Poco a poco...

no hay prisa, 

no hay horas 

que marcar 

ni lugares donde estar 

ni gente que visitar 

no hay nada 

nada, nada, nada 

si nos lleva una vida, 

una vida nos lleva 

no hay prisa 

poco a poco 

lento pero seguro 

Give it a name...

Give it a name:

brother 

sister 

friend 

husband 

wife 

mother 

ex mother 

Give it a name.

Lo dice Lydia a los doctores, lo digo yo...  

¿Qué somos? No somos nada…

No compartimos el mismo vientre
ni los mismos apellidos,

pero compartimos el mismo país,
el mismo planeta,
el mismo universo.

Sobre todo, compartimos nuestra pasión por el arte
y por lo bello.

Nos une la necesidad de elevar lo ordinario
a lo extraordinario.
Nos une la curiosidad por lo misterioso,
mirar allí donde otros no quieren ver.

Nos une la rebeldía
y la resistencia
a dejar que el mundo simbólico nos defina.

 

No hay sueños

​No hay sueños, que recordar. 

Toda la noche escuchando el elevador decir: “going down” “going up”  - Los gemidos de las puertas abriendo y cerrando, sonidos de máquinas y alarmas. 

No hay sueños, solo un dormir intermitente que es profundo cuando sucede. 

Las sombras de un sueño

Poema

Voy a forzar un poema. Lo voy a sacar de mi pecho a la fuerza, solo porque sí. Porque esta tarde estoy aquí, sentada en la librería del hospital de Stanford, mirando un cielo pálido, con la luz suave del sol cayendo sobre mí.

Ventanales gigantes permiten que el día entre en todo su esplendor. Se escuchan los murmullos de las máquinas y los cantos de los pájaros… casi no se oyen los beeps ni las alarmas del hospital. 

Aquí todo mucho mas callado, menos movimiento muy relajado.

Este lugar parece un templo en el espacio. Está hecho por gente verdaderamente sofisticada y artística, que ha tomado todo en consideración. Si no fuera porque este palacio nos ha brindado tanta comodidad, trayéndonos la comformidad, el arte, la naturaleza, el agua, la luz, el cielo, la luna, el espacio la experiencia habría sido muy distinta.

Notas...

-I need to stop thinking about the prior issues with M.I., put that aside, and concentrate on the matter at hand. Maybe a bit of the past slips in sometimes...unavoidable. It’s been more than 20 years since I last saw her. We quickly started talking like old times, and with that, some of the old habits appeared again. That’s only natural.

-Talking to Lydia, we realized that we both share the same habit of projecting the worst. I told her that every time she called me after the first incident, I would assume it was bad news. She confessed she had similar thoughts. We also both feel somehow responsible for what just happened, which is ridiculous. It’s only our minds playing games with us.

-I told her that I used to think it was us Salvadorans who had the habit of expecting the worst because, back in the day in our country, there was often a real chance that the worst had happened. But then she told me her mother had the same habit. That made me remember other women I’ve met who think this way. I wonder if it happens to men as well, or if we are simply the ones more willing to admit it.

-In any case, it’s part of the brain’s entertainment. The mind is constantly hungry for drama, hungry for stimulation, and it will project all kinds of movies and little storylines to keep itself entertained.

I also keep reminding them and myself that we are seriously sleep-deprived. I’m over-caffeinated, we are under a lot of stress, and we haven’t been able to pay attention to anything else. It’s a tense situation, and we can’t fully trust our tired brains right now.

-Tonight I will make an effort to meditate, do some mindful yoga, and perhaps take a walking meditation through the building—picturing the labyrinth, the rite of passage.

-Another thing we need to be fully aware of: when he gets through this and becomes fully conscious, he may not be the same person we knew before this event. He will likely be confused and traumatized. A whole series of emotions may hit him. I reminded Lydia of this because we need to help him through that process by staying strong. He might become depressed, and we can’t fall into that with him. We can’t expect him to remember us or remember everything right away. We need to take it slowly, see where he is, and let him ask the questions. He may be like a baby, remembering things little by little. We need to be patient.

Jack White

ok —-parte de la entrevista con Jack White donde habla sobre poemas y dream journals! 

He’s a kind of historian of American vernacular, drawn to the relationship between pop and the avant garde, between maverick auteurs and the communal imagination. His own work proves that defiant eccentricity is no obstacle to stadium shows and Bond themes, and that being wildly prolific hasn’t diminished his mystique. With this book, he turns his curatorial eye on himself.

​So what made you think of it now?

I wanted to test the waters about doing a full book of my poetry and writings. I was a little bit worried about that being taken the wrong way. It’s tough when you say the word poetry out loud. People can immediately think there’s a pretension to it.

When did you start writing poems?
As a teenager. I started going to coffee houses in Hamtramck, a city in Detroit – the real European-style coffee houses, not the modern-day ones. It’s a bit irritating now to see 15 people on laptops, nobody speaking to each other. I almost want to open up a coffee house where that’s not allowed and you have to talk to other people. I was writing, performing folk music sometimes, learning about art from all kinds of artists. It was a pivotal moment for me. The coffee house needs to come back and be a sacred place where people can commune and don’t exploit it for social media content either.

Seeing all your writing together, I can identify some recurring themes: birds and trees, broken bones and lonely ghosts, God and Detroit …
It’s like you can look at a painting and say: “Oh, that’s a Van Gogh.” Or you can hear a song and say: “Oh, that sounds like Trent Reznor.” As creative people we have these little comfort zones in our minds: this kind of melody, this way of ending a sentence. And that becomes your style. It makes you wonder about the words you find comfortable.

So do you make any distinction between lyrics and poetry?
It’s all poetry to me. I think all music is the blues and I think all lyrics are poetry. When I hear a song, it bugs me when I can’t hear what they’re saying.

You used to keep a dream journal. What are your dreams like?
My dreams are quite hilarious and off-kilter. I so rarely hear people say: “Oh that’s what my dreams are like.” They always say: “That sounds like when I dropped acid.” So maybe my brain is tapping into those synapses.