Falling Asleep

Falling asleep
Is easier than dreaming
In my dream I was falling
Until the bottom fell out
Oh screen, computer screen
Save me.

A supermodel fell in love with me.
Falling and loving are such
Distinct things.
A girl can make me
Happy.  Smile, at least for the time
Being.

If it's raining in my head
It's raining.
If hope is a thing with wings
Perhaps I should pay more attention
To the dead canary.
Mine.  It's raining in my head
Seductive piano arpeggios
Like a wound
Like a lullaby


Like a healing

Sleeping off and
Hanging over,
Falling in love is as easy
As feeling lonely.
An act of the
Want.  And desire gives birth to
Rain and black umbrellas.
Hymns of Sheol.

I only want to die
For a little a while.
Just break until
The rain subsides.

Dancing through 2012

"And everything still moves in slow motion, breathless and blue
Behind your eyes, the sea."

There was a lot dancing this last year.

Salsa was a bit beyond my reach, and

P tried to be gracious and not frustrated with me

We still made each other cry over various things

In three days of opening.

The City Club parking lot in Ixtapaluca is also good for dancing

Even for just a minute

Perhaps its telling that the people I danced with

Were the ones that opened me

I even opened my arms for a couple of hours

And danced at a bus stop in the rain.

The dancing at my brother's wedding was very brief;

Alyssa taught me the washing machine,

And my grandmother took one Glen Miller dance with me;

That was certainly one of the best ones.

I danced with strangers at karaoke,

Some became friends, others were only interested in

A body.  I invited D to dance "Don't worry be happy."

And my mother and I spun swing to Chuck Berry.

A twirl turned into a tumble in the Vilnius snow,

Dova was on her butt laughing.  At Adrian's wedding I danced with

David, who I had to carry because he's two; Carolina, who was mostly interesting in me picking her up and spinning her; and I hit Josías in the face with my knee.

Somewhat amusingly, Carolina was perhaps the dancer the most on the same

wavelength as me, she's six years old.

Did I dance with Krista?  I don't remember, Josías wanted me too.

Did we do a little polka?  I believe we did.  The polka will always

Remind me of Julija and her sister’s wedding, of dancing and singing the

night away with Kate.

All I remember is that Adrian was pumping the club remixes of our

Favorite alabanzas, and there was blacklight and glowsticks and a bunch of

kids jumping around.  Josías was doing the "worm" which consisted of

Inching around in a sleeping bag and asking to be pulled around on the floor.

Angie was a clumsy dancer, and her heels stuck in the grass, but

I still felt super lucky to dance with a girl like her.

Of course, Elizabeth, even with her little asides,

Is worth dancing with every time.

Oh, summer!!!   Began with swing and salsa,

Before long I was dancing to folk music over

Cobblestone streets; it was raining, and the cool

water made it just perfect.  Skaiste and Emma, my summer

Sisters, danced with me, and we even got Karolius out on the floor for

One or three.  We danced the cupid shuffle and cotton-eyed joe at SLI,

Among other things.  Lots of other things.  Party-rockin.  We even tried a “Strip the willow.”

Julia made me hold my breath and laugh

Out loud; she made dancing with a vacuum look good. I even danced at a club for a

Whole five minutes, and Lana's smile, her hands pushing against mine— 
It was fire.
When I danced with Tanya, I was playing Jesus.
Trying to be gentle and loving to a stranger,
She didn't follow so well.
 

I wanted to waltz with a stranger in the airport, and I didn’t,

And unfortunately, 2012 passed without a DDR machine

Or any moshing.

Yes, for all this dancing, I could have done a bit more.

The years dance by us, and if we don’t keep moving,

The earth will throw our feet out from under us.

Dancing is touch, held hands, an almost hug.

We need more touch than we admit to,

Our need is both corrupt and simple, innocent and destructive.

Dancing is movement, spinning, as we always are,

The sun shining in our faces.

Dancing is vulnerability. 

Dancing is taking a partner.

What have I done with my time
And why?

I stumble into a new year without a dance. 

There are scribbles on my paper,

Thoughts and memories in my head.

If I let myself go, if I give it a whirl, will I find a hand in mine?

I remember dancing in the moonlight on the Outer Banks,

Singing into the Atlantic on Brigantine,

The green glow of the algae in Oceanside,

The first stars spinning over the Pacific

As I sang existence. 

Could you be my alibi?

There are dances that have no steps:

Soccer matches, vueltas, spoken word poetry.

Dance with me, be the song in my veins.

Let’s dance our way through to infinity.

Circumstances being circumstantial,

Love and hope being what we are,

Oh stars, set the key, waves, set the beat,
Breeze, carry me.

Amores Perros

¿Oiste el chiste

Del chihuahua y el rotweiler?

Amor come,

Amor me comió.

Oro,

Que el amor es más

Que ser chingada.

Des es, Sí,

Yo sé que lo que pasó

Ya pasó

Pero vivo en des

Deseo

Desamor,

Un chivo con un corazón

Que clama por una hija perdida,

Una vida de los pecados,

Mis malditos tratos de cambiarme

De forma hasta algo con el valor

Abrazarte.

El chance correr a la frontera contigo

Ya se pasó,

Y sabes que, no puedo nadar.

Mis ganancias no brillan más

El chivo las comió.

Y soy el mulo, pues burrón

Borrame, espero en una salida de Tapo,

Espero una salida de mi purgatorio,

Espero una salida de todo.

Estuviste mi perfecta, mi deseo, mi gol, mi esperanza,

Mi salvador.

Pero tengo rocas ahora, perra de tres piernas,

Y hay un clamor bajo del piso

Las cosas que he escondido.

