[8] He carries the past like a moneybag stitched around his waist, quite like a kangaroo’s pocket, and coins jingle deep in his sleep. He desires to become something else, faceless, colorless, odorless, perhaps even that giant cockroach of Kafka crawling across an infinite sheet of white paper.

Who is he and what are the stories he carries somewhere in his body five or so feet long? India appears like a daydream. “What do I know of it anymore?” he thinks, even as he directs his tongue to speak of it to the others, the curious looking for him to explain all those curious, and no doubt savage, customs they find “charming”? Is this paradise or a monstrous anthropological museum? But don’t all paradises come fully equipped with their own versions of the inferno - the inferno at the center of paradise, singeing the hair of everyone tumbling into those ballrooms? One has to give it to the Man upstairs – he definitely has a sense of humor.

No soap can wash this stench of burning away. His skin has stories written all over it, his fingers read stray sentences written in Braille when they surface under the shower on some mornings. He remembers those other bodies from childhood, the first awareness of other scents – hers’, his mortal adversary in the obstacle course of elementary school exam grades, who smelt of sour milk and almonds, whose skin was many shades whiter than his brown, alluring like the sheen of some exotic silk. That Gondwaland boy and Aryan girl wrestled each other to death in pop quizzes. Perhaps they still do.

He studied maps in his geography textbooks with a hunger, running names over his tongue like bubble gum – Tashkent, Majorca, Tripoli, Bangkok, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Nova Scotia, Xian, Leh, Cairo, Budapest, Kinshasa and so on. The mind is where journeys happen first. The sack of flesh and bones, that dead weight, can follow, but it is not necessary. However in exile the tables are turned. The body goes to this other paradise and the mind screams, dragging its feet. This scene is quite similar to those places where they drag corpses of the murdered from jeeps, in chains.

Years pass, books pile on one half his bed, and bottles underneath. Holding a glass of yellow fire in one hand and a sheet of black fire in the other, trapped under the boulder of time, he burns himself up, so as to escape for this paradise, as swirling billowing smoke.

On the way to Isla Negra, the horsey stopped here:

www.wwnorton.com

www.geocities.com

www.ivam.es

www.askadavid.org

www.startribune.com

Obsessions Recorded (from the current issue of TLS):

Thomas Hardy acquired the notebook habit in his twenties, and kept it going all his long life. As well as noting down memories and events, he read widely and took copious notes on his reading, Victorian industriousness further sharpened by the hunger of autodidacticism, building storehouses of nourishment for his novels and poetry. These he referred to as his “notebooks”, “pocket-books”, “memoranda” and “diaries”. Nobody knows how many had accumulated by the time he died aged eighty-seven, as his instructions to burn them were obeyed. Twelve of them survived the executor’s flames, however, and their titles give some idea of their range: the “Architectural Notebook”, the “Trumpet-Major Notebook”, the “Schools of Painting” notebook, the “Studies, Specimens, etc” notebook, the “1867” notebook, and the volumes of “Literary Notes” and “Memoranda”. All have been edited over the past forty years (except Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” notebook which is only available on microfilm, the original having gone missing). The so-called “Facts” Notebook is the last of the twelve to be edited, and it is fascinating.

Rest here: www.the-tls.co.uk

[7] These are some sounds of Neruda:

In that vine of the familiars I have keys for the father of my parent O! Pain of an era in that of no eras Taxiways of a kill for no evolving cause Pork in the wagon over tiers of tarragon.

To key my library Era Compact Firm Ark ado Come one new blank Entreat a bier Come one new rose Era. Nose sense. Infinity.

[6] Gramophone spindle revolving on sheets of shellac, the way some folks scratch out a living, playing with knifes in that dark room of his throat, sour breath of whiskey, baby in a blue sequined dress pouring her liquid body over his chest, nights when sweat drips on tables like rain, cigarettes too raw to smoke, tar on the tongue, tires squealing as notes drive through the tail wind of sixty foot truck liners, driving all night to see momma before sundown, smell of shaving lotion, Jimmy Jim’s calloused hands on the back of his bent neck, mud through which rivers drag the dead at their bottom, dimes for cokes and long distance calls from the diner with pink neon, she done gone, no one to call no more, litany blowing through the horn, got some change to spare man, all he needs is a beer, in this wino town there is nothing to do, the breeze has been long since shot in the alley behind Bethel Salvation Church, Holy Mother of God he sho is gonna kill the bitch with his frozen hands, ass in the can, red face police daddy’s knuckles caressing his face, start to get a tattoo, history craved in flesh and bone, no mo forgetting all this not worth remembering, head in the hands, spinning out some blues for he and you.

[5] Ends of the year blues, hours drag heavy through the bare trees like the dimmed sun. One part of this dark brain is spewing away ticker tape. The same words that I have confronted for years now, almost ten: this life is won’t worth living this way, this day, I hear them said in a glancing echo, as one might hear the sound of falling snow.

So I sit and feed it philosophy, Buddha’s mainly. Life is suffering, and that there is a way out of here, this too shall pass etc. What is this love for words, but a stay against despair, ballast to make this ship on the trackless sea float, another addiction that is not a solution? If madness is a leaving train from the station of unbearable weight, then this madness of mine never leaves, the clocks keep running backwards from the departure time.

Once on the couch of a shrink, I was asked how often did I have suicidal thoughts? “Quite frequently”, I answered. This human pageant with its daily parade quite often appears to be meaningless to me. Then again more words, not from him, but from someone else; the purpose of life is to magnify God. But where the devil is God?