Travelogues by Craig Moreschini

 

PUEBLO
Bicycle, tires, steel baskets bouncing, the streets aren't unpaved.
I nod to the solitary man who reclines from the heat, I've got a
wake of a breeze and fucking cool sunglasses. The tires turn over as
I engage each, new, stroke, weaving, back and forth, perfect
telemark, dodging, riding, smooth, I want to jump things, danger,
seek love, spokes. Nod to the reflection, laugh, light a smoke.
Turning things round and round at empty intersections, curving long
meandering loops, no one else is there, but who am I to care. This
is the part in the movie where I start breaking out windows and
looting, trying on women's underwear, peddling through stadiums full
of furniture, hunting mutates with my crossbow, having long
exposition while playing chess with a bust of napoleon, seeing
myself dying in a completely white room with baroque furniture, go
is green and in between is nothing. Following the veins, moving too
fast to follow the veins, the tar, flash of windshield, lady crying,
the door bell.

 

MADRID
There is a place dry as an oven, where thoughts are turned slowly in
convection, and meaning, thick like capsulated spores, lays dormant
in long brittle stacks of scavenged scribbled scraps and parch
yellow imprints creased deeply with age. Even the insects are obliged to
seek shade, to wait for the mourning droplet, to drink both the salt
and the moisture from the desert, the sage. And of all that
perspires, in this silence and nakedness, reclined forms stratified
and box canyons, there really is no outrage, obligation, or cage.
Here, there, only is the slow beating, of the wings, grounded,
against air, these long momentary curtains of exchange, which we all
currently find ourselves temporally engaged. . .
And as again the bright blue flame moves past the yellow flicker at
the rim and fades, opening celestial shafts between lith and
stumbling path, the sleeper is changed.

 

Mexico City
There is no place for crazy architecture like Mexico city, that
adaptation of the ancient and the modern, the colors of gold, El
Dorado, the Mayan Gods of human sacrifice, the Gothic decay and red
volcanic stone, the marble, dead tortuous paving the subway. Filmic,
Cinematic, dreamlike wandering, danger and crime, dirt and hearts
cut out bleeding down the steep steps into the street, communal caves
rented, carved out, temporary, permanent, transitory, "and when I
awoke I was alone, whispered the fool. . ."

 

Puerto Rico
There is something about the moment that is long, that has been
drawn out, that is as if a coma lingers here on the verge of slow death,
unfulfilled. Walking along the wide path this morning in the half drunken
twilight, along the sea, outside the walled city in which he
dwelled, the battlements and ramparts etched with the names of past invaders,
temporary, and wanton, attachment and disengagement. Stepping down
the wet wooden planks of the jetty out to a point of prospective
back on the overcast population. Carrion, unidentified flesh rotting on
the farthest point, crimson capillary action, recently disregarded
by the raptor or sea bird, it is now mottled with sores from small
flies, which are now buzzing about in the humid oceanic breath. Winter
waves churn up, descend, and wash at, eroding the short flat beach
amongst the rocks.


The rains came a bit later that day, hard, maybe monsoon, and washed
the urine out of the lookouts, the towers, the alleys, and all the
other corners men find when their too preoccupied or drunk. Urine is
urban sweat, and of course, filth has many faces; but alas, the rain
washes away the sins of the world and we should have mercy. It
changes the chemistry as it flows to the sea, turns the water
brackish; and the crystals of salts, urea, sweat and tear, break
free from the faces of the stone; it feeds the plankton blooms Nitrogen
from the dish soap poured out, and scrubbed back and forth across
the ground, baked over the heat of the day into the pores of the
large worn irregular bricks on their balcony high above Caleta de
San Juan, where he was just seated a moment ago. . .