I look for my mother in the eyes of Bangkok whores and go-go girls,


Romanian peasants and market women, Moroccan virgins and fortune-tellers, Peruvian sellers of potions and outrageous notions. I look for love in the eyes of strangers passing on northbound trains, I long gone south for the winter. I look for comfort beneath the blankets of experience and succor within the wrappers of confection. I look for my mother in the nickel ads and yellow pages, the department of lost and found. But she’s not there. She never was. She was at odds with the world, so she got even with me. She turned her back on her own flesh and blood. She created her own reality; I created mine. We agreed to disagree without pardon nor pause. She betrayed me with her words; she killed me with her sentences. She punished me with convictions and tortured me with her cross and sword. In the end it killed her, not me. Death becomes her. All flesh rots and turns to shit, just as all words escape into thin air, without shape nor form, sound nor smell, sin raiz ni razon, sin semilla ni sensacion. Hopefully we’ll meet again in a much better world.

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