Let Me Know What You're Like

Anonymous Love Letters to Athena

Look there, among scatters of voices and roused audience, that by their volume and pace orbit like violent debris; a gauntlet for the cosmonaut's atmospheric departure, among this spinning tetris my queen in black speaks.

Like a death, you announce with vivid detail, words from which I am absent. I make from one end to another; beats of hearts like bullets firing through a spark, an angry, tiny spark that shoots a long way. Your body, like a continent, I the foreigner. From borders I climb and hide in the tresses of your most abandoned attentions, where no thought inhabits such barren lands. Like a thief I make for these edges and consult my stubborn friend, Humility, its with the softest caresses that she convinces me to stay while opening my back with her blade.

What do I wait for? Is it Opportunity and its grifter tricks that send parlors a-roar? Is it Amnesia, that darling little fairy of repair, who patches the wound in a band-aid, too much matching the complexion that one forgets to remove it, mistaking it later for skin.

She's a Deftones song, something like Moana, something especially like Moana. A last song, an empire desired invitation to. She so carves my heart, and the stage with all its actors and rustled anxieties, glows like trembling jellyfish in fields of gossamer bedding. The sparks of nerves, the same bullets but now firing information, sensational execution!

And Moana as she exits this stage in her creme colored winter coat, an indigo scarf noosed about her pretty neck, on an escalator my eyes say goodbye to the back of her head. Yet another day that has introduced me as, "coward".

Universally yours,

Une Ammiratore

Must've Look Like I Was Dancing with the Wall

Anonymous Love Letters to Athena

When I saw you today, in your bright red peak coat, black skirt and black leggings I had to stop reading. I wouldn't be able to continue reading if I heard you speak and I couldn't stand reading if you stood near without saying a word. And you did speak, of course not to me but all the same, for me. When you left the room, I put my book away and I had no more use for being in a room without you.

Later on, when you're on my floor, I make my way up. I time it precisely so that while I'm on my way to my room you're on your way down. As we pass, you smile at me, possibly only because I'm staring. Its a quick, automatic smile; the kind you give to a sudden, familiar stranger when you catch their eye for a moment, unexpectedly. A smile already prepped at the border of the lips, rigged to go off for any mailman, doorman, police officer, and any other insignificant variable that deems harmless enough to spare a twitched curve of kindness.

I didn't see you for the rest of the night. Purposely I remained away. I thought to myself, how fulfilling a smile a can be, regardless of its motivation. Finally when I was ready to see you again, you were already gone. And I was like that fisherman who excitedly battles the waters because finally his bait got a hold of a bite, only to reel in a disappointed reality, my hook got caught onto a boot.

Universally yours,

Une Ammiratore

There Will Be Love

Anonymous Love Letters to Athena

Day by day, you are that thought which has been spanning throughout my mind. Yes, darling to me you are like an imperialist, who's power and ambition recognizes not any limits or boundaries. The thought of you in my mind, steals land, kills or cheats landlords, marries memories and all their fortunes; yes dear, the thought of you in my mind is doing quite well for itself.

Today -

I pass you by and pretend to not notice you, betraying my every instinct to stand directly before you and into your eyes, stare until sight or its focus, expires from me. In your department with your girls, your voice heard here then there, how it travels and so faithfully is it, how I follow. Its perfume to the ears, and then when coursed with a visual accompaniment, it becomes flavor to the eyes--an aromatic, gourmet cuisine. As fine as you are yet you starve me, or more so to the point, I starve myself from you. I chase myself away, the perfume I treat as a stench and the flavor, like an acrid taste, which I then dry heave with perfect disgust.

Am I like the beggar who pretends the banquet is nothing more than a culinary compilation of vile slop, simply because he isn't invited to any access of it?

O love of mine-not-yet-mine, if only that you could see through the facade; perhaps I reveal as much, when distanced from my countenance. Know that my disgust is the darkness from which I invite light to evolve. I want to hate you, despise and detest you so that I may savor every subtle dissolution that transforms, slowly, that enmity into love. Experiencing every atom of love that gradually collects until a planet results, and hatred becomes an atmosphere that shields that love and all of Life within it.

To you, all this love and further, all its future.

Universally yours,

Une Ammiratore

Fear, Shame, Embarrassment, and How They Cut

I once knew this girl who stole a blade from me. It wasn't exactly stolen, more like it was taken away without a presented incentive for me to attempt a rescue. She was older than I, taller and stronger, probably not smarter but that didn't help me much.

It was a summer in the late 80s or early 90s and I was in the Dominican Republic. Los Alcarrizos, thats where my aunt-godmother lives; thats where I ran across a field behind the houses with the other kids and embarrassingly stepped into a pool of mud, just as the kids imagined a New Yorker would. It was right where my brother and I competed for smiles from Josie; where my cousin Yuri constantly tried to kiss me, but failed. So many of my visits to the Dominican Republic are forever committed to Los Alcarrizos, low concrete layers of houses, dirt roads and steep hills, random fields, avocado trees, and the smell of wet tangerines after a fresh rain. It was also here, in Los Alcarrizos, that after one of those fresh summer rains, a shaving blade that I had been entertaining since the morning was removed and taken hostage.

