Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

Evening Star gales of thought drag out a tumult of words I turn away  from the uproar  seeking stillness sky  tinted with saffron  a rainbow  taks me back to childhood

go ahead  take to flying, become a bee  tomorrow  you'll be too old to soar peck the hyacinth in my garden

A Ditch on the Road to your Body Let every month be November with electric euphoria. May tenderness be born from one of your bones, and James Dean's laughter go up in flames, may you show me the scars you no longer remember. I touched your arm, a ditch on the road to your body. I touched the open scar. You laughed and closed your eyes,  your laughter told me that you were naked between wild horses. Back then, you didn't hear me praise your sense of emptiness, that sweetish scratch on the skin of your back. I wanted to wrap myself around your red-blooded-James-Dean jacket and lick the layers of oil, dirt, dust, adhering to your heart. Some speechless voice told me, when I supported my head on your hip, or when you rode me and our testicles  rubbed together, collided, folded into each other  and I thought we sailed a path of wires, threads, to weightlessness,  that the scar was still fresh in your memory. I wanted to...

painting by Christian Schloe who wants  to bring down the door  to my garden  of buried silence, paid for  with shame and lost pride

The Salt of my Tongue  I've known you since  then,  stagnant water, since  you left me.  Now, I'll have to seek refuge in other eyes. I am the valve  you wear down, the man you loath.   Your body and my body speak the love they occupy, the love that restores us unabridged to what we are. We travel with open skin, without calm, blindly pointing the way to the rotten, the ones who still long to live. I always dig you out, my bone, my ghost under the pillow, among men kissing under poplars, and women who need to penetrate each other (a hopeless cause)  to feel happy. I'll be there, chased, a bat flapping in each of my wrists, then you'll know we'll never be so hidden we forget each other.

Spoken from the highest branch of my glory Who wants  to bring down the door  where I buried  my silence, a silence I paid for  with shame and the daily castration  of pride and love, a love that is  nothing but the dirty side of a fallen tree?

A wall painted by Bansky the dust  surrounding my bones before dusk  honey distilled  from your lips to mine

Cedros y Beatitudes Que las sombras te lleven. Que arrastren tus pesados brazos resurectos y aserrados mil veces. Hay barracas llenas de niños esperando que la maquinaria  del mundo haga "clic" como se suponía que lo hiciera hace siglos. Ten lastima de aquellos que se pasan el día temblando. Su silencio es como el silencio de las montañas al caer la noche,  o el de las olas al hincharse.

Painting by Eve Riser Roberts When the Wind Tightens its Grip  You saw my legs and got up from the bed. Later you called  wanting assurance  it was not contagious. The flowers of cold died from a dry wind blowing from the north. But have no fear,  gypsies arriving on ships full of questions beg you not to forget them, the same as Modigliani's blue cat. Don't forget, I'm one of those men that never asks for anything.

Thoughts from my Second Date with Truth You gave me your truth, let me know how you attempted to save yourself from it. How else could we  have gotten  to know each other? Every word a gap, a small one.  Because we burn underneath, and so much light hurts. I dreamt that truth was One. I saw her approaching in silence in the form  of a woman constantly turning her soul on and off. Her soul growing in my heart, turning it on and off as well. Her word ascending over my word,  whipping clean whatever it was I had recorded  up to the very last punctuated period, the slightest one,  the one on my crossroad. We were so small  that up and down could not be distinguished.  So small we erased ourselves from our  heavenly sky of half truths, far from Grace. So small we became tiny bullets  willing to pierce other glass hearts.

After being Stoned in the Spanish Inquisition When I was young I lived sliding down empty,  smooth surfaces where rest and vertigo were rumors of echoes. I fell so many times, got up in different places never to be returned. The detour was Law and openness was feared. When I was young I tried to invent a machine, but my machine made errors, I was one of those errors. The higher  the offering, the more useless. They asked for lamps and words. I said,  love understands praise. They said, your tree is a serpent eating its own tail. But I grew in my tree like a clumsy hand ascending towards that Truth listening to no one. Reader, I call upon you, solemn reader, ironic reader, never be indifferent! You must build,  twirl with the machine, dream you see the Tree of trees bigger than the forest!

