A DANCE OF CHANCES

1.

 
At six, or precisely later,
when dawn
home in on us,
our dreams will stop levitating
from our deadened senses,
like exhausted najas
crawling down
a rickety crate.
 
The fiercest figments of our lips,
after some hasted debate
shall recede as well, together with
the airy nature of heavier things,
leaving our bodies as they wake up
still mesmerized:
they’ve known their lows,
they’ve known their highs.
 
O life!, life bigger than life itself!
Life so far contrived
of so many unreasons and so many wonders,
life full of gags and full of dramas.
And twists of luck and false fresh starts
as in the cheap dealings between
a lonely jack of broken hearts
and a diamond-jaded queen.
 
 
2. 

 
Meanwhile, estranged from any sense of blame,
in the grip of an unabashed absinth nonchalance,
why don’t we escape not a moment too soon
into the next door room and join the dancers
who profit from their trances to take in one more sip and glance into
a remote preserve from the yesteryears before the age of wagers,
yearning and burning for some long-termed though undeserved second-hand ignorance?
 
Where the bottles and the glasses shall accompany us trembling,
the dealers, escorts and waiters, taking their stances,
the bouncers in spades, perfectly trained to appear to look askance,
the club bartenders, stirring and shaking,
the dead and the handicapped, raising and then relapsing,
the light through cleft, winking and wavering,
all of those eyes all around us like mirrors multiplying and enhancing
the high stakes we have dared to have chanced.
 
She would always say men see just black and white and shade,
women did see colors, is this why I still cannot say,
if her hair was black or red that day? So let's return
and check on the returns our bets may have earned us:
28's good number, but an alternate black outcome might tear us asunder.
Can you make out method in the rambling utterances of a mumbler? Then, what might be the odds today for melting heat or pouring rain?
What the odds for hail or an early frost?
And how about the chances for the season to start again?

 
3.

 
A man of unflinching will
will resist the weather.
A man, like a tree, is to be
told by the features of his fruits
(if not by the squalor
of his best pair of boots...).
 
But what if some unsung December,
resurrecting from its embers,
propped with anger, decides
to unhinge time, so that mid-summer
loses its temper, bitterer and drier
then we possibly could have remembered it,
bitterly biting off the very rest of his crop?
 
A method, that is probably
just the sort of algorithm we needed, but if even
that is not to be delivered, maybe an extra dose of whisky
(would you please?) could make a killing. For how else, after being
so far teased by events beyond justification and yet fulfilled in anticipation,
could one be stopped feeling tempted from reading
between the lines and habits, in the wake of gestures and words of wisdom,
a law that had better keep hidden?

 
4.

 
She was in her late twenties,
in the heyday of her beauty,
too uptight to take life so seriously,
too callous to indulge in new, impervious things,
all the more sophisticated to give in
to feelings of delicate sophistry.
 
Her husband, a well-bred
young gentleman, of fine figure
and an extra set of supernumerary wisdom teeth,
was the very sum
of all marital vices and virtues
a man of her class
should earn or possess.
 
Why then would the lady dump him for a fallen and ridiculous
aging romeo? And I insisted, I tell you so,
I confess I did even kneel and beg her, till the tears began to roll.
Many a friend shook my hand, said those same words
we are supposed to voice moved by both compassion
and the pleasure in the other people's throes.
Hence, self-confidence gradually watered down and let me see light,
dawning on me the fact that the jeux were already faits.


5.

  
A pale crystal chandelier, plundered from some unearned
eviction auction sale, scatters a swirl of light sherds
over the herds of penniless gamblers, a stock of self-proclaimed
anglers, only poor daredevils in action playing out their parts,
on behalf of the very excellence of the state of the art,
and sets out to drilling with their shrilling yells
right through the bull's eye in their dulling eyes, as if only meant
to wreave havoc on their just as well overburdened nerve cells.

Moles care to hold hoaxes and bouts at bay,
but drinking to the very brink of inconvenience
an outlived specimen of the first round clientele,
a sort of chain-joker, has yet some flat ones to crack,
before the waiter brings him the check.
And it is like this every and each morning,
as first you are told, and later testimony.
 
In the vermillion wall a venetian mirror glimpses us awry,
like an absent-minded passer-by
that goes past us in a hurry.
Opposite, a floating watch, jealous of its twin,
sulks and takes to humming,
like a snoring moon in a tropical sultry sky:
time prepares for its hit and running,
time prepares to be caught red-handed and burn us in the end.
 

6. 

 
Eventually, only later than they should,
over the lawn and fences,
over the numb vigilance of our inattentive senses,
ghosts of all genres and kins
suddenly begin to surge in,
looming all around the gloomy whereabouts,
the less nonsensical in their appeal,
even the more ghastly real.
 
And, at the close of play,
what was lost, what was gained?
Why could I ever have thought, against all the odds,
that I still stood a chance?
For tell me how is fatality ever to be prevented?
Maybe all had been already lost
even before we began it.
 
O life!, life bigger than life itself!
Life so far contrived of so many unreasons and so many wonders,
life full of gags and full of dramas.
And so many lies that once unveiled, were revealed unforetold gold,
as this ring his hand renders back in, after having finding out made out of tin,
but which, in the end, was truly composed
of the dearest substance of all: for all what it was worth
was only glowing hope.


7.
 

And yet one must resign to his luck
and to his misfortune all the same,
and so take on both his bloom
and his doom,
one must, I repeat, in the end,
repent his very repentance.
And so purged of all scourge that make up
the human condition (if there is such),

pretend not to see his stakes
dropped all around the ground,
recollecting he is bound to bend and collect
his fruits wherever they may fall,
facing the faces, smiling at strangers,
frowning as always on the usually frowning clouds,
and then finally retreat, after all.
 
And as I listen to the morning telling the tolls of time,
I question why time so rich of hours robbed us of ours,
performing its unfailingly uniform
tick-tacking, tack-ticking, as if preparing for its flicking.
Hey Sir, per chance, beyond any bluff at hand,
what is the genuine chance of still earning some grands?
And would you mind if I dreamt of some,
long overdue and numb transcendence?