke

My skin is winter leaves untouched by sun in northern skies for so long and deeper down there are homes where people know my name and smile even when I am intoxicated with forgetting / and say this is what you have lost, here, buried in the gardens of abandoned dances. Am I of the age now where we somewhat... live? I tell you, I am not yet alive the way that I know is true, somewhere inside. But I dance, and I dance into the earth, and I breathe out the weight of the dying and the dead, attempt to let them go, to move on to the next world and they speak of the regrets of those who have too little time, mine would be not reaching down into the depths to drag poetry into a world that has none. For it has so many faces, so many lives, so many deaths. The jungle beckons, but in the concrete seas, why have I turned my back on the words and sights that have given me so much?

Every night I am fleeing something, someone. It has no face. I have decided to name it winter. A winter that comes to my dreams. A winter that I have abandoned in search of warmth. But capi-tan, what about/ fingertips tracing your skin, giving calm to those inner organs on fire and the restless heart ready to leave all comforts and wander the eastern most mass of the Sahara? and when all desert cold disappears into the wagon untouched since he left this world and his cat is old and sick and has teeth hanging out of his mouth. And where do the old and uncared for go? They crawl into shadows and wait to be taken. And wait more, more, the passing of seasons. I swear, as I write this (no poetic coincidence) he comes slowly up to me as if he can hear me writing of him, purring, rubbing against my legs. I still exist, hermano, he says. I still exist. And I have lived a life worth knowing. Memories of moving through the deserts of Morocco, that ancient feeling of the winds howling at night, and the days of sun upon the skin. And how the old congregrate outside beside the road and watch traffic move in and out of the villages, content to see the river of life gurgling, and there was no discontent, just acceptance, and pride, at having lived.

I have moved no closer to accepting my body to how it is, but when I dance, I have learnt to let my mind go, and without the mind, I am all spirit, and it comes and goes like migratory geese. This friday night there are few that I really am drawn to. I am lost in that for a long while. The loneliness of a lifetime accumilated fills me for a while as the songs get real slow. I see Lizzie with her eyes upon the wall most of the night. Pablo with his tattooes stretching around his back the night long sitting amongst it all, and his horses outside the city, and his Patagonia further away still. There is one, from the first moment, that has a line attached to me, and I watch her, and I curse, for there is still a part of me that rejects it. Do not come too close, this part says. And I watch her all night long, and she will dance with me only for a second before moving on, and she has an eyebrow piercing to her right and tape covering tattoos, and I too once had this same piercing till it fell in carribean jungle plants and life said let it go but I will bring it back again soon. T and I got them done together, four years before he disappeared from this jungle garden earth and perhaps if I get it done again he will return and speak to me in dreams of where he is, what he has learnt, and there are two girls that are so joyful that I dance constantly amongst them trying to show them, I am just motion, don't be nervous and for the first time I am smiling broadly almost all night while dancing, and perhaps they can feel it, and one comes up to me and says in Spanish that she adored my energy, and I did hers, her laughter filling the night, and how the moon shines full and and fuller than my belly could ever be. I am experimenting with fasting, what it is not to want, but I cannot put away this feeling of wanting touch and at night, hours later, I do not know what to do with myself while staring up at the attic ceiling to not have another's breath beside me, filling me, to not share these visions, the images beyond eyes and those streets, suddenly alive that were once dormant, how worlds open, how can one be away from that...even for one moment? And so many moments, now, but one must find ways to grow upon different paths, where poetry finds roots and my skin will hold in the sun all dark winter long without fleeing, and touch will return again, a moment or the next, and this dance will be full of footsteps pounding the earth with shimmering eyes, the dead and the living breathing the night air, remembering.

/ Photo - Francesca Woodman, from Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976.

