Everywhere I Go Poem by Carlos Suarez

Everywhere I go I find in the eyes of men the same confused hope: Fitting a piece of the Great Habit into their deepest dreams and sneak out of the party to go change channels in some quiet room where the golden cup won at the Silent Desperation Pigeon Shooting Games has runneth over.

I meet my fellow men in airports, hotel bars and jazz joints of every city I visit, after I leave the camera bag at the register, after I shave, after I look at the place through the windows for a while, after the restaurants are closed...

“Damp weather here, man. I sweat too much. It makes me thirsty earlier... Or maybe it’s the jetlag.”

I meet the hopeful pessimists and the sentimental cynics, the depressed optimists and the ‘artistes’, the princes, and also the loud and simple brothers who make commerce possible and seldom loose the greasy knots of their impossible ties.

I sleep a lot more. I wake up much later in the morning after I meet them, everywhere I go. (I am trying to put somewhere in my mind, in my little scheme of things, the way their eyes look in those evenings.)

I wake up sad, holding some copper coins in my mouth, it seems, and the frozen smile I wore all evening long has left my face aching.

I look at the faces of a lot of my fellow men wherever I go these days... I don’t have a TV set, a radio, or the papers and magazines about the lives and miracles of my fellow men. So... I look into their eyes and I see the swan and the plow and the rock and the flame, and at times an abandoned garden, a forgotten letter held by a girl’s hand... I see rainy Saturdays at the library and a pocket full of marbles. I see old films and old aunts... I see you and also you and at times I see myself.

I cannot believe the fear, the scandal of silence, the way fine words get trapped in their eyes and make another mess of a decent thought... As if some mischievous angels were wingslapping their faces to make them loose track of things.

A couple of wars ago I stopped shaking hands and kissing the cheeks of other men as we used to do while we picked up the camera bags because life and death were a matter of streets, of seconds, etcetera, etcetera. I have managed to stop ‘embracing in fraternal salutation’, as it was said long ago. I have managed to stop writing it at the end of my long letters... It wouldn’t do among my fragile hard bark bothers because one doesn’t send perfumed letters to jailbirds.

Everywhere I go I keep forgetting that one doesn’t REALLY ask “How are you these days, Montmorency? And how about you Jack? Ali? ”
(There is a flower in his pocket and that is why he is frowning.
Some sand of the beach he remembers from the time he was like this little is still under his nails.
All this is happening because he realizes that in his mind she still has that smile that barely shows like a ripple through his bifocal glasses of the middle years.)

Everywhere I go these days I feel that I should just sit around and order something to drink and start realizing that we don’t stash away those memories and then open the files and pick them.... But that we build and rebuild memories and not always with the same stones, the same well watered plants, melodies, shades, the flavor of saffron and cardamom and dates... The blueprints... Those kisses she never denied to us...

Memory is for the brave hearts, for the children of passion. (The fearful and distractful never pay enough attention to remember the things that make our blood so red, the things that those kisses did to our hunger.)

Think about this! We are the creatures who invented maps... This band of forgotten strangers we have become!

Everywhere I go, this same mortality rate, this marmoreal peace within the vortex, and nowhere to go but through the currents... This dangerous scheme... The freedom, desirable as a wild rose... This freedom!

Everywhere I go they... They sort of complain, you see, and they are embarrassed, because I show pieces of the heart they try to hide, and they think I am not one of them because I hide what they ostentatiously show at every chance they get. Talking about exile! (Have you seen how avidly they look for the excuse to leave the room when the singer starts some old country ballad and the burly Russian fellow cries?)

Between the second and third drink is when most of them start making their voices thicker, and glance at their shoulders and arms in the bar mirror, these oversized children whose eyes avoid mine because I can see the girl inside... There! Right there where the knot is!
Everywhere I go these brothers of mine are complaining about things they don’t understand as manipulations, as attempts at controlling them made by their much desired princesses of regrets in their unlikely castles of conveniences, by the “femina pragmatica” that has taken over what is left of this age of decaying wallpaper flora under a sky full of claws.

I tell you...These fellows think high thoughts, play the old rational game for keeps, sleep alone and confess their most severely childish appetites as if they were repentful and wiser monks.

I have been watching them for such a long time, everywhere I go, that nobody notices me any longer and at times I feel I could easily accept invisibility, or the frantic comforts of not being around them when the jokes start, when the bravado performances populate the air with cumbersome mechanical wings.
Perhaps I have been at it not because I am tired of this thing but because I still have hopes... My hopes! These barges trying to go through the breakers every day, these books found in a box, these moments when solitude takes off her faded garments and invites herself into my book-lined room, smiling... And smiling she kisses my mouth and tells me that one day I will be able to find my true brothers, everywhere I go.