INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION "Day's Night" By Jorge Reyes

Who wrote these poems?

Once upon a time, about three years ago, I fell in love with a stranger and a stranger fell in love with me. And, once upon a time, this time unlike fairy-tale beginnings, the repercussions of the disastrous break-up had devastating effects, more than I ever bargained for. Today, looking back, I wonder if what I went through had not been an eerie nightmare; as if it had never happened. How this dream started and how it ended, you’ll soon find out as my story unfolds in these poems. It will unfold soon.

I met this knight in shiny armor at a club in Miami called Pump, an after-hour club that shortly thereafter went out of business. It was here that my life changed, at least taking a different course.

To most of us, three years is like a lifetime; and it may be, but to me it is a part of my present tense. Often, even now, I still close my eyes and I still see myself dancing to that trance music I love so much, house and tribal music, music that awakens my soul to living. The atmosphere at the club that night was intense (clubs that cater to an after-hour clientele is not for lightweights). Pump was edgy, raw, visceral; the music was hard-pounding music; bacchanalian music, pagan in nature, jam-packed with men and women defying what lies beyond those closely-monitored, tightly-guarded exit doors opening to the empty streets of an early Sunday morning in South Beach.

Unbeknown to me, as I was dancing someone was observing me with a great deal of intensity. Every dance move I made was being scrutinized by a stranger, a person whom I’d only heard from by others but had never met. Suddenly, this stranger grabbed me by the arm, looked me over and asked, “Where have you been all these years?”

I opened my eyes slowly. I laughed, taken back by the complimentary but pedestrian nature of the assertive question. Letting the moment sink in, I smiled, laughed nervously. And slowly, oh, so slowly, I opened my eyes and saw a face I’ll never forget. Thank you, I said. We chatted. We danced a bit. In less than fifteen minutes, we went home….

What a night and what a day that immediately followed! But most importantly, what beautiful days and nights which followed! Days that, at first, fused into weeks filled with passionate love-making, raw sex and, yes, fear at some level. It seemed too good to last. For the first time, ever, passions were awakened in me that were unlike anything I’d felt before. I felt lustful. I felt jealous. I felt compassionate. So many emotions, really. And then, towards the end, I felt the opposite: resignation and rejection and disappointment and fear and anger. Anger. Lots of that.

This book of poems, Day’s Night, is a book of horror of sorts. Mostly, it is the horror I lived after the relationship I had idealized turned hollow, shallow even violent. Written mainly in three months (mostly from October 2002-January 2003), these poems now as I read them seem so alien to me, though still able to shake me from my sense of self. Still baffled by the fact that I wrote these poems with such venom, the stranger I met is like me, another stranger.

♣

Day’s Night, a fitting title stolen right out from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, is a collection of poetry loosely connected to love’s manifold effects. Of course, as published they deal with and open greater vistas which far surpass love loosely defined. Mainly, I think, these poems deal with a troubled mind lost to itself; a troubled man lost to himself; a lost world going to chaotically for my own comprehension. The only thing I could do, short of killing myself, was to start from scratch, be born again. In many ways, I think I achieved that, though not with any satisfaction.

In these pages, you’ll read poems that are dark, often written in a state of complete and utter depression, at other times written with a spirited evocation; poems with an almost Gnostic bipolar belief in good and bad, life and death, nothing in between, and I chose mainly the darkness as oppose to its opposite, which is not surprising in the frame of mind I was. I myself was so unsure about what a day would be like without answers I’d ask myself, without seeing the person I loved, without anyone who could make some sense of my senseless situation. Which leaves me with an interesting question: again, who wrote these poems?

Love, of course, is known for its capacity to trigger the very best within you, or as it is often the case, if it fails, it is also known for its horrid revenge. Love is, after all, a tug of contradictions that pit an ideal against its very antithesis, reality. And in such war, one side wins, the other side loses. There are many expressions of love, from the passionate one, which is what I’m used to, to a more placid one, the platonic love, which is often masking something else: friendships, the love of family, even the love of ideals which, coincidentally, can also be passionate or inhumane.

Embroiled in this unexpected battle, all I was able to do was to write—just write. Day’s Night became my confessional, giving me some of my sanity back, answering some of my questions, making my metaphors much more authentic. If pain can be the muse to inspire some of the best writing, then I think that I became a better writer; definitely a more matured one; a person who, for the first time ever, became more conscious of the power of words, “words with roots,” to paraphrase Virginia Woolf. On another level, I became “the man of flesh and blood”, to paraphrase yet another writer, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.

Poems I admit, like much in our lives, can lie and deceive. That’s not necessarily bad, of course. Each of us sees and interprets the world differently, often seeking shields from wrenching pain with necessary lies. We dream. We imagine. We invent. And in that field of dreams, the nexus between fiction and reality becomes superfluous—each becomes the embodiment of a self; an entity; each becomes a field fused into one. Every lie beautifully told is a poem. A poem honestly written is a religion. And a religion, which is all poetry, is the flesh and blood of civilization, a way of life the world over, the spark in each of our eyes.

