The Beacon

As the blackness fell across the city
The man in the white tuxedo stood in the lighthouse
That swept its arm of light across the sea
Surveying for survivors, wanderers, adventurers
     And signs of nocturnal danger

He followed the beam with his gaze
Eyes silently trailing behind the disappearing light
The ice cubes in his martini clinking as he trembled
Blending with the echo of his polished soles
     Click-clacking on the cold grey stone

The barren sea was not revealing
No shipwreck disrupted the invisible horizon
No sound pierced the perfect stillness of twilight
But jagged rocks remained of what had once been
     A magnificent pristine shore

He dragged his hollow stare away
While the lantern continued its endless surveillance
His bloodshot eyes adjusted to the dark inside
And languished on the body of the girl
     Lying softly on the icy floor

The blood that had danced through her veins
Now receded and faded her skin to ashen grey
A shadow crawled up her flowery evening dress
Draining the threads of the last shreds of color
     That clung to her begging to stay

The last trickle of blood that had run through her hands
Dried up petrified at the tip of her finger
As it reached a yellowed paper that had floated from her grip
Landing softly on the obsidian floor
     And slipping now through the cracks

A gust of wind rolled through the ivory tower
The glass of martini burst in his hand
He knelt down and bent over her glacial face
The moon shone pale as bone as he finally found
     The starlight in her eyes

No sound penetrated the lantern room
No trembling breaths cut the calm
A lone white-clad figure lay still on the floor
The silver light poured in and glanced off what looked like
     Slivers of glass in his palm

And the arm of light swept the night

And there was nothing and no one to fear

There was no danger lurking there

In the darkness

Outside.

*   *   *

A figure slipped from the lighthouse at night
     To the rocks of the quiet lagoon
And melted in moments with the onyx-black sea
     And the reef where a body was strewn.

The Wanderer

A sandstorm. A man is walking through the sandstorm. When he caught sight of the sandstorm on his road through the desert, he headed straight for it, like a rowboat sailing the perfect storm. The whirlwind deposits sand in his eyebrows and beats against his cracked and battered lips, looking for the way in. He's been through so many of these that his scalp looks like it has eroded with the direction of the wind. His sandals bury themselves in the dunes with each step, and the thorns of the last dry tree have ripped the cloth on his trousers, pulling the skin on his shin along with them as they dragged across the surface of fabric and flesh.

The man seeks no city of gold lost in the scorching sun. He seeks no way out of this eternal desert. He seeks no solitude or reflection or spiritual enlightenment. He draws no benefit from carving a fleeting road through the sandstorm. He is a sandstorm seeker. He lives to survive the desert tempest. He comes out of each one barely breathing, collapsed, pockmarked by the flying debris. But alive, and inside he's unscathed. He lives for the thrill of survival. If someday he decides to leave, the desert around him will disappear and he'll trade in the burning sand for the peace of the garden. But until then, every time the cloud understands it cannot break him and moves on to seek other victims, the cracked lips on his weathered face will show a smile both tired and triumphant. The stretching flesh will redden his lips again and he will feel the blood seeping up and trickling down his chin. But he will barely feel it. There is pain in smiling through the cracks and despite them. But to him, mustering a crimson smile despite the pain is worth more than the lie of an eternal, painless grin.

Orbital

Who is it circles round you? Do you circle round who it is circles round you?

The Remains of the Day

Today was a bad day.

Today was that kind of day in which you wake up in the morning, stretch, salute the Sun and feel like you're being quartered by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The kind of day when you remind yourself to follow the stoic Code of the Samurai, but somehow you can't help thinking about doomsday and fire and brimstone and people on fire who are not amused that they're on fire. The kind of day when your train of thought is placed on a set of rusty tracks by John Wayne Gacy and kicked down the mountain to travel in inertia without a group of insurgents to blow the damn tracks up already. The kind of day when a demented and retrograde form of narcissism descends upon you from the blue and reminds you discreetly that you're a hack, just in case you forgot the last time it came round. The kind of day when your little failures grow to the size of fat Godzillas plowing through the Tokyo of your mind. The kind of day that you hate in the future and do your best to avoid. The kind of day when you come up with a hollowed-out Bible full of representations of the Seven Deadly Sins for a Christmas present (though you don't contribute to the execution thereof). The kind of day when you stare bug-eyed at texts without understanding jack, but you do feel every grain of sand scraping its way through the narrow part of the hourglass. The kind of day when you know Christmas has come and he too looks like a fat Godzilla, the bastard. The kind of day when, reading about it in the foreseeable or unforeseeable future, you stop and think to yourself...

Damn. Today was a good day.

Now Is the Perfect Time!

