flood

so many of them
one atop another, in an endless queue
yellow & red
new & resurrected
tired & angry
persistent & sad
i feel them with my nose and my stomach
i smell the obsessive-compulsive disorder
anxiety & delusions
it smells like fear
it hides within the old cathode ray tube
it annoys me
comfortably tucked in 79 percent
of instinct & blindness
geography & hormones

because that’s who we are
we follow the beat and we belong
a coffee on every break
heavens at all costs
ignoring the natural fear of heights
a healthy desire to forget
we’re still barking
we’re still dancing
lost & found
30 times per second
we’re hypnotized
by the shadow of greatness in the distance
war & peace
pain & justice & death
love
for a dream
for oneself
and for life,
naturally


music: “Mezzanine” – Massive Attack
movie: “Brazil” – Terry Gilliam

friends.. for a little while

I don’t remember the time i had first recognized my face to be the objective representation of myself. I do remember the first time i saw my friend: we lived in the same building, his family’s flat directly six floors beneath ours. We were of the same age, six when we first met. I remember seeing his face for the first time and thinking: “This is what I look like”. Others confirmed the resemblance - we did look alike, for a while. The following year we started going to school: same school, same class for the pair of us. We didn’t sit together, though, because our teacher had the policy of pairing up girls with boys and good students with the not-so-good ones: there were no bad students. We had a good teacher. Both my friend and I ended up with some dumb chicks - for the time being, that is. Later in life i had the chance to share my desk with a few more chicks of various sorts; for my friend, however, the girl our benevolent teacher made him sit with was the only one he would ever come close to in his entire lifetime.

I can't recollect much about him, actually. Apart from the little sentence that flashed through my young mind when i first saw him - this is what I look like - and the fact that he liked basketball while all the other kids preferred soccer (not much basketball courts for 7-year-olds, and quite a lot of soccer fields) i don’t recall anything else about the time before his illness took place. I believe it was half way through the first grade when he suddenly disappeared. All i knew was that he was very sick: i had already made other friends and I quickly turned to them, with a previously unchallenged belief that every illness has a cure. It may take a while, but he will come back.

So he did. We were second graders now and were in a different classroom: the new one was on the third floor. I don’t think he’d been back to school for more than a day or two before he collapsed on the stairway. He didn’t return to the class after that. His father was a teacher, so he gave him lessons at home. My friends and me used to visit him, for a while. It was then we learned that there is such a thing called “brain tumor” and our friend has to have his skull drilled if he’s ever to be rid of it. Later on we discovered that this thing makes him forget stuff: conversations, faces and, as our visits grew more infrequent, even his friends. Eventually, i was the only one who came to the grim apartment on the ground floor of our building to see him, and with every visit the pause between him seeing me and the sparkle of recognition appearing in his eyes grew longer. For a while, he was able to play darts, build lego castles and talk to me. Later on, all we did was watch cartoons. Finally, i wouldn’t come to see him more often than once every few months and i became aware that the look in his eyes did not mean that he recognized me, but that he realized the fact that he should. So he pretended. So i pretended, for a while.

As i was finishing primary school, i used to occasionally see his father taking him out for slow walks in front of our building. I dreaded encountering them, a drained school teacher, looking twenty years older than he really was, and a zombie that used to be my friend, bloated from the heavy drugs and almost completely unaware of the world. I was in high school when he died. I didn’t attend the funeral. Those of us who knew him mentioned him sporadically, usually when we came across someone from his family. We used to say that he’d been a bright boy - a not very bright friend of ours praised him and swore that he took him for a genius those couple of months of school before he got sick. And we’d also say it was a shame that him, his parents and his sister had to suffer so much over eight long years, and that it was surely a relief for everyone when he finally found his peace. As for where he had found his peace, I found out a couple of years ago. My family and i were at a funeral; we made our way towards the grave for an old woman, a relative of ours. As there was no direct path to her burial place, we had to jump between and above other graves (it was a neglected and a very crowded graveyard in the hills outside of town). On one of the tombstones there was a name I recognized; and a face of a boy above it, one I can’t recollect now.


music: “Boatman’s Call” - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
movie: “My Life Without Me” – Isabele Coixet

a distant lover

Once upon a time there was a Mary. On a Thursday morning she woke up early to procede studying schizophrenia for her psychiatry exam. Mary had always dreamed of becoming a doctor – not because she looked really sexy in a white overcoat (she was sexy wearing anything, and nothing), but because she liked helping people. Whilst studying, she was expecting a call or a message from her absent lover, who had promised a “good morning” story the evening before. But the morning has blossomed into a pleasant june day, and the unimaginative and frustrated outcast of her vast eyes couldn’t write anything other than that he missed the satisfaction of being with her, and how each of the 150 miles that stood between them is a nail piercing his hungry heart, eager to have a bite of the sweet Mary.


