RELIG TWELVE FOUR

The car is only a can that begs to be freed from its bonds, unbridles wills, adds more ruptures to the collapse, invades the historical highway of this half-life, aware of the path of resemblance and undoing, breaks and unlocks the padlocked wall that guards the chaos of creation, this is a world in syrup, the earth in fury feeds back, sees its shop windows adorned with garlands of lies: the mannequins have been thinned by the modular optics of unnecessary customs, but they still transpire in them the jurassic human taste that harbors in itself the brotherhood of genes, but we here can be a hiatus among all this horde, we can be the rebellious cell that flees hallucinating through the prairie and sights the grass promising new flavors, we splash our feet in the sewer of goodbye, we splash súlfur on the road, we mock, we direct sharp arrows at the heart of civilization, we are excrement, crazed prisoners who say goodbye to be more, others, almost universe.

Not even the noon of life equals or calms this will to power, what is born in the bitter foam of these waves of revolt has the strength and bones of a bandaged mastodon, rises above the curtain of poisoned years, glimpses the perihelion dismissing the morning and pointing to the rotor of existence, recirculates, recalculates, makes, redoes, retains, returns and eternalizes the brightness of the sunny morning, each step is dressed in gold, it is a vampire clock that sucks seconds and remains always without end, what lives would receive permission to carry the divine maintenance of eternity, of the permanent jugular jet that circulates the continuous engine of this resistance in us? the stones already mold to the weight of our imperious steps, from up here the sky seems reasonable and weightless, it has already dropped what it could and annihilated what it knows, over each dwelling it has spread its layer of curse absorbable by the pseudo immaculate skin of the implume creatures that believe they can parade sovereign on the ground woven with snakes, the divine clique on Olympus spits spells, down there the meat thrower accelerates his vehicle, knocks down the concrete pole, dyes red another journey of pain for the smile of the gods, no afternoon falls without the spectacle of human tragedy increasing with the fall of skyscrapers, of the stock market, of dignity, of the confused feelings of the child waiting for his father's birthday gift that deepens his fingers in his pocket, cries inside the dirty emptiness of bankruptcy and impotence, here it is flesh that eats flesh, hatred that deepens to flames, unfulfilled desire adds trauma knowing that faculties will pour doctors who will try to heal.

A question of not scorching even more this life that wanted to be original, in its essence it would be destined to unravel crudely but sensitively the meanderings of diversity, however human movement obeys much more to pleasures at the behest of the brain deluded with the glow of ouropel, if it had been careful it would have scorned this blindness, it spied and remained unscathed in its will of steel, it searched for gold, it returned to the forest, it climbed the hill, it searched among the stones, it tried all the entrances, he went into the caves of the australopithecines to transform himself into them, but it is early said one of the owl's hooting, it is late said a drunk and lost guide, it is beautiful said the curious one amazed at the myriad of life, we are boutique immortaloids but we have the perseverance of the Hellenic warrior, we wounded with bayonets what we could in 1944, we threw away the helmet in 1968 and planted hallucinogens among the roots of corn, we are napalm lighting coconut trees in vietnam in 1972, we listen to rare music and out of tune violins of nurses wounded in these battles.

A decision that provokes a rupture is uncomfortable, the coming noon seems only a mirage and its taste of spoiled fennel and its old New Year's clothes and its pungent smell of ripe peach and its rough voice of symphony without velvet symbolize much more than the distance of Eden to be reached, they also indicate the impossibility of being happy in this world of carcasses floating in a Styx without barge or Charon, in this retreat of the suffering infected by open pests liquefying in pus, that is why the broth always spills more and the infusion reverberates in the cauldron that receives the herbs and extracts of the witch of the new millennium, she twists herself inventing illnesses to compensate for having forgotten the recipe of her potions, the decision to change is an unfolding, one must be awake to enter the dream, one must know each illness of reality to embark on the onirism where the accesses are narrowed, the sunny season from where the composition for ecstasy departs closes its doors, the clouds bring lightning, the wide no longer expands, everything is alley and darkness and the only door becomes bloodless and tiny, you enter it like a wounded mouse, groping for the rest of the food of hope but it is found in the dim light beyond the hole and only admits access if you carry with you the password called decision.

The seconds slip by, and according to the second commandment, love the other as you would never love yourself, close your eyes out of empathy, close your nose if it makes you happy, open your covered ear, put oil on it so that the other accepts it, this distance of centimeters takes centuries to cover, the other is a ghostly entity that inhabits the very obverse of the universe, uses an alphabet that needs a dictionary to understand it, he is often a donkey erected with the cement of falsehoods, your antipode, who has never climbed a pile of books, has moved his amorphous body away from school, he is your other, your Moor, your pagan, your anomalous enemy with a cruder and more primitive biology than yours, he is Neanderthal, rough, coarse, grotesque, with corn beard, glass eye, sewer mouth, garlic tooth, hand on the wheel, slipper foot, river arm and dirty navel of the world.

