Jaumear

I sit and wait in front of a blank screen.
Nothing happens.
Nothing will ever happen if I don’t allow it.
Old drawings get smudged in my mind
but I didn’t want to forget them until death:
your smile,
the touch of your skin,
the taste of your sweat against mine.
¿Why can’t I remember?
I thought I always would.
Always.
A word that used to have some sense.
It meant every morning, when I woke up
I’d know you existed thus I could smile.
Never.
That’s now.
Nothing.
That’s what’s left either the sun raises or sets.
I fought against the dragons of oblivion,
against fierce hordes of ink stains
who hoped to erase my words.
They tried to make me go back,
to the trenches,
safe from the mortars loaded
with silences and empties you throwed at me.
I wrote a thousand lines.
A thousand verses.
A thousand lifes with you.
I lost not for giving up,
but because the rival didn’t show up.
¡I wanted to fight for you!
Struggle to death,
cry for the rage,
try again and again,
never faint.
Facing nothing.
But that nothing I talk about,
that’s what showed in your place.
To play, dance, shout, even fly,
it doesn’t matter if you can’t see me.
I wonder if it was fear,
maybe cowardice,
if it was me or it was destiny.
I was left behind.
Waving my sad sword,
now turned into an harlequin stick.
Nobody to fight with.
Nothing to defeat.
Only the shallow sound of oblivion.
Only the darkness.
I can ask as many questions as I please,
only you can answer them.
You did nothing.
Never.
And now all that’s left
are two words which describe what I’m worth.
Nothing.
Never.
Wish it could be everything,
always,
like it was, at least, when I dreamt of you.
How are you?, he asked.
She just turned away and walked.
And she walked until disappearing into the oblivion’s fog.

Play before reading

The Frames throw at me an exact sentence from the darkness of my room: your will changes everyday, it’s a choice you’ve gotta make. I don’t understand. A sad voice keeps singing. Always never seems to work. Why is he so right? I ask to myself while loneliness enters through my pores. Saliva drawns my throat and it gets harder to swallow. I take a deep breath and my lungs burn and all of a sudden I feel a tear rolling slowly down my face and an impulse grows from inside like my entrails are going to explote. I need to get out of here. Mp3 keeps stuck in my ears and a violin echoes with weak tones from a far away place. We can burn this bridge or stay. I don’t know what I want anymore! I never did! And yet I can only think of seeing you, touching you, making love to you and yell out from the roof tops that this so called life of mine doesn’t belong to me anymore. Where did we leave the need for absorbing each other every second like it was the last one? I run too fast, escaped afterwards, I wanted more, but asked for less, gave everything even knowing I had so much more saved for you inside of me in a place dead long ago. Always never seem to work. I’m down the street. I try to walk without shedding more pain. I look into the faces of the people who pass along. I wonder if they cry too. I clench my teeth because the will to live pour away from my eyes. Music stops. The song is over. But somebody invented the repetition mode. They talk to me about decisions again. I would sell my soul for a kiss from you. For a smile from before, for you to grab my hand another time, for you to look into my eyes without saying a word while they say everything that is to be said. But I have nothing left to sell. I gave it to you. You took it away. Mis steps stop. I can breath normally again. I dry my tears with the back of my hand. I erase from my thoughts the warm touch of your lips healing my war wounds. I raise my eyes. Time will be the judge of all here. So right. I take off my headphones. The sounds of the world overwhelm me. A bunch of kids come back from school. “I want candy!”, yells one of them to his mother. She nods and the miracle appears. Somebody smiles. I stare to the sky and I understand the pain will go away only if I decide it has to. I can go back home now. It may take a while, but it’s time to burn some bridges.

I wander aimlessly through the street.
Sang verses in my ears,
memories of better times.
We all know the taste
of tears.
Not all know the meaning
of happiness.
I select the parts of the people
who pass along that light me up:
a smile,
sensual lips,
eyes which observe intead of looking,
giant steps for little minds,
ogres laughing like children,
soft caress fingers,
voice tones,
legs swinging desire
and distant places
explored long time ago.
I look, scan, observe,
I grit my teeth and allow myself to dream.
I am you and him and us.
No, us never was.
I broke hearts, slept with no will
and went to bed with princesses and dragons.
Sometimes simultaneously.
Some others not.
Shows through the corner of my eye
the back of a wandering hand.
It is my hand.
I see it but I don’t realise
because now yours is not hugging mine.
People keeps passing by around me.
All alien to my misfortune, my glory,
my nothing.
If I die now, nothing will change.
I could have changed so many things
while still alive.
I could have loved you better
and my hand wouldn’t be orphaned now.
I could have realised
after selecting separated parts of the world,
the whole created is worse than your whole.
I could have missed you less
and gived you more of myself instead.
I could have…
Wait… I’m alive!
Oh, but if I am, the conditional form dies
and the present is born and so is the will for change.
Do I want to change?
I want to love you. Can you let me?

I’m going to open a new section dedicated to poetry. From now on, friday becomes the poem day in www.jaumear.com.

