Poetry for Love: An American Poetic Anthology Focused on Art and Love

Young American Poetry for Love

This is another collection of poems to appear in Alma Mater II, and focused in content on art and love, as part of my American-centered poetry. In particular, the poem Surreal is Our Love is to appear in several publications, most recently, in the American Anthology, “Stars in Our Hearts” (Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-60880-123-7). The poem has been also called to appear in at least two other pending anthologies of young American poetry.  At least another half dozen of my poems have appeared in various anthologies by the International Society of Poetry, poetry.com, and various American poetry organizations.

Crown of Thorns

Purple is the fabric that covers the pillow

shines neatly below the cross and next to the crown
the crown of thorns without flowers, to mitigate our pain

the crown is heavy with sharp thorns, and no roses there.

The white flowers were lilies with sharp long stems
which I painted in colors to bring you peace and hope
were despair had ignited passion, and retrieved
older forgotten glories never delivered in love.

The now rotten rose, was still unopen, but rigid
its perfume was still intact, yet paradoxically rotten
with the fragance of love, smell of passion, sweet
with a stem radiating heat of feelings, living feelings.

In the end, there are no thorns, no sharp spines

only a long soft kiss that elevated our souls
you recall that you were looking for me the day we met
so love was not a coincidence, but the result of
your strong pursue.

Sunday of Love without Fantasies

We spend the entire day in bed

relieving the tension and the stress

we navigate over passion and love

resting, our bodies sweat all nude.

We struggle to determine when it happened

that friendship vanished and love took over

flowers bloom over the spills of the unconscious

we constrain our bed to our silent murmurs.

The long day stretches the morning

forgetting the duties promised during the week

neglected go around the wandering tasks

that neither of us signed for this Saturday.

We struggle to set the right positions

teaching one another the art of love

the flowers on the table dropping petals

that I bring red over your pillow.

The scent mixed with the natural perfumes

go vanishing over the threshold of the night

where dinner awaits us, before we find out

that it is already Monday, and dawn is in the air.

Being Together

Being together means loving each other
you see me, and look for me in your past

yet I am your present, and also am I your search
each day you wake up, I am there with you.

We dream the same dream, touching our bodies

all along the dream

we drive together all along the landscape

inherited from our dreams, and you smile

as happiness embraces you, and you lean on me.

The drizzle is speaking of the future

our kisses reflect on the city's skyline

the moon is a white box, rounded, bright,
and imperfect.

The sun wakes us up in a place we do not know
and we do not know yet about our past, yet...
we are delighted that our solitude is what unites us.

First Class Man, Second Class Woman

(or Seduced by the Singer)

We make love in an upscale hotel room

I am the king, and I look like a young Gerald Ford
I see you dance nude, singing a song that...

you want sing on stage

and as time passes, we overcome the cold,

the room is now hot.

I kiss your body, that brings me recalls

yet I don't play, nor I ever have casual sex

I want to take you always my way, so you enter

my real world, that you forever forget the zero sum.

You enter today, but it is all gone the next day

as you missed the school day, and there is
no make-up day

there is only your nude silhouette that vanishes

in the shadows of passion.

Yet I am still the wealthy young man who made a mistake
loving you in the shadow of happiness, because

you surrendered to me what others wished most from you, for them.

Surreal is our Love

Surreal is our love. paint it, in blue, in carmine, in orange.

Let the colors vanish in lines that can dissolve into blends.

Let the lines speak of shapes and trust
that my verses travel on each point in each delicate line.

Surreal is our friendship that spans into love feelings,
unknown to the present, unknown to our ages,

we love each other naively

like two youngsters that went to school together.

Let me kiss your lips in the shadow of happiness
against our own will, destiny takes over our souls

and unites us without despair.

Surreal is Dali, lines dressed in colors

espresso served very hot, caressing your lips and mine

breaking the fear, our hearts beat next to each other.

Wine Tastes like Love

Wine silences the claps of pleasure

words wake us up not to argue, but to say “I love you” letters say the truth inspired by solitude, not mine
flowers are being brought to you in my name.

Voices say the truth about us that cannot be hidden
silent is again the driver of our feelings
our hearts join the deep feelings we have for each other
water blesses our steps, as we walk in a hidden garden.