Between Cracked Walls My home floats, within its walls, no land to drop my roots. It sails between dense clouds  of feathers. It's doors and windows open like eyes gazing at the moon glowing over rooftops. The photographs hanging  on its cracked walls sing your farewell  to the love I nestled.  My grandfather clock twists and tangles its needles. My sisters cry at the foot of its bent shadows. The echo of its tic-tac  loud in their ears.  My home roams in my dreams until all that's left are lullabies  sung by my mother, a ray of light  shooting through a starless sky.

Buried in my Heart Heraclitus's waters, time passes dragging its back between the edges  of polished stones... my shadow falters trees shed their leaves as do faces perpetuated  in old photographs... my newest face diluted in the stream

you toss  the days to come  up in the air  our life together  a gamble

The Fall do you know  how sparrows die? water  engulfs them like lead-- at the very last minute, silence the blow   of their bodies on the water a rumor of wind... from my room you cannot see the sea

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, this one's for you! You're already a forest. There are dolphins,  lakes, and impossible  loves inside you named Dylan  sitting at my table. When someone  mentions your name  in the future,  empty houses  brim with people. Have you forgotten it was happiness  that first plowed my heart, a storm in an empty glass of water. When fear and hopelessness arrive and the Cherry blossoms fall on muddy ground, you'll hear me scream  like a gull or a woman who knows moving forward is to be left alone. When all this happens remember the tambourines and the way rain  turns into trees.

You were Born in Winter you brought the murmur of a memory and little feet as small as a snowflake in January how will life be when it unfolds in your hands, a fish squirming to return to water, or a ship ready to sail?

I t's raining too much for a Monday and I can't complain, destiny won't let me. The cold will eventually come w ith its searing humidity, its depopulated bones, its voice broken and badly injured, its heartless experience, and above all else, its scam. Winter will walk on steely sheets, cross forgotten bridges, leave its mark on silence, take revenge on good fortune, a lunar eclipse, what is born never to die, restless hope that disturbs the senses, that fragile image that sways in the garden, (my heroes are unsettled) . It will fight to be triumphant and dwell in my memory and in my dreams. affecting my conscience. I know, there will be no light to protect me from Monday's loneliness, no distance or impassable frontier.

Upon reading the result s , To Alan Turing  Genetic abnormalities, he said in his white coat, ordinary exceptions that prove maddened chromosomes. But the sum, the calculation does not return, it spits on all his pain. You, who gave birth to large artificial thought closed in lived diversity in retrospect like a vice under a sky of numbers and signs, you’ve found evil in the fable that constricts the deformed face of your generation’s morale.

My Dear Renier, you reached my bed, turned around,   and I left me  feeling nothing! Your onyx head was the size of a spindle spinning above my physique like a pirouette knitting a supernova on the peak of my impossible soul. And me? I was the feathered  comet  tail of your  what-could-have-been.

¿Qué tal si me siento? ¡No pierdo más mí tiempo! La distancia entre nosotros   es humo de tren que partió en domingo hacia la nada, imitación ventrílocua de palabras eróticas, laberinto de rejas con alambres de púa enmarcando los pasillos del deseo. Ofreces afeitar mis días mientras mido tus intentos de lamer mis sueños. Pero pisas en falso y te caes antes de estremecer   mi zona intima.

Mi querido Renier llegaste y te fuiste y no sentí nada. Tu cabeza de ónix era del tamaño de una rueda de huso fluyendo sobre mi cuerpo, una pirueta bordando un supernova  en la cúspide de mi imposible ser. Y yo?  Fui detalle emplumado de lo que pudo haber sido y no fue.

¿Cómo de bien conoces América? Viví en su jaula de carnaval como un babuino. Fui liberado con un microchip en el oído, toda mi lucha extinguida. Deje que sus botas aplastaran mi cara en el fango, nadé en su sangre, me senté desnudo sobre las estanterías donde almacena las causas perdidas.