Letter soup

Names and dates swirl about my head in a sort of primordial stew.
Sleep will not come.

It is the worst, I think, the one thing that must happen doesn't just because we want it to, need it to.

Get a good night sleep before you take tests. That's what they say as if to cast a miserable, unyielding curse. I know it doesn't really matter, that what I know, I know, and what I don't... well, I am generally good at hiding that in a sea of circuitous locution. But sleep, sleep, how I long for it, and my prickly hot sunburned skin on the unpleasantly rough sheets (I will throw these out, I swear) is enough to keep me tossing. I am reworking one novel in my head, while writing the next chapter of the almost complete sequel? in my head, I am dancing across eras that do not include what will be examined tomorrow and drawing on cinematic anecdotes so far removed from the task at hand that it all makes me laugh, laughing in that crazed hysterical way, you know, that only happens in your head...

Ah, yes. So sleep, and years, and solitudes and labrynths and honor and honra and courtly love and secret marriages and babies in boats and predestination vs. free will and civilization vs. barbarie and bloody dictatorship and satirical letters and large noses and fantastic journeys and governors of islands and human detritus and social mobility and the inability to overcome one's circumstances and costumbrismo and disjuncture and treatises on opera aperta, endlessly splitting paths and protofemenisms and hombres necios that blame us for who we are and who they make us and palid princesses withering in tuberculoid flurries and count and palaces in decadence and caciques that steal the land from criollos who steal it from the indios who rise up in arms, and then turn into the same barbaric murderous revolutionaries for the sake of revolt and not evolution to a higher plane, and the lost and the disappeared and the guillotine that chops heads, violín...and the cries of green and blue and moons that bring death and moons that give life and the air, that lifts her skirt, and the boy who looks on, and a way to talk about it, how to talk about the impunity, how to stare it in the face, and why poetry and why sex, and why not? and it doesn't make sense, and it all makes some sense or no sense or nonsense, and Mallarmé struck the dice and unleashed a monster, ideogram, what's the big idea? no idea, break the swan's neck, between your fingers, snapped like a stick. Life on earth and a death in the sea, she walks, because you want her white and chaste and under her thumb, and a town will rise up in the face of a tyrant, all for one and one for all, but it doesn't happen anymore because art has been dehumanized, there is no more appealing to the masses, no more sweeping romantic idealization. Elitist snobbery for the elect. Select, lectores. An appalling display of mangey parrots and dogs and cities and boys that kill boys and military that will hide its dirty laundry and the unbearable levitation of beauty, to which there is no Remedy, but a shot to the heart in a circle of chalk or a glass of cianide water, or a walk straigh out into the ocean, because there are no paths but the ones we make and a populace that yawns, and opportunistic brothers that clamber and claw their way to the top, only to watch the baby sister die. There are snakes and oriental scenes, and little boy guides and frag-men-tation, exile, a while, novels that write themselves and breath fear into the hearts of their makers, and souls wandering in deep and penetrating gazes, and the dead that speak to the living dead, and entire generations decimated and the vision of the vanquished, and the walking on coals and the breaking of promises and the stealing of gold, the coopting of identities in the name of the lord, and the name of the King. There is mistic union and simple communion, burning passions and daft indifference, weary travellers that arrive too late, and people who convert but will never be pure. There are years of mysegination and yambambó yambambé songs that rumble over ages, through bodies that dance in frenzied circles. Floating down the river, dying of sun, slit throats for the chosen ones. There are plays inside plays inside plays before Pirandello and after. There are friendships that transcend the lines that are drawn in the sand, in the desert, you can rule a desert, alone. Where is that tragic sentiment when you need it, and why won't sleep come, sweet dreams, life is a dream, and dreams are merely nightmares in disguise. Goodnight and goodbye.