Tag: writing

Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, Pt. 12 (Poetry)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this short story (or novella) from the beginning (link here).

Lunch break at last, I sat in the shade
Beneath broadleaved guardians.
My Izar, I’m here once again.
Come join me, hold my hand.
The world’s jagged edges softened
As your gentle light enveloped me.
Did your day treat you well?
Anything you want to share?
You’ve gotten hooked on a new manga?
Oh, I’d love to hear all about it.

On my commute home from work,
My eyes closed to shut the world out,
As I swayed to the train’s rhythm,
And the song of rain and thunder
Poured in through my headphones,
I felt your fingers caressing mine,
Tracing my knuckles and creases.

The morning light streaming
Through my bedroom window
Spilled into the open wardrobe,
Gilding the hanging garments,
Ranging from T-shirts to sweaters,
Whose hems were draped over the lid
Of the sturdy moving box
That enshrined your remains.

I caressed the rough, corrugated cardboard
That had cradled you for more than a decade.
With my family out to play at the park,
I heaved the box onto the marital bed.
When I peeled back the lid, you grinned
Through photos taken in the nineties.
I held hands with your motorcycle gloves.
As I listened to our pretend radio shows,
I laughed, and tears streaked my cheeks.

Izar, the things that bind us,
They are the only lasting truths.
Although your body turned to ashes,
Your name remains carved within me,
Inscribed inside my organs,
Scratched on my bones,
With every cell echoing it.
Once we are stripped of our shells,
Love is all we will carry.

On a stormy night, the beddings’ warmth
Had coaxed my wife into a snore-heavy sleep.
The wind battered the windows,
And raindrops tap-tapped incessantly.
I lay on the opposite side of the bed,
But in my mind I had returned to my old room,
Whose bed you and I had shared.
As we clung to each other,
And my fingertips skated up and down
The ladder rungs of your vertebral bumps,
I buried my face in the crook of your neck,
Where I sniffed your aroma:
Sunshine, cinnamon, motor oil.
We had woven our way into each other
By learning one another’s shapes,
What each vocalization meant,
What brought pleasure or pain.

Your warm lips brushed my earlobe.
“I missed you so much, you know.”
Izar, tell me when you want to leave,
And I will follow you anywhere.
Just say the word.
“Hey, Cap’n. I wanna ask something.
How long would it take to die from drowning?”
Drowning? You mean falling into a river?
“No, like jumping off a cliff.
Is it true you can’t scream underwater?”

My wife had been avoiding me since that morning,
But I traced the stench of cigarette to the balcony,
Where I found her shrouded in her wool robe,
Seated with one bare leg crossed over the other,
Defiantly exposing her skin to the biting breeze.
A thread of smoke rose from the cigarette
Clenched between her index and middle fingers
As her gaze pierced through the landscape
To wander in some faraway place.

I asked her if anything was the matter.
She shot a sidelong glance at me.
The cigarette’s cherry flared orange
As she sucked on the foul stick’s vileness.
The taps of pedestrians five stories below,
Along with the hum of passing vehicles,
Accented the tension in her silence.
When I was about to insist,
She exhaled a grayish-white cloud,
Then said I had been talking in my sleep.

“You apologized to your teenage girlfriend,
And called her name over and over.
The other stuff, I don’t even want to bring up!”
I asked her if she also expected an apology.
My wife crushed the stub on the ashtray,
And demanded to be left alone.
What, should I repent for unconscious outbursts?
During my waking hours, around my wife and son,
I sealed my burbling depths with a hermetic lid,
And I behaved like a functional family man,
Or at least tried my damnedest;
In dreams, my subconscious probed the abyss,
Prodding, scratching, licking the scar tissue
For signs of fresh bleeding.

I still remembered the adult grace
With which my wife, then a legal advisor,
Dressed in blouses and thigh-length skirts,
Had approached the business park bench
Where I reminisced away my lunch break.
The first time her legs halted beside me,
I had wanted to peel off her stockings.
Contrast that with her now-slouched shoulders,
And her lips pressed into a thin line
Whenever her hardened gaze scrutinized
The guilty half of our legal arrangement,
Ready to dissect any sign of laziness; of failure;
Of straying toward you, the forbidden.

Why the hell did I choose for myself a life
In which an inspector could interrupt
My worship of you anytime,
And interrogate me about my devotion?
Since you died, I had yearned to return,
In flesh or spirit, to our teenage bubble,
When I could still smile,
And the time was ours to live.

My wife and I weren’t right for each other:
We had been forged in different furnaces,
Hammered into incompatible shapes.
When she had pursued my broken self,
I doubted my strength to endure
Decades of solitary penance.
I had craved someone to lean on,
Who might try to understand.
If only I had rejected her advances,
And remained the shell of a teenager,
I’d be living in a one-bedroom home
Furnished with a computer, a mattress,
And the moving box of your relics.
Your voice would play full-volume at all hours.

For the sake of our child,
Whom we had dragged into the harsh lights
Of this indifferent cosmos,
I would continue living a lie.

In the time between work and work,
Resting on my bench sanctuary
While the overhead leaves rustled,
Sketchbook perched on my knees,
Headphones clamped tight,
And your voice bleeding into my brain,
With a sharpened tip of graphite,
I etched the outline of your curves:
The slender breasts that fit in my palms,
The belly swollen with our baby,
And the thighs that loved to hug my face.
I shaded the heaven between them,
Where I had gladly lost my sense of self
Tasting the tang of sea salt,
Drowning in your intimate waves.

One night, after reading a tale to my son,
I entered the master bedroom to find my wife
Waiting for me at the foot of the bed,
Straight-backed and stiff-necked,
Naked except for black cotton lingerie
Embellished with lace embroidery;
Hands clasped in front of her navel
As if to conceal the tortuous stripes.
She instructed me to lock the door.

In the sultry dampness of her mouth,
My penis went flaccid.
She withdrew and gaped at my failure
Before wiping her glistening lips.
“What the hell is wrong?”
“I’m sorry. I’m tired.”
My wife rose swiftly.
With a voice edged in hurt,
She accused, “I disgust you, don’t I?”
Then stormed out, retreating to the bathroom.
As for me, slumped on the edge of the bed
With my limp, shriveled member exposed,
I rubbed the bridge of my nose.
A minute later, I slid under the covers,
Shoved earplugs in, and hoped for sleep.

To celebrate the anniversary of my first kiss with you,
That interrupted a playthrough of Resident Evil
And signaled the start of our romance,
I splurged on a bakery cake,
And, unbeknownst to my wife,
I took a personal day from work
So you and I could spend the whole morning together.

I cradled the cake box, my precious offering,
To the woodsy depths of the Meaka neighborhood,
Strolling along a narrow, cracked, cement path
Encroached on both sides by grass and weeds.
The fresh air smelled of pine, earth, and wildflowers.
The birds trilled, the leaves whispered, a creek babbled.
A butterfly chased its mate’s erratic trajectory.

I reached the spot next to the winding path:
A picnic grove canopied by verdant trees.
Sunlight cascaded through the webwork of branches
And spilled shimmering patches of gold
Upon my chosen picnic table, rugged and gritty,
That bore names, hearts, and curses
Carved by generations of lovers and drunks.
I settled at the wooden table, my back to the path.
As I breathed in peace, my heartbeat slowed;
Nobody would disturb this solitude
To chastise me for loving you.

I laid the cake box before me, and flipped the lid.
Chocolate layers emulated a muddy racetrack,
With ganache frosting mimicking earthtones,
And intricate icing recreating tire streaks.
On top stood an edible sculpture:
A fondant motocross bike painted yellow.
Wouldn’t you have gotten a kick out of my offering?
In your translucent likeness, seated opposite,
Sunlight shining through, I glimpsed a beaming grin.
“Dude, you’re awesome. This is, like, the coolest cake.”

