Classic and New

for Jennifer


I don’t believe in soul mates, love.
That would be demeaning to you:
you who were born in years later
made specifically for me? Yikes! 

What I’m sure it exists is rhyme,
where we can rhyme with others
in couplets, strophes that we read
to others each, then to each other.

All our poems depend on factors
beyond reason and thus in poetry,
which is music in text fabricated,
from the mighty ode to the petty.

Even without text we still dance
and our common dance is tango:
the male holding you, directing 
your female self back to trance.

All of us slaves to our rhythms,
which rhyme even in dissonance, 
the length of our time revolving
on how we rhyme day after day.

My rhyme and dance with you
is scary: we might not stop ever,
thus I sense fever lurking yonder,
as music without silence is eerie.

Yet we rhyme as we never did:
to celebrate such new wonders
I opted here for a rhyme different
with alliterative letters or words. 

[pause for a tango nuevo arabesque]

As I write my love poems to you,
freedom of speech is decapitated
fundamentally, almost yesterday,
a vulgar yesterday that's yet to die.

I wonder if similar worldly events
that turn lovers' woo into wounds
should make my wooing you end 
or by rebel contrast gain weight.

This much I know: the structural
world is flawed, and we must try 
to bring back its humane stance 
by rhythm and structure of tango.

A pause, love. And here we go.



_______

image: a postcard of circa 1919.

Two Duets - A Quartet

On Children

by Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

A Matter of Personal Taste

for Jennifer


In my darkest night, / when the moon was covered / and I roamed through
wreckage, / a nimbus-clouded voice / directed me: / “Live in the layers, / 
not on the litter.”
--in Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Layers”


She loves cheese.
Cheeky, I love her.
So I like cheese.
I lick it through her.

I lick deeper and salivate.
I taste salt and freckles.
Lemony tones.
Stolen orange from a tree.
A relaxed Spring in Sicily.

And deeper.
And deeper. 
My tongue turned sandpaper.
Her layers wet picked away.

She tastes of warmth.
Warmth tastes like Yellow Stone.
A thin layer of crust.
Skin.
And a mega volcano within.

My tongue is aching now. 
So I bite her bit by bit.
Hunger triggered by taste.
My appetite increases.
And I rip her ribs apart.
I can’t help myself.

But that’s never enough.
I want her whole again.
To repeat my feat, my feast.
So I need a desperate trick.
I swallow her.

And I stop here to confess.
I’ve been lying the whole time.
Taste's nothing without sight and smell.
A sense that needs some help.

Well, the whole truth too is one.
My digestion’s in French. 
Soupe a l'oignon au fromage.

Real Life Mathematical Problems and Solutions

Emma wishes to buy a new sexy pair of pants that costs 80 € and six new books that equally cost 80 € in total. She counts all her money and finds out that she’s 81,27 € rich. How can Emma fulfil her wishes? Choose only one of the following options:

a) Emma buys a new sexy pair of pants and increases her chances of getting laid.

b) Emma opts for buying the books, reads them and increases the chances of being loved.

c) Emma browses through an expensive clothing store and steals a pair of pants, then goes to the bookshop and buys those six books, reads them, puts the pants on, and increases the chances of being loved and getting laid. 

d) Emma equates the morals of option c) and comes to the conclusion that stealing from a clothing store linked to the slave-like exploitation of Latin American workers is unlikely to perturb her views on global social issues as much as stealing from a bookshop would, and thus proceeds and executes option c).

e) Emma is ecstatic at how much lower clothes prices are since the economy went global and thinks that books can always be read for free in a library where she went twice in her lifetime to try and seduce George but he was never there, and so she embraces option a). 

f) Emma is the ideal catholic, buys a sandwich for 3,50 € and gives the rest to charity, in the total of, err, well, 81,27 minus 3,50. 

g) Emma uses her credit card to buy the items she wishes for but cannot afford.

i) Emma cannot make her mind up and sits on a park bench lost in thought.

j) Emma, sitting on a park bench, wonders if this listing of options will ever end. 

500th Post

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state? 
-- Lord Byron, in a letter to Thomas Moore dated from July the 5th, 1821  


This is my 500th blog entry since I started in the last month of 2004, never minding the quality of those previous 499...  

For a while I entertained the idea of writing this post as a reflective story on how I changed or what I learnt through these almost ten years. That story would provide deep insight into the human nature, or then again it would only raise many a sneer, “Oh, how naïve António has been...”

Though the thought of writing that story was not abandoned completely, I decided to celebrate the 500th post in a lighter tone.

I've been in a long poetic state of late and it'll eventually end one day. While shaving I already cut myself twice. And three large plates and a wineglass tried to make a bloody adventure out of the simple walking on my otherwise dull grey-stone kitchen floor.

As poetry has been in my bloodstream, I think I must wrap it all up with one of my latest creations:    


Love is like reading through a stream of Facebook posts.
It'll make you laugh, shed a tear, think deeply, sing a song.
You'll feel an inner wave ranging from sweet to despair.
And the very next day, addicted, you'll do it all over again. 


I'm kidding with those who unlike me are addicted to Facebook. On a serious note now, and as the last line of André Breton's Nadja goes:

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all. 