The dragonfly with the wounded wing that arrives exhausted at the shore tries to climb up the precipitous gap between one branch and another of the pine tree, swerves from the stems split by the weight of the wet leaves, gets off balance and falls in time to avoid the aggressive beak of the canary, slips through the blades of grass on the lawn and finds the car tire with the engine still warm as it clears the highway like a sidereal object leading its human occupant wrapped in metal, cigarette after cigarette masking this flight as a search, the feeling of lightness on the road replaced by the heavy apprehension of arrival, this sea and what it brings: the breeze laden with Nordic scents, perfumes of foreign lands, exotic fragrances of oriental stops, I would give a buck to imagine myself abroad, a camel to be in Carmel, a candy to sing the yellow sea, now I am a heretic of the comoros, levitating over the Chinese mines of huangshi, oval eyes watching the planet open up before us spectacularizing every corner, from the stilts of paramaribo to the temples of angkor my lord, but we need to remember who we are, to temporize with the pain, accept here my condolences for your missing aunt, remember what we lose in men we gain in honor, sit with us by the sacrificial stone, the vestal virgins wear volatile veils, what spins is your mind for the rest remains static, we are almost to nowhere where all succumb to what they do not know and do not see.

In the beach house, coffee is served at exactly eight in the morning, his hand serves hot bread and jam that makes the noise of chewing teeth, mitigating the sound of raindrops on the glass of the rear window, yesterday predicted the arrival of the storm but for days already crawling through the clouds, it scared the sparrows and the airplanes, it began to soak the cobblestone streets and washed the sand from the beach which is now filled with small holes where shellfish and armadillos hide from the seagulls, the wave hits the fishing platform and rushes destructively towards the beach, bringing in sargassum and dead penguins, the sour smell of rot and iodine, we are barefoot on the land, fish fry play between our toes, the fishing boat that has entered the ocean and the sun itself darting through the heavy clouds can't hold on, the rain thickens to remind us that the days are not yet healthy, we will have lightning for company, winds and overturned barges, I am growing, I bring a piece of joy inside, torn from the laughter of the gods, I am a puppet but rebellious, puppet but insurgent, thin fish that flees the left hand when it sees the blade wielded by the right.

For what recedes in us seeks oblivion, covered in shame hiding its eyes, he hears a nursery rhyme enveloping the retreat, sees the banners lowered and a waxed cardboard cup tossed on a dirty soda towel, the plastic chairs strewn about the tiny room, sees the guests, they say goodbye as if it's important to repeat the litany that it was great, they congratulate you on the organization, but it was a disaster, all very nice but that's just kindness, congratulations to junior once again, hope you like the gift, it's Sunday afternoon you know, the TV with the faulty screen is mute and the kid is nauseous, horrible cake and dry sandwiches, I know people hated it, remember we have a seventh day mass for my deceased sister and then there are the bills, did you pay the light? My God tomorrow at eight o'clock all over again, horrible cold in this house, screaming kids, boring game, hand me the medicine please, I think I'm going to throw up, someone forgot the keys, someone forgot the cell phone, this is all defeat, the fall of all happiness, the naked plunge into the cruelest side of life, vertical descent and fall down the ravines, there is no bush the hands can reach, the guests leave for their homes, handcuffed by routine and towing enzos and ícias sleeping in the back seats, you look at their faces and wonder if they will repeat forever our stereotypes.

In the clinic where my aunt passed away there was in the past a ravine that tore the earth nearby, people came to look for semiprecious stones embedded in the ravines, they tried to climb the earthen walls but the lack of bushes did not allow it, so they collected the smaller stones and not so bright but I boy yes, I have the desire of the impossible heating my veins and I jump and grab in the nooks and crannies of the dry clay the most beautiful of the stones, today it's washed, cut, polished and adorns the wooden sideboard in the little room that will soon house those who will congratulate me, well, it's nine years running around this poor neighborhood in my blue shorts, my eyes are like marbles and my father uses hard words, you know how it is, he lives dying inside his books there, my mother's hand used to go through his hair there and it was far away, I think he lives in another dimension, he says this world is his but he's poor, he wanted to have those nice motorcycles from the advertising, video games I don't know, but soon I have a birthday and my mother asks me for cake and snacks for someone over the phone, we're not very well he says, I have to organize the baby's party and look, we barely have enough for the electricity bill, I don't understand anything about humiliations, and this is the word he uses, I don't even think my father knows what it really means, but it doesn't matter because when I hear what he says it's always like a dream for me, the words that don't hurt come out of his mouth warm and I learned what he means by antipodes when he talks about my mother, when she talks about him the words come out dry and yes, they actually hurt me too.