I often see myself the way I was then, about a year ago even: hurt, pained, and lost, very lost. The person who could have given me some answers as to what had happened, just some simple honesty nothing else, wasn’t there for me as it always happens in relationships that end on a bad note, nor did I want to such companionship-- not anymore, it was too painful and it was meaningless in the long-term. Typical of an artist who chooses the path of tragedy and not of comedy to make sense of the world, I chose pain for the short term, a period that extended to more than a year of personal mourning. The struggle I was feeling was within, it was personal, nothing else other than my own scorch and win strategy would do. And so, there I was: alone, frightened and screaming with such low-sounding whispers that only I heard them my. And so, I partied and wrote poetry; partied and wrote some more poetry; partied some more and wrote some more poetry. And in this potentially harmful journey, what I didn’t know is that I was slowly hurting myself.

Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote something that now speaks with double-truth to me: “we…don’t know our feeling’s shape,/ but only that which forms it from outside.” For me, what gave my feeling’s shape from the outside (at an after-hour club no less), was someone who came unbidden, by accident almost. But once it happened, once I was committed to a belief, I accepted it, I embraced it, I poured all my grief, all my broodings, all my best over it; which is why I don’t believe in those self-help books that guarantee happiness without letting you go under the skin of your nightmares.

Don’t despair. If love comes your way let it take over you, let it possess you, accept it and then live with its consequences. See where it leads you to, through what dark alleys of the soul or what regions of your unknown self it makes you tread on. You never know, you might like the place you’ll end up at after.

What is love, anyway? At what point does it unravel and instead of being an affirmation of life it becomes the pathology of a way of life? Frankly, I’m not sure. Love is almost always known for how it tethers under our feet, quicksand of dreams, than for what it should be, the complete surrendering of the self to another beautiful human being and unshakeable foundations it creates in each of our lives.

Now I can look back at my life and understand that my entire existence has mirrored my persistence to find love, to be loved, and to be, ultimately, a happy man. I can’t stop that search any more than I can stop breathing. Hence, like I’ve done, if love ever comes your way accept and embrace it. Don’t deny it.

These are my day’s nights, my gift to you. What started as an inconsequential passion and a lifestyle of recreational self-destruction, transformed me forever. Who would have known? I know I didn’t, much less expected. Let these oozing droplets of thick, glistening, gooey, infectiously sweet honey touch you, affect you. Let each drop heal you if necessary. As for me, I will travel back with you to that early morning of 2002 at that after-hour club I loved to go and where many of our problems began, where most of our problems ended, and where that trance music, music that enervates my soul, continues to beat with passion, with fear and with darkness—rebellious polymorphous darkness.

~~~

I wrote the first part of this introduction three years ago, when I was contemplating publishing these poems. For personal reasons, I shelved the manuscript hoping that those days would vanish. Wrong, again. I guess that some emotions are too powerful to forget. It may not happen all the time, but once is enough. And, sad to say, whatever emotional changes we undergo, those experiences mirror our entire lives. This, perhaps, was my defining moment to accept or be defeated. I had a choice to make, to live, but the process of forgiveness and personal transformation is a slow one. This very night, these poems are as metal-sharp as they were many nights ago.

Though I hate to admit it, the stranger who murdered me once, years ago, is a person I still look back upon, a person whom I think of at times and wonder… just wonder what it could have been had our lives been different. Fortunately for me, this was a love affair whose consequences will grow and mature within me not because of the bad circumstances surrounding it, but because of how I chose to carry on alone. From the many lanes I could have taken, this one made the difference that night at Pump, years, oh, so many years ago…

I wrote this introduction four years ago, almost a century it seems. Looking it over for publication, I'm still amazed that so much of it is true, and yet, so much of it is so alien to me. It is now four years later and my life is different from that guy who met another guy at a club called Pump, now a name of a club known to the very few. As for the stranger, I never saw that face, that smile or those eyes again. Not sure what I would do if I were to see those features again, that person again, but it is an idea that resides less and less within the echoes of my dimming memories, though never extinguished. No. Never that. And I guess that if there's any redemptive value in falling in love and, then, dealing with its consequences, it is this: that no matter what time and distance may bring to each of us, that no matter how one moves on and, ultimately, numb the pain, it never ceases to affect you and, in the end, it shapes in more ways than one the person you are today; the person you will be tomorrow.

Jorge Reyes

Miami, Florida 2007

You can read more about this topic in Reyes's blog by clicking: http://the-reyes-report.blogspot.com/2008/05/on-re-reading-ones-poems.html