Enrique Cuevas

 “Now That the World is Closed” - By Luis Cuevas (Recited by Abril Carro-Gonzalez)

Hay tantas cosas que desearía estar haciendo

Todo esta lejos

Me quedo en bunker hill

Porque está tranquilo en estos días donde temo no envejecer

Los ancianos se deslizan hacia abajo con pasos débiles.

Bañarse en el resplandor del sol poniente

El sol cae maravillosamente sobre este edificio.

Las líneas motivan mi anhelo de envejecer

Es tan silencioso que el sonido más fuerte fue el aleteo de las alas.

De cada deseo que esta tarde canta

Señales y preocupaciones que me atormentan los sueños

¿Qué soy yo?

Encontré un libro de poemas de Mario Benedetti, un poeta uruguayo.

Estaba tirado en la cuneta junto a mi auto Levanté el libro azul hacia mí reconociendo amor

Palabras suaves pronunciadas desde lejos

Veo que estos días significan mucho para mí

Aprendí mucho y fui mucha gente diferente

He crecido en palabras y mundos en tan poco tiempo

Con el mundo cerrado, nunca tuve tanta urgencia de vivir

“On These Night of Dying w/out Remorse” (06-25-20) - By Luis Cuevas

I feel nauseous, but I stayed up to watch a film.

It's almost over; like the man in the film, I almost feel like dying

I'm paled over

My lips dry as my attempts to swallow

I start to panic In and out relax the heart

I need to flee the soul

The constriction around my neck

I can feel the demon's hand wrapped tight around my intestines

Tomorrow calls, and the bed yells for my body to rest

I feel like I have things to get off my chest and aches to get out of this vessel

I am calm

The pain of yesterday has been medicated

I saved myself, but only to come here to die

A beautiful life I have lived

Without remorse, I would go easy if they would have me now

The tension of mind to know its destiny

Now or tomorrow, you know the call when you hear it

The silence is thin, and the screaming turned stale

To see my image scattered across the mirror

My eyes hollowed by my insecurities

My heart eaten by my sorrows

My soul sold for tomorrow

I feel human

I sick human

I bleed human

These pills will save me from ache

In bottles, medicines are the only bottles that I have let turn me numb

Why do I do this when I'd much rather feel the pain

Without remorse, I'd swim easy to my father's embrace

This life is grown hot, too hot for me to handle

I don't have a hold around a thing

Yet, I can see that I am a person for the first time even though I treat myself like a machine for so long.

On these nights of dying I call no one, but my memories

Sweet photographs to tie love around my heart

Sweet fragments to try and hold me together

These nights they run over me, caught in those currents

I can't swim

Never have I attempted to be another person

Another person brings a hell I am not prepared to handle

Water that would burn me to nothing

I turn around to face the little of me that is left

A torn man suffocating at ends unknown

A knot tied backward against a flaw and another

I try to speak, but jaws locked

Words they all go nowhere, meet the white of this night

The only lines I comprehend the only compliment I can pretend

I go there often and broken

To heal from the sick beating of my flailing world

Crying out for help, but those cries are never heard

May the hollow of my throat make you come alive

Unable to swallow, I had never been a thing so lost

Hobbled my right leg no longer wants to stand

It's all sick around me

They are closing again

This time I might be swallowed whole

For nothing behind me can be reasoned with

All these strange pains have come to finally run me over.

I had to cry tonight because my eyes hurt to do anything else

I took my sister on a drive to see my school

Down crescent heights in the dead of night

I saw her walking In her face, a gleam I can't hold away

Tonight I drove around Los Angeles for hours

Three hours on the phone with my big brother

He thought the world mad for where it led us, but he found the beauty in the filth.

I saw the darkness and your sadness.

We all but maddened at being so hopeless.

Chances are that I won't be what I want to be

On these nights, the truth is augmented

I fall flat on my desire to not be a thing

At least I have a ton of notebooks to prove that I tried.