To access the house there was a slight slope from the sidewalk, the door was in the hollow under the staircase leading to the upper floor, behind that building was the vegetable garden with lettuce planted under the clothesline where sheets were laid avoiding stepping on the seedlings, five rows of five meters, sure that if I dug there, among the vegetables, I would reach the other side of the world, in china, in huangshi, this is the insular dream of any child, despising the rocky core and the lava, the imagination fertilized by the archaic atlas fixed next to the blackboard on the wooden board where she, the second mother, professed and extolled the virtues of knowledge to us donkeys, mere lugs outlined and frightened on good carpentry desks, shivering in the cold of poverty that made us wear inadequate clothing, the hexagonal pencil between index, thumb and middle finger, out there the usual eight degrees stoning the fog, boys and girls behaved, afraid even to ask to go to the bathroom, if you walk and think about the fact that you are walking, the legs get in the way and lead to the somersault, better the neurons cadence the steps, like an airplane that follows in automatic and lands screeching on the ground, feeling of confident surrender, you go to bed and do not remember that you may not wake up, unless being a child you ask the nanny what is death, she answers you that it is when the heart stops working, scared you fall asleep with your hand on your chest, the sound box rumbles,

What's scary is the little white coffin in the room, brother child only four years old, crib next to it, smell of pine from the tree plucked by the lake, colored balls reflect on the pale face, no presents but the bells ring, that noise is from a sewing machine, complements the budget says the first mother with less beautiful but maternal words, she needs to work while her son faces hades, the coffin will leave for the chapel 1 of the morgue at nine in the morning, a part of the small town mutes and cries, another part plays the toys received, Christmas.

Spy and furtive script of this life, there are pieces of skin flanking the nails, tufts of hair by the nape of the neck, rebellious swirl on top of what was the miller, when he grew up he cleaned and prepared cans found in the trash to put lichens and mosses on them, science fair, on the T-shirt was embroidered the name of some saint, we made night processions carrying lighted candles and protected by wooden frames wrapped with cellophane, the dog that accompanies the processions is always called bento, barks in the future of this moment, now it is almost sixty years that we venerate the saint, but it is always the same dog looking at the lattice of the door that resembles a shutter and allows us to see only a part of the image of what is happening at the door of the condominium, the screams, one more who has lost his mind in this city, I need to rest, I wake up early but look, everything is wrong, if we were on the beach I'd be eating oranges nonchalantly, she'd be naked, lying down and dreaming, it would dawn to reaffirm every ode to eros, dismember the way of the cross of stylized torches, that horrendous Christmas night, the humanized dog and consume the flesh of the flesh.

The bridge that separates two very different banks is small, on one side the predominant color is almost ochre, the tiles shine in the sunset when I cross over the dirty river, the little houses built on huge pillars to face the floods, on the other side a slope has moved the houses away from the volume of water and the buildings are slapped on the ground, the fauna that inhabits the square is the drunk who argues and fights with black garbage bags, the children on the toys and on one of the benches she is, just as they had said, torn by wounds, the mind erased by the crack does not recognize me, inside I say hello, what a pity and goodbye, she does not even notice this visit made in my most certain moment, there is a sweet taste of revenge, nemesis, the rage I swallowed for such an incomplete being resembles those frogs all digested without the perception of the poison they contained, a lifetime believing in the goodness of words and the innocence of souls and yet no, my blindness tastes like shit, the same stupidity as always, deaf to the prick and sarcasm, the most ignorant of the children of man, me, ignorant to the marrow of the perfidy of those who attack with veiled feelings, I wonder when conscience grows and rises, what holes must a man visit to be able to say he understands the falls, how rough must the texture of bitterness be for him to recognize it without re-scarifying what he believes to be his purity? Nemesis, I always return strong from crucifixions, I reverse and repay every debt caused by the arrow of those who postponed the transcendence of this enlightenment, my eyes work in temporal layers, the mind calculates and stores in vengeful steps and degrees the equations in which it was entangled by the now insipid cunning of those who pretended to underestimate the original strength of my being when it was incomplete, Nemesis.

