American Royalty Poem by Carlos Suarez

You arrive from a land devastated by repeated storms half hidden in your voice of always, of casual chatter, of memorable anecdotes of dubious or perhaps imaginary old friends...

You arrive with the always present explanations and the customary gracious gestures; the half distracted motions of your arms hiding the broken branches and the fruits fell by the hailstorm behind your eyes.

You arrive with some important and fictitious news about myself, as if I had been absent, away from this body and the recurrence of so many memories of that old war, of the way this falling empire have set the world on fire and slowly dies of fear.

You say you are coming from some places of sadness and regrets you can’t avoid. But you come from the usual games of masks under masks you and some others play with terrible mothers and loving enemies. And you must tell me those things as if words were melting and burning holes in the fabric of time... as if pages and pages of the same story were blown by the breeze in an abandoned garden, dotting the greenery that has overgrown to erase the paths, and then –word by word- kept falling in a dry fountain full of sand, gray leaves, and dead birds.

No. I don’t want you, child of chaos, of the rich, and of those excuses you smiling call your freedom. I don’t feel that your morning chatter is as good as the silence in this book-lined room where I keep finding a smile as old as this fatigued land that music itself has abandoned to the busy hands of greed.

I am tired of listening to those whose words you repeat for me, imitating your own voice while looking rapidly aside, as if someone could get into this place to deny the abstractions you believe reasonable, important. I would soon be tired of listening to their indulgent sadness and preoccupations with the proper names of everything, the textures of their progress, their loves, gates, locks, animals...

For a while it was hard to believe you are growing older without dreaming even once about the misery that fills this place, without even once realizing that this whole thing is as real as your skin, as the preoccupied glances you waste on your own image, and the amazing feats of forgetfulness with which you keep nurturing that enchanting smile working its way into the hearts of idiots who are ready to worship you in these times of great fires, flags, and broken bones.

There is something frighteningly right about all the things you wear, carry around, speak about... You ignore it, but the whole thing is an inventory of buried cities, of ancient thrones, chambers, vast colonnades slowly excavated by distracted diggers. In those ruins polished by moonlight and bleached by the sun, your voice wold always be superfluous and soon to be forgotten, like the idols of old, the riches of the dead, the ways the ambition and power of the great owners always vanish at the end of time.

But you persist in your fearful worshipping of goddesses you project from the shadows of your own bitter night: The one who runs surrounded by her eunuchs. The one who burns the books. The one with the barren womb and the knives sharpened in her angry loneliness with words of false reconciliation and empty pardons, while the war rages and burns away the childhood of yet another distant land.