Spooning

for Jennifer


We are spoons, you and I.
Face to face, staring at each other’s concavity.
Reflexes reaching out from our deepest ends.
Distorted? 
Upside down images in each reflected upright?
And then when you turn around we fit in perfectly. 
Puzzle pieces.
Puzzled in a way that makes sense.

And our spooning soon progresses.  
One of our favourite sex positions.
Your leg on top flexes.
It opens the middle gate.
The common country where we'll unite.
One of my arms holds the weight of your thoughts.
That hand freed for touch.
The other hand fully free to touch you bounteously—
a fisherman's wife's dreamed octopus but in a decimus form.
And then we feel.
Spoons holding our liquids.
Drops us.
Flow.

*   *   *

The other days, most of those days, we were lying down.
Our convex back on various pillows.
Our minds flying above us.
Scooping for organic food.
Lost in translation, in complexity found.

Laziness and Overpowering Forces

for Jennifer


I was on the beach where my father took us year after year, belly down on a towel, feeling the sand in between my fingers and toes, and the graininess of that sand stuck to parts of my body, a few grains on my scalp, a few more hiding in my eyebrows so that they could escape those barren grounds and come with me when I returned home; feeling the towel wet from my swimming trunks, the salty drops dripping from my body, feeling the towel hot from the sun; feeling the warmness of the penetrating sun on my back 

[subliminal message: DON'T FORGET YOUR SUNSCREEN]

                        in contrast to those shivers the cold water I had just come out of provoked; feeling and hearing the breeze playing around my ears, feeling it caressing my left loin and my spine; hearing the distant sound of crashing waves invisible from where I was next to the lagoon; tasting the salt on my lips, those lips tasting my left arm, the youthful blonde hair on my arm tickling my lips; smelling algae and their iodine; my eyes semi closed so that I could see my eyelashes through which the sky blueness and the sand yellow came in into my brain as diffusely as bright. That was me being lazy--lazy yet more alive.

At that very same beach I went for a swim in the choppy North Atlantic, confident in my newly learned swimming skills even though I was still unable to float. There were other swimmers but all strangers to me. I dived and played under and over and through the waves, and when coldness finally defeated my thin layers of fat I tried to swim back to shore yet to no avail. The receding waters were dragging me back in. To the abyss--it felt that way. I shouted for help. No one seemed to have noticed. I swam again only to be defeated once more. I panicked a little--that little heart hard at work. And then. Then a true goddess, the one of Instinct, took control over me. I calmed down and waited for a favourable rush of water to swim back to the shore. And when the water receded each time, I let myself go; no resistance. After many repetitions, I felt the sand under my feet and walked the rest.

In the presence of overpowering forces, fight, flight, freeze? Or is it flow?  

Fuck! What the hell do I know?





______

photo by Jorge Francisco Martins de Freitas
(Foz do Arelho, Portugal)

The Universe

for Jennifer


The Universe was born out of a singularity and
is composed of but one lonely verse. 
It is expanding in search of another Universe.
Then, as a Multiverse, they might merge one day. 

In the Universe we also find stars and planets all alone. 
Even those that have the company of debris or moons
cannot touch them or by those be touched.
This is a scenario of a certain gravity.

Comets and meteors provide orgasms
when they crash into a celestial body.
The larger the crashing object the greater the spasm.
Material spread out in circles of pain, later pleasure. Or even life.

We too are a by-product of this truly divine sex.

Planets ova; comets sperm.    




___________

Photo by the astrophotographer Miguel Claro
(The Milky Way above Lake Alqueva, Portugal)

Dogs and Africa

While having lunch today in a local and humble sports club, this very friendly man who lives in our neighbourhood engaged me in conversation over dogs. I passed onto him the information that I know of the association between dogs and humans, and he shared with me two of his experiences back in colonial Angola. 

* * *

In order to cross a river safely, villagers threw puppies into the water. The crocodiles came to snatch them and then the crossing would take place.

* * *

Some villagers painted themselves in white and beat the local dogs. Thus, when the colonial tax collector came, the dogs started barking at the white man they detested giving the villagers enough time to hide their money and their jewels.

* * *

In the first case, my girlfriend's dog carves a snip out of every bone she gnaws at. Is she thinking of retaliating, marching villagers or a cruel red riding hood (photo) into crocodile-infested rivers under the threat of a snip? 

And the latter story makes me wonder if those villagers read Pavlov's research on dogs, or if they had found out how to condition dogs behaviour much before the Russian did. 

Mongolian Horses

for Jennifer


Mongolian horses, Mongolian horses, over the hills
and it's plain their piercing ululating voices will
bring us vast warmongering love; much pains.

My people withdraw to the mountains,
take the shortest route to the sea
while I, witless, witness all that and me.

I, under the shady protection of a brave olive tree;
their composite bows bend and arrows
rain on my ancient people in the meadow.

Their armour more visible as distance narrows,
I feel slit eyes now narrowing on a figure
immovable, in the shade of peace yet eager.

Eager to snap a branch and summon a dove,
eager to hear their tales of wanderlust and murder,
eager to show this native innocence of love.

A mounted bowman draws near;
a arrowhead well aimed at
the very heart of fear.




___________________

photo by Jennifer Allison
http://onestreetshy.com/