“You know,” I said, “it’s the anniversary of our first kiss.
We played Resident Evil and, while you were cheering,
I kissed you by surprise. Do you remember?”
“Hell yeah, I do. You thought you were being smooth,
But I totally knew you’d kiss me, so I was ready.
I was dying to kiss you back.”
“Izar, if I went back in time and prevented your death,
What would you do?”
“Dude, I would kiss you until your lips bled.”

I lit a candle shaped like a number one,
And anchored it beside the fondant bike.
“Happy kiss anniversary, Izar.”
I cut a slice, then dug a forkful.
In the flickering light of that lone flame,
Chocolate and cream melted on my tongue.
I savored the blend of rich flavors
And delighted in the textures
Of velvety ganache, smooth frosting,
And the crumbly patches imitating dirt.

Another year with you, my thoughtless girl,
Who had tossed the die without regard
To what your demise might unleash,
Leaving the heart that adored you dead.
As for my wish, I hoped that both of us
Would plunge into a bottomless lake
And hold hands while we sank,
Until the weight of water crushed us,
And everything turned black.

Author’s note: today’s songs are “Sally Cinnamon” by The Stone Roses, and “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground.

You may be wondering if I have changed the title of this story. Nope, just a case of the Mandela effect. Now seriously, I did change the damn title for reasons that I probably shouldn’t bother explaining, but that for some reason will: while “Love of My Life” refers both to the song that sparked this story as well as to the unending grief that the narrator endures, that title didn’t capture the remaining oddity of this tale, from the unrealistic dream of Izar Lizarraga to the increasingly hallucinatory tone of the story. “Love of My Life” makes one picture a straight romance, while “Motocross Legend, Love of My Life” could make one stop and wonder about the strange pairing. You know, assuming anybody cares. Anyway, I just prefer it like this.

Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, Pt. 11 (Poetry)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this short story (or novella) from the beginning (link here).

During my fifteen minutes of quiet,
A respite from scrubbing greasy dishes,
Folding laundry, tidying up toys,
And chasing after a toddler who found joy
In turning the apartment upside down,
I retreated to our fifth-floor balcony,
And tried to settle into the bistro-style chair.
A pair of seagulls whirled over the rooftops.
I took a deep breath of the afternoon chill,
Bracing myself to confront my scarred wounds.

On the table, I rested the old tape recorder,
Already obsolete by the late nineties.
I flipped my sketchbook to a blank page,
And beside it I lined up my graphite pencils.
I adjusted the headphones to eclipse the world,
Then dared to press play on the recorder,
Inviting you in.

Your brisk teenage voice, vibrant and infectious,
Hit my insides like a rock smashing
Through a frozen lake.
An ache surged, a relentless wave,
That threatened to ravage the shores of my self
With memories too potent to withstand.

“Welcome back, stellar listeners,
To another thrilling episode of ‘Izar’s Takeover.’
I’m Izar, your DJ and host, accompanied
By the one, the only, Captain of the Cosmos!”
“Hey, folks. Who do we have beaming in
For today’s intergalactic interview?”

My fingers reacquainted themselves
With the textures of the pencil,
An extension of my nervous system,
While the fifteen-year-old cassette
Hissed and crackled.

“Hold onto your space helmets!
Today, we’re delving deep into the psyche
Of the fierce, formidable Asuka Langley,
A.K.A. the Crimson Devil,
Ace pilot of Evangelion Unit-02,
And defender of the Tokyo-3 Geofront!
Let’s find out Asuka’s favorite color,
Whether she prefers coffee or beer,
And why she has no friends.”
My teenage self pulled back.
“W-wait, I’m doing Asuka?”
Your giggles rippled the channels of time.
“Yeah, come on, do the prime tsundere.
I’ve noticed the way you stare at her.”
“Don’t make me sound creepy.”

Now that your voice carried me,
My hand drifted of its own accord,
Combining graphite with paper
And fading daylight.

My teenage self deepened his voice.
“Favorite color? Blood-red, of course.
Drinks? Coffee, when it’s arabica;
Beer, if it’s brewed in Germany.”
Struggling not to crack up, you asked,
“And friends?”
“I’ll have you know, Izar-chan,
Everyone else is an inferior specimen
Unworthy of my company.”
“Asuka, are you a cat or a dog person?”
“Penguin. Duh.”
“How many nipples does Eva-02 have?”
“Uh… three? Maybe four?”

“Asuka, you’re famed across the cosmos
For your skill in a biomechatronic superweapon,
But what drives you to stand atop as the best?”
“I must be the best! If not, then who am I?
My strength is all I have.”
“Beneath that tsundere exterior,
Your heart cares deeply, doesn’t it?
What truly motivates the Crimson Devil?”
“I fight to protect pathetic losers
Like my family of plug-suited nimrods.
But deeper than that, I fight for a world
Worth existing in, worth loving,
One where nobody has to feel alone.”

I pushed the stop button,
Cutting off a teenage voice.
My aging hand holding the pencil trembled
As my heartbeat pounded in my ears.
On the page, the contour of your face,
Along with the shape of your eyes,
Your nose, and your parted lips
Smiling mischievously,
Had manifested
As if through a blinding whiteout.

What had we been, Izar?
A boy and a girl, alone together.
Too bright, too bold, too brave.
A nova, a celestial collision.
The blood in our veins
Had flowed in a single stream.

A gaze bored into me like a needle.
My wife, wrapped in a bathrobe,
Loomed in the balcony doorway.
I slid off the headphones, then stared back
Wrung dry, with my scars peeled open.

“Have you forgotten to buy cake mix?” she asked.
After recovering from the jarring intrusion,
I retrieved the crumpled grocery list from the garbage.
“Well, maybe I didn’t write it down,” she said,
“But I definitely told you about needing cake mix.
Run down to the store and get it, please.”
How come the moment I could finally rest,
Some chore sprung up, one that couldn’t wait?

In a dream, my lawyer-wife’s belly
Grew and shrunk in rapid cycles.
She carried her organs bundled in her arms:
A bloody tangle of intestines,
A pulsing brain,
A heart-shaped piece of coal.
Dream-her, scowling, rebuked me.
“You seem like a high school student
Posing as an adult,
Trying to take responsibility
For the mess you’ve created.”

Dream-her must have taken notes
From the ghost of my wife I conjured up
In daydreams, to build up my defenses
Against forthcoming arguments.
In the realm of matter, we merely coexisted:
Two planets orbiting a toddling star,
Exhausted by their revolutions.
Yet, both of them, my wife and son,
Demanded all my energy and focus,
As if the cramped quarters of my soul
Hadn’t been filled to capacity
By the specter of you.

Some days, I forgot you were dead;
Your laughter echoed through our home
To fade as a ringing in my ears.
Other days, a frigid wave of sorrow crashed
And drowned my surroundings in darkness,
Submerging me to a depth where time slowed,
And light could no longer penetrate.

The nocturnal breeze chilled my face
As I clutched the balcony railing.
To my left, a dark-gray road
Lined with bare-branched trees,
Their limbs stretching upward,
Sliced through apartment buildings
Toward Juncal Church, whose steeple,
Etched against Mount Jaizkibel,
Towered over the Roman museum.
The church’s clock face reflected
A sky punctuated by dazzling stars.

You stood in my periphery,
Hands jammed in your jacket pockets,
Your silhouette rimmed in starlight.
To succeed in our elopement
And fulfill the wish from a decade ago,
To flee this pain-burdened city
Where all I did was waste away,
I only needed to grab your warm hand,
And jump from this fifth-floor balcony
Into the hard asphalt below.
The world would vanish in a puff,
And we would drift upward and upward
To that ocean of forever,
Where we’d get to play among the stars.

