I fell in love with you without a notice
As natural as a baby growing inside the womb.
Your essence of sweet grass, spring breeze, blooming leaves in the path
Cool fire, blue
You are a melody
Tones sweetening my core
In distance you are present, you are here, there, everywhere
Like a radiant paradise garden
Poniant as hyacinths
Visible as daffodils
Spread as dandelions
Without requests
Without regrets, I receive you.
I give you my hues of pink, my sun, my secrets in the night
My voice of whispers, of umms and ahhs…are yours now.
I dreamed we were riding a blue purple horse.
We moved as one sound, as one palpitation.
Your motivation became an outburst of tunes.
Gestures of soft and hard shapes, exquisitely untamed.
Your hands, one caressing my torso, the other, holding me tight into you.
You could not release me from your rhythms of many pleasures.
With your fingers you drew figurines made of light, ephemeral as day moving into night.
My eyes were mesmerized with the beautiful forms suspended in the air, and with your eyes, in pure recognition of heaven.
Seasons passed while riding our horse.
flowers showered us,
rain blessings poured our senses,
a bright sun followed by a winter breeze showed their sharpness on our skin…
all while we ride our melodies.
Dreaming with the inevitable, your eyes became an ocean.
Tears of joy and tears of sorrow they all came at once.
As they fell out of your shinny eyes they turned into sprouted seeds in the ground.
As we departed, you gave me two stars, one you placed inside my heart, the other, on my crown.
The sun showered us with its deep warmth as we kissed good-bye.
March 11, 2006
70,000 women have been raped in Congo
Panzi Hospital is just a house of horrors.
Tears and blood as oceans… voices of anger, shame and sorrow.
These sisters were assaulted with pieces of wood.
Their scars are just a small part of a sinister plan.
70,000 families have been raped, blown into dust.
Oh, please, let me be a bird and fly away so I never return to this land, to this day, to this brief moment of life.
‘My husband was forced to see me being raped,
gun in his throat forced to do not cried.’
They raped his soul.
‘They split me apart, they did their thing, then they killed him.’
She was raped again, when he stopped breathing.
Oh please, let me die next to him.
Let me fly with him to the garden of eternal flowers, where there is no pain and no warlords.
I should it being killed too.
I should it spit and bite their faces, and insult their dogma as a provocation for my imminent death.
Why my body is still here?
Kill me now, ‘you piece of shit.’
I stopped existing anyway.
I am gone since two hours ago, I left with my lover.
I demand you finish your work, ‘you fucker, murderer of my lineage’.
Break me into small little pieces, I DEMAND, ‘you dishonored my ancestry and my beauty with wood and muscles’.
You destroy my essence, my vast sky and my grassy valleys.
Just kill me, stab me 70 thousand times.
October 7, 2007
Our train ride on the express train was historical. It was actually one the last days Poland was stamping passports in trips coming from the European Union. We got passport checked, we required polish currency, and police screening. Some people wanted to have their passport stamped as a souvenir. This is my trip from Berlin to Poland with Mike, in the days preceding the end of 2007.
For my ego of self importance this is the end, Rammy500 was out of the question. This guy was more interested in getting a Puerto Rican porno girl experience than to know my name. He was in a trance with my physical similarities to those cheap movies characters he has seen before. He said: “Puerto Rican women are the most beautiful”. I said, “Have you met other women from the island before?” “Yes, in porn movies”, he said. I do not even care to analyze it… after 7 vodka shots, 8 degrees Fahrenheit and been very late, who can create a distinction between porn star and a bohemian traveler anyway? I cannot feel insulted nor bother with his urge. My new ego transcended my old, (BRAVO) and I laughed out loud and made him laugh about his xxx confusion. “Rammy, I am not a Puerto Rican porn star, I am just a traveling artist.”
I ignored that I actually liked Rammy500. He asked me to memorize Rammy500 because it was part of his email address and he wanted me to write him so we can go on a date. I liked his mathematical mind, his savvy manners; and I felt flattered and excited about the odds of having a ‘mature’ and educated person giving Mike and I a tour of old Warszawa at 2 am, even that he was supposed to be functioning professionally in his accounting firm 6 and half hours later…. Why did I not proceed with a traveling affair, my friend Jorge may ask, ”who cares, life is good”. Yes, life is good ok, but Rammy500 was in a solo trip to a Caribbean heaven trying to grab whatever rounded body parts he could, from one of his xxx angels. For this, his hands could not hold still and after much wrestling I walked out of the ring. He stood alone in the middle of the fog as I said goodbye.