I inhale a mouthful of sadness.
Dense,
heavy,
almost liquid.
It slips into my organism.
Slowly.
Savoring me.
Palace defenses fall.
It is too late, it always is.
There is so much I want to say,
do, delete, redo.
Or just be.
¿What has happened?
¿When did all matter no more?
No difference made whatever I do, I say,
I think,
feel,
shout or struggle.
I lost but I didn’t die.
The defeated soldier knows no glory
and oblivion’s worst part is to be the only one who remembers.
I just wanted to love you.
You, just to forget me.
Poor luck the gods picked for me.
No more common jokes,
the orange blinking has been wiped out
from the computer’s screen: new message.
No more Imissyou,
ifyouwerehere or akissforyoutoo.
A void fills the place of the previous all.
Sweet words flew away
and there is only left on my lips
the burning of yours.
I stare melancholic the infinite kiss
living inside an image in jpeg.
I would rather go back there than remember,
but my lungs are on fire.
I exhale the mouthful of sadness.
Dense,
heavy,
full of yearning.
I just wanted to love you.
Maybe I can only achieve that from oblivion.

X: don’t hurt me. That’s what she said while we were making love… or just having a fuck, I don’t know, while we were sarcastically emulating the act of procreation with a condom in between. And there I was, inside her, moving my hips gently. I won’t hurt you. That I answered and I added: never. It’s a confusing word “never”. Did it mean no anal sex?
Y: that’s banal.
X: sorry if I’m looking for shelter in irony.
Y: it is not ironic, it’s pathetic. ¿You love her?
X: how can I know. No! I don’t know. No, goddammit, must I love her in only two weeks?
Y: who obliges you?
X: what?
Y: you said: must I love. ¿Do you really MUST love her?
X: no. That’s silly. I’m just saying if she didn’t want me to hurt her, ¿why leave?
Y: it sounds like a reason to me.
X: truth is it really sounds like one.
Y: so?
X: so nothing. I just think it’s coward.
Y: we all are.
X: not all. Don’t generalize.
Y: true.
X: I don’t know. Did she leave because she didn’t want me to hurt her?
Y: …
X: right. You don’t have an answer. It’s not fair.
Y: it is for her.
X: and that has to be enough for me?
Y: what if not?
X: if not…
Y: she is gone. Period.
X: I would have never hurt her.
Y: you don’t know.
X: nobody knows. That’s the fun thing about future, it’s unpredictable.
Y: she din’t find it that fun.
X: banal.
Y: you are right. Sorry.
X: if just because we are scared we stop doing things, stop feeling, living after all. What do we have left?
Y: safety.
X: the hell with safety! Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Y: you can only remember winners stories. A lot are left behind in the way.
X: and they regret have ventured?
Y: probably.
X: probably?!
Y: yes, didn’t you ever tormented yourself for making a bad choice?
X: I guess.
Y: you guess or you are sure?
X: …
Y: all right.
X: if we do nothing because of fear we could be losing something really good.
Y: better than the peace of loneliness?
X: yes, dammit, yes. A lot better. Something that gets your heart to beat. That makes you wake up every morning.
Y: you just need an alarm clock for that.
X: you are an ass.
Y: and you are a romantic. Each one has his own burden.
X: ok, so now what?
Y: you just keep going.
X: what if I can’t do it?
Y: oh, come on. Two weeks ago you existed without her.
X: it stinks.
Y: get used to it.
X: what if I don’t want to?
Y: then maybe you still have a chance.
X: to what?
Y: to live.

Hit play before reading:

Johnny Cash’s “hurt” song sounds in the distance, his hoarse voice sings everything I feel. Sunday is a sad day. It is by default for us who dream and find nothing more but a wall in our path. It is for us who love the invisible nothing which cohabits with loneliness inside our hearts. It is for we idiots who pretend to be happy while there is something inside us eating our entrails and turning us into what we hate the most. What have I become, asks the master Cash. And I can only figure out that I am as sad as this day I’m leaving behind with the hope of a different tomorrow, maybe better. I might even dream of a Sunday where smiling is not hard. I’m seized by tears. I write line after line, barely guessing the traces of the letters I type on my computer.
Today I climbed the Tibidabo. I observed the town of Barcelona in it’s full splendor. It occured to me there are three million people down there living, loving and dying every day. Some of them laugh too. To think that I am a grain of sand on Mars makes me feel tiny. My mistakes seem reversible. A little light shines at the end of a tunnel of darkness I have been inhabiting for too long. I am better than what I am. A smile pops in my lips. Tomorrow I’m going to get someone to smile too. “I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel”, and you know what mister Cash, I am alive yet.

You feel drowsy and tired, but you can’t sleep. Thoughts collide inside your head, when and where you screwed it, unforgivable whyes. Echoes of verses you wrote for a muse now dead sound in your ears and you can’t avoid feeling a sharp pain in the chest. You are unable to bring back any good memories, because the grief is so intense that it hardly lets you breath. You want to quit. Nothing works. Everything is grey where she drew a 16 million colours rainbow. You need to cry, but you can’t because exhaustion devours you from deep inside yourself. You want destiny to be kind, but clearly it will not happen this time. You entered this labirinth with no exit by yourself. Wish you had a time machine so you could go back to who you were when being you mattered or at least was worth something. When her hand was there if you reached yours, and the whole universe fitted perfectly, because you had finally put the missing piece of the cosmic puzzle. You take a look around. You are alone. Incomplete. You want to go back. So you demand a second chance to the gods who pushed you to agnosticism, but, as usual, the only answer is the hollow sound of the thunderous void that lives inside you. You don’t want to keep going, but you will. You let yourself be carried away by the flow of madness your life has become. While you keep walking forward, heading nowhere, you have one and only wish, that she asks you to come back. The worst part of it all is that you know she will never do it, because she has forgotten you a long time ago.