Unbound

tic toc

so much shit unbound

so much illness

is it mojo, voodoo

the accusation is my foul mood

by dark energy

me, it's all random, right?

no need to invoke the divine

in the events of entropy

randomness divine!

unbound

such a nasty word

decode it and you'll find

just sadness

there's an unmailed email

shall it disappear?

why send it when it will be

unread

or unbound

or nonsense

or selfserving

or punitive

or just sad.

Still unbound I suppose

in my inbox

do I press send?

will you resent it?

or delete it?

tic toc

so much shit unbound

do I want to know?

Don't I know?

Do you?

Need

I need to see you. I need to see
your face, your arms,
your wet hair,
your back

I need to have you in my arms.
All I have is your name tattooed across some
mass email listserv message
and a picture in a social networking site,
and not much else.

I need your image, your smell,
your skin and your lips and
all the pretense gone and all
that's missing recovered

I need you

Still life

Still, because even though life seems at a standstill, i still dream.Dreams are motions unrestrained by the morass of the interludes in life. Life has a few of those, syrupy pauses that make time crawl in its axis, making us wonder if we're stuck. It's what physicists call a change in momentum; what literary critics call a liminal moment. It's what I call still life.

Stillness usually evokes calm, a respite. But this stillness is not still. It rages inside unrestrained. It pulls at the corners of vicissitude and challenges its temporality. It has no patience. It wants it to be over. It wants to be un-still.

I dreamt your life was un-stilled. It made my skin crawl, full of the vestiges of jealosy.

Still, I remain. And so does my love.

Writing and the word

Writing is an experiment in improvisation. It is an artistic exercise that seeks to establish a truth based on written characters. This truth can be existential or profound, but most of the time it is a truth that seeks to inform or to entertain. Sometimes, the truth is not what is written but what it pretends to portray as truth.

Fiction is a shell game, a way to hoodwink the reader into believing a truth that doesn’t exist, except in the mind of the writer. And once this truth leaves the mind of the writer, it stops being his. It then belongs to the reader.

But fiction writing needs more than just an avid imagination. It needs the tools to tell a story, and tell it well. So the writer seeks words, much like the painter seeks brushes and colors, to fix his vision on paper. In this sense, the dictionary is a writer’s best friend.

Used to be, a dictionary was always at my bedside. I would wake up and read words and their meaning, in an exhaustive exercise to know and master all the elements needed for writing. Now, in the technology age, dictionaries are not bound mountains of papers, but are contained in websites and programs that help expand one’s knowledge of the written word, enabling us to perform with respect and reverence the art of fiction writing.

Entertainers, newscasters, they all use words found in the dictionary, but only a writer lets the words use him or her in the process of creation.

The weight of my thoughts

I almost snapped by the weight of the incongruity of my thoughts.

Wanting and not willing to go. Stuck in the in-between, of wanting and loving and not acting on it.

I almost went to you today, but was afraid you wouldn’t be there, or of what you’d say.

Seeing you as I do, trying to be seen without being seen, struggling in days like today, when idleness inevitably sends my thoughts to you.

Yes, I confess, I have to keep busy to pretend, to flesh out the makings of daily life without you.

I almost went today, and I didn’t, again.

I just hope that, in time, you’ll still be there, willing to take a chance on me.

Just so you know

Silence is a double-edged sword, a prism through which myriad interpretations can be filtered. It’s a dangerous thing, this business of silence, because in the absence of noise, anything can fill the void. Doubt, remorse, anger, frustration, all those can ravage the void created by silence.

But silence belongs to the incandescent truth; silence is the necessary projection of the self, the needed rest before action can be taken. Silence belongs to the golden rule, it belongs to the scriptures, and it belongs to the epiphany of all that is worth anything in this life. In silence you find inspiration, repose, reenactment, imagination, succor, joy, enlightenment. Yes, it may sound trite, corny, worn. But in silence is where I find peace, and also a whirlwind of emotions and thoughts. Yes, silence is thought, and to think is to be.

So, pardon the interruption of your silence and forgive mine.

We’ll keep thinking.