I dreamt of our last moment together.
The amber glow of streetlights
Swirled like auroras in the rain-laced air.
You parked in front of the candy shop.
Drenched under the torrential barrage,
We clambered off and removed our helmets.
The taste of rain mingled with your saliva
While the Aprilia’s idling engine rattled
Like a hiker hopping from foot to foot,
Eager to move on.

We wished each other good night.
Thunder growled as you straddled
Your gleaming yellow-and-white bike.
You pulled on your helmet,
Gripped the handlebars,
Lifted the side stand with a kick,
Leaned forward, and twisted the throttle.
Your Aprilia roused with a throaty roar,
Then sped into the rain-engulfed night.

My chest strained with the weight
Of the countless combinations of words
I could have uttered back then
To save your life.

Had I insisted on accompanying you,
We might have woven ourselves into the night,
Resting in the refuge of your childhood bed,
Immersed in each other’s warmth.
Or we might have crashed on the highway,
Where we would have drawn rain-flecked gasps
Lying shattered on the bloodied grass
Amid scrap metal and broken glass.
Either way, I wouldn’t have left you alone.

At the Mount Igueldo amusement park,
A pine tree cast its dappled shade
Upon person-sized mushroom sculptures
With dot-speckled red caps,
And stout stems featuring cartoon faces.
Amid the mushrooms, fairy-tale gnomes
Stood brandishing shovels and pickaxes,
Caught in eternal toils.

Along the tracks, the train came crawling,
Its design imitating a bygone steam locomotive
Painted sky blue, sunny yellow, and candy red.
As the train passed in front of the mushrooms,
My wife, encapsulated in that vibrant world,
Leaned toward our son seated beside her.
“Look who it is, honey. Wave to daddy.”
My beaming boy recognized me as his father,
A beacon in this unfathomable universe,
And waved exuberantly.
A pang tore through me,
But I raised my hand to reciprocate
With a smile bolted onto my face.
If I were living the life intended for me,
I would have never met this family.

One Friday evening, in the living room,
Our toddler, sitting on a playmat
Amid a disarray of plastic blocks,
Replicated his giraffe plush toy
Drawing on a dry-erase board.
My wife and I, slumped on the couch,
Settled on the escape of fast food.
She suggested Chinese,
But in my mind, a hole had opened
Into the vault of memories,
And I remembered a scarlet polo shirt.
I insisted on ordering pizza,
Then looked up the number of that shop
Located downtown, beyond the bridge
That spanned the railroad tracks,
In the sloping Lope de Irigoyen Street,
Where you delivered pizzas
For money and adrenaline
Back when we were teens.

After placing the order, I couldn’t sit still.
I roamed the apartment,
Drank water only to drink more,
Splashed my face at the bathroom sink.
Anxiety built up in my chest,
Sweat beaded on my brow.
I saw you hanging out in front of the shop,
Chatting animatedly with the other drivers.
Once the cooks had finished baking,
You put on your scarlet cap,
Loaded the pizza into the cargo box,
Then rode the scooter across Irún,
Heading to my home.

The buzzer startled me.
I checked the monitor:
The building’s front door swung shut.
A minute later, the doorbell rang.
Heart lodged in my throat,
A foolish and fraying part of me
Hoped against everything I knew
That time would fold upon itself.
I stumbled to the entrance,
Paused, took a shaky breath,
And peered through the peephole.
There you stood, sixteen again,
Clad in the scarlet cap and polo shirt,
Balancing a pizza box on your palm.

My heart sputtered back to life,
And I threw the door open.

As I gazed into those chocolate eyes,
A wave of vertigo swept over me.
Your mouth stretched in a grin,
Exhibiting crooked front teeth.
“One family-size pepperoni pizza.”
Your youthful voice pierced my ribcage
And stirred the liquifying viscera.

You offered the hot cardboard box,
That smelled of burnt crust and grease.
I realized I held bills.
Your caramel ponytail swayed
As you fished into your fanny pack,
But when you extended the change,
I closed your fingers around the coins
With my larger, trembling hand.
“Oh, that’s my tip?” you chirped.

A lump welled up in my throat,
One I couldn’t swallow nor breathe past.
“Enjoy your pizza, sir,” you said,
Then tipped your cap as a goodbye,
And trotted down the stairs.

My lips quivered.
The back of my eyeballs burned.
The pizza box tilted downward
And thudded onto the floor.
I hunched over and covered my face.
The dam containing a lifetime’s laughter
Creaked, cracked, and burst.

Author’s note: today’s songs are “K” by The Clientele, and “Diez años después” by Los Rodríguez.

If you enjoy my free verse poetry, I have three books worth of it yet to be self-published. Check it out.

Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, Pt. 10 (Poetry)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this short story (or novella) from the beginning (link here).

On my train ride back from work,
Inside an eggshell-white passenger car,
Slumped with weariness in a plasticky seat
As if my muscles and bones sought to dissolve,
Lethargy pulled down my eyelids
While I fought to remain awake.
At my stop, I exited dragging mutinous feet,
Then trudged my way to a purported refuge.

In the past, after the workday had drained me
And I returned to my parents’ apartment,
I ensconced myself in my childhood bedroom.
Many such afternoons, I dropped onto bed,
Where, as white noise coursed through my limbs,
I slipped into daydreams or hallucinations.
Now, when I opened my apartment’s door
To the smell of home-cooked food
Mingled with those of baby powder and cigarettes,
I faced my lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mom,
Who looked pale and jittery, stimulated by a cocktail
Of caffeine, nicotine, and food-derived boosters.
She unloaded her day’s frustrations onto me,
Her patient listener and supportive husband,
Who could barely string coherent sentences.

I yearned to collapse onto the couch
And indulge in the oblivion of mindless shows,
But my wife had waited for the chance to escape
And puff on her damnable sticks in the balcony,
So I, as if prodded by a cattle farmer’s pole,
Was thrust into a chain of duties.

I tended to our baby, who spent his waking life
Cooing, babbling, crying, and pooping.
I changed his diapers, bottle-fed him formula,
Wiped the trickle of milk dripping from his chin,
Played with him until his squeals fizzled out,
And struggled to soothe his colicky self.

I went out on evening errands
Such as buying snacks or cigarettes,
Fetching prescriptions from the pharmacy,
Or perusing supermarket aisles for deals.
I held plastic-wrapped packages of meats
While the fluorescent tubes overhead
Bounced reflections off the polished tiles.

As if the apartment wanted to fall apart,
I had to replace burned-out bulbs,
Repair leaky faucets,
Unclog slow-draining pipes;
Tasks that I, who had grown up drawing,
Should have known by instinct how to do.

I didn’t complain against an adult’s fate,
That of ants, termites, or bees,
Perpetually teeming.
Besides, I received the orders from my wife,
Who had sought me out and witnessed me.
I had become a vessel for her hope,
And I didn’t dare discard it.

In the amber glow of the nursery lamp,
I rocked our baby in my arms
And crooned “Brahms’ Lullaby”
As I paced under the gaze of a plush giraffe.
Sleep is a realm, or a void,
Into which one eagerly dives and drowns.
Why would a baby fight the descent?
What better way to spend one’s time,
What lovelier gift could anyone hope for
Than a momentary reprieve from consciousness?

After my baby’s eyelids drifted shut
And his drowsy coos trailed off,
With him cradled in his crib,
I snuck into the master bedroom
And slid under the covers
Beside my wife’s warmth.
As I lay like a bruised, spent sailor
Whose ship had battled tempests,
Finally left alone, I sank
Into the ocean of the subconscious,
From whose murk you emerged,
Gliding through the viscous tides,
Your caramel locks billowing,
Arms extended toward me.
Tangled and embraced, we swam
Out of reach from the surface.

