by TS Hidalgo

MACAU, ROUNDTRIP

At Christmas it’s cold and time:
in a dark alley, near Fisherman´s,
betting my last yens
among interpreters of Russian roulette,
defiant before the theater of the infinite,
all questioning
for a thousandth of a second:
defiant too before all logic,
before all probability,
versus all mathematics,
which is this one time defeated
(exclusive currency, suicidal roulette:
five heads to just one tail
in singular random poetry).
I walk away unhurt
and after luck
my profit is sealed,
which I will quickly have to settle
in the form of successive contempt:
of the goddess Fortuna
(we’ll continue to tempt her),
of my own metabolism
(why is the hotel’s bar
filled with Godzillas?),
and of good habits,
scaffold, perdition, and desire
in prepay neighborhoods,
over going from sun to supporting
(desire to be Tim Duncan).
Through Largo, Ruinas and Fortaleza
I start raining in a thousand pieces,
and through streets of pain
in worn out Metropolis,
these my blindfolded eyes move,
to not see her,
to not place on them the reflection
of her eyes, her lips,
her little ass, her soul:
shattered tears.
On my way home,
Madrid exhales on me
its enduring breath,
intrusive, related,
the memory of a past,
she and I, both,
in common,
life like a limited sum
of experiences in present continuous:
among others
a summer screwing in Harvard,
blithe as beasts,
blithe as balls,
tante auguri a te,
there were also
hard discount times
(that is,
we admired Fassbinder’s films
-Rainer Wender-
in parallel and ongoing;
sharing sweat and snails
we lived champagne and cramps,
and other times we let time flow
like those who admire Fassbinder).
Everything breaks…
…excepting, of course, eternity:
our last fifteen minutes together,
a scarce portion of human being:
a hospital in pluperfect
(that is, a kolkhoz in Venice).
After I asked
the philosophers’ trade union conclave
about the meaning of life
and they redirected me to Wall Street
clearly distressed,
dying of laughter.

INSOMNIA

Too much time on the wall:
the number of times a suitcase turns
does not determine the turn
or the rhythm of the ballad:
no one loses all the time,
and I suspect that even those from Macau
probably know that,
-or was it maybe
another place?-,
those 600,000,
or so,
all lit up,
there below,
all of them:
none even travels
by canoe or panda bear;
and if
a raggedy cloud
just scratched the life from a human eye
in a close-up…:
back to what I was saying,
long live Scotland,
and I drink Scotland:
I raffle the rules,
gazing at the Alhambra,
and the palindromes,
and I loathe the cathodic jail,
while I take a seat:
welcome to the sudden AK-47 of my voice.

TS Hidalgo holds a BBA (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), a MBA (IE Business School), a MA in Creative Writing (Hotel Kafka) and a Certificate in Management and the Arts (New York University). His works have been published in magazines in the USA, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Barbados, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, India, Singapore and Australia. He has currently developed his career in finance and stock-market.