[birdsongsofpersia]

the wandering goat,

There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is.                    —                                    Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry              

And how does one retain strength for oneself when giving? You know these moments when you are an empty vessel completely spent..? I asked her. I had been under the sky and it was real close like it could touch my skin. But it was relentless, this night, and my mind is a wandering goat that I must keep following and leading back by the horns. And my belly is full of sunken memories that are just now rising back up, and I still remember my name but my head - shaved at the sides, is cold and I am deep in my sleeping bag this august night. She reached into my chest and pulled it open so I could see down through my ribs, to the organs. There, you go there. Lungs, heart, rib cage. This is where your energy can be stored. Right there. Focus it. I’m gazing in for a long time, and it just begins to rain, and those candles are still burning out on the marshlands and my goat is asleep at last,

Photo : Paricutin Volcano erupting in January 1944. Michoacán, Mexico. Arno Brehme, field work photographs. Smithsonian Field Book Project via Nemfrog

[birdsongsofpersia]

a history of sweat and revolt part i,

[I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see...] - James Baldwin At the entrance is a man serving chocolate. He has skin darker than the earth itself and his chain goes from the tray to the staircase. Try explaining this for reason.  The agent at the door barely batters an eyelash and compliments the chocolate. One can really taste the work that’s gone into this production, she says, sighing, exhaling before going up the stairs, her mask hanging from her like a dead flag. She quickly readjusts it once the chocolate melts inside her. I gaze at him before venturing upwards, feeling my stomach contents ready to spread out over the cold tiles we tread. His eyes are downcast, his breaths barely visible, as if death itself. I feel the weight of Africa collapsing upon the kingdom. “You don’t care for sweet things?” the agent calls down the stairs, surprised. I don’t care for sweat things, I mutter under my breath, as I begin to climb, but I swear I see him wink. It’s in the old town of a part of the country I’d never visited before. Circumstances had come together to bring me to consider living in a place that I’d never imagined nor planned to live. It was to be close to someone who would very quickly disappear entirely. They say everything happens for a reason; though war, tragedy, broken shoelaces and the like be damned. You are what you seek, or seeks you, or vanishes without trace. I meet the agent outside, and she is flustered like some kind of creature that lives underground moving back and forth pushing balls of soil into a mound. She has a folder of paperwork that drops to the ground. Illegible documents, scrawls of numbers, accounts, witness to the decomposing economy. “As I understand it”, she says, “you’ll be coming and going from here in order to write. But what exactly are you working on?” she asks. We’re inside the studio. She shows me the little fridge, the shower that one has to bend down into in order to enter, the desk at which to write at, the single bed made for people without company, those waiting to die alone. Something about them makes me shiver. “I’m focusing on the housing market”, I tell her, looking firm into her eyes, telling her what she wants to know and can understand. She registers interest, and then almost immediately, closes up again : “What lives on in the things that people leave behind. I’m investigating the way that people take on the dreams of former tenants. I want to write about how the walls absorb shame. How cups take on people’s desires and if only one would ever drink deep enough the yearning would increase. The non-expression that dogs all of our days, how the floorboards absorb our madnesses. And I write about housing prices and...-” “Housing prices?”, she asks, suddenly paying attention urgently. Up till now she had thought me to be mad, no matter what I would’ve uttered. “And how very soon, none of this will exist any more.” “What do you mean, it won’t exist?” “This money. The people who own things.” “Where will it go?” I take a deep breath. “You think you can take this all when you die?” She eyes me with sudden alarm, registering a threat. She scans my hands for a weapon, for danger.  Her wrists appear to be artificial, the joints of a doll and from this moment I imagine the strings, almost invisible, hanging above her. She reaches for the closest objects she can find, but the strings prevent her from getting much launch or momentum. A lamp. A giant wooden key from a vineyard. She hurls them at my head, but honestly she’s a real bad shot, and they barely get near me even though we’re just a few metres apart. She goes for the pencils. A few hit me in the chest like flying daggers thrown by the wind. I duck a glass. It smashes to the ground. I swear the pieces shimmer and whirl for a few seconds. I had good practice when growing up attending to such events, though once got knocked out by a honey jar. Makes you mature real fast and get agile as a squirrel. She pants. “I’m ready”, she says, pointing out her chest. “For what?” “For you to kill me.” I squint at her as I try to hold back a tremendous laugh. “I’m not going to kill you”, I tell her. “You’re not?” “No.” “So why are you speaking about death?” “I was speaking about its possibility one day” “Oh.” Her entire body appears to sag in disappointment.