Through a gap in the bathroom door, I glimpsed
My topless, teary-eyed wife’s reflection.
She was grimacing bitterly at her midriff:
Over the waistband of her panties, which pressed
Into the softened roundness of her lower belly,
The overhead light accentuated, deepened,
A cluster of stretch marks surrounding the navel
In patterns of silvery and flesh-toned scratches.
With a fingertip, she traced the striae
That reminded her of the burden taken on,
And the toll it had exacted.

He lay cocooned in a blue woolen onesie,
His chubby fists curled near his cheeks,
His pacifier abandoned in a corner
Like a bone of a half-consumed victim.
From his barrel-shaped chest,
The ribs rose and fell rhythmically
As his small lungs expanded and contracted,
Preparing to spew volcanic ash.
Overlooking this dormant bundle of rage,
This little tyrant from a hostile planet,
I, his caretaker, or slave, stood motionless,
Dreading that the alien would awaken
And, while thrashing his tiny limbs,
Erupt in an incandescent wail
That would pierce my eardrums
And ripple through my bones,
Shattering my sanity.

The shower’s scorching jets
Steamed as they scoured my skin,
Streaming down my hunched spine.
I clawed at my skull;
Another goddamn Monday morning
Of a suffocating cycle
That would last lifetimes.
What was I holding out for?
That your ghost would burst in
And whisk me away from this cage
To resume where we had left off
A decade ago?

Cloistered within steam,
Under the drumming of water,
I whispered “Izar, Izar, Izar,”
A plea for help, an invocation.
The hooks were carving deeper,
And trickles of blood
Were dragged down the drain.

In a weekday evening, crumpled on the couch,
I had drifted off only to jolt awake.
A cartoon flickered on the TV screen,
Mingling its colors with the apartment’s lights.
At the edge of my blurred vision,
My son’s toddling form loomed
As he, clad in dinosaur pajamas,
Dragging a stuffed plush puppy,
Explored the living room
In a quest for the limits of the known,
Or anything to gum and drool on.
His clumsy fingers seized the remote,
That he shook experimentally.
The TV blackened.

Author’s note: today’s song is “La puerta de al lado” by Los Rodríguez.

If you enjoy my free verse poetry, I have three books worth of it yet to be self-published. Check it out.

Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, Pt. 9 (Poetry)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this short story (or novella) from the beginning (link here).

After my pregnant lawyer quit smoking,
Her poised persona devolved
Into furrowed brows, clenched jaws,
Shifting in her seat, pacing aimlessly.
To keep her mouth busy, she snacked constantly
On nuts and seeds like almonds and walnuts,
That she seasoned with soliloquies
About her research into dietary changes
Which would maximize fetal health.
She increased her intake of kale and spinach,
Chock-full of folates, nutrients for a growing brain.
She switched to whole grains rich in B vitamins,
And integrated more milk, yogurt, and cheese,
Hoping that one day, out of her would emerge a baby,
Instead of some godforsaken abomination.

Together we researched cribs and strollers.
She shelved her popular novels and self-help books
For guides on babies’ developmental stages,
Creating a nurturing home for a child,
And balancing motherhood with a career.
As if bracing for a shadow boxer’s pounce
From the corners of her mind to sucker-punch her,
She swung words at phantoms, often striking me.
During legal arguments, she found her wit blunted,
Her sentences faltering, her thoughts scattering,
And she suspected that those colleagues of hers
As useful as shadows in a blackout
Gossiped about her incompetence.
When one dared to rib her, she snarled
Like a cornered junkyard dog.
Until now a lawyer focused on her career,
She pondered reducing hours or working remotely
To dedicate more energy to our awaited baby.

The lawyer and I indebted ourselves
To a bank, my parents, and my in-laws
To buy a second-hand, two-bedroom apartment
On a fifth floor, with built-in wardrobes,
Electric heating, and an American-style kitchen;
Located in San Pedro Street, beside the Bidasoa River,
Near the primary school you and I had attended.

The largest bedroom bloomed into a nursery
Equipped with a crib of white wood;
A mobile adorned with stars; a changing table;
Wall stickers of lions, monkeys, giraffes, elephants;
A sturdy, comfortable rocking chair;
And set on a nightstand, a lamp with a dimmer.

Inside the master bedroom,
In a corner of the wardrobe,
I tucked the moving box
Housing my keepsakes of you.
The hems of my row of shirts
Draped over the lid as if caressing it.
In that confined darkness,
Your figurines, my comic strips,
Your motorcycle gloves
And handwritten letters,
The tapes with our pretend shows,
Photos that had captured you,
All aged second by second
While you remained eighteen.

Evenings lost in the glow of dramas,
Lying on the couch watching TV
With our legs and fingers entwined.
The heat emanating off her curvy body.
The scent of freshly-brewed tea.
Shelves of books and DVDs,
Framed motivational quotes.
The lunar landscape of my existence
Had become inhabited.

Her cravings escalated to chips, doughnuts,
Potato omelets, ice cream, fried pork meatballs,
And whatever she could munch or suck on,
From candies and energy bars to popsicles.
She gained weight, her breasts swelled.
I made myself useful by rubbing her feet
And massaging away the aches from her joints
While she, amidst balled-up snack wrappers,
Pored over childcare books, flipping pages
With her cigarette-deprived fingers.

She zigzagged along an agonizing route:
Aversions, headaches, insomnia,
Nausea, vomiting, constipation,
Anxious gynecological appointments,
Prenatal yoga, birthing classes,
Nightmares of miscarriages and stillbirths,
Of episiotomies, hemorrhages, C-sections,
Of premature infants hooked to machines.
At night, she clutched her belly,
Fearing the budding life inside
Would twist and strangle itself.

Whenever I failed to intuit her needs,
She snapped at me, and slammed doors.
At times, exhausted, loathing herself,
She sobbed inconsolably,
And repeated that she had botched her career.
Sprawled across the bed, backaches gripping her
Thanks to the demon’s growing weight, she cried,
“Why the fuck did I need a goddamn baby?!”

The echo of “Fly Me to the Moon” playing elsewhere
Resonated in the sepulchral bedchamber.
Dust motes danced in the beams of evening sunlight
Spilling through windows stained by time.
The light gilded an ornate, full-length frame
Adorned with carvings of wildflowers,
That encased a scratched and scuffed mirror
Whose bottom third was marred
By a dried-out splatter resembling rust.
Within that glass portal, you, my Izar,
Wore a dress with a pleated bodice,
Dyed like the blush of summer dawn.
Your caramel locks cascaded in gentle waves,
Framing your twinkling eyes and buoyant smile,
Both alight with recognition.

Through the mirror, you strode into the room.
As you padded barefoot towards a vast bed,
You made your dress glide over your head,
Leaving the fabric to flutter downward.
You rolled onto the plush duvet, lay supine,
And illuminated your face with a playful grin,
Showcasing those crooked front teeth.
Your satin, coral-pink panties glimmered
As you eased them down your thighs.
“Fly me to the moon,” you asked.

I awoke to faint snoring,
To a naked, round-bellied woman
Whose swollen breasts heaved against me
In the warmth of the night.

Before you vanished once again,
I shut my eyes tight
And gathered the dream’s fragments
As I fondled my partner to her senses.
Our breaths mingled,
Her ballooned belly brushed my abdomen.
My hardness delved into the silky folds,
Becoming engulfed in your warm currents.

I pictured you bouncing on me,
Your caramel waves bobbing,
Your breasts shuddering.
Light and shadow played across your torso,
Accentuating the ridges of your ribs
And the grooves of your abdominal muscles
Under smooth, taut skin sheened with sweat.
The outline of your pelvic bones emerged
With each rock-and-roll of your hips.

