Southern Poetry Stamps – Revisited 7 years later
May 19th, 2018
16:52
“La Poesía” cafe, one of the best known literary coffee houses in Buenos Aires, was full when I arrived. A patron then rose abruptly from his small table and walked out leaving his fresh coffee behind. Maybe he had just looked at his watch and realized he had to be somewhere else. Whatever the reason, I got his table towards the back, the one right under the metallic stairs that ensured dirt would fall directly on my dark beer, Spanish ham, and even the piece of bread I ordered later.
Bill Maher said to his audience in his monologue last night – “… I’m not sure what you’re all so happy about. The world is falling apart” -. From the eruption of a Hawaiian volcano, to yet another shooting in Texas, the North part of the globe keeps surprising to the downside. That’s not the case of the South, but hardly because of a shortage of tragedy. Down here, tragedy is expected and good news are viewed with suspicion. Everyone waits for the other shoe to drop even before the first one does.
A big, fat man walked in wearing the shortest tie in town. In fact, it was its thinner part that was significantly longer than protocol dictates. But he seemed like someone who did it on purpose. Perhaps it will distract people from his receding hairline, or from his weight, or from the penguin-like steps with which he made his way towards a coveted table near the window near me. He sat down clumsily and started talking to the woman that was waiting for him. For reasons I’m unaware of, he seemed to talk with poetic metric; his sentences rhymed. Eavesdropping, I thought I noticed that every other statement was constructed as a haiku poem. 5-7-5. 5-7-5. 5-7-5.
Suddenly, I couldn’t hear them clearly anymore. The couple next to me, a music-type long-haired guy with a cast arm and a tattooed girl with a ringed nose, kept getting louder. They were having a political discussion. But they seemed to be mocking the first couple by speaking in rhymes.
The loud couple left and an older one took their table. They were also arguing, but the topic was what they can and cannot eat on account of their weakened digestive systems. Their discussion transitioned to the aesthetic value of the cemetery door they passed on the way here. Her next statement was constructed as a rhyme. She stopped once and smirked. She did it again a few seconds later. Then they both continued the conversation in rhymes. This could no longer be a coincidence.
Does hoping for poetry in a world of prose make conversations sound that way? Perhaps there is a mental disease that makes people hear words in a distorted, rhythmic way. Maybe speaking in poetry represents a strain influenced by a combination of an emotional state, the particular type beer one consumed, and the surroundings.
I won’t wait to know
Time says I must leave here now
Have a flight to catch
May 19th, 2018 at 18:23
Edited May 19th, 2025 at18:12 from the table next to the door, where I felt the constant discomfort of the cold air coming in every time someone opened it.
This time it was different. My voice was gone from a food swallowing accident that required some Heimlichian acrobatics that left the walls of my esophagus bleeding thick, dark chunks of tissue and blood. I had a migraine from the efforts to unclog it when I arrived. And I had started to sneeze a few minutes before, the omen of the flu that was to come from too much recent traveling. And the patrons… they were oud posers that yelled at each other about the latest Bad Bunny album and the next Taylor Swift tour. The air of intellectualism had been replaced by incoherent waves of the “what’s new?” crowd. People wore their tastelessest pieces of clothing, some that one could tell had been in the dirty clothes bin earlier that day, in desperate need for washing.
I guess the things we like aren’t meant to remain. Everything changes. We do too. Some say we need to embrace change. Others continue to complain and try to preserve their little corners of artistic escape, comfort, and intellectual challenge. I toyed with the idea that maybe I shouldn’t have come back, and instead kept the memories of my visit 7 years ago. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but he died knowing. I have to be careful and make sure nostalgia also doesn’t kill me.
But wait… aren’t we meant to find what we love most and let it kill us?
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