/ The landlady makes an appearance. She had ventured up to investigate the crashes, though doesn’t seem particularly surprised. One can suppose that this is a familiar occurrence with the agent. “Why do you only speak French?”, she asks, in thick German. It’s a Germanic way of asking it, as if there are no other languages in the world, just German and the other. I would go on to learn that she’s not from here anyhow. For this is the language of flora, of prunes hanging in the southern sun. Ah, the older woman responds. I did not know of the existence of such a sun. Most of the prunes are rotten, I add. She reveals that she has a dozen or so properties, spoken as if the heaviest work on earth. We the rich suffer like no others on earth... Corn follows me everywhere. I am too exhausted to pick it up from pushing myself to collapse in the barn the last days, but I bend down anyway, obligated by social necessity. That river of kernels is endless. The sea of necessities and polite doings. I’m almost afraid it’ll begin to seed. Could well get me arrested in this country for littering. And there, sweeping up, is the figure I’d met downstairs offering chocolates. He had followed the landlady up the stairs, chain now around his neck. “Arnold be my name, bro, how’s it hanging?” My mouth drops so much my jaw could snap.  “Comrade, hush your surprise, will you? I’ll make this quick for they count money by the second. I want to create an insurrectionary group of dream rebels here – you dig? Join us, if you move in. I just work 9-11. The ol’ lass just want me to dress like this. Gives her nostalgia for the good ol’ times of the colonies and all that jazz. I can deal with the chain a few hours. When people knew what they owned in the world, that gold was endless. When there was order. When things were prim and proper. Irony is that it’s too expensive to pay me for more time without actually enslaving me and there’s too many police wandering around for that to happen. O’ course we’re all wage slaves in the end, but depends on what we do with it. Now stand back up, and we’ll speak later.” Arnold goes back sweeping up the kernels. “Ten years you’ll be here?”, the agent asks.

“Oh yes…” I purr. I’m now ready to put down some roots. “And if and when you die, do you have some insurance to continue paying for this?” “Oh yes…”, I croon. I now have insurance even for the buttons upon my shirt. “Excellent...” she replies, with a certain element of surprise in her voice. I am unsure if she has yet noticed the various holes in my shoes, but takes the six months pre-emptive rent handing me the keys. “Sometimes I dream at night,,,”, she says, heading out the door, “the dreams of the visitors to the properties I show. Their dreams possess me. I don’t dream my own dreams. You ever experience that? Perhaps I don’t even know what I would dream, for I am filled with the dreams of others...”

She leaves, and I lie down, exhausted. It’ll be a while till Arnold comes by again. I begin to work on remembering all that I had forgotten these years – the uplift, the strength, the wonder, the feeling of freedom...for these coming days and weeks and months will be darker than ever before and one has to resist. There are fields waiting to be slept in under clear skies and dreams of revolt and the sea and shining eyes, I swear. I swear. / Painting Roland Topor - (1938-1997)

[singingmice]

Writing To Spirits

[A little more than a hundred years ago, some moved farther out of the way - into the northern hills of what are now Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. They brought a distinctive script, based on Chinese characters and used for writing to spirits. As both refusal and acceptance of Chinese authority, the script is a neat expression of contaminated diversity: Mien are Chinese and not Chinese,] from The Mushroom at the End of the World : On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Tin, I’m fascinated by the concept of a script used for writing to spirits. As if this script itself must come from the contact with spirits themselves in order to be the guide for the writers to create it. 