music: “Different Class” - Pulp
movie: “Chungking Express” – Wong Kar-Wai

sensations

numb for election campaigns
numb for crappy food
numb for desires of men
numb for the pain and the joy
deaf, dumb & blind
for the numbness around me

numb for the weather
numb for my girl,
my cousins & my friends
numb for the troubles upon me
slightly disbalanced
by the misery of others


music: “The Virgin Suicides OST” - Air
movie: “The Jacket” – John Maybury

i killed a man

it’s much easier to write about dreams. reality requires too many words. dreams are poetry.
poetry. i have, as all healthy people do, frequent dreams about being chased. i don’t have “falling” dreams – that’s for crazy people. in my “being chased” dreams, i often find myself in possession of a firearm. but, sane as i am, i never have any ammo. either that or my gun is broken – i could never shoot any of my dream pursuers, be they nazis, aliens or your common ambiguous “evil force”. up until last night. i don’t know who was he or why he was after me; his face appeared from behind a wall, i raised my gun and pulled the trigger. there was a bang and, as i could see lowering my hands, there was a hole in the middle of the face’s forehead. i killed a man. and then i woke up. am i going crazy? or am i getting better?


music: “Amnesiac” – Radiohead
movie: “Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)” – Alejandro Amenabar

february (fear, frenzy, freaks, philosophy & futility)

i get shot in my leg
but i can’t get no bullet removed
because my insurance had expired
long ago

i drive a huge truck
but i have no breaks
i should stop
but i go

i ought to break away
from a standstill
lazy & cowardly
i choose to chill

i get two unread messages
after a week’s absence
i should label them spam
but i don’t
my companion
misplaces the songs
and screws up the subtitles

i should bathe
but i hate being cold
i should remember
things i forget
and vice versa
i let my conscious
wander into the night

high or low
i say the wrong things
i mishear the echoes
i let my dreams
slip away
i must be a senile bear
in a world of bears

me, myself & i
& who else
yet another mistake
not to be made
i would rather
hate my verses
for their solitude
i prefer
fearing the world
for its multitude

people seem to like me
but i don’t believe them
because i’m never their enemy
i seek admission
to the honesty race
but i’m denied entrance
for being a liar
and too personal
too dead
and oh so vain


music: "Antics" - Interpol
movie: "Waking Life" - Richard Linklater

define : internet

a .doc file can take anything. a browser will take you wherever you never intended to go. the net is an orchestra (or a pop band) for everyone – what a cacophony it produces. then again, a musical metaphore may not be appropriate for a phenomenon such as  the world wide web. but we must have analogies to things we’re familiar with in order to study something new. and this is new – a couple of years is nothing for a thing as big as the Net. so, how do we label it? give me a category and a differentia specifica! turbo-charged means of communication? define: internet.. an electronic network of computers. a contraption. and what is it we’re creating with this extension to our tongues and our fingers? is it an enormous jigsaw-puzzle: you get to paint a piece – or a few, if you own google. are we creating, or do we even want to create anything? or is it about destruction again? assuming the net does not become a conscious entity and enslave mankind, what is this universe of static and dynamic web content, multimedia whatchamacallits, and words, an overwhelming flood of words? a symphony, a painting, a building, a super-sized hall of mirrors, a myriad of distorted images… a revolution (duh). perhaps “virtual reality” is the most adequate term. although it may be the next revolution, there is no need to wait for the “patch my senses directly to a 3D simulation wherein buildings are actually data” technology before we start calling the Web what it is: a virtual reality. reality depends on our mind for interpretation anyway, which makes it a very vulnerable concept.


music: “Second Toughest In The Infants” - Underworld
movie: “Ghost In The Shell” – Mamoru Oshii

johnny don't need no mask

..long time, no write..

An unexpected thing happens. Good or, in this case, bad: i mustn’t let anything like that happen ever again. Oddly enough, i have no desire to make a note of the events which occurred on november 20th - worse things have happened. no matter how extraordinary it may seem to me (and everyone i talk to), there’s nothing really special about the whole incident: far more extraordinary things befall people, and they write & sing songs & make movies about them. Ultimately, it’s not the events that count, but the personal experience they induce. The events make their way toward expression through mere passage of time – their impact will reflect itself through everyday life and my relationship with other people (and myself). This is because i can not stay the same after my face had been cut by a broken bottle; i couldn’t go on unchanged try as i may. The fighting & the cutting, bleeding excessively, driving in an ambulance, having to endure the stitching by a half-asleep doctor who, as i later realized, did an appallingly lousy job; wandering around the hospital, having half of my face under bandages for two weeks & dealing with scars in the months to come, endless explanations to everyone i know and don’t know about what happened to me, all of that has absolutely no extraordinary quality to it. The way these things affect me and people around me, however, might be of some interest. just wait and see, as you always do..

..and yes, i had it coming…

music: "Surfer Rosa" - The Pixies
movie: "Run Lola Run" - Tom Tykwer