Your thighs trembled,
Your fervent moans grew ragged.
My hands clenched the bedsheets
And her nails dug into my back
As I thrust desperately,
Escalating the slaps of colliding flesh,
Until I released all that hurt and sorrow
Into the cushioning waters.

Under the moist bed linens,
Your figure merged with the lawyer’s,
Who nestled against my side
While the fetus’ kicks nudged me.
She loved me with an infant on the way;
It should have been enough
To hang onto and live for.

On a rainy Sunday morning,
A gush of clear fluid soaked the mattress.
The woman grimaced and cursed
As she clutched her belly like a wound.

Labor pains, hours of pushing,
Sweat and tears mixed in her eyelashes,
Her crushing grip bruising my fingers,
Tearing of flesh, blood loss,
Insults flung at me for knocking her up,
Feral screams and utter helplessness.

Ripped out of the womb with forceps,
Emerging into the harsh fluorescence,
Coated in blood and amniotic fluid,
Arrived a screeching, blue-tinged thing,
A sea creature destined to die ashore.

While our newborn’s wrinkled limbs jerked
And his scrunched, purple face twitched
As he protested against the indignity of birth,
The obstetrician cut and clipped his umbilical cord.
A nurse, efficient like a conveyor worker,
Suctioned the mucus from the baby’s nose,
Rubbed his skin with a towel to cleanse him of gore,
Then placed him in my partner’s trembling arms.
Weeping, shell-shocked, she gasped,
“Oh god, I’m his mother.”

Lying in a plastic bassinet, swaddled in a blanket,
My rosy-skinned, plump-cheeked firstborn fussed,
His miniature fists protruding from the binding.
My fingers brushed the silky tuft of black hair
That crowned his defenseless head.
Over the years, the clay mold of his body
Would take on the contours of the boy,
Then the man he would become,
Perhaps one who, despite life’s challenges,
Would never falter, never give up,
Who would pursue his dreams,
And remain free of sorrow.

On an October weekend, at Irún’s city hall,
The lawyer and I signed documents
Affirming our legal partnership.
While my mother-in-law held her grandson,
And my parents pretended you had never existed,
I posed for wedding photos alongside my wife
In a dimly-lit corner of the registry office,
Standing theatrically still.

I wore a well-fitted charcoal-gray suit;
My bride, a sleeveless ivory gown
Dappled with flower embroidery.
I had shoved my hands in my pockets;
She, solemn and lost in thought,
Clutched a bouquet of red roses.
My sunken eyes bore a piercing gaze
That stared past the confines of the photo
At someplace distant and unreachable.

Starting my own family, getting married,
Both promised a rebirth,
But even now, remembering that ceremony
Fills me with sorrow for her, and for this life
That carelessly tossed us together.
As a girl, my wife must have fantasized
About her special day, about prince charming.
Instead, she ended up bound to a wreck
Whose cracks oozed tar,
Who dreaded to look beside him at his bride
In case a dead teenager gazed back.

Author’s note: today’s songs are “This Is How It Always Starts” by Grandaddy, and “Only in Dreams” by Weezer.

If you enjoy my free verse poetry, I have three books worth of it yet to be self-published. Check it out.

Ongoing manga: Isekai Craft Gurashi Jiyu Kimamana Seisan Shoku No Honobono Slow Life, by Aroe

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

Four stars. The title translates to “The Heartwarming Slow Life of a Free-Spirited Production Worker.”

This is yet another title in the isekai sub-genre of “let’s contrast how shitty my life on Earth was by having a good ol’ time in this fantasy world.” When this series started, I expected it to be completely mediocre, but it surprised me with its character work and sense of humor.

The story follows an overworked Japanese salaryman in his thirties, who works at one of those Japanese companies that require you to wear a suit and tie, and to die inside. Wanting to remain human, he exercises his architectural talents in an online VR game. His buildings are so popular that they’re regularly used as backgrounds for wedding proposals by the kind of people who would propose to someone in a video game. Anyway, the godess of love or some shit contacts the protagonist through the game and offers to send him to a new world where he may be able to have a good ol’ time.

He finds himself in your average isekai fantasy world, based on Central Europe during the post-medieval period, but including monsters and sentient fantasy races of the Tolkienesque variety plus beast people. His abilities back on Earth have been turned into vastly overpowered skills: previously a crafty fellow, he’s now the most talented builder person around. He has also access to a warehouse-size inventory in some private dimension, along with the kind of Minecraft powers that allow him to dig through a mountain easily. Although initially he’s a bit freaked out, and tries to remove the VR headset in front of confused fantasy people, he quickly gets used to a life that won’t involve working at a Japanese company.

Like in many other isekai, first cute girl he meets, who is usually the first female at all he meets, becomes the intimate option. In this case, with the guy in his thirties even though his new body doesn’t suggest it, they establish a sort of father-daughter relationship with no incestual undertones. Because she helped him, a broke guy with no ID, to get around in that new world, he imprints on her (or is it the other way around?), and is happy to follow her on her adventures as long as he has the opportunity to make her comfortable. By that I mean stuff like cooking restaurant-grade food for her every day, or producing entire houses out of his inventory whenever they need to take a rest in the wild.

Still, she doesn’t fall for him, which may have to do with the fact that she has a questionable relationship with the older female receptionist at the adventurers’ guild; this girl even calls “dates” her outings with the receptionist. Oh well, can’t fix nature.

Plenty of the plot so far involves the protagonist wanting to enjoy a slow life in this new fantasy world, only for people to take notice of him because of shit like stacking the processed meat of eleven orcs on the guild receptionist’s desk, or earning about a year of his previous salary in Japan with a single quest. Soon enough he attracts the attention of the local duke, and a troublesome party of adventurers.

This story is fun, and I like to have fun.

Review: Joou Heika no Isekai Senryaku, by Eiri Iwamoto

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

Four stars. The title translates to “Her Majesty’s Swarm” (supposedly; I don’t see the word “isekai” in there).

Our protagonist is an eighteen-year-old Japanese recluse who spends her days playing a strategy game set in a fantasy world. She’s particularly fond of the evil faction, one focused on “zerg rushing” with a horde of spiderlike monsters. Anyway, one random day, she either dies or just arbitrarily gets transported to a fantasy world (all these isekai stories are blending together).

She finds herself as the real-life queen of a horde of spiderlike monsters, the same kind that she commanded to victory in the game. They operate as a hive mind, and she quickly realizes that with herself set at the middle of that web of consciousnesses, she may end up dissolving into the collective.

After an encounter with some local elves, she discovers that this world has never seen monsters like the ones she commands: she hasn’t only been transported to a fantasy world, but to one where her own game faction doesn’t belong.

What should be her goal in this fantasy world, where she has no business existing? She figures that she may as well focus on the same goal she pursued in the game: absolute victory. But is such a victory palatable when she’s going to look into the eyes of the people she’s supposed to slaughter?

The protagonist struggles to retain her humanity by dividing the world into victims and oppressors. She refuses to unleash her horde of spider monsters into someone merely because they annoyed her or because it would be convenient. However, one day, a neighboring country makes the regrettable mistake of fucking with her, and for the spider queen who increasingly cares less about losing herself to the collective insectlike hunger, that means one thing: a genocidal war that won’t spare even children.

Apart from the protagonist, the only other main person the reader could connect with is the queen’s spawned hero unit, her sole knight, a devoted half-woman half-spider who is more than eager to slaughter every single living thing in her path as long as her queen demands it. I found her quite enjoyable.

This story, determined to pull a “downfall” kind of arc for her initially normal protagonist, pushes us to empathize with the hapless human inhabitants of the kingdom that finds itself in the crosshairs of the horde. They’re a zealous bunch that believe themselves under the protection of a god of light, and they actually are, since their higher-ups can summon angels at will; they nonchalantly show up from the heavens to try to save the day. While bigoted against any infidel and heretic, their perspective allows the reader to feel the absolute horror of facing an onslaught of previously unknown monsters rushing through your lands, consuming everything and everyone in their path.