Tonight was a strange night. There is something in all of these happenings that is saying : now is a time to gather strength. The storm is coming : I was nine minutes and forty six seconds into my workout that I do every day. That I’ve done for two months now. A knock on the door. I live in a studio above the old town. Above a woman who is rarely here. She’s from Serbia, has lived here for fifteen years and still doesn’t speak French. She has no interest. She has fifteen properties or so around the country, and in Spain. Nor does she speak Spanish. But she speaks German, and I can understand her. She’s at the door. She’s furious. She’s just noticed now that I’m exercising after two months of it. This happens to the bitter and lonely. Time swallows life and before you know it, suddenly there’s another thing to be bitter about. She is really very angry. She says it is not a gym. This is correct. They are all closed due to the pandemic. Go and break in rather than exercise here! I close the door. I begin again. I get another two minutes. She threatens me with the police. Tomorrow the police will be at the door, and they’ll have you put in jail! Instead I met them tonight, cycling in the snow. They pulled into a bicycle path, blocking my way. “Why are you stopping me?” I ask. “Because you’re strange,” one replies. “Why am I strange?” “You’re cycling in the snow.” I gaze up at the falling snow and wish to be taken up there with all the oddly shaped flakes. “Where do you sleep?” “I never sleep”, I say, without skipping a beat. “Why are these times so strange?” They ask me if I’d eaten today. Only the homeless cycle in the snow. I’d been gnawing at the sky all afternoon. I’ll be seeing them tomorrow, I guess, my studio full of snow and bell peppers.

I missed you. Yes. I caught an ecstatic laugh coming from the distance sometimes, in the last years, and it must’ve been yours. It is a miracle how much we are capable of surviving. Not only surviving, but coming out with poetry and truth. I’m very sensitive with what others are going through. I wonder if I would’ve been able to sense your inner worlds if we would’ve collided back then in a kitchen full of utensils. I like to sit inside sinks. Dipping your toes into the water... glowing plankton... I saw it for the first time in Andalusia two years ago, with someone very dear to me. I never thought I’d see it in person. Just as magical as seeing fireflies for the first time. We camped out there for two nights. I went back again a few more times, but never saw it again.

You know, I wrote the last letter coming from Granada. Years later, I would live there after years away travelling Latin America...how lines become interconnected... What would your spirit and characters script look like? The pandemic... it looks a lot like this. Being strange. Feeling strange. Looking out at the strange world and missing feeling it for myself instead of observing, reading...the fear the fear the fear. I fell in love. I broke into art colleges to watch films on giant projectors. I lived in a community where I was never alone. I moved to a studio where I was always alone. Then my country left the continent. As if it just broke away, sailed towards the arctic. I was sadder than perhaps I’ve ever been in. I missed people and wondered why I constantly go back and forth between extremes. Then I decided to become my new best friend. Sometimes we get along. Sometimes we fight. I better sleep. The police are coming soon, and I want to be awake enough to laugh at the situation. I’ve been missing the jungle a lot recently, as well as you in these eight years ;) I will ask the spirits how to find a little more strength and a little more self care. What would you ask them for? Big hugs, Jass

[birdsongsofpersia]

Desert return,

[I am released from trouble. I thought it meant to die in comfort. It doesn’t. It means that I die.] - Sophocles, tr. by Ezra Pound, from Hercales’ last words to his son; “The Women of Thracis,”

I wake in an unfamiliar place, but more familiar than where I’ve lived for the last two months. Outside it’s raining huge monsoon rains. I dress. I put on my skin again. I brush my teeth. I hear breathing. I check. Nothing. I swear to you. Nothing. Outside, the desert : dry, endless, without mercy. I adore it. And my cracked throat. All night we wake repeatedly with an unknown thirst. The desert winds. The owl swoops low over the bed. Layers, openings, forgotten memories.  It’s been a long while since my skin sang like this. I see abandoned train stations, and the tracks I used to cross with my bicycle on the way out of all that.  Sometimes I would wish for a train to come on past, though it never would, long disused, and there is always one faint memory of wisdom somewhere, there, to move on out of the way just in case. A wild fruit. A closeness. A flicker of eyes. A knowing. I see the horse, too, on the path to the sea. He and I would stand and stare at each other for a long time, thinking of our sacred lives and mourning our fences, our cages, our prisons. I eat a little bread. The bread eats me. My tiredness fills the room. My insomnia pulls my skin back into place. I leave. I pull the castle doors shut. From inside the owls hoots, and it sounds like, why-why-why. We are cycling back together, in the monsoon. I always forget how these rains come back when I can’t make an important decision. I’m not surprised to see him. He came up behind me at an intersection. It had been years since we’d seen each other, and even then we didn’t have much to say to each other. Now he’s cycling without hands beside me, in the tram tracks, as if he has no worry about his safety. Why would he? His face is purple. When we reach traffic lights and stop, he checks out his hair in the reflection of a car. Moistens it down. A worm comes poking through his cheek. “Where did you go?” I ask him. He shrugs. The red in the traffic light turns to fire for an instant, and I look back at him. He’s styling his hair, once again, and pulls out a beer from his jeans pocket. “And where did you go?” he repeats, staring right through me. “You’re still here... but where did you go?” Photo : Solar eclipse, with a view of the pyramids and Great Sphinx, Giza. August 30, 1905.

