|
At The Beginning
At the beginning
you only see swimming pools.
When you become a soul
your eyes go on looking at the Earth.
I was flying and passing through the people’s dreams
like a movie’s extra until
one night I found myself inside
one of my ex – wife Elsa’s dreams.
You have changed so much! She told me, and she was right
because souls do not have hair on the back.
Soon you see the world as in
Potemkin Battleship... “For a bowl of soup”.
Using my new talent, I still repeat “For a bowl of soup”
inside my coffin and above the clouds at the same time
when I look
at the Earth.
Guinot. Sunday Afternoon.
At 3 pm I adjusted my tie and lit up a cigarette.
I was wearing a sign to be read by
the girls with the shortest mini skirts. Among all
the sentences that went around my congested brain
I had chosen this one: “BLIND”, in capital letters
and smaller below: “for Love”.
From 4 to 5 pm, thanks to the salary of my supermarket job,
I drove my life well understanding that there would be
infinite doses of forgiveness after death.
At 5.10 pm I looked as if nobody was looking at me,
same as when I go somewhere by subway. Later I looked
as if I had to erase some manly sins that I carry inside me
but I don’t know how.
At 5.30 pm I finished my favourite sunday fantasy.
It was impressive, it ended with my hobbies: to go shopping in America
because over there shops open all days,
like those two sisters that used to sell their ass monday through
sunday.
Those two sisters.
At 5.45 pm, I remembered my father.
He smelled of Floyd aftershave and left again
to a place with people and rules that did not concern me.
It was 6 pm and I was still in the street
when the walls of my home spoke,
because they all fit between the walls of my home,
my friends and my foes,
there they are, sometimes shut up,
sometimes gesticulating and speaking too loud
as voices inside a phone,
beside the phrase I have bad news for you or
beside my uncle’s voice –who used to call up from Argentina
and never called again-,
at the end a whole life fits in a very small place,
it’s like putting the hand that writes in a pocket
and smoke.
In the street.
With the unknown.
José Manuel Sevilla has been a spanish resident in Hong Kong since 2003. His third book of poetry
was published in Spain some months ago and several of his theatre plays have been staged in commercial thatres in Spain too.
He also carries on a photograph collection called "Street Language" that was first exhibited in HKG last year.
Email: José Manuel Sevilla
Return to Table of Contents
|