Father unfurling the green handle in the late afternoon when venus approaches the moon, fresh water for the cypress that looks like the vegetation of a cemetery, on that side wall I could paint a waterfall that simulates a running and consistent life, then I see him smoking nonchalantly among the plants, the spiraling smoke rises to the sky, cars chase what they can on the avenid, the music playing on his cell phone has nothing to do, the abandoned house next to ours houses one by one these hauntings, it was a place of sacrifices and received black goats on Fridays, there was singing all night, when they moved away the silence seemed like an angel sanitizing the structures, but today through the broken windows the wind sings a litany of heresy and abandonment, ghosts dance and disappear into the nevermore.

I found in me substructures of understanding and they see more than my eyes, they guess a future under the shade of the trees in the huge yard behind the house, the light coming from the sunny roof of the world, gills of few fish quivering in the tiled lake, chairs around and sitting on them the dead of my life who chat and disappear like the ghosts of the house, replaced by the dead we will be, the fish bubble confidences about everyone, the wall is uneven because the roots of the banana trees have lifted part of the ground, I feel ecumenical at this moment, but my hands burn making your coffee, you help me with damp cloths, you pass transparently through the empty rooms of the rest of humanity swept by the moving air, dust circulates through the maturing children, I see very well through the periscope of this dream nautilus, I see that the coast is being bombed, the fragments of the dispatches are paper sentences and each one condemns us, surely we would be in the news, but January never comes for a December so expanded by memories.

Excuses a boy who does not remember or even know aunt ida, after all she was a distant person though godmother and worse: never a gift a word a greeting; died during the early morning in the clinic, the nurses whispered that the old woman is dying, she heard that but it was peace that invaded her angina-stricken heart, enough of feeling afraid of this moment and accepted it, enough of not facing the inevitable and relaxed for the jump in the dark, metallic taste that must be blood, then it gets warm like peace, the room becomes blurry and foggy, the crucifix on the wall becomes a brown dirt, now all is well, dying must have its pleasure, the child does not know but the guests who will leave the wake later will be the same ones who will enter the house for the birthday, the cake is too bad, the snacks too salty, and dry, something earned, and screams, laughter, people take too long at these events said the father to the mother, they believe in themselves, in their congratulations, in their empty words, lies dancing in their bored eyes and only one of all, only one who looks at the abandoned house next door, imagines the empty rooms, the wind coming through the broken glass raising dust and slowly the man returns empty to himself, the demon of incompleteness that inhabits us, falsely puts the waxed cardboard glass on the table and the glass falls, spills the soda and stains the towel but no one notices, there are bigger and worse stains, unpaid bills that will darken the house and inflame the things that could have been said if the boy's father would lift his eyes from the books, if there was one more caress in his hair, if they understood the need some have to be constantly accepted by their peers, because they are insecure, awkward, teeter scared on the edge of contradictory feelings every damn second.

How many don't recognize themselves as crazy and then support their sanity by pointing out the coherence of their words? look how they fit together, they say, here I placed a beautiful long onomatopoeia simulating the centipede, there I built a beautiful alliteration for the love of repetition, and yet maybe not, logic does not shine for this ability, it originates but in everyday positioning, in concrete actions, this kind of madness makes you lose control of your life, your procession dog, bento, falls into the pool, it's a truck that goes off the road on the slope, we are in a loop back to the beach, the birds come in flocks to scare and prey on dragonflies, my father catalogs and explains every gesture of the thrush and knows the panacea for all ills, but isn't he also lacking in lucidity? And the man who drives the open-door, low-speed Kombi with watermelons for one euro? when he returns home hallucinating, he finds in the same existential hole an obese wife and the asthmatic son whose teacher condemned him to redo the school year, he learns nothing of what he says, the world does not flow, the earth needs to go one more turn every time he makes a mistake, then a watermelon salesman, an ornithologist who uses his left hand to write obituaries, one who breeds rats to sell them to laboratories, another who begs for a job in the asbestos glove factories, who faints from his faculties and recognizes it screaming, who opens his bewildered heart to accredit himself resigned to the asylum of self-recognition of his madness? The rain gradually gives way to the sun, the sand dries, but it is like a depressed grandfather that we have non-existent there in the room, he opens the door at lunchtime and sees the table set, the family seated and gives up, he returns to bed sighing comforted by not needing to demonstrate his unnecessariness in this plane of almost non-existence, the rain hits again, lashes the waves that lash the beach, there are four monthly moons if you think of fishing.