[birdsongsofpersia]

try / give up / once again / lose y'r wings /

I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.

- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye,

A figure, who was more a boulder than man, and more toad than matter, stood in the first hot spring, unmoving, staring at us with his tongue hanging out. His belly, almost larger outward than he was tall, seemed to be perfectly rounded - a cannonball who had landed in Santa Fé astonished at glistening skin. Men are formed by environments - it is only striking how powerfully they can imitate that which is beneath them.

Small flowers are in bloom around us. Spring, for an instant, is here, until the furnace arrives. Winter had taken most of the gleam from my eyes. I'd allowed myself to be frozen without much of a fight, with little preparation, pocas cojones, ni nueces, ni palabras. There are periods, in life, when you are erased from time. And when someone asks, "Quién vive aquí?", they just reply with a stamping of feet, a hissing of the lungs.

A daisy, with a mouth full of golden teeth, stands by the pool jiggling from side to side to the sounds of flamenco coming from the rubbish heap beside the pool. Imagine it's one of those radios that never turn off, that somehow go on forever, but spoil even the songs that you once held dear. The flower and the toad boulder stare at our flesh, taking in our breasts or crotches and ask, "cuánto sale una noche con vosotros?" and everything is meat here and has a price and a slice of eyeless jamón beside it.

We, who search these waters for warmth, are Enila, who is headstrong with eyes that I cannot place, from somewhere... a dream I once had, and who is hard when she wants to be soft, and cannot shake it. Sometimes I do not know when she is here, and when she is far.

Then there is Foarn, who was born somewhere in bursting light in the east, and where she does not know. She looks for calm pockets, is often of good dry humour, and lives almost entirely upon nectar. I don't know how she does it, and how her body allows it. My own would digest my entire body if I were to treat it like this.

Magna, who in some lights I see as not of this world, but looking at this world with great wondrous and sometimes confused eyes. Sometimes her gaze is too much for me and I can barely meet it. Not because it strips away, but it sees too much, though she rarely says. She is in flow, is hungry for new experiences, and doesn't give a damn about others. If there were a smell it would be fresh coffee. And I have much of life here to thank her for.

There is Stexav, of the earth, easily affected, and who I know little of, but I like. He was born with roots in his hands and mouth of a falcon.

And I. Winter had broken me and given me ashes to paint with. Once I was a limbless kid in Bombai staring at the sun falling into the ground. Once I had full lungs. What was once dorment is returning. Sometimes I catch sight of those eyes, and I do not know, where they come from.

We ignore them, the daisey and the toad, regardless, dragging our chewy limbs along, but always wondering if anyone has ever said yes to them. I don't really have it in my system anymore, the constant urge of yes, of acceptance, after Morocco, and later in Latin America. There is little worse than the imagination, and even more so particularly mine, but I don't need to know what it'd be like to be squashed by a toad like this under his passion, and if the flower watches, and if her gold teeth rattle in the wind. How life goes on, and extends life. And what they feel when all this ends, when the desire turns heavier than the desert rocks, and their breaths too. I too, wonder. I have misused my body so much, filled it with the emptiness so often, have swallowed entire cities and all their bars and derelect houses, that I am not one to judge. Take me and abandon me upon Jupiter and its colours to clear me through. Leave me whole,

Though they are reptiles, and fauna, respectively, I cannot see them as beyond myself. Who has not made a fool of themselves in the face of desire? Sell me a river and I'll float downstream for the rest of my days. How much loss goes there, loneliness, search of connection, unity, escape?

Forget it. I'll find every river and drink from it.

In pool number two are multiple teenagers dry humping. We move on.