The village opens the doors of the past, reverses time.

It is sweet like honey, as we accept each other into love
for it blesses us provisioning each time for all
by uttering words we can understand naturally.

Our courage for love is great, as you and I are having dinner
while France's wines are served uniting us, and we rejoice
sharing glasses of wine, red and white, giving flowers,
our kisses separate us from others who desired you by instinct.

Our silence is our witness, that we truly love each other
the pleasure is yet to come in the shadow of happiness
the long solitude ends, as others depart from nearby
the beauty is indeed yours, always all yours.

Spiritual Dreams and Visions

Visit the Alma Mater I website

On Dreams, Visions, and Reality

A sketch of my New York City East Village Vision

When I was a little kid (before I reached by seventh birthday and probably during the following years), I used to have visions while I was a in a dormant state before fully falling asleep. Therefore, I used to call my grandmother Antonia, to whom I probably owe my first name, and who was nearly blind by then, in her mid sixties, due to heavy chataracts in both eyes, and I used to ask her to accompany me. I used to sweetly tell her: “Abuelita, acompáñeme” (“Grandma, stay with me”). So my grandmother used to sit with me until I would fully fall asleep. Then, as I recall from my high-school short story “Papeles”, published before my fifteen birthday by newspaper Diario del Caribe, formerly of El Tiempo, “...solía soñar con seres extraños, muy estraños...” (“...he [ I ] used to have dreams with strange, very strange beings...” ̶ referring to the character the Cesar of the mirror in that short story ̶ , as if I immersed in a subconscious astral contact, as many science fiction stories relate. Indeed, perhaps unaware, everyone has had such visions or dreams at least once in their lifetime. The fact is that in my life I have personally had many celestial visions, for the most part good, many with celestial creatures and light beings. However, none of my chilhood dreams that I could recall today had anything to do with my personal activities beyond schoolwork, such as, building and flying kites, building and riding scooters, or playing soccer with my friends on a street near home, in school, or with my own brother on our home front terrace. Besides, the fact is that one should never relate these experiences without expecting an impact in one's social relations; the main reason why people ignore and forget these experiences is to avoid confronting why they occur. And I shall make my point: I recall that just over a decade ago, one of my girlfriends felt quite confounded after I recounted one my experiences, as were reaching intimacy. I recalled that she looked at me in the eye, and became somewhat insecure about understanding what I had related to her. Besides, I had also written a poem about that experience by the time we were essentially engaged and that made it worst, so I most likely lost that relationship because of recounting my visions to her.

During the middle of December last year, I visited the East Village in the City of New York, just to attempt to find a place where I had had dinner with a girl friend the previous week, since something was unclear or subliminal in our walking together, first. As I could not find the place after walking the entire neighborhood, I drove the next week to the area. Surprisingly, during one of my promenades, I had an unexpected and bizarre vision that flew through my eyes, a vision as described by Plato in his Allegory of the Cave: I saw a young woman being tortured by a man with a long whip, while she remained tied on her left arm with a heavy iron chain. I believed then that if this was a normal or paranormal vision, it was probably related to one fetichist shop in the area ̶ I thought ̶ , and most likely consensual. That night I had a dream with the same vision. However, in my dream the woman seemed to be quite unknown and different from my vision while the man had a significant resemblance to someone I had seen on the web later, a man who looked like a lead psychiatrist in a torture camp in the former Soviet Union. The fact is that as usual the perspective of the vision in the dream was realistically impossible in 3D, although I could clearly perceive the scene, and had seen everything nearly conscious, as in the original vision. I must say that in my dream visions do not occur with a natural geometric perspective, that could make the vision part of the real world, as I write in my French poem “L'Homme à la Table Carrée” (Alma Mater I, Xlibris, 2011), where the square table is actually a rectangular one. I recently learned that other writers think alike, as I explored the novel Géométrie d'un Rêve; by Hubert Haddad, a francophone writer.

