#elysium garcia

As if the city’s got your back. As if you’ve got a mouth that can swallow all things made of cement and are tall. The audacity. As if the sky and the scrapers can live harmoniously in your tummy. As if your biology is bigger than all geography. As if all the traffic and escaping pickpocketers are your blood. As if the city has never made you bleed. Love it. As if the city will never have a mouth bigger than yours and challenge you to a swallowing contest. As if in the end, you will win. As if everything dying has nothing to do with you.

Last night I opened the pandora of our dreams, past and present, even the dead ones. I saw our fortress. I saw the giant windows. I saw floating books. The library with the sun as the closest neighbour, then the other library below a six feet count, where humans are usually buried. I didn’t remember the kitchen layout though. We built a spirit house. Something the Hermetic described well in the Kybalion, something of something above mirroring the below with precise reflection and properties, even the nuanced attributes. I walked about the house for a few moments, well in physical measures it felt like moments. I know I must have spent what now seems like a lifetime in that house without you. I was not tiptoeing or anything inconspicuous. The wooden floors would give my presence away anyway. The paintings on the walls were all alive. There were waters spilling from the rivers we drew together from that hourglass watercolour artwork we collaborated on. The mural from an unknown artist I bought in secret without telling you was missing one of the woman-slaves on that well crafted farm of living things. She had Drapetomania I think. I thought of looking around for her, but I’m all for slaves escaping or doing whatever the fuck they want as long as it does not entail serving those oppressive fuckers. I should have told you about the painting. I think this in silence. So much so that I don’t what my brain to make waves because I know how you love hacking me. I used to enjoy this as well, but lately the hacking happens because you do it with a certain intention and other things in mind already. I’m not talking about purity of thoughts as yet. I’m not one to speak of honesty, that I know. As soon as I got closer to your esoteric study room, you know that one that I’m not allowed to walk into? Yes, I thought I could walk in and loot some moments in there since you’re not around, or as I now know that you’re never coming back, but a big big wind of needly air came through from under the door and I ran out. I quickly remembered myself into my body and retuned to the brick house that I keep this sickly congregation or bones and skin inside of, yes this one that you now despise so much. I remembered your body too. Your face. Your nice smile and radiant eyes. I exploded my entire brain in recalling the sight of you by the mirror fixing your face for a night ahead, your arms, your shoulders. Your chest. Your ego; a jubilantly falling tree in the forest of unknown trees, asking for no one to hear it. But all can feel its majestic blood. I’ve always enjoyed your discrete tango. You love dancing. That I know. But your stillness for me has always been more than amazing. You have such a lovely intonation of the beauty and the tragedy around you, I enjoy your stories. Much more effectively when told loosely, even better in silence. I love your quiet. Your closed eyes. Your sleep is beautiful. This is not to be confused with inactivity or oppression, as you now believe. This is to say, your stillness is lovely. The most awe-inspiring quality of ocean-people like you. You, as you are, mad-amazing. Your presence is a whole mind-fuck. Well... I have seen you though lately. How big you are. How you know so much about so much. How you superimpose some qualities on me. This was once beautiful when you placed a wizard in my heart and the sage in my mind. Not before this goblet of flaming poison you see. Not this ear smothered by music of the blind thing you now see. Not this eye damned with sighting mares in daytime and nothing of fair colour thing you now see. Not this nose of cloud deteriorating thing that you now see. I forget myself sometimes. It’s a new thing, not here to stay. These are traits of mine yes. But not as perpetual as you are telling the others of them. Or at least yourself. Sometimes this is me yes, I will not deny. Not as frequent as the insults you’re building now off of me these days. I do destroy a lot yes. Only seasonally though. I don’t support this new perception at all. But also what was? Well, here we are again. It truly has been a while. First there was a waiting. Then there was an arrival. Then a sudden uncomfortable departure. Everything takes time. Matter. We occupy everything. Still or mobile. Seen or hidden. Here we are again. After a while. Still occupying things. Out of our liking or not, we don’t do anything. They do. Things, or for precision of language, THIS happens to us. Or we happen a lot to things. I’m no longer as eloquent. Do not forgive my clumsiness, please. I’m begging you. I ask you to please when you hear me being irresponsible with my chest once again, as you have concluded, look at your ears and see if there isn’t anything clumsy about them. When my tongue sounds like a broken glass, see if your ears are not made of cement and rude gravity. This was never designed to be like this. At least not for us mountain-people. Us fire-people. You air-person. I wind-person. Us ocean-people. You tree-person. I crocodile-person. You monkey-person. I ant-person. You me-person. I you-person. Us spirit-people. Us blood-people. This bodily separation breeding insults because life-things happen to us or we happen to them, cannot be the design for us. Or the design of us. The body is a burden and get’s into shit most times...If we could see past that...Imagine. 