In pool number three are two turtles, bald, slightly tattooed, speaking to each other, and perhaps intimately involved. They wouldn't lift a finger for the end of the world. And perhaps they would too smirk, but they also would not be capable of violence given the state of their eyes, the reach of their flippers, the plucking of their eyebrows. We agree that this, of all the pools, is our most prefered sinking hole.

"Is it always like this?" Enila asks.

"Perhaps this is life and everything else we've experienced up till now was a joke of pimp in Abu Dhabi, and we're just his daydreams," Magna says, stripping off her bikini and moving into the water.

I groan. But I'd be impressed by the details if so. It's so extensive. Anyhow, make the most of it, possession or not. For so long I have been in love with what is wild, but often I am not. My mind is domesticated like the worst of kitchen mice - sticking around for crumbs and nothing more.

"Imagine everything that has ever happened around these pools", I say, more to myself, than anything. It's comforting to know of a life outside of my own, sometimes. It's easy to get chained up in the mouse mind.

As if to prove this, or add to it, a flock of sheep appear. Hundreds of them. Up above. And a shepherd, crooning over at us, at our bodies, at Magda's bare breasts, at the turtle's shiny scalps, at my dull rodent eyes and my skin still full of this winter. Goosebumps come, a cause of his eyes, as if he were scooping the meatiest parts of us out and keeping them there at the corners of his mouth to suck on.

He holds two baby lambs upside down, full of birth blood and guts. I don't know how to call that, and I don't think he does either, but he laughs, and I gaze into the gap between his teeth and inside I see her, who I have not seen for so long now, and I'm wondering how she got there, of all places, because I had been looking everywhere, and I remember once we trusted each other more than we trusted the full moon and the coming of each following breath as we lay down beside each other. And it's only a split second, less than that, and you cannot explain to anyone this, and think that they will take you seriously afterwards, you have a reputation to maintain - or, do you?

The shepherd is holding them upside down and throwing them down to us into the water. We duck, instinctively, all of us. Stexav is the first to leave the water, disgusted, speechless. The shepherd does not drop them, just swings them back, rasping, waggling his eyebrows with his joke. The rest of just gaze. The turtles smirk and nudge elbows, grateful for the spectacle. Enila and Foarn close their eyes and hold each other. Magna shouts. "Déjalos, déjalos...hijo de puta! Que haces?"

He grins big, and I see her again and I want to hug her, in there, but I cannot go near the man threatening to throw the lambs. It would be odd, but this whole thing is odd, and what the hell, you only live a thousand different lives within this one particular body.

I get out. On the other side, I notice, are others. Who have slithered up, jacked up with lust and nothing more to view the new telenovela taking place. I figure I'll show them. In these situations, like I'd always understood travelling in lawless places - the more mad you act, the better off you are. And it's the only way to have some peace of mind - to act when all else is chaotic. To hijack all regrets.

"Hola, tío", I breathe, next to him, dripping with hot water, emitting steam. He looks at me, startled, releasing the lambs to the floor.

I think of the jungles that I have known. I think of my dear brother who will soon wear robes for the rest of his life. Of those who give me a little more to go on despite all this. And the trees swaying in the winds. Wild almond trees still to be picked. I grab his beer bottle beside him, which I swear is full of cactus needles, and I throw it out into the fields.

"No más bebida para ti hoy, mí amigo."

"Pero vivo en soledad, no lo sabías? Qué hago ahora?" he says.

I point to the moon, rising. And I return to the warm water to sink, and to be watched like a broken television screen, for I am no longer part of the glass.

"Good job,", Foarn, says, grinning, but looking at me as if I were juggling my kidneys. And Magna watches me as if she is not, trying to figure me out, but accepting me, liking me more, somehow.