...for a completely random bout of marveling over beautifully expressive Portuguese words! Hooray for emerging from Blogger darkness after half a year with a completely random and utterly irrelevant post, with deadline upon deadline mounting and severe pressure from individuals and forces that shall remain unnamed!

Whooppah!

Estrondo! Estrambótico! Estrafalário! Estapafúrdio! Abstruso! If they all sound like insults, that's probably because they can be.

Well, most.

Los hijos secretos de...

Rome, whose melodic intensity on Flowers from Exile goes far beyond anything that can be classified as "martial industrial" music, whose lead singer is out somewhere lost on a journey of self-discovery and whose official website contains nothing more than a succinct "WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS GONE FOR GOOD" (a prize quotable, by the way) - well, they have a song called "The Secret Sons of Europe". Along with "To Die Among Strangers", it took my breath away and put it in a box. The concept of the album borrows heavily from the story of the Spanish Republicans banished from their homeland after the Spanish Civil War, and the flamenco guitars and claps reinforce that sentiment. The sentiment expressed here is nostalgia (processed though it is), and the secret sons of Europe are those who drifted in a life of shame and virtual inexistence as the Franco regime encroached on what was once not a land of fascisizing nuts. I'm not a fan of making martyrs out of anyone, and the civil war was about much more than the good freedom fighters vs. the dark, ominous colossus of merciless military might. But the fact is every time a shameful, tyrannical time comes along for a country, the generation borne by it and bred in it is later a lost generation. The losers are silenced, smothered and obliterated. But to have been part of the great tyrannical machine and later subsist following its dismantling - that is also being a loser and having to slither and creep under rocks, hiding from the sunlight and the scornful faces of those around you. Because the loser always has to slump his arms and bow his head. Think of the simplest examples: the former people of Nazi Germany in 1945, still at least partly faithful to the criminal regime Germany spawned; die-hard Stalinists from the Russian countryside in 1956, whose Great Patron's face suddenly crumbled and fell apart like an old collage of facial feature cutouts glued together long ago and falling to pieces as the glue dries; Japan's post-war society of complete disillusionment with the free-fall of imperial authority; Poland's ex-communists -with Jaruzelski as their epitome - tainted by the (perceived) wrongdoings of their time. They lived, to some extent, between the cracks, in a hard shell of shame.

Here's a poem randomly lifted from this blog ("Noctívagos") that expresses more of the same:

---

Soy el hijo secreto de Lee Harvey Oswald
Soy el hijo secreto de Unabomber
Soy el hijo secreto de un Pantera Negra
el hijo secreto de América...

Soy el hijo secreto de Franco
Soy el hijo secreto de Olof Palme
Soy el hijo secreto de Adolf Hitler
el hijo secreto de Europa.

Soy el hijo secreto de Hiro-Hito
Soy el hijo secreto de Mishima
Soy el hijo secreto de Pol-Pot
el hijo secreto de Asia.

¡Dónde están las televisiones públicas y privadas
para publicitar mi enajenada vida, mi propio horror!

Soy el hijo secreto del Primer Mundo
mis cinco minutos de fama ¿dónde están?

---

I don't even want to begin elaborating on those, but interestingly enough, the references to Olof Palme and, to some extent, Mishima , seem a bit out of tune with the rest. Nice criticism of today's "First World" though - the secret sons of today's powers can float up to the surface riding the currents of cheap scandals and shock value.

Maybe subconsciously I'm posting this because I'm about to become a secret son of Europe myself - this being my last week in Poland before I go bumping into a Belgian afternoon. But hey - nothing new there. I've always felt a bit detached or excluded from the concept of nationality. I'm Polish by birth, by passport, by language - but not by spirit. And since I'm getting a bit too muddly and convoluted, I'll finish this up by saying that I hope I make it, hell, I believe I'll make it. 7 months in a foreign land alone is more than I've ever done. The challenges of the MA will come in a total package with the comings and the goings on the other side of the classroom. And an important relationship to maintain, to keep well watered and evergreen, and all that jazz. A big test it's up to me to pass. And last but not least, part of being a son of the world is moving around it, absorbing it as much as possible. After all, the road is the destination.



Titotazqueh.

All in a Day's Work, or: Proto-socialist Rants and the Poor in HD

(Part of this was written before)

Gotta love a day when what should be the most exciting line in the agenda actually turns out to be the most blah. So, I'll refrain from commenting on the Spain - Portugal match other than that it was about as exciting as a boxful of doilies. The World Cup is a no-no for me here - why comment on something you'll joyously forget the next day? Just a shame some class teams - and if class is what we're after, Cameroon, Germany, Argentina and Slovakia probably showed the bulk of it when at their best - went tally-ho and buh-bye, off to another ball game. The instant-replay/ultrasensitive-camera/homing-device-in-ball/laser-implant-into-eye-of-referee controversy is not even worth touching on. So, that's about it for the World Cup. I mean, North Korea's out (coming to a "training camp" near you, comrades!), so why get too excited? The rightful champion is disgracefully gone and the capitalist horde of the ever-cursed Pig-Lord of the Fifty Stars has been named the winner even before the kickoff to game one. I'm tellin' ya, these bourgeois dogs will stop at nothing.

