Casa Robino

Everyone is sick of my blues.I'm sick of them too. But they stick to my tongue and my feet and make everything heavy.Always at the point of disconnection, disattachment, disillusionment. Words games. Suck out the marrow of your bones. A man carried along by the crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgements, fixed smiles, lifeless words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled in his path suddenly surge into him, driving him out of his desires and his dreams and exploding the illusion of 'being together'. People touch without meeting; isolation accumulates but is never realised; emptiness overcomes us as the density of the crowd grows. I gaze deep down the throat of boredom and wonder if it's not what I have been scared to death of these past years. Moving, but to what? I am verbose in my creation only to cover up what gurgles and burps beneath. The bored businessman in turn floods me with it. I am scattered easily.But lately, things have began to strengthen. True, the blues gut me everytime but this time I become fascinated by my insides, by my reactions to small things that sting, killer bees of sadness. Like him, I consume myself but only as far as to catch myself before there is nothing left to eat. The hole deepens everytime, my teeth sharper, an expert at self destruction. To destroy anything else would be far more challanging. You quit before it even begins, easier that way.Last week, in Toulouse, I was limbless and dragging myself around the streets. I knew that I was close to something, however. The loneliness of the long distance runner strikes me. I fall into a church, begin walking the isles, gazing at the paintings. I look at statues, at a man exposing his right leg, cut. I recognise myself in his stupidity. He's cut himself, I know it. I taste salt on my lips and old women pass me filling my hair with perfume. My fingernails pierce my skin, and I leave.Walking out, I pass a bar. A man in a wheelchair sits slumped outside. He has a tattoo on his head. He looks like he could beat me black and blue. His head lifts and I stare into his eyes. His solitude fills me and I move on, away from his cold world. And they follow my feet, plunge into my holed shoes, cling to the hairs on my lower exposed legs. And then, I am gone.A coffee shop. I am drawn by its dim lights, its lapson suchon, chocolate crepes. I haven't sat in one for months. I sit. And drink tea and soft french music from the stereo and write. A chocolate crepe with pistachios. The tea pot gives out six cups of tea. What is powerful is calm sometimes. I sit for hours, writing, writing about what I am not, writing about what I am. Words save me again, I need no other saviour, no other saint to suffer for me. It's all here.Exiting, I find my way to the bridge over the river just as the sun sets.The light is incredible and no one knows it, ablaze, filling all the houses, licking at eyelids of people that will never know how to come to know such things.I sit and people gaze at me and I can't stop grinning, not for anything.