I found the ending quite haunting. In general, this shortish story (around forty chapters) left me feeling a bit ill, I don’t know if it was the constant gore, the extreme hopelessness of it all, that something I ate didn’t agree with my stomach, or a combination of such factors. I do recommend this story, but I vastly prefer isekai in which the protagonist has a good time without attempting to ruin the world in the process.

Ongoing manga: Grand Dwarf, by Saito Naotake

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

Four stars.

The story introduces a seventy-year-old master machinist who’s on his last leg as a professional, having to deal with corporate punks that intend him to accept unreasonable conditions.

He suspects he’ll end up on the streets soon, old and alone. How would he spend the rest of his life? Thankfully he doesn’t need to worry about it, because he suffers a heart attack and dies.

This story is one of the apparently millions of isekai out there. What’s an isekai, you ask? For whatever reason, the Japanese created a genre based on the notion of a Japanese person getting transported to a fantasy world, where they’re bound to enjoy a cooler new life. I don’t know what that says about Japan, but in my case, I love stories about exploring bizarre new worlds filled with colorful people and monsters, going along with a protagonist generally so overpowered that they might conquer the world if such were their preference.

Our seventy-year-old protagonist finds himself as a young man with vastly enhanced skills related to his decades of experience as a machinist, allowing him to surpass even the fabled Dwarves of legend (hence the title). For whatever reason, his workshop also gets isekai-d along with him; that’s a new one. Anyway, first fantasy person he comes across is a one-handed, scarred gal who was dismissed from a party of adventurers (a relatively common trope). A healer by trade, she has no choice but to train her offense if she’s to honor her late mom, one of the former heroes of this world.

The protagonist, charmed by her determination, asks her to lend him her magic staff. She’s a pushover, so she accepts. A couple of weeks later she finds out that the master mechanist has turned her staff into a futuristic gun capable of one-shotting the worst monsters around, and is even capable of healing for some reason. The protagonist’s overpowered skills allow him to gather and process the most hardcore materials easily, which he proceeds to turn into weapons of a quality that his new world has never seen.

One of the main joys of this manga series, apart from its art style and character designs, involves following a self-assured, old Japanese artisan that’s having the time of his life in this fantasy playground, to the dismay of the locals that he ends up dragging to face monstrous horrors.

Character work is quite strong so far, with a couple of redemption arcs that I enjoyed a lot. As in plenty of if not most other isekai, the protagonist and his team are gearing up to kill the demon king, whatever it’s called in this story. I don’t recall having actually seen such a feat achieved in any of the isekai I’ve read in the past few months, unless the story starts with the protagonist having already won. Oh, well; joy’s in the ride.

I recommend this one if you enjoy peculiar protagonists, cool designs, and having fun.

Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, Pt. 8 (Poetry)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this short story (or novella) from the beginning (link here).

When I worked a nine-to-five at Zuatzu Business Park,
I spent the lunch breaks on a bench sanctuary
Nestled under a verdant canopy that provided shade.
I read technical books on website design and development,
Immersing myself in technique and precise logic
As I nourished my body with vending machine sandwiches.

A pair of stockinged legs halted next to my bench.
The woman offered a smile like a business card,
Radiating the composed confidence of an adult,
Though most people seemed older to me,
Whose clock had frozen in nineteen ninety-nine.

“Mind if I sit down?” she asked
As she claimed the space beside me.
I wondered where I knew her from,
But I didn’t; she worked as a legal advisor,
Negotiating contracts and handling disputes
At one of the legal firms housed in the business park.
During lunch breaks, her gaze had sought me out,
Perhaps drawn by the cold flame of my brooding,
A contrast to her life’s rigid rhythms.
Unprompted, she offered personal advice.
Upon discovering our shared roots in Irún,
She grinned as if that were a fact to celebrate.

Should I describe this woman in detail?
I will share with you, Izar, what she lacked:
Your cascade of caramel waves;
Your eyes, twin pools of chocolate;
Your crooked front teeth that flashed
Whenever your bubbly laughter burst forth;
Your restless passion.
Unlike you, she didn’t shine the brightest
Before the dark, shapeless backdrop.

Sharing that bench became a daily ritual.
She brought her homemade lunches:
Plastic containers stuffed with quinoa salad
Enriched by grilled chicken and chickpeas.
Cross-legged, she would puff on cigarettes
As she dissected headline legal battles,
Ranging from corporate scandals to civil rights,
To point out how she would have handled them.
She named and described her coworkers
So I could picture them like fictional characters.

She took advantage of crowded train rides
To gobble up the novels everybody recommended.
Eager to discuss their finer details with someone,
She coaxed me from the refuge of technical texts,
Challenging me to explore popular narratives
Like The Alchemist and The Da Vinci Code.
Apart from fiction, she consumed self-help books,
Seeking to strengthen her mindset
Cultivating virtues and combating vices.

Nobody else allowed her to ramble on,
And she felt her every word sank into me
Like pebbles rippling a pond.
She admitted that recently, in her free time,
After coming across an intriguing article,
She had yearned to share it with me.

She invited me to grab coffee the coming Saturday.
In Constitution Square, we sat at an outdoor café
Packed with patrons enjoying their leisure.
The glossy metal tables glistened in the sunlight,
That also glinted off the wrought-iron balconies
Of the apartment buildings enclosing the square.
The robust stone archways cast elongated shadows
Onto the tiled pavement of the arcade.

Immersed in the hum of overlapping conversations
Broken by bursts of laughter from nearby youths,
I sipped my café con leche, and bit into a croissant,
As I stared at her opaque sunglasses,
At that face aglow in the sun’s warmth,
At those strands of hair lit like fine gold.

To meet me, she had donned a pleated skirt,
A crisp white blouse, and a burgundy jacket
That matched her glossed lips.
I wondered what they would taste like.
Later that evening, I found out:
They tasted of cigarette.

Those soft lips, our tongues probing each other,
They bestowed on me a respite,
A detachment from reality and grief,
As if resuscitated from a surgery’s anesthesia.
But a few breaths later, the truth awaiting
At the periphery of consciousness
Flooded back in like tons of icy water
Through a dam’s drain hole.

Izar, I felt the shape of your body in my arms,
The scent of your hair tickling my nose,
As if we were lying on your childhood bed
Like in days long gone, when the sun’s rays
Still warmed and nourished our skins,
When we imagined the foreign sights
We would behold together.
Those sensations, stored in my neurons
Away from conscious recollection,
Vanished again like a dream upon waking,
Despite my struggling to cling to them.

I boarded the train bound for our hometown
With this woman whose saliva I had tasted.
She sat beside me, and grabbed my hand.
“This feels right, doesn’t it?”
The tracks clacked steadily,
The landscape blurred past.
Her breath brushing against my ear,
She kept whispering to her patient listener
As I slipped deeper and deeper
Down the well of my mind.

In Irún, after she and I parted ways,
I was ascending the sloping Pintor Berrueta Street,
Trudging in the gloom under overhanging stories,
When my internal stasis cracked.
I found myself holding onto the rusted security grille
Of a closed storefront, a bankrupt shop,
While my gut writhed, twisted, and churned
With an acidic, gnawing guilt.

The duty of preserving your memory,
Alongside the promises made,
Had convinced me to keep breathing.
Yet, I tainted these lips that had kissed yours
By smearing them with someone else’s molecules.
Didn’t I know that any contact with another
Would corrupt, contaminate, and diminish
The fading traces of you?

During lunch breaks, occupying that bench,
Hadn’t I looked abandoned and broken?
Couldn’t this woman tell, at a single glance,
That I only contained undigested pain?