Tried to be human in doing so, I became

Unending my obsession, even though I hurt, I write

Even though the other side beckons, I fight

I tried to be human on these endless nights, but I came undone without remorse.

In the rancid of night, I stare at the daunting black of my life

At night I am nothing alone, no dreams, no ambitions, only anxieties

On these nights that hold me as I have turned heavy in all the wrong places

I've felt the drowning the waves at my throat

I think about the poem at the end of my book.

I will lose two people I care about with those two poems and maybe more in collateral damage.

Is it self-destruction, or is it coming to

Coming out of all desire, what do I hope to garner?

Of course, since I'm a coward, I would never entice it.

The layers of me the therapist is set to peel from me

What does it mean?

Your reiterating of my every thought

I turn to that same pain and strain on my flaws

I go home, but at home, there is no hope

Turmoil after turmoil, there was stress and love in my day

I walked down those streets

Wrong streets bleak streets it made sense

I was myself than I was nothing but the man behind a camera trying to frame unrequited love.

You came out in black & white.

I'd fill you with all my color despite the sadness in my desire

To quell these lesions pulsing from the hard blows I've eaten

I've felt this daunting choke since a fetus

On these nights, there is no hope nor allegiance

There is no god or religion for this grieving

There is no medicine to quell this peeling

There is no fountain to hold my bleeding

Full (Turning 30)

Inspired by Big Sur location and Book by Jack Kerouac,

I spent the days of my youth staring out of windows, windows in shapes I couldn't put myself through. A world out there I can't walk myself through. And for all those days, at least I had a song to keep me full. I'm not scared. I'm terrified of my future because I can't find myself in pictures, movies, or books.

Kerouac Said, “The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth. The efforts, nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you betrayed every effort your father made to feed you and raise you and make you strong, and my God even educate you for life you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil, and God seems far away, abandoning you to your silliness you feel sick in the greatest sense of the word breathing without believing in it sicksicksic

I asked Elsa how she felt when she turned 30. She said she couldn't remember. I hope 50 years from now, this dreary, swollen feeling gets pissed out. I know I'm not empty, but I sometimes feel that way.  It's deep sometimes. It's superficial, self-inflicted torture. I'm trying to change my tune and sing a different song. I don't want to be anymore; I want to turn horror inside out—the only horrific thing around me is the sea.

Like waves in and out of self, I got dragged out by Destiny, an invitation to rot out in the open. Like one of these waves tumbling horrific thunderous punches into the earth until it crumbles miles off this narrow suicide road back into its tummy. Full. Heavy. Hungry sea. What can't it devour? A year ago this wave and crashing of feelings made me sad. Now I understand. If you can't wish me a happy birthday. It's okay. I forget things too.

I got my mind made up, and I'm gonna be intentional. No more feather in the wind. I've had some time off and I've done everything I could to not do what I want to do. But those things, they fill me like cinema. A great cup of matcha turns me on as much as a good film.

In a world of instant sex, instant gratification, instant coffee. How many instances of fullness do you know? How many times have you let yourself die trying to control it? The binges I can't have enough of this world. What it offers I take. What it wants from me I hide.

The sea is saying something from Jack that I do understand. But his translation doesn't help me any maybe I don't drink, that’s why I don’t understand. It's so cold but somehow whatever it’s saying helps keep me warm. Helps build me whole. Like a buffet, endless satiety. I don't want to eat beauty anymore.

My brothers called me wished me a full life. My mother texts me that without me she’d die.

This beauty agitates my heart, spikes my adrenaline, and makes me dizzy. I walk down the street get some fresh air in me. People out and about, I realize everybody is just living their lives quietly but it'd only me that's insane.

I have to open my eyes to why God put me here. I can't keep staring at the floor hoping it won't open up below me, swallow me whole.