Confusedly yours, Thababosiu, Shadow-person. Tshepe. 

At the touch of a lover everyone becomes a poet, the old man says. I listen to him, and for my little mind; I make it all up in comprehensible colours and simple pictures in my head. I see a lot of red and fluid shapes, a liquid something. Everyone’s dead or about to die. I don’t tell him what I see. I keep it all to myself. It doesn’t hurt much. I tell him about something similar an average aged man once said, that when love is born a friend dies. I imagine a smile across his cynical face. I’m allowed to assume if it suits me. We all do. We all are. I have killed many people for this once in my life. He probably knows this. That I’m assuming or that many people have died because of my own teeth. He knows that I’m just a little boy. I know he is old. We try to not focus on that. With love; we have both learned that counting things isn’t a good thing. He tells me about the beauty of kisses and the many worlds they open up in our chests. He tells me about the niceness of holding hands even in sleep as if the lovers are trying to walk through the same dream. He tells me about the healing powers of shoulders when tears or fatigue and worldly things make us sad. He emphasises on how warm and comforting it is to just know that a heart is there at home or somewhere, beating in your name. I’m smiling at most of them as he relishes himself though his speech, his eyes are closed and his smile is not just my imagination now. That’s good, I assume. A cloud is shaped like a sore knee above us. We look at it and say nothing. There are no birds at all. This is terrifying. I assume an owl in my head. He assumes a bat, I assume. I show him my scars. He shows me rivers. I show him how new they are. He shows me a graveyard. It was opened a few months ago. Apparently there isn’t enough empty space for people to be buried, it might close soon. There isn’t enough of earth for people to keep dying. I show him a shirt I wore just last week, the stains on it are still fresh, you can even guess what kind of tears were spilled all over it. I shouldn’t have worn it that day. I imagine the things about kisses. The painful tongues we toss into each other. I assume a sadness form atop his forehead. He doesn’t look away. I imagine things about shoulders. The heavy we build and solidify on each other every time we don’t understand our respective meanings. The faulty wires of communication. I imagine the electricity of hands, the warmth and the comfort. I see all these from the other side. The shock, the burning and the aching, not so much a discomfort but something a bit lethal. My point is to tell him about the dead things I see when love is born, or when a touch from a lover approaches. I cannot find a good way to say this. I want to say something like; at the departure of a lover a poet is born or continues dying. I know he will definitely assume that I will further elucidate on this. I’m not certain if I want to do that. I mean; he should just look back at my scars if he really wants a better understanding. He will want to know if I got these scars from a lost love or an approaching one, I assume. I don’t know If I should continue this dialog. He’s heard a lot from the dead ones talking about my fears and doubts pertaining to this subject. He knows that they were all assumptions, propelled by their circumstances. I know that he knows that I’ve never feared dying. This time I’m not assuming. He’s heard about the other time when I enjoyed these talks and the experiences because I truly liked this love stuff. I still do, he assumes. Or we both assume. That I don’t like this stuff or I still do. He doesn’t really look at my shirt from last week. He knows I can cry more than that. I have seen him cry many times. Or I might be assuming, again. We both know that I’m either running or waiting. We both know that I’m either ready or about to die. I’m usually about to die, we both know this. He might be dead already. But I’ve always been good at dying, far classier than him. He doesn’t like to admit to this though. We both know that my last escape was exactly that, the last. Both him and I are fully aware that I might be running or waiting. For you to arrive or return.

Yours, assuming something alive or really dying or dead. 

The Hidden Boy with Circles. 