Books stacked, spine on the horizontal line that allows the vision of title and author, cars in front, hood and sheet metal, people and trees distinguished by height and hair or crown, the sequence of years diminishes the vision but endows the brain with a detailed scanner that eludes even pareidolia, in one drawer texture and colors, in the other weight and flavors, as for example that little you, cataloged in the session of visually acceptable beings, human, preadolescent and his presumable 9 years, blue of underpants taken from picasso's palette, Latin slippers unfailing, irregular dentition demanding palate expander and, like a grandfather spying on the family eating lunch at the set table, his curious brown eyes spy from the doorway the father's small library on the dresser, fourth grade demands reading the national classics, there are none, so he reads the Iliad which becomes a kind of alternative treasure, a bank of almost incomprehensible words or a safe and depository of linguistic jewels; a down-on-his-luck kid, he'd have a better fate grating his knees running around the neighborhood, but you know how it is, a father pours his pretensions and alter ego into his offspring, some are rewarded with ignorance as in a lottery, others meet an early doom if it's called wisdom.

If you want I can tell you what color the hate is, no doubt it is red and it is usually born from that constant ringing of the phone, demanding and reminding you that your insolvency is a reflection of your inability to manage your own life, she no longer has the slightest patience with the interlocutor and is about to string together the appropriate swear words when he comes downstairs and enters the room, she sees in his eyes the vacant expression of someone who is out of it all and continues to dump her own problems on the backs of others, she gestures for him to answer the call and speaks loudly, angrily: - argue with the guy, explain how we're going to pay this damn bill, get your own way! but in the end she apologizes to the bill collector, hangs up the phone and bursts into tears, on her birthday there was only cake and salty snacks for the humiliation she went through, having to submit to this, you don't want to know how you feel inside, the feeling of being a nullity, a hole where all the other negative feelings converge, she looks at him and she already knows, she will leave the room in silence, absent, she will go to her room to read, she will bury herself in books, it is the way she has to live another life than her own, miserable, abandoned, dead.

The boy was playing alone with the ball he got for his birthday, one more hard kick bounced it over the wall, he climbed up the brick wall and saw that there it was, brand new, colored, next to a vase of dried plants abandoned next to the back door of the empty house, he jumped up and was about to kick it back when he noticed the door ajar and on impulse decided to enter, you know how we are, we do things that are not what we expect, decisions cause splits, we are always one step away from changing destiny, I think it's in the human blood to corrupt the agenda, take a longer walk than necessary, have an extra scoop of ice cream, another hour watching TV, as he always begged his mother, then he went inside and at the end of the afternoon the house seemed clear, the spacious rooms painted light blue, in the kitchen the faucet poured a thick drip every ten seconds, then he heard a strange sound coming from the broken glass of the window and felt the cold wind rushing through his body, he ran out, grabbed the ball and disappeared over the wall.

I must have problems with dragonflies, he thought, wherever I walk there are always several and here, by the sea, there are thousands of them, they fly to their death not knowing that they won't be able to enter the ocean with those fragile wings, the birds are fat and lazy, they don't even sing as they should, the table for them is plentiful at the end of spring, but somehow we are not all in search of food? yesterday at dawn I was eating oranges in the kitchen and saw his picture as a child, a wooden sword in his hand, lower lip bitten by the teeth of the upper jaw, marble eyes, little blue pants, his face with the same features as today, frightened, restless, curious, almost sad, I remembered fallen angels and a landscape in the late afternoon being slowly devoured by the night, so he goes, he seems to be leaving, saying goodbye, he looks at you as if saying hello and goodbye, he will close the door behind him and we will not hear his eccentric words again, the huge sentences that seem oblique, said without pause and with a hoarse voice accompanied by the sound of his heavy breathing, I know he does not agree and that he cannot stand what I do but I am fragile and I only find relief for the pains that I do not even understand when I use something to distance myself from the world.

In the little plastic box that contained the domino set I got for my birthday I put an ant and a bee, I covered it with a clear acrylic lid and only uncovered it when the ant finished off the bee, it was very hot that afternoon, the storm had formed quickly, I dropped the ant on the grass next to the cypress tree and before my father lifted his eyes from the book or my mother dropped the phone on the stained tablecloth, I jumped over the wall and entered the empty house, the wind produced a terrifying symphony in the rooms and it was then that I saw, in the room next to the window, the figure of a man looking at the street, I froze and was about to scream and run away, but he turned and raised his hand slowly, I immediately found myself looking at that frightened boy at the entrance of the room, I raised my hand slowly and finally he understood, the wind intensifies, the dragonflies cannot overcome their strength, the cypress shakes violently, the man drops his book and the woman drops her cell phone, the ravine gives way and buries semiprecious stones, it is a tearless burial of the aunt, selfishness blames angina for the distance and omissions, the car moves fast towards the coast, we are many in it, we are innumerable, we are multiple, we are all looking for each other.

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