A few days ago I wrote "yesterday I had become a murderer." Without remembering the promise.
Killing time is a phrase nobody hears anymore. I used it twice, seven years apart: once to
promise it and once to find out I'd carried it out.
I put them side by side and found things I never put there.
In the old poem there isn't a single past tense that belongs to me. I will kill, I'll make,
I'll kiss, I'll weep: all future. The only two preterites belong to time, not to me — what it
gave me, what it took away. The past was his.
In the new one there isn't a single future. Not one. And the same word shows up three times:
yesterday, yesterday, yesterday.
In seven years, the ownership of the tenses flipped.
Both end up admitting the same thing by opposite roads. The 2019 one asks: stop time for me, my
love. Someone else has to do it. The recent one deduces it while taking apart an electrode:
they come from two, it's two, the verses. With one pole alone, no current flows. One knows it
because he's in love and alone; the other proves it with physics.
I had read the old poem as if the high tower were a vantage point. Someone showed me I was
wrong, and they were right: in the Feel Good Inc. video the tower isn't a privilege, it's
confinement. The singer is stuck inside it looking out the window at a floating island he can't
reach. The height wasn't an advantage. It was the first prison I ever wrote, four years before
I wrote "bodily prison."
The first one sees the colors from his elevation; the other gives his mother an explanation.
Spanish, English and Portuguese.
⚡ ₿ROCK CASTELLANOS
#poetry #nostr #ElSalvador #gorillaz #literature #writing #time