Sea, I'm coming home, failing body, disheveled soul. Will you let me near you, I'm scared you might eat me whole. Not like others you've met, but I'm alive even though I smell like I'm dead. I'm happy, I am, even though my eyes look like I've wept. Are you hearing me ocean? Waves like thunder exploding, eternally in a war with the earth.

You know sea and all. Treacherous turning, whirling, curving road and all. I will be 30 for a year and a year from now 31. I'll wake up in my little room, with hundreds of books and all I've decided to cherish and keep for my sake. Not all of it important, but all of it mines. I'll wiggle my toes and let blood rush to my fingers to mark me alive.  I’ll stand in the middle of my room in between piles of sneakers and stretch my arms to the sky.  I'll drop my hands to touch my toes and internally I will complain about how much flexibility I lack early in the morning.  I'll walk into a coffee shop wide-eyed. I'll order a matcha, iced with oat milk. I'll hike up Griffith until my calves thump senselessly. I'll watch a film that I declare irrelevant or a masterpiece. I'll walk miles on miles upon concrete. I'll arrive home tired, my mom telling me about her day at work. Any gossip or dream she wants me to know. Any nightmare or problem she wants me to solve. I'll try to be there. I'll try and listen. I'll walk into my sisters room annoy her with my presence, but I just want her to know that I'm there. I'll sigh at her teenage indifference, slip into my room crawling over sneakers and books to fall flat into my bed. I'll roll around restless for a minute or two. I will grab my ailing shoulder for a minute or two. I'll dread work. I'll dread my dreams. I'll dread nightmares. I'll dread decisions. I'll close my eyes.

There is no need to think another word.

So Much Poem

I just feel like its so much, a lot going on

Here, there, everywhere, its like it's on me

Full disease, full culpability, full responsibility for all that turning into nothing

Wrote a lot of poems about me falling for the women that make my coffee

Ufff, so much, all crumbling, all guzzling, all humming, me, big, gargutuan tummy I take in so much

Blank page depriving me of me.

I jotted beliefs, thoughts, pains, and suspicions.

My ego carried me well, but it's spilled and sunk decisions.

The margin is closing in,

I can't get a handle,

I can't seem to forgive.

Every slight remembered,

Every stare cast judgment

So much

So much

So much

Big noose, little trouble

I want to hang from you

Now not never

There is no desolate feeling under your moon,

So much you get lost in the stir

So much you get lost in the blur

So much you get lost in the work

Outside, construction crew, Insistent humming like a buzzsaw cracking my head open, I see you, makes me think,

If you were an image, black and white, whisking my matcha, I’d be Drowning in a picture

If you were a starlet, dressed for rehearsal, action to stardom, I’d be Arrested by a video

If you were literature, I'm a prisoner to your description, I'm falling in between the words that build you

I'll never, never, never know you

The negatives taken of you composed like a noose, nothing positive comes out of my truth

The last page of your book, the blues

The spinning end of your reel, some type of attention, some type of affection coming to an end

The pulling of my strings, by the mouth of your soul

The shaking of your lips, as they quiver to mine, the suspension of belief to believe that hope

The air between your movements, the kindness in your eyes, the feel of your skin, the chills from your touch,

Something I’ll never, never, never know

So much you get used to the crush

So much you get used to dust

So much

When I wake up, one by one the thoughts are falling in

The sunlight kills my room, slowly the rest of my day falling in

I couldn’t sleep last night, I kept failing, slowly, eyes sinking, sleep falling in

Every soft fall I have gets harder and harder

So Much

So Much

SO mUCH

I gave it all so much

Every way, every time,

So much

I'm crippled by your gaze

I'm swirling in my pain

Im spinning in my rage, breaking down, killing all my day

At least I got enough in me to run to you, 1 mile, 2 miles, 14 miles it don't matter

At least I got enough Left in me to get in line, March up to you

At least I got enough in the tank to give the big dream another shot, big shot, half court buzzer beater

So much