Overview

requiem represents five decades of poetic writing with many frequent and extended periods of silence -the poetic thoughts of a boy, adolescent & adult. The poems highlight my experiences in the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, and Latin America, as well as those solely in the geography of my mind. It's a multisubject attempt at art. It considers many themes: fantasy, love & sensuality, death, magic, darkness, our existential reality, travel, places, silly topics, language, time, family, and others. Why did I choose requiem as the title? To answer this question, we must first consider the following: What is a poet? Two creatures in one: the human & the poetic being. These creatures have two things in common: birth & death. The life that unfolds between these two biological events inspires, touches, scents, tunes, colors, and seasons their words. To feel, touch, smell, hear, see & taste the essence of their words, all we have to do is read or hear them sincerely and honestly, without agenda, allowing them to rapture and possess us. More often than not, this bipartite -yet melded- being suffers both biological death and poetic death simultaneously. On the other hand, some poets are fortunate. Their poetic deaths occur years, decades, centuries, or sometimes millennia after their biological deaths. There is still another group of poets whose poetic deaths dawn upon them while still breathing, years or decades before their biological deaths -hence, the chosen title: requiem. Upon our poetic death, as poetic rigor mortis sets in, we simply wait for biological death and the comfort of being absorbed into nothingness. However, there is another path. We simply move on to our second poet. This subsequent poet becomes our new poetic voice and expresses our aesthetic interests for the remainder of our biological lives. I let my first poet die after a half-century of existence. The creature you're reading now is nothing more than a poetic ghost. The first poet no longer feels, touches, smells, hears, sees, nor tastes this world. I let him die, and he chose to die. The first poet's death arrived with requiem. The book you read originally had many, many more pages than you currently hold, but many poems suffered the same fate as the first poet. What you have now must suffice. And, whether a second poet comes to life is still on the balance. I wonder... Will the second poet choose to be born at all given what happened to the first? The second part of the book contains poems that I personally translated and/or modified from Spanish to English. I attempted to salvage much of the syntax and verse construction of the originals -as much as English would allow. At times, I let inspiration have its way. For this blatant poetic crime, please accept an apology. I must admit that the sincerity of my apology is highly questionable; but this trait is not so grave as to be unforgivable. As I began the process of translation, I sometimes strayed and ventured into the realm of creative modification. Thus, some verses are a version or nuance of the Spanish lines, not literal translations. The poems' Spanish-language origin and traits can make some poems an awkward read, some more than others; but this allows readers to experience some of their authentic, Spanish-language essence. For your information, the original Spanish titles appear in parentheses below the English titles. Please understand that much is lost when translating or modifying poems from their original language to another -from wordplay to rhyme, structure, smoothness, tightness, and beauty. These poems will soon be available in my Spanish-language poetry book titled post mortem. Finally, some poems were written when I was an adolescent or young adult; and naturally, they reflect it. They were poems written in a different world, at a different time, and for a more limited audience. _ _ _ Poetry Produced By A Human for Humans. NO AI ...

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