Time, love, music and ideas changes. Sex, god, color, borders, changed. But nothing could change itself. The Cuban night creeps as cold as a tracheotomy choking on words or a hole the diameter of a thimble in your temple. You are at risk for tick tock, you are at risk of bang bang, you are at risk of me. Sooner or later we all all have to kill magnificently. It’s like a miracle. We overcame life, but not old age.
Saturdays are blue. Sundays are sad. The heart a rotten orange. The doors are for forever. The songs are not enough. The walls are wastelands. We were not born here. The clocks still strike too loud. If everything was as easy as closing your eyes and waking up, for example, in January 1972. Or in December 3010, for example. Or never, the hardest. Or when you like, but not today, please.
Give me your hand, the shakiest one, the one almost without pulse, the fastest pulse. Fever without faith. The Revolution is an amber dream. Honey of forgetfulness. My eyes can’t reach you now, blurred as you go toward the city. While they they kill their citizens more with machetes (all of winter is criminal by concept). While their mannequin bodies fit less in the beds. While the cheap bedspread of lies of the soul fits less in their bodies. Ah, impossible to sleep with the memory of Cuba in your head. Breath, relax, pray. To help you forget the damage. It’s impossible. To help you forget the urge to destroy. Still at time the nightmares are preferable to ruminating on reality.
And it tried to be free and beautiful and true and good. It tried to live dangerously. Bleeding before weightlessness. Walking the tightrope of unknown abysses and nameless trees, bypassing the tedium of the sun and the mediocre tropical light, skiing in lakes deeper than the candor of its eyes that still don’t reach me while more clearly it becomes this city.
And it tried to be creative and not change time or love or music or ideas. And not change sex or god or color or borders. But all all all is turmoil. The old European night burst words put on images and monstrous black holes that are still the diameter of a thimble drawn on its temple, all all all its childhood terrors fit within, and even room to spare for pleasure, depleted quickly if you look a second time, and then all that is left is blind escape to another nowhere where you encounter this silence called freedom.
November 19 2010