I had forgotten to open up his mouth and take her out. If only I was quick like a monkey dentist. A perfect combination, that would be. But perhaps it was just time to leave her be,

Photo : Francesca Woodman,

[birdsongsofpersia]

Where we live, what lives inside,

Once I even said to the body I live with: I think I need more light in my body, but I really did not take this seriously as a need, as something I deserved to have I said: I think I need for something blue or green to shine from my rib cage - Daniel Borzutzky,- Let Light Shine Out of the Darkness, from The Performance of Becoming Human Across the street is a man who belches, farts, coughs, and blows his insides out and down onto the street. He is awake all night. Perhaps he doesn’t ever sleep. When he does, he dreams of wading through rivers of thick oil. Then he wakes and pulls his large body with him to the balcony to let it all out. We have breakfast on the balcony. Our San Pedro lives there. Most days the sky is clear, the days are more than warm. Sometimes he appears there, smoking, and sometimes I am surprised that he is still alive. Above us is a woman that comes only on long weekends. She wears high heels, which we can hear through the ceiling, walking up and down her living room. We met in the elevator, one night, my bicycle and her luggage. She looked at me in a way that always takes me a long time to work out. Sometimes days. Eyes curious, taking in my body, surprised by our meetings. We spoke briefly, and I felt like the time a guy had asked me to fuck him in exchange for a ride to Italy, as my girlfriend stood beside me. One night from the kitchen I could hear a dog moaning, making love. It got louder and louder. I leaned out further. Slapping against skin. Words. Mas fuerte, mas fuerte. I understood, at last.  Something pulls at me, hearing them, burrows a small passageway through my chest. No. Nothing about it turned me on, having seen her eyes. Knowing how energies can be exchanged. That slump, that dispersion. But I felt as a call to my own wantings, to be electric, not like this, but like this. Having a body. Having an erotic life inside it. Then, as if woken up by a spell, downstairs a couple began too, equally as loud. A symphony duet.  I and my body listened until it died down, and began again, climaxing, roaring. H is naked in bed when I return. She is warm and full of love, tenderness but no desire, and I tell myself no me, and I don’t know what to do with me and my body, so I paint it green and go running to the mountains. By the end, I am exhausted enough not to pay attention to the erotic wallpaper on our ceiling anymore, and I can sleep. It’ll be many more nights, weeks, even. Sometimes I want to forget being a man. To hack off my penis, my cock, my tool. Metoo#, all that shame.  The neighbour downstairs is a coñaso. I don’t know if it’s feminised, but it’s her. She drinks all the time and plays 80′s classics on a stereo with crackling speakers. Sometimes she records herself and plays herself back again and again until she can find the perfect Whatsapp response without coughing too much. She avoids us since H left her a handwritten letter (w/drawings) asking if she could share her internet connection with us until we got it sorted.  Everything about her body is stretched, torn from smoke and fried food. She spoke about us the next night, after the letter, on the phone for hours. She lives alone, and according to her messages on her phone, searches for a man from a 80′s pop song. I wish her luck, and know that it feels strange to hear her, but to be always be ignored, to know intimate details about her life, to wonder how it is to be in her body, so yellowed like century old newspapers. All those news stories, forgotten. One night her son came. I was surprised too. A son, huh. She is a great supporter of state violence. They argued for some hours about Catalonia, and the police attacks in Barcelona. They should have attacked more people, she said, with her yellow fingernails.  Our apartment is full of photographs, paintings, máte. Film nights on friday nights with our new projector. Warmth. A nest.  A new student came in with high heels, bella, made up, short skirt. She refused to take off her shoes. It’s not done here. I examined the bottom of her heels. One had a used condom stuck to it, the other wild boar poop. It’s everywhere, here, in the streets.  She said, afterwards, that she would never come back, because it wasn’t tidy enough.  Directly across from us is a family that just watches screens and nothing else. No, this is not true. The mother gets up every morning to clean the windows, the balcony. Nobody can see it apart from us, so it must be assumed that she is cleaning especially for us, and yes, it shines well.  This is what she does with her body, but I do not know how she had children. Perhaps things were different, once. Whenever I realise I am pushing another to do something that they don’t want, no matter how much I want it, I immediately lose all desire. This is of anything - when I’m trying to hitchhike a ride in Patagonia and the only car at the petrol station for three hours is terrified. I will not even try.  It makes it hard to understand rape. Then I realise that it is mental sickness, and the rates are so high that I wonder what is wrong with our society, and where all this goes, now. Or when you have a body, and the life inside it, goes on, unheard. How you can continue on, to be alive,

Painting - Goya - El Pelele