I have new music. I want you to hear it. I want to come to your house. I want to find you next to whatever tree of your choice. I will pick you up from there. I will place you into my wagon and hope the horse gallops west. I want us to go there together. Drive and drive and drive. Towards the sun. I want us to relish the soft sliding landscapes past our windows. I also want to see the random dog crossing the highway with no house or any civilization nearby. The dog; I want to see it cross successfully, unharmed. We might be happy about that. We should also be quiet and listen to my music. My music should be loud. I can only hope that you hear it as I wish. It’s good music, after all. Not much to the ear at times, but the heart loves it much. Much much. I want us to really go towards the west. We should be wearing our sunglasses because the sun, though distant, is very blinding in the afternoon driving thing that I want us to do. I want us to hang some of our hands outside the windows. The other drivers on the road will be confused, but we won’t care. We will make shapes of our spirit birds with our fingers. I will not laugh at yours, but mine is okay to laugh at, I hope you do. But in silence. We will look slightly at the city moving away from us through the side mirrors. This will not scare us at all. You will want to touch me and I will feel this before you move your mind from the thought or your hand towards my knee. I will almost cause an accident. You will quickly jump to the wheel and I will look at you like you're just a little bit crazy. It is in this moment you will understand my idea of seeing forever with you. You will remember all the words I said to you about the future, my hands, the absurdity of time and growth, about death and eternity. You will remember me from a future you once dreamt of. I will remember you as well. All the plastic yellow flowers in your house and the owls on your face, I will remember them. I will remember the sage hanging loosely in your living room air. Your room is quite alive, you should know that I know this. All this will happen while we are trying to bring the wagon back to control. But the horse will be gone. The horse’s disappearance will teach us about control. From this we will instantly learn that we shouldn’t ever try to control anything. My hand will bleed slightly from something we both didn’t notice. When you see this, you will want to fix me, but the bleeding wont stop. When I look at your knees I will find them bleeding as well. I might think of fixing you. I will not attempt to fix you. We will both look at our respective bleedings and forget that we are there together. You will cry and hate your body. I will be angry and feel weak, in a derogatory manner. You will realize that I might have caused your bleeding. I will do the same. We might laugh about this and move on. Or we might drive to the west and find the sun gone then cry more. You will remember your wonderful east and I will remember my displaced centre. My music will keep playing. Because it really is good music. You will start hearing the songs as you wish and I will cry because you will love them more than I do. And then instead of driving back home; we will never, regardless of our hearts, our wounds, our wishing and blood, we will never be. But the music will play on and the horse will be gone and the wagon will be there, playing the music inside of its own chest, wishing it was human.  Wishing it was one of us. But it will only wish and then move on to find another horse to introduce my new music to. 

In the house there are beautiful cups. They were coffee mugs just a few nights before. Today we call them cups, the name might be too much for them. We cannot handle them anymore. We don't really remember how they lost their mug handles. It must have been night when they broke. We might have not been home. One of us might have mistakenly broke them. We would like to say we don't mind, but we do. We really mind. Because a lot of things are broken already. A lot is broken. When the day is done and the work is complete, nobody wants to return home. The broken things are too many. We go home to fix them. The fixing is so difficult. No one can sleep peacefully at home with so many broken things. The tree outside is not broken much. Each of us selects and brands their side of the tree. We don't want anyone sleeping on the wrong side of the tree. The cold does not bother us as much as the broken things in the house. At noon, if it happens that we return early, we try to fix them. But when we take the fixing tools and attempt to fix things, the tools themselves break. the other day we let go of everything and decided to fix things with our bare hands. The people at the hospital hate us now. The hospital is not a place to fix hands, we were told. They seem to be tired of looking at our daily broken hands. We made a plan once to fix things one by one, we made lists. The important things on top. The hierarchy of priority. We saved our fingers for straight two weeks without fixing anything, hoping to not break quickly the day we decide to get back to the fixing. Our fingers were made for pointing out broken things and not actually doing the work. We don't point anymore, we simply stroke the broken edges and bleed slightly. We know we are alive. We are alive because we bleed all the time and not die, well at least our fingers don't die. We fixed the bed the other day. The bed was the biggest broken thing after out hearts. Then the stove, the second biggest after our family. Then the windows, the most important after our eyes. We also fixed the door handle, the most, most necessary after our hands. We thought the floor can wait a few weeks, our knees are more important. After saving so much of ourselves from the breaking, everything in the house is breaking more, everything breaks and we cannot do anything about it anymore. We are afraid now. Everything we touch breaks, last night I touched my hair and something out of my head fell off. I pulled the pillow below my ear and something broke, it could have been the pillow or my ear, I didn't hear properly. Today I was reading a broken manual of fixing things, the last page contained the most important lesson of mending broken things. The page was going to save us all. The tree would finally be free of us. It would finally be able to spend a night alone and dream nicely. I swear, we were finally going to give it space. The page had many spelling errors, I'm far too accustomed to fixing things. I tried fixing a few spelling errors, the broken English. The last page, so so important, far important than all our lives combined, it broke with my fingers, then my heart followed. Something broke from my face. I went home and nothing was there. Broken things everywhere.