The Scholar

You have learned so much. You have learned great and terrible lessons and you have found beautiful things, but you failed to learn the most important thing of all: that you have a home, and that I love you.

mira lo que m'encontré

doodles of dawgs

We Wanted More

Guess we can huddle the way strangers huddle,

Close, but never close enough.

We’ll chew on fruits that never satisfy,

And theorize that desire must have hints of citrus in it.

You will busy yourself making beasts of

Copper and acai seeds,

Spinning and twisting them

Between fingers that can never be still

And I will busy myself thinking of words

That struggle to take shape,

Spinning and twisting them

Til they make beasts out of me.

Guess we can stare the way strangers stare,

Hard, but never prying.

You have cheekbones that are high and etched of sandstone,

And when you smile it is sundrenched.

But here’s where you look most at home,

Starving beneath the light of a streetlamp and scrounging for a smoke.

‘I have seen Venus!’ you say. ‘She sweats when she hikes up the cerros and the side-street murals remind her that her shrines have been defaced.’

‘I have seen Van Gogh!’ I say. ‘He cut off his ear so that he could hear

the exhales of butterflies, he wants to know what they cry out before they die.”

When my hands fall beneath your gaze

They cease to be insatiable and become things worthy of creation:

Stop for a moment and I will make you something

Yes, a poem you will never read, but oh.

We shall drink the night in, the way strangers do

Untainted by a past or future,

Reveling in our skyline,

In our fragile collaboration

That has neither beginning nor ending.

We huddle, two well-kept secrets in each others’ arms.

well i had a cool camera to use for a semester, it belongs to my chilean family. it is a Zenit Helios 44 M-5. Here are a few shots that I got the chance to develop. unfortunately they are pictures of pictures since the scanner is in valparaiso...

Pisco


student protests on the 21s. I believe they were looking at a clown harassing the cops...

imogen

Ciudad de perros románticos

Ciudad de perros románticos

City of romantic dogs,

Frantic, dragging open ribcages through the gravel,

Up the steps of crumbling stairs, peaking out of doors that lead to nowhere,

Lapping up cigarette smoke,

sliding hands across the scars of breathing walls,

Chasing down an ugly heat,

Enraptured by the call of flesh and melted wings

What is peace for romantic dogs?

Are you one of them

Running breathlessly along the cerro circuits,

 buscando el fin de locura—

(The end of madness: it looks like you, sighed the urban sprawl)

Do you believe that this is it,

 sitting on a bed of ash and 40s left over from the graveyard shift

Staring out at purple buildings, sunken roofs

You still worry about damnation and eternity

Licking at the pomegranate seeds between your teeth.

But nothing here is permanent:

The ships at dock are all submerged

And the churches ringing noon have long been razed,

So when I hold you close and touch your jaw,

It’s because we’ve already parted ways

What is peace for beasts enamored by only buried things,

Who holds the leash—you? The starving arms of the city?

 Elbows torn from the endless fight and flight from cycles

Soles bruised by piss-soaked cobblestone,

From scouring the streetlight hours leaving spraypaint proof of life.

Have you hands or claws,

Are you man or dog when being torn apart at night?

When you and I lock eyes we take shape

and remember what it means to exhale,

Before we blink again,

and lose again,

And chase and chase and chase.

more non-fiction

The things that have been mine tonight:

Sunset is most beautiful when it's the most grave--brightest light, sign of rising hope the closer it grows, when one is lost amidst the backroads. Hustle down the abandoned streets, past Jack Nicholson on a monster's body, past Colon. Hustle past a house of screeching parakeets: which is it--the purple house the orange with rainbow blankets in the windows? Oh, it's a wild cloud of sound in there, is there a woman in a Lay-Z-Boy sitting by those cages with eyes closed, sighing, ah, the sound of home?
Where to now? to the park with tear gas residue, making all the skaters sneeze, upa  dark alley and into the arms of famililar faces and your favorite poor-man's beer. Once you've said goodbyes, into the slopes of cerros once again. Sparkling lights wavering tot he sound of drums and frantic trombones. Now a man's voice rings, a ballad down the winding streets and I'm alone on dirty stairs an for a moment I'm at peace.