Recuerdos de Tejas

Tejas, te extrano todo mis dias. Here lies a late-night sentiment to my friends back home.


I miss you.

I miss those hot, sweaty
dirty Texas nights
Boots stomping on sawdust floors
Singing songs in the graveyard
Fireflies till morning,
mosquitoes all day long.
It was coffee, breakfast, music;
then biking to the river,
to ease the stifling summer upon our skin.

In the evenings we'd drink tequila
and go out dancing,
Singing heartily along with our friends
in half a dozen languages.

Later still we'd wander off
on some latent adventure
Or fill a room with smoke
as we nursed a whiskey bottle
And piece by piece,
after all those years
my soul came pouring out
in vast channels which flooded my sight
But you,
with grace and tact,
became the valley which calmed the roil
Your voice and your eyes
were the eddies in which the deluge pooled,
sighed,
rested a while.
When the moon had all
but disappeared,
you reached out your hand
and pulled me from those yawning depths.

And so I find the hours imbued
with the echoes of your memory
The sun charts its path across the sky
and I recall so vividly
the light upon us, day or night
That crackling spark

O god...
and the flowering pink crepe myrtles.
And the shade of the fig tree.
A haze of smoke rising from the patio.
Hidden in shadows,
when first we looked upon each other again
Beyond the storm,
in that moment
I could not remember ever having lost you.
   

La manana

Good morning. Goodness, but it's been a long time since I've written here. Here is a, um, very sad excerpt thing from recently:

These days nobody sings me to sleep.
These days I miss all the sunrises
and sunsets,
I count the clouds as they go sailing by
Until they become a thick blanket,
hanging low over the hills
These days I am a goldfish.
And the light seems further away
each passing week
And the mountains laugh at my loneliness,
the rivers mock my anger
I can't agree with myself much
anymore,
I have burned all the memories I could find
But the sadness of you remains a great weight.

You refuse to shoulder the blame,
and so
it's lodged itself in my spine.
Well, it's nothing new,
I suppose,
though it's been a while
since I've felt its sting.
The whiskey helps,
the howling of the desert wind -
when I can find it -
but you're lost in the lie.
I hope it's every bit as awful.
I hope you ruin your boots
and knock out a couple teeth, at least
falling down the mountain you built.

I'm ashamed to think I ever loved you -
the coward;
the manipulator.
You thought money and silence could stand in for love.
You're still the selfish teenage boy
I'd always believed you'd grow out of.
But you can't trust a fantasy -
I've learned that enough times over.

I hope that deceit serves you well.
You know, when you don't treat your wounds -
they fester.
and you bring your insides into plain sight
Where the day spills its truth on you,
you cannot hide.