Roberto Tejada

When I stop to consider my calling, remark the places a wayward temper impelled me I’ve found in light of where I wandered lost the most appalling evils could have befallen; but when I disregard the journey it’s hard to even fathom I endured so much affliction; what’s more, my days being spent, I feel I’ve seen my wariness go with them. I’ll come to my end, for I surrendered artless to someone with the science to dispel and destroy me if so inclined, else the know-how to want to; for if, with this very hand I could slaughter myself, why—not on my account but because so suited—would my enemy do otherwise? ………………………………………………………………… Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado y a ver los pasos por do me han traído, hallo, según por do anduve, perdido, que la mayor mal pudiera haber llegado; mas cuando del camino estó olvidado, a tanto mal no sé por dó he venido; sé que me acabo, y más he yo sentido ver acabar conmigo mi cuidado. Yo acabaré, que me entregué sin arte a quien sabrá perderme y acabarme si quisiere, y aún sabrá querello; que, pues mi voluntad puede matarme, la suya, que no es tanto de mi parte, pudiendo, ¿qué hará sino hacello? [Garcilaso de la Vega, 1501?-1536]

When from my counted days I think of times still owed to me by tyrant love, and my temples anticipate a frost beyond the tribulation of my years I see love’s counterfeit joys are a poison reason sips from a glass raised to those for whom hunger dare appear in the guise of my honeyed daydream. What potion of forgetting pleases reason that by neglect of its duty so toils against itself for satisfaction? But my affliction seeks solace, measure of the desire to be remedied and the desire to overcome it love’s remedy ……………………………………………………………… Cuando imagino de mis breves días los muchos que el tirano amor me debe y en mi cabello anticipar la nieve, más que en los años las tristezas mías, veo que son sus falsas alegrías veneno que en cristal la razón bebe por quien el apetito se le atreve vestido de mis dulces fantasías. ¿Qué hierbas del olvido ha dado el gusto a la razón, que sin hacer su oficio quiere contra razón satisfacelle? Mas consolarse quiere mi disgusto, que es el deseo del remedio indicio, y el remedio de amor, querer vencelle. [Lope de Vega, 1562—1635]

My words were sent underground to where the toggle switch detonates. That was the glare our voices were avoiding. There was something also broken about the obedience of this retainer. The arcades weren’t semaphores just because the arrows leading there facilitated those of us in line as though reliant on east or west quadrants. The ticket master was prone to elide requests from the travelers, the sliding doors sounded a fanfare for the common man, get faster as thought, or mind the gaps. What I infer can never altogether establish a space adequate to the body count. The platform motivates two guardians who were instructed in safekeeping to usher me from harm’s way but my stand point so recedes from this tableaux as to acknowledge a footprint perspective. Translucent envelope inside remaindered by the riptide or such tunnel vision as to warrant arrest. Why I was sent to the nether world inflicted with no wound. Someone lets fall a pair of zip locks containing the pixie sticks of this conspiracy; what I had to say was sent, I mentioned this I think already, underground switch and toggle intended to ignite what I could never bring myself to mean. Where the voices were avoiding me—hands outstretched at quarter day to hold back the beam—was there something broken? I weather compliant. I rally.

There is someone who knows. In no beginning was there just one language nor did the surface gleam with nineteen hours of music as in our body-heat through the head & limbs the thumb and index finger to form the ovular OH of our self-fathering fable war flail ≈ morning star The original garden erudite, lush lawn, & round of trees behind the limestone square, night rain out of paper, under the lights of the narrow path up the rose hill. From a dark corner rising now to write orange with a knife over green of the elusive wall no one is watching

We’d often been included in the weather, whose changes (as in the still, portending darknesses of after noon) were hardly evident, if even manifest at all. The August rain over Mixcoac & the deadening of all aspect at a distance: yet our sudden wet bodies, firm swelling divested finally of shirts & trousers, left beside turbid footprints on the tiled floor; this tongue, these lips the lightning over the unchartered landscape of your thigh: successive terra nova to resist the still life of the body

for E. A. Vulnerable therein & perfectly relinquished by stasis, object always of my natal, crepuscular desire, into the translucent specter, body’s blue fossil of ice, never autochthonous, still embarked upon the imperative passage to get there, to secure a geography that will beg description, narrative map, adopted tentatively; if only to write the ritual book of what was possible, but never bound to occur.

And surfaced a flame in the dark elsewhere of one remembered form: just one, suppose it the flesh of unspecified man a mouth down deeper between my legs his heavy beard in the beginning against these wet thighs our bodies scribbled in signs to draw the grey curtain of steam back by which we found ourselves surrounded sound of water off the tile (or on this sheet of paper stammering) by which we came to nestle a will from which the colors rose resilient sparks of orange over the waves of trickled hair on chest and forearm light green to trace the conduits formed by vein of biceps and prick the pink ridges of his brown nipples in brackets raised this tongue in blue translucent embers to emanate where a moon of fingers along the dark red notch of earth is a field over which armies raged with catapults of burning stones until all was left there smoldering below.

For days to situate the flesh in whose inadequate precinct motionless: a monolith of the often spoken of which nothing is certain: or abstract of whose gender to the use of all acknowledged desire formal parlance & pronoun to form the stars across your back: whose hardened muscle: tremendous lateral delta of which to the shoulders: there is a way from yes: the very inside an eternal tick of the left eye: a language not only illegible as the vain translation of a fictive contradictory self & its consonant verb to be: but the body’s crystal falling through a grey film of failed memory & brushfire this Autumn midnight: to unfold (in the form of your body) pleasured corners of a place in which the difficult new breathing and I are foreigners