poems by T.S. Hidalgo

Song-objection-obsession, facing a grave not William Carlos Williams’

In a tank, the cited obsession.
A prosperous eccentric, war veteran,
decides, every once in a while,
to steamroll the door of a nearby cemetery,
pulls his body up through the hatch,
and hums, walking through hallways,
names of his fellow soldiers,
there, under his eight wheels,
while, in the background now, he thinks,
facing the cross of his beloved, to himself
“We weren’t married yet, of course,”
but, also,
“These are just the rules, right?”

 

 

 

Tienda de Lolitas

It’s usually argued:
the Old World descends, say,
from Jerusalem, from Athens;
misogynist really, since the dawn of time,
i.e. droit du seigneur,
or burning of adulteresses.
In Ancient Greece,
the nobles had a predilection for their ephebos
(a rose is a rose is a rose*),
with the females relegated to a secondary circle;
in the sacred scriptures they’re referred to as vipers,
synonym of perdition
(word of God).
Taking it to an extreme and familiar case,
we find misogynists like Voltaire,
like Frederick the Great,
proponents of enlightened absolutism.
Ehh… I’m not sure,
in the same boat as well, perhaps, Mallarmé
(“Perdition was my Beatrice”).
In that way even Marx, even Engels:
women stopped then from being marked territory.
Are you not going directly home today, sir?
Well… You can always hire someone.


* Gertrude Stein dixit.

 

 

 

La Manada

Caravaggio’s violent angels
(some crazy and, against Lucy Lurie,
their crushing fit of rage:
austere silence on the curved loin of the lightening);
a very unique interpretation, lysergic perhaps, of Grace:
they used their strength to subjugate it.
Welcome to the fuzzy screen of an X movie theater.
Love perpetrated perhaps in the open field:
a broken gazelle on the fabric of the dream.
In this garden, now surrounded by flames,
a chiseled diamond;
also confiscated,
far north of this new South Africa;
raving, trick, trompe d’oeil
(and, possibly and impossibly, its death).
Sanity has been locked up:
always transparent prison with no escape,
and subservience in the end:
a war like an operetta.
Hurricaned storm,
on this side of Leviathan,
Humanity can no longer be saved:
today it all looks, fatalist,
just like an insane asylum.
Pale and round,
like an owl egg,
the moon barely shines, tonight,
on the floating thickness of fog.
The Criminal Code we have cannot, no,
solve, just-in-time,
defenseless writing.

poems by T.S. Hidalgo

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