I don't remember her name but she was the neighbor's daughter. She was the older sister of this annoying kid, who was around my age, who I had just pushed off my aunt's property, off a platform, down to his front dirt (there was no lawn). I pushed her brother a few days prior to her stealing my blade. I only pushed her brother because he kept asking for it, literally.

"If you're such a bad ass from New York then prove it...Push me off this ledge. Go 'head, push me."

Translated from spanish of course. After a long, monotone looping of his request, I became bored or irritated and I complied with his order, he thanked me by crying and maybe hurting his arm. When he called his mother I made a break for it. Not that anyone would believe his story, even if it were true; I was considered an angel.

His older sister, however, she saw right through me. She was about thirteen or fourteen and politely asked to see my blade as I stood outside my aunt-godmother's house. She let me have it in the open, very straightforward did she smile and tell me what she thought of me, that she knew I pushed her little brother. I was barely paying attention, I just wanted my blade back and made a face to reply to the smell that followed her like a disciple. After she wrapped up her veritable accusations, I asked for the return of my blade. She must have misunderstood, because instead of placing the blade back on my palm which I held extended, she did something quite contrary. One would wonder if my spanish was indeed that awful, that cock-eyed as to have someone confuse, "give me back my blade," for "shove my blade down your pants."

I stood before this older, taller, stronger girl and pouted my entire face with annoyance. "Is she serious?" I must've said with my eyes. All the while that disciple of hers warmed like an aura around her, like an atmosphere. I almost had to hold my breath but my anger usually demands air through flared nostrils. I asked her once again to return my blade, release the hostage, let's walk away from this peacefully. She replied with an invitation, said that if I wanted the blade so bad I'd have to reach in and pull it back out.

Now, don't get me wrong, she was dirty. She looked like a dark, wet alley cat. Nothing like Josie or her older sister, who wore long skirts and smiled like a piece of something sweet. There was nothing sweet about this kidnapper, this terrorist pervert and that sour smell which perfumed her like a bad frame. Nothing sweet about her smile or her husky voice, yet when it came down to whether or not I would reach into her crotch for my blade, none of this made an impression on my decision. I blushed at the idea and in the end, I didn't get my blade back but not due to disgust, rather because of fear.

Soon after, I left with my family to another town to visit some other relatives, my cousin, Yuri probably came with us. I never saw that girl again, neither on that trip or any future return. She ran off with something I was scared to do, something sharp and intimately fresh. As a result, there is a possession of mine wandering along the past, snuggled soundly in the crotch of a teenage alley cat; and when I see an older dominican woman, who is questionable in character, I think only of my blade and its rightful, manual owner.

That Sound in the Background

My Monthly Aresian Horoscope

March 21 - April 19

I could be a serial killer. It isn't the violence or the regard and respect for life that stops me. I stop me only from that last reserve of fear, a reservoir in fact, abundantly holding the thirst at bay, there is no thirst to go further so long as that fear holds me there.

I know perfectly well what would happen past that point. The thrill of acting out that desire, that freedom after drilling out of that fettering inhibition. How fulfilling to finish that which the mind initiates. How proud, how greatly satisfied, magnificently palliated even, as if it were from an ailment I were temporarily dismissed of; as it were it not rather from an ailment I was dismissed towards.

I could be a serial killer.

That first time would not be enough. Nothing is of a lasting duration, everything slips away or the memory becomes insufficient, I'm left a drunk sucking liquor off ice cubes. My thirst will not silence any less when that reservoir shrinks to a puddle. And that first time is all it takes to dry the reserve to half its inhibition. In its place, in the negative space, the half-empty, what plays in its stead is a dare, a thrilling, exciting dare that is always new, that displays for the first time for all to see what's there at the bottom of that man made lake. Fear becomes mud. One doesn't regularly drown in mud only gets himself dirtied. And in the mud there are two types of people, those who get partially dirtied and must become clean right there and then, and then there are those who don't see the difference between being a bit dirty and going further.

I have an obsessive personality, that is, I obsess and form habits easily. Given the amount of happiness or temporary pleasure I derive from certain activities I could become addicted no sooner than once after losing my virginity to that activity. It all takes nothing more than that first step past the last reserve of fear.

I could be a serial killer.

I'd repeat again and again, there's no reason as to why I should stop besides boredom. Even if I wanted to stop, if the personal satisfaction outweighed the personal discomfort afterwards, I wouldn't. The personal discomfort would probably be momentarily silenced by the next exorcising of the haunting act itself. This would become the final surviving bliss I'd be capable of, perhaps even suitable for.

Yet, all this said and nothing done as the reservoir is ever so faithfully obliging to that thirst. I am only a coward and can only empty the literary correspondent to that reserve through words. This isn't enough, its all a matter of how much you are aware of this fact, it isn't enough.