Warsaw, where I stopped by a few days ago, gave me a lil' internship in the Embassy of Venezuela, a remote chance of being accepted into the Yucatan program in Mexico, and above all, a chance to meet up with a friend of mine who I'd never talked to before quite so freely. "Intellectually inspirational," said she as I walked her to the train, missing my last bus and not giving a damn. "Right back at you," said I. "Thank you," said she. Until I see some results and set about inspiring myself and others to ACTION, not to thinking, I ain't convinced. But I have come a long way from the bumbling blob of hypersensitive thick tar I was a year and a half ago. Still, I need change, and not only change in my life, but to enforce change where it needs enforcing, be one of those in the front line. Not the guy who puffs his chest out to pin the medal on better (vanity destroys, and baseless vanity is pitiful), but the guy who actually works in a team to take someone out of the dark hole he's in.

But where's my practice? I have no practice. I've never saved a life, never pulled someone out of the gaping maw they were falling into, never changed anyone's walk of life. It's just talk, and chattering, and bullshit. And talking about acting. And talking about talking about acting. How about a "DO", huh? How about a "DO"? It ain't gonna come floating down river for you to collect. The friend I met up with in Warsaw had been to the favelas in Rio, and she said the poverty here and the poverty there are worlds apart. Here, we lack programs that could really make a difference, take people off the streets permanently, give them just enough cheese to want more but just enough hurdles to know that it ain't gonna be easy to get from the bench back to real life. There, the favelados do what they can, but try as they might, the putrid system puts the hurdles there itself - stay inside, poor bastards, we don't want you peons moving. Maybe.

One thing is for sure - the dirt-splattered, weathered and beaten-down dregs everyone in Poland sometimes comes across (the older generation, not the current human wastes of are that go around robbing people at will) rarely elicit a second glance, or a bit of attention. Do they deserve it? I don't know. To each his own answer: would you grace a half-naked, old and broken drunkard with more than a fleeting glance? The last time I did - a few days ago - I stopped and took a few minutes to talk to a man with drooping skin and dirt smeared all around hands and fingernails, a man claiming to have been a sailor who did 24 years of jail time for beating up his bosun and a couple of others - which the faded Bruce Lee tats seemed to at least partially confirm. Toothless, he told me his plight: 65 gr for a beer, and starting from the 5th (which is when he gets his pension), he's off to rehab. Said it with real tears in his eyes, too, as he did when telling of his sons - two out of three supposedly dead. On the rehab front, no chance. I have no naivete to abuse there, he's not going anywhere voluntarily. Might have lied about the rest too. But who knows?

I gave him 70 gr.

Wrong? Right? Either way, it won't change a thing. And my talking to him doesn't make me any better than countless others who wouldn't even spare a second. It doesn't make me any better, because it's really just a formality. Nothing comes of it, like tossing a beggar a dime just to quash and quell your pricked guilty conscience and tickle your sense of righteousness - when in reality it changes nothing and you'll see the same beggar reeking just as bad and needing just as bad the next day until the day he dies or someone shakes him and takes him off the street. And someday I'd like to be able to say that when I'm stopped and talked to by a person of the category of the Anonymous Seaman - lower than low - something might come of it.

Parting thought: take a look at the teenage plastic princesses that abound on these streets and others. Or better yet - since this is a backwards town and always will be - imagine yourself in NY, LA, Boston, London, Paris, or the metropolis of your choice. And the slick suits that stride through the streets with confidence oozing corporate success. Would they want to admit the existence of a world unlike their own, a world of dirt and drugs and destitution? And starvation and wife-beating and hitting the bottle time and again? Would they acknowledge any ugliness in this world? Or is it easier to dig a trench in your pristine bubble and pretend it doesn't concern you?

Yeah, trench wins.

In Warsaw, at the station, I saw my first methhead. Up close, the bruises and open wounds on her face were grotesquely covered by a thick layer of correction fluid. Her eyes were dead, she was a shuffling zombie, asking for money with hand cupped, head down and gait somnambulant, despite a surprisingly (apparently) unravaged body - a meth trainee, perhaps. Now the question is - does she exist? Can she be helped? Or is she just a transparent ghost sleepwalking through a train station that's full and vibrant by day, but horrendously empty by night, the eternal night that never gives way to day in her little life of horrors?