¿Cómo te caíste?

No puede ser.

¿Por qué no podemos caerse juntos?

¿Por qué tememos la cosa que más necesitamos?

¿Por qué los chicos quieren matar a los perros?

Y ¿Por qué amamos a las cosas que van a matarnos?

¿Por qué deseamos tanto?

¿Por qué somos tan malvados?

¿No es excelente el amor?

¿Por qué siempre ladra y pica?

Direct English Translation:  

Dog Love

Did you hear the one about the 

Chihuahua and the rotweiler?   

Love eats, love has eaten me.

I pray (gold)

That love is more than
Being fucked.

Dis is yes,

What has passed has passed

But I live in

Des

Desire

Desamor (Unlove)

A goat with a heart

That clamours for a lost daughter

A life of sins

My damned attempts to change myself

Into something with the value necessary

To hug you.

The chance to run to the border with you

Has passed

And you know what, I can’t swim.

My gains are nothing

The goat ate them all.

And I’m the mulo (mule), the burro,

Erase me, I’m waiting for a way out in TAPO (Mexico City Central Bus Terminal)

I’m waiting for a way out of purgatory

I’m waiting for a way out of it all.

You were my perfection, my desire, my goal, my hope.

My savior.

But I have rocks now, three-legged dog,

And there’s a whimper beneath the floorboards,

The things I have hidden

How did you fall?

It cannot be.

Why can’t we fall together?

Why do we fear the things we need most?

Why do boys want to kill dogs?

And why do we love the things that kill us?

Why do we desire so much?

Why are we so evil?

Isn’t love excellent?

Why does it always bark and bite?

Imbibing Auschwitz

We imbibed Auschwitz deliberately;
It was bitter despite the sweetener;
The hot chocolate made it go down easier,
As did the blurry images of old towns, old kings,
Litanies, histories,
Packaged neatly in their dates and movements and stern font stylings:
Just another piece of the tour.

The extraordinary is often mundane:
A daily regimen of gassing
And burning bodies
In a small concrete garage.
No one is allowed to watch the process,
Lest it make them unstable.
The condemned are condemned to carry the
Ashes and bodies; cleaner that way.
A few metric tons of human
Hair for the textile industry,
Deadly efficiency,
Damned precise,
Mechanical consumption, the furnace
Belches the stench of burned flesh
Over the city.  The locals had their own
Worries.  Who knew that people make
Good soap?

We came together, a family,
But we went through Auschwitz alone,
Separately.
They took our hair,
They tried to take out our "I's and
Replace them with epithets and
Nine-digit numbers, like
.coms a website of
Our interconnected hatred,
Apathy, destruction, and sin.
Here lie the cobwebs of history to be
Swept under the rug or used
To normalize goods and evils ad nausem,
Tag lines for escapists.
As if there were no Nazi
Inside of me,
That it was just a German devil machine.

I swallowed Auschwitz; I enjoyed the experience,
The pain. I critiqued the self-serving nationalistic displays;
I partook in crimes against humanity.

We opened the valves,
Together, we took showers,
We are the victors and the victimized,
We are the villains and the passersby.
All mankind is my brother.
We are ashes and blood,
fire and screams.
We are bodies.

I was scanning the lines of the dead
For the eyes of a pretty girl.
I'm sorry Ms. Frank, but
We certainly are not very good.

The Pianist

For Chopín, Szpilman, and myself.

I.

"Nothing will come ... nothing but reflections, shadows, shapes that won't stay fixed. I'm trying to find the right colour… What if I find nothing but moonlight?"

I am in exile over the keys, my life a string of minor

Revolutions forcing me out, a series of improvisations

Runs of bitter notes, an unfinished engagement.

The Russians came.

My heart was firebombed in Dresden,

Run out of Paris,

But made it home to Warsawa,

At the last.

II.

The realities of histories are daily,

And while we endured them we mostly thought

Not of so many high things,

Just of traumas, of escape, of bread.

I was saved from starvation by Chopin and those Jews

Who had the money and strength to sell out their friends and sell

Contraband.

I was saved from Treblinka by a coward and a traitor who pulled me from a line.

I was saved from the ghetto by the resistance who locked me in a room

For the duration of the Warsaw uprising; I almost died.

I was saved by a German tank shell which opened the wall, let me out so I could eat.

I was saved by a Nazi captain who found me and kept me alive.

He told me to thank God, because it must have been His will.

They kept me alive for my hands, for Chopin,

For pity.  It was no strength of mine,
I mostly sat in rooms and tried to survive. 

Everyone is alone in a war. 

The things you see separate you out

And even when circumstances shove you together

You are still alone.

The sky is a minor black and the moon is a lonely key

In the moonlight you can smell them burning bodies.

III. 

Chopin locked my eyes

And my heart flew the cage

Everyone is alone in a world.

Fires sparked out in Dresden,

My lips loaned out to Paris,

The girl at the café in Warsaw smiled,

But didn’t go walking with me.

I am in exile over the keys, my life, a string.

A string of surrenders forcing me out,

Unstarted engagements, running by the sea,

No one came.

The realities of living are daily

And while we endure them we mostly think

Not of high things,

Just of traumas, of bread,

Of arms and escape.

I was saved by God and more than a

Few friends and strangers.

Must be a thousand times already.

I thank God, because it must have been His will.

They kept me alive for my hands, for Him.
It was no strength of mine.

Everyone is alone in a war.

The sins, they separate you out.

And sometimes even when you pray

You feel alone.

No one will come,

No one but reflections, shadows, shapes.

There are holocausts in my head.

I’m trying to find the right colour,

But all I can find are nightshades.

The sky is a minor black and the moon is a cold upper C.