(k.)

 Before, it was enough to let the hours pass.

It was enough just to have a couple of extra coins—
enough to stop pretending I didn’t care.
Flying in silence had never felt so damn loud.
You see, three years ago, I’d find myself in some forgotten corner,
drinking the same indifferent coffee,
maybe smoking a cigarette I couldn’t remember buying.
I became some half-child, half-man—
a walking hole in my head,
where worms pirouetted like dancers
stealing seconds and moments from girls and women
who’d lost their minds and just kept on smiling.
And today?
Today it’s even further away—
and being far from normal is still just a convenient excuse.
But here’s where you’re wrong:
We didn’t stop time, no.
We became its owners.
We didn’t leave our lives;
we just wandered in and decided to squat for good,
finding rabbits to share, and laughing like idiots
at a joke no one else could hear.
We didn’t move through space—
we erased it,
made a new one,
just for hollow children to play in.

What I have isn’t some intestinal scandal
or a desperate referendum on my sanity.
What I have isn’t called childish, celestial,
or some empty token of importance.
What I have is worth more than the Bible
that spat me out into this absurd world.
What I have is a collection of half-truths and illusions,
wrapped in the kind of deceit that only a tickle of the mind can pull off.

What you have is called Rigoberto—
a name, a winking ghost of something real,
but let’s be honest, you don’t even know what it means.
What you have looks a little too much like mine,
but it’s better at hiding the cracks.
What you have destroys everything I’ve decided to believe in,
one kiss, one look, one too many silences.
You’ve got me dancing in the ruins of my own faith,
like some divine joke I never learned how to laugh at.
What you have… you lent it to me,
but even you can’t figure out what to do with it.

And here I am,
still living in inexplicable fits and starts,
like a sailor lost in a sea that doesn’t quite exist.
Only for the fact that not being—
not even existing—is enough to give me the right
to ask the questions time doesn’t bother answering.
The essence of my scent, my sweat, my colors—
it’s been you,
always you.
I wish for you without hunger,
without the usual pride that comes with it.
Without knowing that everything I have
was stolen with a kiss,
a glance,
a silence,
and that persistent pursuit of a tear that never falls.

And then,
it was enough to stop reading it.
And she didn’t stop because she didn’t want to.
No, one moment,
and suddenly she lost her hands,
her rage,
her eyes,
her left-wing arguments,
her annoying clichés—
and no,
she didn’t do it because she wanted to.
Maybe she never did.
Maybe that was the only thing she really wanted.
Or maybe she just wanted the escape plan
written in someone else’s script.

A glass of wine,
a view from some overhyped balcony,
will never stop being everything.
It is everything.
It’s the only thing I know.

But don’t leave me.
Come after me.
Find me,
and if you want—
lose me again,
for good measure.
We’ve already learned—
it’s never enough to just let the hours slip away.

Sometimes they ask me to retell stories I’ve long since forgotten.
Not because my memory’s shot,
but because I’m choosing to forget them.
Letting them go doesn’t make me some kind of noble sage—
it just means they walked out on their own,
without so much as a goodbye.
They left because the bus almost passed them by,
or because the rain here is like a permanent residency,
and they didn’t want to get caught in it.
Once, those stories had bounce,
I swear they did.
Others stunk of regret
like last night’s spilled wine.
And none of them had a destination.
But that’s what made them interesting,
all raw, unrefined,
the journey to nowhere.
Like one of those verses
that has absolutely no business existing:
“…of peyote and horizon-fame,
of my bathtub pirate heart.
14 reales and some old green warrior,
fighting the same fight with no abyss in sight.
You steal my words before I even say them,
and suddenly,
I’ve got nothing to say to nothing.
Because without you,
I still have you—
locked between these infinite, written, cursed,
beautiful… words.”

One day I realized:
it’s easier to forget
than to learn to play the harmonica.
The next day,
I forgot how to breathe through it.
“Forgetfulness is for boys,”
my mom taught me.
(She didn’t have much patience for sentimentality.)

And her face,
her forehead—
still tastes like lime to me.

 (brought to another dimension "Las horas" 09/09/08)