Sketches

3.

you did not read the pages that fluttered away, pages with words or something like that, you relied on conjecture and hearsay, you thought that language and spoken words were enough, you did not understand the difficulty of loving in two languages, did you? you thought that at sunset the sky looks the most beautiful, the sun wears colours that have ripened and saturated finally and given to the sky what it loses at dawn, you ignored the blue of noon, the fierce heat of certain southern afternoons, when appleyards are sleepy and farmhands and their young lovers have kissed and wept, you ignored all that, didn't you? you heard the music and you knew all the songs but you still thought that music was elsewhere, else why would you forget the tunes you heard outside cheap public houses when insomniacs drift out and the moon slips in? you thought that unheard melodies were the sweetest, else why would you drift away like certain clouds do from certain other clouds, leaving gaps and spaces that are bigger than the sky at times, you ignored certain forlorn spaces, even though they had music, didn't you? you said that nights are laments and days are dirges and that poetry is water for the soul and that bull fighting is the most melancholic invention ever and you bled when the fighters bled, didn't you? you said that you felt cold in arthouse cinemas and art galleries were a load of rubbish and that real art was on the streets and after midnight along the seafront on cold northern nights along tacky hotels when a lone towel swings in its loneliness on the clothes-rail, you remember? you said walking with one hand in the other was your idea of resistance and rebellion and that philosophy was cheap and even poetry was tacky compared to the loneliness of a lost cat, you shouted and whistled and your white teeth shone and you said this is the world and this is the life and this moment alone is real, didn't you? you said only poor students on drugs with cheap clothes live the high life, they mix music with saliva and their kisses are the best, the most satisfying and the most fulfilling, they touch the core inside or something like that, you remember? you said one should stand with the back naked against a window wet with rain and then make love after midnight with all the burning and the yearning and the with all the anger and the rage one feels, didn't you? you said poetry is in the skin and that the waters of true poetry rise with the moons and the dunes of the skin, you laughed that brandy laugh and everything finished, the days and the nights and the skin and the moons and the aches and everything, you remember? but you didn't write and record what you thought and felt, even though the pages and sheets were always there, bare and empty, as they are now, bare and empty, as they flutter now aimlessly, tired and wasted, you didn't, you didn't.