I continued walking with my friend Mike into the Guards Plaza. This is a holy place. In one side two guards protected the ruins of an old building destroyed in Second World War. In the other side, in the floor, a small vase of daisies give tribute to John Paul II. The scene altered Mike by igniting an inner heat as he thought about the long history of politics of war and religion in the world. He encountered these guards of his same age, marching around this old ruin, of an old era, of an old Poland. He was not able to hold his own poetry of disdain about countries that make young men believe there is something to protect that is no longer alive, to bring the sorrow of death and old pain back again and again, to perpetuate the vicious cycle of “we will never forget our tragic past.”
He turned himself into a renaissance warrior and walked into the prohibited guards space and tried to pursue them to stop what they were doing at 4 am in the bitter cold. He pursued them with fierce, without a drop of concern about his actions and approached them almost like a kind father, and request of them to be intelligent and to do not let government brainwashed their spirits with their stale nostalgic pride, to form their own opinions of what is right and wrong, and most important of what is needed of the world population right now.
As I looked at Mike in his rhetoric heroic moment of truth, my senses got lost on the unhappiness of the Europeans of the east. I remembered Praha insidious smoking air three years ago. In my observations at least half of the people I encountered in Prague are exhausted and somewhat sad. They carry the historical pain from many war invasions. Now, thousands of tourists invade their streets at once. Tourists come to Prague in masses. It is an unbelievable scene, an ocean wave of people no matter what season is. I was there during winter snow, on blooming spring, hot summer and early Fall. Praha is so beautiful, so old and with a medieval darkness that is enchanting to people. This is a little ironic but some tourists act like invaders too, the care less for the natives, they just trash, create noise and believe they have the right to take over. They dismiss courtesy and basic respect for natives and their values. Natives turned into treasure objects. Since tourists cannot not take them home with them, they take pictures of them, and collect memories of those thirty seconds encounters, and say “I know Czechs.” It is kind of a tragic comedy. They try to take over in five days, if by being able to buy a good priced airline ticket and a four-day in a hostel or prime hotel give them the right to possess the entire country, and have people as their servants. Then they leave the country and say, “I know the Czech Republic”.
Back from those Prague memories I found myself in a plaza in Poland at 4 am, three years later. It was my first night in Poland and seeing those guards protect a monument to their war heroes and those fallen in gas chambers created an awareness of their massive sense of loss and sadness. I looked at Mike who kept going in his awareness speech. I thought for sure those guards will press a secret bottom and in two seconds the police will show up and arrest us. I looked at Mike and told him to step outside of their designed post area. He resisted, he was so compelled by seen people as young as him serving their country at 4 am at 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
After few minutes, my fears came to fruition. Few people approached the area. From the distance and with the fog preceding the new dawn we could not distinguished who these people were. I just pulled Mike out of the post and we ran in the opposite direction, away from the scene. We realized as we ran that these people were not in uniforms, possibly they were tourists like us, or people leaving or going to work. We disappeared into the unknown city. We followed Rammy500 around and now we did not know where we were. We laughed and found our way to the hotel an hour later. We collapsed in bed. A new day was just beginning.
Few hours later, with three hours of sleep, Mike and I are stumbling on a 15 minutes race out of bed, and out of the hotel into the Warszawa Express Station. Our destination is Krakow, Beautiful and Friendly Krakow (BFK). I will call it like that from now on. Before the train ride story I have to explain something about Mike and I. For me Mike is older than me. He is 17 years younger. We met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We clicked as seat belts pieces or like Velcro, we snatched together five minutes after we met. He was 22. I was 39. We connected in this space of fun, art critic and intellectualism. This guy is naturally extremely brilliant and we loved laughing. We met in the middle of this chronological gap. This is good and enough information for now.
As we settled in the station I stared at him as he draws a whole universe with his thumb. He shared his concepts of universal law of magnetic polarization and the relationship to us the Earthman. The content of his words were very profound but my mind was still in bed, needing another four hours of sleep. When the time was right I decided to investigate the Polish water supply, and left Mike with a ‘hold that thought’, and went to buy water.