Like a stray dog, I had wagged my tail
At the first hand offering kindness,
At a stranger that had become invested
In a damaged boy unable to care for himself.
Her warmth was akin to a camping lantern
Illuminating a spot in a pitch-black forest
Where I could huddle and wait for dawn.
Izar, a part of me yearned to trust,
To let my defenses crumble.
I couldn’t stomach a whole life doomed to be
A sun-starved seedling trapped in concrete.

Five minutes away from La Concha Beach,
At a one-star hotel: two single beds pushed together,
Draped in pristine white linens,
The pillows patterned with white roses.

I hoped to disappear in ecstasy,
But once, I had ventured too near a star,
Leaving my skin blistered, my soul charred.
After that woman and I fucked,
With my sperm confined inside a condom,
She padded to the bathroom for a smoke,
And I wet the white roses with tears.

Alone in my childhood bedroom,
I flipped my sketchbook swiftly to a blank page.
Armed with my collection of colored pencils,
I focused on scraping the virgin sheet with graphite
To render a facsimile of my memory:
A halo of sunlight bathed her tousled locks.
The reflective surfaces of her sunglasses,
Mirroring the expanse of Constitution Square,
Concealed the sharp, analytical gaze beneath.
Her tender lips, slightly parted in contemplation,
Were embellished with burgundy lipstick.
She wore a white blouse, the first button undone,
And a jacket that draped elegantly off her shoulders.
Hunched over, I drew and shaded every crease.

The following Monday, on that secluded bench,
As she grumbled, vexed about a colleague’s errors
That forced her, yet again, to pick up the slack,
I kept thumbing the elastic strap of the file folder
Cradling, along with the portrait I had drawn,
Comic strips, relics of happier days with you.
When a pause beckoned, I cleared my throat.
“Listen, have you ever been into comics?”
She glanced sideways, took a drag of her cigarette,
And with a practiced flick, cast off the ash.
“What’s that about comics now? Please,
I’ve outgrown childish nonsense.”

My blood cooled abruptly.
I lowered the file folder beside me.
I had been chosen, indeed, by a prim lady
Fitting of her role in this world.

One afternoon, when I returned home from work,
I collapsed onto my bed, eager to recover from the toll
That forced smiles and hollow exchanges had exacted.
As my every fiber trembled, undone by exhaustion,
My cellphone vibrated in its pocket,
Its chirrup evoking dread.
This woman wanted to listen to my voice,
Chatter about trivial stuff, or bore me with legal jargon,
Even though I yearned for nothing more
Than to be left alone.

Izar, had I ever resented your presence?
Ours was a shared solitude:
As we nurtured our private language,
We played games we both enjoyed,
We read stories that entertained us both,
We encouraged each other’s dreams.
Now, in the lawyer’s gaze, I felt evaluated,
As if she catalogued my screw-ups,
Every flaw, every deficiency,
Storing them away for future indictment.
After mere hours in her company,
I required some leeway to breathe fully.
Still, I appreciated her more than anyone
Ever since you rode away for the last time.

Raindrops drummed on my umbrella
While the woman and I strolled arm-in-arm
Along a rain-soaked, glistening promenade.
Under a heavy, slate-colored sky,
White-capped waves of the restless sea
Crashed relentlessly against the breakwater.
On the opposite shore, past a line of buildings,
Rose the tree-covered Mount Igueldo,
Capped by the tower of its amusement park.
I smelled fresh rain, salt, and seaweed.

Rainy days thinned the membrane
Separating me from that final ride
To which my dreams hurled me
Whenever I needed to repent.
I felt an echo of that wet, frigid wind
That had etched itself into my bones.

To my regret, to my resentment, I opened up:
I confided in this lawyer about you, my Izar,
Who on a rainy night had crashed her Aprilia
And bled out on a lonely slope by the highway.
I confessed to squandering a year as a recluse,
That ever since, I struggled to relate to others
And their delusions of a just and ordered world.
I spoke of the weight of each day
Like an endless march up a steep incline.
To survive, I had erected a fortress of barbwire,
Encircling the raw viscera of my grief.

How many times have I berated myself
For voicing my pain aloud?
Did I hope this woman would encourage me
To guard and cherish your memories?
You know, Izar, you had spoiled me:
Whenever I handed over my pain,
You had cradled it against your chest.

This woman’s thoughts were filtered,
And those deemed offbeat, discarded.
But who else could I blame except myself?
I had accepted a simulacrum of love,
One lacking the fire of passion, of dreams,
And the sense that we were meant to be,
Like a Macedonian general leading his troops,
Knowing that a glorious destiny awaited
At the fringes of the known world.

Those locks whipped by the stiff breeze,
That profile fixated on the heaving sea.
She asked if I had attended therapy,
As if I could want anybody to exorcise you.
I swallowed the taste of bile.
“I cannot be fixed.”

Unlike those who dispense their hearts freely,
Unburdened by ties and promises,
If anybody shared their core with me,
I would preserve an echo of its beats.
I was a miser hoarding bits and pieces
Of what used to make me whole,
But I had grown tired; I couldn’t stand alone.
That lawyer, a level-headed lady,
Had invested in a lost teenager, an invalid.
Yet, I never loved her. How could I have?
My patched-up heart treasured the frozen fire
Of my girlfriend, whom I would never see again.
We had promised to love each other forever,
And I will.

The woman approached my secluded bench
With her earlobes and lips bare,
With her hair tied back in a hurried ponytail,
Loose strands escaping the bond.
She wore a pale-blue, wrinkled blouse that clashed
With her earthy-green skirt of textured cotton.
The odor of cigarette clung to her.

Beside me, slumped on the bench,
She toyed with her purse’s clasp,
Her gaze darting away to avoid mine.
I pressed her, “What’s wrong?”
Guessing that she intended to break up.
Instead, she pulled out a pregnancy test.

My eyes glazed at that pair of blue lines.
For how long had I known her? A year?
She asked, stripped of pretense,
“If I decide to keep the baby,
Are you going to leave?”
With all the resolve I could muster,
I hugged her to my chest.
“No, I won’t leave you.”
“Do you actually love me?”
“Yes, I do.”

Ropes, chains, shackles, zip-ties,
Meat hooks impaled into my flesh;
A child would anchor me away
From razor blades, pill bottles,
Bridges, cliffs, and incoming trains,
From the urge to leap into the dark
And find you there.

Author’s note: today’s songs are “Same Thing” by Islands, “17” by Youth Lagoon, and “Todavía una canción de amor” by Los Rodríguez (also this live version).

If you enjoy my free verse poetry, I have three books worth of it yet to be self-published. Check it out.

My old Re:Zero fanfiction

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificialLeave a comment

This morning I woke up to a surprise: someone from the US had hit about fifteen chapters of Re:Zero fanfiction I wrote back in 2019-2021, that virtually never receives hits. I assume this stranger read some of it as well. That got me to reread a few chapters again, and I remembered that I had an absolute blast writing this story. Some of the funniest scenes I have ever giggled through appear there (most others in my ongoing novel).

Why on Earth was I writing Re:Zero fanfiction anyway? Back in 2018 I had released two books of novellas in Spanish, my native language, but nobody cared. Although I sent them to a few contests, I got no reaction. That was disheartening, even more so because I had come to a turning point of sorts in my creative life: for years I had only read, watched, and played stuff in English, and I didn’t connect with the material either produced in or translated to my native language. I resented plenty of translators, because they injected lots of local colloquialisms into other people’s works, and in general I simply didn’t enjoy the vast majority of the stuff that Spanish-speaking people created. To this day, the only album in Spanish that I listen to semi-regularly is Los Rodríguez’s Palabras más, palabras menos (that I think is fantastic).

