GRIMY BITS OF VINYL Comments

It must have been the most-played record:
the Fifth Symphony, conducted
by Klemperer. The mornings
and afternoons promised a better
future, virtuous habits,
which I soon forgot. I was already eyeing
Ana's tavern,
which filled my bedroom window.
I feared the shadows, silence,
feeling in each footstep the monster
inside me. And I read, so as not to think,
discredited French writers.

I loved it so much that one day
I grabbed the record and broke it
to bits - tiny bits of vinyl -
so that they'd hurt even more.
I'm not sure why, but I kept
the stiff cardboard jacket,
that lugubrious allegory of childhood.
And the remains of the record ended up
in the stream next to my parents' house.

Later on the stream, flanked by weekend
vegetable patches, was strangled by an implacable
housing development, the provincial version
of a gated condominium, in a world
with ever more doors.
As for Beethoven, buried like the frogs
by invisible killing hands,
he almost ceased to move me.

What moves me now, years
later, is to realize I did to that record
the same thing I do over and over
to the bodies I think I love:

I shatter them, very slowly, so that
they'll keep on hurting a little more.
...
Read full text