Abusing Tea Biscuits at 00:22 AM

You and I have been feeling the same shit. But at different times. Or at the same time maybe, you never know. OK, you want to know the truth? I have no idea what I'm doing here, I just haven't been able to write in a while, mainly because I've had a good chunk of my time occupied. I've been distracted and now I'm not. Or maybe I'm less distracted than I had been before- All I know is that now I can think. But it's not doing me good. You know. I haven't cried in a while, I don't exactly know whether I haven't cried longer than I haven't written or it is that I haven't written longer than I haven't cried. Well, one thing's for sure, I haven't done either one. I also haven't loved in a while, Silly me, always bragging the L word into the fiasco. Why am I being honest with you? I don't even know you. You don't know me. To be honest, you are comfortable to talk to. You don't say much. We were both babies before, right? At some point. Why can't we remember the events of that point? Did we have fun? Did we cry a lot? Maybe I cried so much when I was a baby up until four or five months ago that all my tears have dried up and I will never ever ever ever ever cry again? I'll be the girl who never cried again. I just ate my twentieth biscuit. I ate 20 biscuits from the instant I started writing this until now. From You till now. Twenty fucking biscuits.

Twenty-one.

Tea biscuits.

I'm not original. Ho can I be original? Is it just luck? Do I need to get lucky? Or is it that I need to be cocky? I know, I just need an incredibly unoriginal idea and just be incredibly cocky about it. I thought I had everything planned. I really did. And I've never been lost, I haven't went searching for myself, I think I know who I am and what I want to be. You've been lost, haven't you? I know it's difficult and challenging but I just- I just got lucky. This can be one confusing monologue acted out on stage. I'll print this in a book on a series of one-act plays. Cocky.

Something's not right. This is very un-pretty, It is. I was hoping I'd start this and halfway through I'd start stuffing it with pretty words and I'll end up with a well-written piece of shit but now it's all just a piece of shit in it written my shit. Cussing in relieving as fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.


Twenty-three.

Fuck.

Something's wrong.

















































Thirty.

The Poetry Whore

1

It was all u-u-u unexpectedly exotic. You don’t climb down your mother’s womb with the intention of leading a life of whores and art and alcohol, it just hap-p-pens to you. An exotic life happens to you. It hits you. Art and whores and alcohol hit you.

Violetta was a downright whore - in the literal sense. She worked at a place called Prostíbulo Poético; it was a brothel for the intellectuals of the raving Spanish city. The brothel of the Barcelonan art scene; packed with ridiculously-dressed painters; ostentatious women with extraordinarily huge breasts and kinky hats. The tables were occupied by mad old men and their mad old whiskey and their mad hoarse laughs, ricocheting off every corner of the smoke-filled, dimly-lit niterie; the corners were ornamented with priceless gothic whores, decently dressed for their vocation; and in one sacred corner, there stood Violetta, my Violetta.

It was a place for the miserable and astray. It was a place where the lonely would resort to in time of d-desperation.

 Un-inspiration.

Cathartic liberation.        

Prostíbulo Poético was located in the bohemian district of Gràcia. You had to climb down a worn-out set of damp, wooden stairs to make it to the disheartening cabaret. The entire space was occupied by lustrous red and yellow, yellow and r-r-red. Everything screamed sounds and colours and everything was brilliantly seizure-inducing. In Prostíbulo Poético you were allowed, for a fair fee of twenty-five euros, a private poetry reading with the whore of your choice.

Now, accompany me in imagining all the gruesomely dirty things that could- and would -take place inside one of Prostíbulo Poético’s private rooms were I to ever join my Violetta in poetic secrecy. Imagine all the seductive words I would ask her to recite; all the tempting, enticing, intensely lecherous, and unacceptably perverted prose she would read aloud to me and only me.  

My Violetta, my beautiful Violetta, was a Poetry whore.

2

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

Thump...

I – I – I was too young.

I started stuttering at the age of five; that was when my sister died. Ten years my senior, banging at the locked door of a bathroom, she was by herself; our parents got us used to being by ourselves most of the time. I stood at the other side of the door, quiet and helpless – a highly competent five year-old ­– while she screamed for help.

They later informed me that it was her heart’s fault; her heart hurt her and then it killed her.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

Thump...

I thought we were playing a game.

I was too young to have a dead sister.

3

My parents weren’t around. It was just me.

It was just me and Bukowski, Salinger, Kundera, Neruda – sometimes Plath – and a pack of cigarettes at eleven. I started smoking at a young age because I liked the burning sensation each cigarette brought along. My throat burned, my lungs burned, I burned. With each smoke I felt like my entire existence slowly and gently disintegrate; a hundred more packs and soon I will be nothing.

I don’t blame my parents for not being there; they’d already lost one kid they didn’t care for much, I was too hostile for my age anyway. They would find me in my room reading instead of playing with the other kids outside, they didn’t do anything about it, they just left me there. I liked them for giving me my privacy.

I was too young to be left alone.