House

What’s so important about a house? Is it location? Its components? Its style? Are colors or materials more important than school district or age? Are old houses just old or do they have character, persistence? Are new houses just new, or are they just bourgeois, or extroverted?

All these questions float underneath my consciousness, especially at night. Especially at 3 AM. Must be the time when I’m about to dive deeper into sleep, and my mind takes a quick look above the surface, to take a deep breath. Sometimes, the waves are too thunderous, or the sunshine too bright, and I can’t go back to sleep.
Then the whirlwind begins: thoughts, doubts, anger, remorse, all the crazy and expected thoughts swirling behind tired, opened eyes. Restless in bed, I get up and try to regain sleep in front of the TV, or with a dull book (all books are dull at 3 am).

Sometimes I stay up for a couple of hours, trying not to think, but inevitably falling into a reverie of thought, wishing to sleep at the same time as I examine the minutiae of picking a house, of trying to catalogue the important aspects of buying a new house. Location, price, pain, basement. Roof, parking, kitchen, carpet. Waves crashing against my tired eyes, keeping them awake.

I look around, at the house I live in, the house that, at first, was another restless choice, and that now has become hard to abandon. I secretly wish it never sells, knowing that selling it is an inevitable step, that getting rid of it is tantamount, just like getting rid of a loved dog after it bites someone, or getting rid of a worn and tired car after the transmission gives way. But those are inevitable choices; leaving this house if just a choice. Seems like the more adjectives you add to a choice, the easier it is to pick it.

So I’ve decided to pick a house. My realtor says that if you like 80-90 percent of it, you must pick it. But how can one be that certain of uncertainty? I tell myself, it’s all about compromise and putting things in perspective. It’s about finding out what’s important about the house. Is the house a bedroom, a cave, an office or a home? Are its components important, or is it more important that it is in a good school district? Is it close to work and school? Is it big enough?

All good questions. The problem is that most of those answers won’t come until after you buy the house. Is it ever too late? Not really. Houses these days are an exchanged commodity, temporary abodes, trade-up stepping-stones.

And that’s what makes me sad. I remember every single house I’ve lived in. Have I loved them all? No. But they all leave a scar. House hunting is a lot like love. Too bad love is so complicated, full of compromises.

What happened to unconditional, love-at-first-sight, forever, love?

Probably sold for a bigger love.

Goodbye...For Now

What’s goodbye?
A capitulation or an enticement?
A cessation of breathing or a struggling pause?
A comma or an exclamation point?

Various responses suffocate
the growing magnitude of its certainty.
A goodbye is not short-lived, rather
it is an ice age.

So, goodbye to what?
An apple core,
Or just a soul,
Or a speck of dust
settled across the back
of a butter bar.

This goodbye, I say
restraining a tear,
is an antediluvian struggle
for survival.

wet hair

I saw wet hair
silent and mellifluous
indifferent.

Until you turned around,
wet hair and freckled shoulders

and the vision

turned into our reality

Another rainy day

Another rainy day. He thought it was always like that, that the rain suppressed a certain stimulus of his brain’s machinery. It was as if his brain was composed of strips of paper that shriveled when they became wet.

He was okay. He slept well, and awoke with the noise of the rain trapped between his ears. It was a synaptic reaction, completely unconscious. His mood fell further, and he thought that maybe it was better to not get out of bed.

But he did, because of his sense of duty to the job. And that’s how his thoughts tricked him. They hurled him towards dark thoughts, towards a new dictum for his life. “You should wait until the end to render a verdict”, his other voice told him. But it doesn’t matter, his thoughts continued, ignoring the other possibilities his mind screamed out. There’s nothing to lose.

He thought of his sense of duty to his job, of the word “duty”, of all his obligations, not only the financial ones, all his financial debt drowning the sanity in his house in between screams and threats, and the obligatory tension arising within the ascetic pecuniary climate that accompanies every recession. It was the word “duty” as antonym of liberty, as its opposite force. Duty as chains, as expectations. That’s why he admired artists, because they had no obligations, except towards their art. The rest could burn as a meteorite of indifference. But that wasn’t him: his artistic underpinning crushed by his scientific duty; his artistic capacity drowned by expectations. Always living off the expectations. Even if he denied it, even if he boasted that his life was his and he was in command, he knew the reality of it all: the stares full of disdain; the sarcastic, ironic or duplicitous comments; the feigned support that was later withdrawn when threatened.

