with this stick

The artist comes face to face with a white wall. At its lock. At its threshold. He’s just about to draw a line that, once set in motion, will pressure the very functions of a line. A weak line. Macaroni in goose-step. A spiritual and emotional freedom subject to avalanches of criticism that will become a myth.  And yes! All the tension and all the strain gathered in this line is useless.  So, between spirit and effect, the artist invests a lot of chemistry in order to properly excite Great Grandma.  Of course, the artist must reach uncharted territory. The line will spring from behind a dial’s distorted time, as if taking a breath before an event. A naked line stripped of nudity.  A vague slot releasing the artist from bench-vice limits, launching him towards freedom and chaos.  Nailed to the heart of his ideas, the artist crawls on his knees across the ceiling.  Making an elegant entrance to the scene: “Aunty Florence, wait, the line is coming! Leave that kitchen window the open. Assist the artist!”.  But, said artist had already hurled himself into the well of all his possibilities. When Grandma draws it, the line smokes, purring its tomcat ears. The artist waits. This keeps the line awake. A line damaged by the extraneous movements of some other tool. A line that at the mere suggestion of the artist will bite its own brush.  He will swallow it whole. Grandmother will not reject the offer. A white wall keeps her at the edge of orgasm. The artist plays a box-vice game brimming with ambiguities, quietly  developing a web of possibilities, of lines censored to the brink of madness. Where things interrupted in the act can no longer be abandoned. if the focus wasn’t on the artist, Grandmother’s cargo might explode. That’s how the world goes. The artist does not know this. One line and that’s it. A product of the perils of advancing towards the hymen of Great Grandmother. But between you and me, Grandma never had a hymen. So how? Not even the world’s greatest thinkers know how to address this question.  That’s why artists were called with all their fragile, sublime approximations. The artist is silent. The wall is silent. In this inhumanly slow, diluting silence, the line stalks the artist.

HEAD

Return. Simple, like all simple things, his face has the anonymity of an illustration. When reflected in windows, it’s as if he’s lost something precious, a sort of questioning ripples through the muscles of his face, freezing into a severe twitch, followed by passing his fingers through his hair with a smug glance to finish it off.  Return requires a zebra-skin jacket, a hat for killing time, trousers that pay the penalty. This, accompanied by fumes, phlegm and fashionable bad language. He becomes vulgarity exhumed. He told us he was coming back, and now we’re bribed by the force of his pledge and, as if that’s not sufficient springtime, it’s a promised slap. Between a blank look and a pectoral thump, enough to feed the market.  If he even utters the word button, his pals think about buttons for at least half an hour.Look at him walking by and, just like the first drag of a cigarette, he gulps an identity crisis but pale enough not to shake his style. You grew up on the same street, you know he’s back, you’re ready to rough him up, and select three sentences from the shredder, ending with a caution for those compelled to share the same kerb as him.He can be seen at traffic lights dragging the same pertinent fag, lowering his gaze to the calves of teenage girls eager for poetic indifference. He looks down on those for whom sex is just a burglary at work, followed by banking and recrimination in the same two breaths. He avoids ready-made flirting. He’ll choose a woman who can hammer nails into an electric socket, a daughter of the mob, a drop of water from a flood, someone who’ll polish old furniture until it looks like new, then he’ll sign all her vertebrae.  His nocturnal appearance, along with a predictable portfolio of gestures, allies him with the deaths of Borges’ cutthroats.His silhouette creates confusion under streetlights, doubling an aura that censors his intentions. Street people need to be alert. Like all those who return, he concentrates. He can slow his breath. So slow that people loiter in his head and freeze like that, motionless, for hours. When he releases them, they boisterously hug each other.