Bueno, puedes cortarlo, pero por lo general se da una pérdida significativa de sangre, sin mencionar el daño al tejido muscular, y que la cicatriz es un poco difícil de explicar a tus amigos... Y puedes usar un láser para quemarlo, pero cuesta miles de dólares y a menudo queda todavía un fantasma del tatuaje en tu piel... o puedes cubrirlo con otro tatuaje si puedes encontrar un artista tatuador con la suficiente habilidad....
Love is a lottery ticket.
What are the odds?
But you play anyway.
Life is a drawer
full of old lottery tickets
that didn’t pan out,
each one a springtime of hope
in its day.
And there’s nothing like hope, is there?
Besides, it’s only a dollar… or two
and what’s a dollar for a springtime of hope?
So you go down to the corner store every day
or the corner bar every night
People are like geological layers:
The first thing you see is appearance,
maybe green grass,
a well-manicured lawn
or wild amber waves of grain
or an overgrown thicket of sharp thorns
or a vast and vacant desert,
but it’s always interesting…
first appearances are always interesting,
but peel back that thin layer of appearance
and you find the crust of people,
the hard dull heavy thick personalities
All those whom I’ve known
are dying now,
dropping like flies,
evaporating like disappearing ink,
leaving nothing behind.
It’s a strange thing to live long
while everyone who gave your life
context
disappears.
Where is the context, then?
If no one remembers that you won
the Pulitzer Prize,
the home run prize,
the hotdog eating prize,
then did you in fact ever win them?
We don’t feel the moon
but it pulls the tides and the menstrual blood.
We feel the heat of the sun
but not its weight that spins us round and round.
The physicist says there’s no gravity without mass
yet now my flesh aches for you
and you’re not here.
We take gravity for granted.
We take everything for granted.
She texted me this evening to ask how I was doing.
I texted back "fine", told her about my day
and asked how her day was
and never heard back from her.
That's the problem with checklists, you know.
If it says "text Roberto, see how he's doing"
and you do that
then you can cross it off your list and forget it.
Next time I'll just type, "K. U?"
Strange to be sitting here
in the twilight years
on this patio bar looking out on
the Zócalo.
All the restaurants have patios
facing the square down here
because the weather is so beautiful,
while ice buries the north
and war rages in the east.
I order another Sangria.
I’ve gotten partial to Sangria lately
because I believe there’s less alcohol
so I can drink more of them
Every night is October 31st
You know the time of year,
EL Dia de los Muertos,
Halloween, All Saints Day,
the time when the veil between the two worlds is the thinnest.
Ghosts speak to me at night
the number of ghosts is incalculable
infinite
crammed into my dreams.
I bring back fresh knowledge every morning
like honeydews cleaved in half
the small seeds scooped out
the green flesh glistens in the sun.
Everyone gets to take one secret
to the grave
whether it’s something you did
or something you didn’t do
or something that happened to you
a crime
an accident
an affair
a betrayal
whatever.
There are some things other people just don’t need to know
that you don’t need to say
ever
ever
ever.
There are two couples sitting
at the table next to me,
all from North America,
gringo land.
I hear one couple say that they’re
from Minnesota.
I can hear this because they are
talking so loud,
as gringos do.
Oh how nice, the other couple says,
they’re from Virginia, they say.
And on it goes.
I try to ignore them,
but then they start comparing travel notes
as gringos do.