I no longer consumed material nor thought, for the most part, in the only language in which I could become proficient enough. That surely killed any hopes of writing original works in English, as well as trying to write seriously in my native language.

Around that time, GPT-3 was impressing the few people in the know. Most civilians only interacted with it through middleware like a website that used GPT as a director of “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type narratives, and it worked quite well for it even then, mainly because it wasn’t censored yet, or at least not remotely to the current extent. I won’t mention the website, because it ended up betraying its users.

I recall an instance in which I, as the protagonist, was attempting to have a normal conversation with a supporting character, only for that character (a female, no less) to blurt out something about scratching her balls, or something to that effect. You never quite knew what sort of material you would be presented with, which made “playing through stories” using GPT-3 very entertaining.

Cue Re:Zero. It was a series of Japanese light novel series that I came to know through the popular anime adaptation released in 2016. I’ve been a life-long lover of Japanese fiction, particularly manga and anime, and they excel at creating fantastic, colorful worlds with competing factions, weird races involving their own peculiarities, and above all, a sense of adventure and camaraderie that has been lost in the West, where our storytellers have been exchanged for political activists. In Re:Zero, a teenager named Natsuki Subaru gets isekai-d to a fantasy world featuring multiple races/species with weird powers, warring medieval factions, bizarre mythical monsters, etc. As the kicker that worked for me, Subaru was a bright, cheerful kid who tried his best to help the people he cared about, only to end up killed over and over: he has the power to reset time whenever he dies, which he does often, in horrible ways. The concept of solving problems through dying agonizingly, having to repeat the same sequences when nobody around you knows you have already lived through them, remains fascinating to me, and I wish I had come up with it.

I figured, why not have a good time playing through that narrative relying on GPT-3 to move things along? For the first eight or so chapters, it didn’t work very well: I relied on GPT-3 too much, which made the narrative quite incoherent, and different from the original (to the extent that I failed to reproduce introductory sequences whose absence ended up biting me in the ass later). By chapter 9 or so, I started taking the narrative seriously, using GPT-3 to spice up the dialogues or come up with intriguing details I could explore.

In my hands, the protagonist, Natsuki Subaru, turned into a wild, semi-deranged pervert, a masochist who openly welcomed at times getting killed even to get off, and who entangled the hapless fantasy characters in some of the most ridiculous and funny dialogues I’ve ever written; when I reread some of them earlier today, they made me laugh. The result was a joyous romp, as far as I’m concerned.

In the end, I abandoned the series when I was about to finish chapter 66, because by then, I had already read the ending of that arc as the original author had written it; I disliked it quite a bit, and it had diverged so much from what I had set up in my own fanfiction, that by then it I might have as well written my own stuff in English, now that I was confident enough. And so I did: lots of free-verse poetry, short stories, a novel that I self-published (My Own Desert Places), and a three and a half books-long novel I’m still writing. So I’d say that writing Re:Zero fanfiction was a great idea.

If you’re curious, and you can tolerate incorrect punctuation, some verb tenses used incorrectly, and in most chapters, paragraphs not separated correctly (for whatever reason, I thought it looked better), then check them out at the end of this page: my novels.

For some specific chapters that I remember fondly:

  • When Subaru and his demon companion try to ascertain the nature of a flying whale with the help of a bunch of idiotic travelers (chapter 11)
  • When Subaru, dismayed about his inability to stop an apocalypse, decides to mooch off an opposing household while trapping himself in a loop of debauchery and suicide (chapter 16)
  • When Subaru drags a cat-girl amputee through a warzone (chapter 24)
  • When Subaru disappoints everybody in his fantasy life to exercise his suicide powers (chapter 33)
  • When Subaru meets a dead witch and ends up drinking her spit (chapter 42)
  • When Subaru confronts his troubled past in a witch’s simulation (chapter 46)
  • When Subaru goes through a sultry encounter with a contract killer who gets off on disemboweling people (chapter 50)
  • When Subaru deludes himself into believing that his sexual act with a half-elf princess was a witch’s simulation (chapter 52)
  • When Subaru annoys their senior servant to an extent that causes him serious physical issues (chapter 53)
  • When Subaru and their demonic senior servant travel back to the mansion to confront a German lioness (chapter 55)

There’s lots of other chapters I would have mentioned, but editing them to space their paragraphs is quite annoying.

On writing: Conflict

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Do you have a killer concept, a promising premise, a protagonist worth a damn, a goal worth pursuing, and meaningful stakes? Then you should ensure that your characters won’t blaze through your plot unimpeded. Don’t allow them to tell you who they are: force them to prove themselves.

A warning, though: don’t inject unnecessary conflict into your story; Western narratives have been plagued with such for decades. If you can remove an instance of conflict without crippling some plot point, and that conflict isn’t funny, then drop it.

  • Figure out what your characters want most, then put the things they fear most in their way.
  • Is there enough conflict to sustain a story? Freewrite possible conflicts based on what you know about your story.
  • How is a character who goes after a desire impeded, and how does that force him to struggle?
  • What is the central (outwardly visible) conflict in the story? Who or what is preventing your protagonist from reaching her goal?
  • What opposing goals of other people or entities in the story provide conflict?
  • How is the drama the product of the values and ideas of the individuals going into battle?
  • How is the force of opposition present, and well defined?
  • How is the concept tied in with the central conflict of the story?
  • Is there at least one actual human being opposed to what the hero is doing?
  • How do you tailor your conflict to create the highest stakes possible for your protagonist?
  • How does the conflict force the protagonist to take action, whether it’s to rationalize it away or actually change?
  • How does the force of opposition allow the protagonist to prove his worth?
  • Test the big problem regarding how it impacts your protagonist’s arc, either making him change or making him worse.
  • How are at least two constituents weighed against each other in this story?
  • What unresolved tension in the story would make the reader want to see what happens next?
  • How is the conflict stress-inducing and/or painful?
  • How quickly can you introduce the central conflict element in your story?
  • How do circumstances beyond your protagonist’s control fling her out of her easy chair and into the fray?
  • Can you put your hero in the last place he wants to be?
  • What is the biggest obstacle preventing your protagonist form reaching her goal? How can you make it much worse? How can it push her into despair and hopelessness before the climax?
  • What strong inner conflict is your protagonist dealing with? Come up with two things she must choose between, both unthinkable. Tell how that showcases your novel’s theme.
  • Who challenges the views, actions, and beliefs of your protagonist in a way that involves your thematic elements? Make their opinions even stronger with higher stakes and greater conflict.
  • How would this story be considered a war?
  • Can you add emotional friction? Competing egos? Status struggles? Clashes of styles and personalities?
  • Can you come up with at least five minor, different conflict components you can add to your plot that exacerbate the central conflict of your novel?
  • What conflicting, multi-layered emotions hidden beneath the surface could be at play?
  • How do the conflicts in the novel warrant strong reaction?
  • What big stuff goes wrong with your heroes’ plan?
  • Can your protagonist’s external goal be in conflict with his internal goal?
  • Do you bring in the threat of a clear, present and escalating danger, not a vague facsimile thereof?
  • How are the impediments your protagonist faces potentially too great to be conquered?
  • What can make the goal more dangerous, more impossible to be reached?
  • How are you mean to your protagonist? How do you hold her soles to the fire, even when she starts to squirm?
  • How would this premise generate external conflicts and twists that would bring the characters with things about themselves that they’d rather not see?
  • Can you make the conflict bigger, much worse? List some possibilities and their outcomes.
  • Spend time thinking about the central conflict element in your story and all the different ways it can raise ugly heads to threaten and upend your protagonist. Try to pit as many things against him as you can, and push the stakes so that what he values most is at risk of being lost.
  • Whatever your hero has to do, make it hard. Every task for your hero must be difficult.