You purse your lips and you force
a smile due to the tiring days.
You arrive late going somewhere. Always.
Along the way it happens
that someone hurt you
you hurt someone.
We are the grimaces from all the days in vain
from the broken hearts
the beliefs
and the doubts
from the drowned hopes
in the clay
from the days that always seem like too much.
Life is a Great Theatre, they say,
but the price we all pay for it
are the confusing passages
the aching of tired feet
the look that knows that behind the
hand comes the knife or indifference.
Behind the eyes the truths are
revealed
the brutal ones and silly truths
with which we fill our days
saying tomorrow is a new day
that this will not be in vain
when, in truth,
we are that fool that struggles
against gravity:
that which drags us around the
corners of doubt
through the shards of lost desires
in the alleyways of any scene.
We do not have daylight.
Just in case, we go disoriented behind
the lantern
of whomever we believe will save us
from ourselves.
And we learn to act.
Each day. Each life
Just to forget
that if your scene comes up you don’t
return the same
and that,
if you bow, they never applaud enough
they don’t even see you
they don’t even boo.
You are just that shell of a person
that hopes to be somebody when you go through the theatre door
when the function is over.
You are your own mask.
That which, from so much feigning, it
has stuck to you
and now you struggle to give yourself
that touch of truth
that we look for
when the function begins.
Published
originally in Spanish by Rosario Curiel, 27 March
2017
