Gallows' flower

It was today that I saw it, within a window of the rusted bridge. It dangled from a Spider's thread, as a lone man hanging on gallows, a flower yellow as gall, condemned, yet its face turned towards Heaven. It does not rush to climb up Buddha's thread, but waits for the rest of us to grasp its wisdom, to entwine in its enlightenment. It was not clinging, but gently clasped by its faithful rope, gently strangled. Take my breath away, dear Daffodil. You are the troll of this my bridge, and my payment is thy risk, as my passage turns you, throttling you tighter, imbuing strength to this your death and straining this your link to life. I can't undo the harm, yet ask you to forgive me, sweet blossom, that I did not stop to tend to you, my karmic wheels forced me to carry on. Perhaps I was not meant to pick you, yet if the rain did not bid you fall, then tomorrow may be our day.

This eve, I stood by the mirror, alone on this side, but on the other holding on to you, breathing you. And as I remember your fragrance, my chest constringes, halting the flow of my life. I thirst for water, for your dew, a dying bloom too I am. Here, have the rest of my spirit, I still send you my breath.

Three grains of thought

The solid light was the drop that tipped this glass. An ice cube of impenetrable rays, filamentous, webbing within a trap for itself. It floated in the far corner of the room, which pointed outside, beyond the fragile surface of the room, but then it would change its mind and orient its angled digit towards me, accusatively.

Yet it was not my fault, the blame lay in those modest capsules holding three grains of thought: Hawaiian baby woodrose, passion flower and guarana, blended into a consciousness of its own. I had taken a couple, a glad one melting cozily inside my gut, fusing first delicately and then again, more violently, as their marriage bed contracted and crushed them, broke their body but freed their spirit, releasing their seed into me. It was they who impregnated me with these ideas, strangers to my waking mind, only familiar to my nightly wanderings.

The light melted again, its fibers now weaker, curtains that would not open, hiding the actual fabric forming my microcosm, but had they opened I would only see emptiness through and through. Let me turn my attention from this veiled mirror and onto something more appropriate for the occasion. Three candles, not the placid lake now at the corner of my eye, but roving rivers of surging life, rising knights, galloping nowhere, knowing no time nor destination but that which we may lend them, our thought bestowing them breath, one which when torn away returns them to servitude, to their physical slavery, their thirst for the balm beneath them, which they can never touch nor feel its sustenance, Tantalus threefold. But let us be merciful, return our eye to these our dancers, their ardent flamenco.

And let us dance ourselves, me and you, closely. Surrender to one another, then fall, by chance, a never-ending free descent, never culminating, not even as we lie rolling upon the floor. And as we climb the spiral stairs again, rising to the peak of the alabaster tower to fall longer still, but this time there will truly be no climax, no death to life, breath, motion, love. The joy outlived the convulsions that arched my body, ready to release its soul, an arrow into the firmament...

...it was the string that broke, the train of thought torn, the memory fragmented. That life twists itself together again where the past and future meet. I smell a rose-garden...

the King, the Fishbowl and the Gypsy

This brief bedtime tale is inspired in a dream I had this somewhat lazy morn, and on some contemplations I had the night before:

"Once upon a time, on a small island in the Mediterranean sea, lived a sad King, whose sorrow stemmed from the loss of his dear Wife, who in her wake, in her endless sleep left but a thick, bronze lock of hair, a bookmark in his crimson notebook, once the place where all his passions were kept. Each night the king burned one hair from the curl as an act of remembrance and mourning, but as years passed, the curl never thinned within his book nor did the King dare to ever write within it again.

One dreamless eve, desperate to rid himself from the tangles of dolorous memory, he tore the dense whorl and cast it out of his heart and into the hearth. But when the hair did not catch flare, remaining stolid in the thick blaze, the king resolved to fuel the flame with that which burnt most brightly within him, that which tormented him each moment of his now solitary life. He took his volume, empty of visible writing, yet thickly scribbled with the ink of his Love, in all its shapes and sizes, with each thought dedicated to his beloved Queen impressed there by his bare breath and subtle touch. Grasping it in his right hand, he prayed to free himself of grief, to find happiness again even if it cost his Heart. With that, he threw the volume into the fire.

What occurred later that night is but dead reckoning, but in the dawn the court saw an eerie Fishbowl standing upon a slim, hourglass shaped table by the throne. Within, turned and swirled a shoal of green finned parr and one Goldfish in water that oft reminded one of quicksilver, appearing at the same time thick and murky, yet also bright and of easy flow. No plants nor rocks adorned the Aquarium, not even muck nor rests of food were to be seen, since the King had ordered them not to be fed. Day in, day out the King observed the fish, and when, out of hunger, the Goldfish gulped one of the fishes, he would promptly and merrily declare war upon one of his many neighbors and mobilize his armies to seize their domains.

As the kingdom expanded so did the Fishbowl begin to run out of fish, until one day the very last parr was devoured by the greedy Goldfish. That eve, the King hosted a great feast, serving his noblemen and officers his best wine from his clearest crystal glasses, and bade them shatter them on the floor, but throw as they might, no glass broke nor scratched. Taking this as a good omen, the King took a small band of his closest knights and marched upon his last remaining rival, a Gypsy maiden residing in a low keep. The Gypsy offered no resistance and, to welcome her visitors, removed from their hinges the gates of her hold, much adorned with flamboyant designs depicting the forests, mountains and sea around her modest patch of land. But the jealous King was covetous, and said: "This is my domain, not yours to picture and delight in." And with that he ordered to chop and char them.