4

I grabbed my first p- p- p- paintbrush when I was sixteen and three months old. By that time I had read all the books that seemed interesting enough to me and I didn’t want to read anymore. Bukowski was morbidly miserable, Salinger talked too much, Plath had only one book published, Kundera talked about sex a lot and I had no one to love and Neruda made me want to love and Kundera, well, he made me want to make love. So I resorted to canvases and paintbrushes; I had the talent, I was good at painting, I just didn’t know what to paint.

5

At eighteen I moved out of my parents’ place and went to study in Spain; the same land where Picasso and Dali were brought up. I managed to find a good Art school in the middle of Barcelona, the city of everything. I painted fruits and flowers and sketched people while walking down the street. Even so it was still inadequate; I was still not good enough. I had reached a point where I was willing to shed someone’s blood for artistic inspiration; everything and everyone existed but I was unable to find the right subject. Everything inside me was empty and motionless and I was dying to wreak havoc inside my poor, wasted body, let it fall to bits then spit the fragments out onto the canvas. Only then, would it be my precious canvas of sacrifice, and I would finally want to exist.

I was already nineteen when I found out that pain is the soul and Art is the body. That pain is God’s answer to life and Art is the manifestation of it.

Art dwells in pain, pain dwells in us; therefore, we dwell in Art.

I was in too much pain already. Cutting and suicide were not the answer. I had never been in love, that caused enough pain altogether.  

6

One night I visited a studio apartment right off Urquinaona square, it was about five blocks from where I lived. A classmate of mine from Art school had decided to start a weekly get-together for his artist friends. That night – to my unfortunate, sexless luck –he decided to have us spend two hours working on life drawing. That’s when you have a perpetually motionless human- stark naked in this event- posing for you, their ever so artistic master, to depict their every feature and every contour on paper.

That was the first time I laid eyes on my beautiful Violetta.

My Violetta’s collarbones were one of God’s m-m-most impeccable works; the pair of them protruding beneath flesh fabricated by nonexistent entities, entities that are capable of unearthly perfection. She had one hand laid over the side of a long and seamless neck, while the other was gently placed on one of her v-v-very, very, very gentle breasts, and her nipples, mi Dios! Superbly sketched and shaded and firm. She had previously pierced her navel and I was unlucky to have never been there with her before - since the beginning of my existence and hers and the world’s. Her pubic area was not what had necessarily aroused every iota of my being. To be quite honest, it was her nose; a silken slope of beauty, with a tip that would drive Aphrodite jealous. My Violetta’s hair ran down her spine and slept over her breasts and caressed the corner of her lips and at this very moment, I could not breathe.

We started sketching.

Everyone in the room was sketching Violetta, but I was sketching my Violetta.  

7

On a day of bitterly cold rain and self-condemnation I visited Prostíbulo Poético’s cabaret in an idle attempt to finally unbosom myself to the agonizing beauty that is my Violetta. And only heaven could witness the degree to which I rue the day I spent twenty-five euros for privacy with my only. For there she was right in front of me, in all her aesthetic glory, undressing her mind and soul to a stranger who has seen her body bare before – without the service of her memory of course. But even at that moment of unsurpassed nudity – in all its senses – she was still unapproachable, I was still unfamiliar; a regular customer in her world of poetry and whoring.     

But there she was and that was enough for the time being.

There she was, reciting the verses of Lord Byron’s When We Two Parted. At my request, Violetta’s tongue began to sermonize:

When we two parted 
In silence and tears…

To harmonize…

Half broken-hearted 
To sever for years…

My mind, agonized… 

Pale grew thy cheek and cold, 
Colder thy kiss…

The hem of her lips…

Truly that hour foretold 
Sorrow to this.

The untimely candlelight…

The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow—

Shadowing the hollow of her breasts…

It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.

Her breasts…

Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken, 

Violetta…

And share in its shame.

Violetta.

They name thee before me, 
A knell to mine ear;

Violetta…

A shudder comes o’er me--
Why wert thou so dear?

They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well--
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met--
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?--
With silence and tears.

8

Yes, that night Violetta and I made love in a room in Prostíbulo Poético’s cabaret, she did not know it at the moment nor did I, but later that night after I had departed from the gloom-ridden space where all poetry whores reside, I enjoyed the company of my aloneness and had known that I had made love to my Violetta at last. Yes, she may have screamed a plentiful of times; she may have fidgeted and howled and was concerned about the eerie fact that a stranger like me is capable of such fervent love-making to a beautiful stranger like her, but she was no stranger to me.

I have spent years studying Violetta’s steps as she swayed on Prostíbulo Poético’s stage, I have drawn her face more times than God could count, I have practiced making love to her every night.

I may have been a stranger to Violetta but dear Violetta was no stranger to me.

Yes, that night dear Violetta and I made love.

She did not know it at the moment.

Later that night, tinted in delicate blood, after I had departed from the gloom-ridden space where one poetry whore will no longer reside, one last time, I enjoyed the company of my aloneness knowing that I would forever miss Violetta. 

THE END