That’s how he lived.

And it was when he met Her that he felt a breadth of fresh air, a sense of liberation. For nothing. So that in the moment of truth, he would continue living off the expectations. So that when the time came, he would return to this role as an agonizing protagonist, victim of his destiny, about to obtain his liberty, but afraid of the final jump. Why?

Because he was afraid. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don't”. Because he wouldn’t risk losing everything to gain everything. Because a glimmer of doubt grew like a cancer. A doubt silenced by a whispered “I love you”; a doubt that, in the absence of these words, eclipsed everything else.

Afraid. That’s how he lived his life.

Georges DiStefano Folly
The Book of Absent Fears

Fear (Redux)

What is fear?
It is the absence of reality.
The poisonous scab that ails us.
A virtue, to despise what we want.

To bite the apple, thinking of the original sin.
To kiss the lips that will betray you.
To look for inexistent options.

Or to not look for them.
To lag behind, sheltered by a cinematic and mimetic
normality,
sheltered by ears cloistered in sarcasm,
in a constant moan of
inaction.

What is fear?

It is a law of physics, the absence of momentum,
a convalescent vector.

It is inscrutable, unfathomable,
like a black hole,
or a smile distilled
by alcohol.

miedo.com

¿Qué es el miedo?

Es la ausencia de realidad.
La costra ponzoñosa que nos aqueja.
La virtud de despreciar lo que queremos.

Es morder la manzana pensando en el pecado capital.
Es besar labios que te traicionarán.
Es buscar opciones inexistentes.

O no buscarlas,
quedar rezagado, al amparo de
una normalidad cinemática y
mimética,
al amparo de unos oídos satíricamente enclaustrados
en un constante gemido
de inanición.

¿Qué es el miedo?

Es una ley física, la falta de impulso,
un vector convaleciente.

Es inescrutable, insondable,
como un agujero negro,
o una sonrisa destilada
por el alcohol.

Vapors

Empty room
its geometric façade shines
at its brim,
no whispers heard, no breath, all
the vapor is gone. Gone.

Naked room
flourishes at its seams, just where
you used to lay
crumpled and abandoned,
lost, gone

the bathtub becomes a blurry
mirage
History unkind to its
devotees


How did it happen? All mirages end with the morning
How wispy, the air dew.
here suddenly gone? This one persists

El vaivén

Me preguntas si eres mi dosis semanal
de cultura pop,
cuando en realidad eres mi dosis semanal
de realidad.
Ahora, asoleado por tu sonrisa,
regreso envuelto en el efluvio de tus ojos,
envuelto como un atuendo,
cuando en realidad pretendo
navegar las posibilidades
y callar nuestros labios.

Y ahora que desentiendo
el vaivén porque así existimos,
sin determinación de un anclaje
porque no es posible, ahora, en el tiempo, en
el momento
que es lo que quiero,
imaginar un beso, y una rendija para atestiguar
tus sueños, y todo lo que queda es este silencio
de carcoma existencial y considero si estas líneas
se pierden dentro del lugar donde
todos los puntos del mundo son visibles
y si no importan, y si son (soy) anticuado
como los juegos de vídeo de antes,
Frogger o Donkey Kong.

Pero por eso las escribo, para que las rescates,
Si lo consideras oportuno.
Si no,
deshílalas y que queden
como adornos subrepticios
de tu piel.

Ghost

And now you’ve erased your presence,
trying to not even exist.
You exist within your pores,
macerating the thoughts that portend a sliver of
Sanity.
But now you turn invisible,
Probably just to me.
Maybe I’m thinking I am over important
I exaggerate the effect I may have.
But this silence, this immaterial presence
which has turned you into a ghost
in my mind,
chills me for all the wrong reasons.

Ghosts do not scare, they portend,
and what you’ve unfolded is
the veracity of the end.

What’s the answer?
To leave the haunted house.
Maybe that way, you
can reincarnate
for someone else…