Mute, the Gypsy motioned her guests to enter her abode, whose walls were filled with Romany art and the air riddled with music, offering them her best delicatessen and drink, but the cruel King would take none and ordered his knights to tear the silken cloths, smash the painted vases and rip the guitars' strings. The Gypsy fell to her knees and wept, cupping her hands up to the King and with her moist eyes asking "What then? What will you take?" The King, satisfied, smiled and took in his hand her long black mane and with a swift cut severed it off her head. Thus he turned and left her, bearing away the sign of his last conquest.

That night, the happy King looked into his Fishbowl and watched his Goldfish twirling within, chasing its own, now nibbled tail, until all at once it caught its tail fin and bit further and further until it finally swallowed itself whole. As the liquid stopped moving and cleared in the vacant Aquarium, the King came to himself and remarked that in his hand he still held the Gypsy's mane. As he turned to glance at it, he discovered it was not black, but bronze."

Nephritic stone

I decided to dedicate a small playful ode to the kidney stone that so complicated my life a year and a half ago. My folk say that one must laugh at adversity, since crying is of no use:

"It feasts on flesh, banquets on bone,
or quick, it gobbles body whole.
A grain well placed will urge you prone,
Not love but sand takes such a toll.

A germ that grows on salted ground,
in taut terrain, nephritic night.
A pearl, wet desert rose, ignite
this wraith into a question wound.

You jade me, nephrite, graven gem;
your wanton wound, unfaithful ail,
predicted death and bade me pale,
my petals plucked but spared my stem.

I thank thee for that sleepless time,
in Orwell's wing (eighty fourth ward),
its Telescreens, my piddle poured
and turned to wine; but most, this rhyme."

Duende Gallego

Trace now a curve, round the peak of O Cebreiro, the passageway into Gaelic Spain, as yet near free from the sully of our faithless hearts, the defunctness of folklore. Its spirits troubled and trickster fays know not our harsh morals but squeeze between our laws as light through alabaster, with mellow mood and gentle gait. This domain of thin fleshed sprites is said to be guarded by Cerberus, whose six great eyes wander the hills each eve as ignes fatui. The wind is wrought by his wild breath, exasperated as he shakes us, but fleas to him, rippling the treetops.

Only the vivid paints of the landscape brand the permeant lust. Immortal green, vehement violet and ardent cerulean, the passions pressed, egressing from these ethereal channels saturate our carnate world with what the gitanos call "duende", goblin or ghost. This force manifests too in contours we too can comprehend, but rarely see. Bearded gnomes buried in forest bulwarks shouldering your path, their rooted beards palpating the air, seeking your sudor. Dead, crusted trolls amidst the countless broken trees and crumpled leaves idling about, but his right arm reared, its hand vacant, more than empty, hollow, a porthole through his palm voiding our vision. Rustling, restless hobgoblins hiding in the bushes revert to the verd guise of great lizards, which as quickly turn to air. Smell it now. You'll catch the scent of burning hair, the self-styled torches of minute elves, baits for the giant moths they gallop, the flame a carrot, the shaft a cane. Listen to yours as it hits the ground, its echoes tell of tunnels running deep beneath, harbouring impish armies feeding on sulphur and lime, but field mice too and pilgrim rods when these abound.

Each year they grow extinct, as their ambient is divested. Just as we fall as flies without our oxygen, they cannot breathe an air that has no silence, absence of speech for its own sake. We're used to give quiet to the dead, but we should give it also to the living. Indeed, it is their gift to us, for without stillness we've no soul.

Enanos de viña

Take a map of the Iberian peninsula and trace a line between Pamplona and Burgos. Along that trace you shall find a vinery entrenched upon a modest hill, flaunting a militant, ruined manse, surrounded by silent troops camouflaging their tanned skins in green garbs, their veins prominent and virid. Hush is all there is to hear.

Legend tells these planted folk were not always rooted thus, though the barky commands of their master kept them nigh and fast in place. It was from the tenebrous eyes of the house that he blustered his vociferations at his then slaves in blood and serfs in law, a rather extended family beaten and pressed into thralldom. These his "children" were each hardened more by the relentless leather of his many belts, each one tardily eroding with their sweat the sturdy hide, than by their crushing labour. It was their yells that fecundated the soil each day and night, concocting the sorely delicious grapes that erupted as bodied fireworks into the clusters hanging from their sinewy gallows.

For three handful years the residence drew wealth from their spirited wines, whose taste was sought out by ecclesiasts and nobility, who sought to drink a grape that matched, severally, their habit and blood in quality and colour both. But as the lord aged, his grasp grew weaker, and thus his seal softened, started melting as did the flesh under his skin. As all tyrants, he was disposed of subtly and shamefully, rather than by much deserved violence, by daily doses of arsenic into his chalice, one stone of it in hefty weight across some years that did not show decay until his demise. Indeed they say the poison restored his strength and shifted his aspect from great proud villain to a crooked dwarf, hardening from the innards out; his tongue turned a plank, insensitive to the ratsbane delivered to him in ever greater portions. Die he did at last, at the dinner table, choking on the clumped solute clotting his throat, but not before he gargled through a curse, as Spaniards do, to each relative thrice removed.

Removed they were that eve, before supper, afore they had even time to take his corpse from the table, though try they did. Yet he was grounded in his place, his feet bound to the floor, his hands clutching the woody legs at the table's head, and his own caput twisted over the back of his oaken throne. Their slaver dead, they fell prey to custom instead - without fail, to work the field until the fall of dusk - and when a storm contorted the sky's brow and pushed forth its million tears, they did not take refuge within their quarters, but laboured on until their knees sank deep in mud, as did their hands. Not one emerged, nor knew the house again. 'Tis said the master now eats alone.