The fact is that the vision would have been real torture rather than fetichism, as in the search for my dinner place, I encountered a different restaurant displaying (visible from outside) some of the tools used in fetichist psadomasochism instead, which actually had nothing to do with the long whip and the apparent actions in my vision, as they were much smaller tools, i.e., the woman in my dream had been receiving a long whipping. These were the only times that I ever visited the Village (at night), and possibly there was some kind a magic mystic energy that flows in the area, hopefully for good, as I had lost my black hat as if a ghost had grabbed it from my gloved hands, and my hat had flown and disappear from my hands, not to be found again when I walked back. Surprisingly, my head remained unusually warm without my hat on at a temperture of about 40ᵒF. Besides, that night, even a rat, that walked right in front of me by a pile of garbage bags on the sidewalk, seemed to be staring at me as if talking to me, and had gone back to hide downstairs in a dark basement, as if enticing me to follow her... Unbelieveable... I think this was around 10^th street around Avenue B. As I learnt later, there are probably not only some fetichist shops in that area, but also probably some related or unrelated cults. From a quick web search, fetichism is big in the area with apparently many famous dominatrices. As I kept having the same vision for weeks, I prayed about the issue and that if it was a real vision for the woman to be released, as she seemed to be in severe pain in my resilient vision. I hope it had been just a vision or a day dreaming event that would have triggered literary creativity. Although all of these events may appear quite bizarre to any reader, they became a personal experience, that most people could have normally, and probably never dare to talk or write about. I only told my mother when I saw her a few days later, and asked her whether she believed me. And she said to me: “Don't tell anyone...”, as a good-will recommendation.

In literary writing, many writers, in particular, Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel Prize winner for literature, has written about many mysterious events in his magic realism literary model. Among them some relate to insomnia and forgetfullness as in some of his short stories and in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, where he actually presents a scenario in which people have the same dreams and peers walk into each other's dream, making a unique astral multi-dimensional reality. He also presents visions of the wandering dead expressing the sense of guilt experienced by Jose Arcadio Buendía after defending his honor. In Chronicle, García Márquez refers to Santiago Nassar with trees as a regular dream rather than a premonition of his own death, as interpretred by another character, Plácida Linero. 

There are many other writers and poets writing about dreams. Spanish poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca

wrote La Vida es Sueño, while Colombian poet Jorge Zalamea Borda wrote El Sueño de las Escalinatas, a long vision of elevation and conscious dreaming conflicting with his poetic reality. Honoré de Balzac relates some of his visions in his novels, but most significantly mixes them with real description and events, as at the beginning of La Recerche de l'Absolut. As Zalamea Borda relates his dream, anyone can attain elevation but “attachment to sin”, as suggested by Christian existentialist S. Kierkegaard, is the driver that drives us away from some sort of spiritual elevation, a status of the soul and mind in which our dreams are clear. Shakespeare recounts and mixes his dreams in his poetry and drama. Jack London dreams with obsession in The Sea Wolf after the sinking of the Martínez and confronts manhood between two different man types, as the motivation. Hemingway stresses man's character, so characters, like the old man, who suffer signficant stress may dream, but as men they are, they are not made for defeat.

For others, who may have a more scientific view of dreams, like Freud, the driver and trigger for dreams are essentially the dreamer's sexuality. As such, dreams can reflect unattained desires, goals, or fantasies, i.e., experiences that we wish to have but remain in the subconscious. However, for many and at least for me, Freud's believe that a person's libido was the actually energy generating the dream is rather arguable. I personally believe that dreams reflect our spiritual and mind state, and that people who cannot dream have certainly serious issues with their subconscious and spirituality, on which Jung, Adler, Foucault and others had widely discussed over Freud's theories. Yet everone has conscious visions and dreams at least one time in their lives.

Like my grandmother, who used to accompany me during my first five or six years of life, my mother often kept a book on the Interpretation of Dreams, not the one by Freud, but one that looks like a dictionary of dreams with their semantics and interpretation. But I personally do not believe in its content.

While the mystery of my unusual East Village vision will remain in my mind for sometime, there have been other visions that gave me the energy to write about them in prose or free verse.

Also, many spiritual meditation practices using conscious breathing suggest that conscious dreaming is possible as well. Some acquaintances through my entire life who have practised those techniques for many years look healthier and signficantly younger than their age, and they have usually confronted reality without fear or anxiety, an essential state of the mind to attain happiness.