http://slow.writerscafe.org/thecoldpoet The original writings of author G. Cedillo en-us Copyright 2026 WritersCafe.org 1775953069 WritersCafe.org RSS Generator 15 Magic involves caring quickly for one version of meaningbefore it becomes another. How fragile your flowers hangwrapped in white paper when, offered in a loose fistful grip, a flash of light, they become a transient bouquet of flames. The stage show’s assistant, too, sits in a chair .. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/2803569/ I shouldn’t be telling you this, but in our final yearof yet another disastrous reign, an outbreak spread over, in, and across every sentimental European nation state. The capital cities had decisions to makeabout how we sabotage ourselves in public spaces. They sent word around.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/2801175/ for Elizabeth, 2019Like handshakes at evening, we metwaiting for the clock to fall fast asleep or else ignore us. Those old seducers, they played the concert of the untouched instruments and without the usual electric wiring of tedious nerves. God blessthe water that sports over the p.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/2795550/ 1.An hour until showtime. What friends will later describeas puberal, the soft down of their hairlinesbecomes an experience all its own as they throb in their clothes and writhed in stadium seats, separately, but each tied to a fabric of incoherent saga.Soundscapes as vast as a snow confou.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/2789151/ 1.But our eyes dim as we look out and away.A scene whorls in front of us. We only acceptdeception before a curtain fall. Who really likes it?If only there were kind, constant actions runningthrough all our choices, past and present: silencesafter we argued, a door pressed between us, too uninte.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/2152393/ Pre-dawn like a long holiday stillness, I’d carry the dog to the car and findan open coffeehouse for a quick cupbefore dedicating myself to the roadfor you. The imprecise rituals we spoke in then, begging me nearly two hundred mileswith a moan you sent up in a southwest direction that’d .. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/2110029/ An often told joke goes like this: three ironworkers eat their lunch 800 ft. atop a New York City skyscrapercomplaining about the same meal day in and day out. All three men decide to jump. At the funeral, two wives wail and sob ‘if only I had known, I would have made himsomething different,&r.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/2044916/ What is a clock but another cheese grater hacking away at an infinite block of rich,fermented time? Can you imagine a world where that clock’s numbers sink downto nothingness and we feel no danger?Your mind gets the message but some worrying organ won’t cooperate. All our wonderful kitch.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/2006906/ Later when the moon’s sand illuminatesnight-whipped palm trees, streetlight interstices cut in glass, the morning’s full-size mirror not yet warm where we have rested, not quite outside of memory, but faroff with meaning, we lay in punishing silence. I wish I were close as all the hands .. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/2000784/  It’s beena day like a Wednesday and all dayit’s feltlike evening. No one’s come to flip theswitch on every unlit street lamp, yet. Evendamned cars are peaceful. It’s the wind,  this windin the public park as I lay againsta tr.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1974970/ 1.If I consume a decade of your life, it won't be as lonelya century. I’m certain not one person of the millionsthis city offers holds me in their thoughts, now. It’s cleansing, like photographs boxed in the attic. I am boxed away in the attic of your heart. My edgesyellowed, my lines so.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1961471/ Friend, if I heard you call my namemy body would break like scattering fish. There are owl’s wings opening and closing over our eyes when we think of the past. Carrying the years on your back for months now? I don’t want to open a fresh box of recriminations. Luckily, I finally heard of .. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1927572/ 1.After the strollers and wives left the park, the quiet track of a miniature train, and in the pond’s rushes swans resting on water, we climbed the empty amphitheater's hill, wooden pews and warm box lights chilling, we sat in the pressed grass, cagey, afraid someone may interrupt our innocen.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1824816/  Soft-core used to do the trick, sure. Now, you want sex. A comic sensibility is the short end of the stick. I’m sureyou want sex. Sometimes a punchto the face feels much more assured than always this wanting sex. Weed outthe a******s by experience. Too sureo.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1813075/ It’s 10:20 Houston time, moldy Wednesday night, not yet a week before Bastille Day, as people recover from long weekends, shop and recouplosses, the year 2016, crowds in here at the Wal-mart off 45 South and Waysidepicking up more cat food and an odd light bulb that’s been out from the d.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1800086/ 1.In your apartment, the mountain abbey, I woke up slower.I recovered, took the waters. Unwanted madman strolling in my robe across your perfumed spaces. I dreamt our life together, diseased mind, behind these curtainless windows.A dog’s bark genuinely distributes some restless energy.Naked bo.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1793902/ That’s what I wanted to say, then.Something about your bare back looking like the sun-flecked shoalsof a river I’d never seen,     whose banks were too broad a country to be silhouetted by one rippling bed.   That dark crease down the center,how it wavers l.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1781948/ Not the first Fourth without you, but the first Independence since we finally split apart, I remember because the weeks between messages grew like the anxiety you feel between a round’s fuse being painstakingly sparked then that sorrowful scream it sends up throughout the cold night's air befo.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1770573/ 1.I confess, I’ve always approached your body as a supplicant. My mountain temple, climbing the million steps carrying a bowl of water. You demand I not spill a single drop. Prayers wheel around your hips. I whisper my deepest desires on your inner thigh. You sleep, I kiss a string of flags ac.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1768775/ 1.Nothing personal about cold salad. You may rememberwe sat in the southwest corner of the Italian restaurant,but the food is the food, as is the table's silent lacquer,and those unmemorable cups hold all lips the same.So, the other little rituals you will do with him and notremember me. An omerta o.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1767724/ I’ve such exciting news to tell you now, in case we never meet.All the cultural forces that keep iron bars cold and unbendinghave broken open. Around the city you and I looked for eachother through closed windows where paranoia’s brown windsrough the glass and smooth the dimensions of ou.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1661075/ Look. We are nowhere near home. The carescaped too many distracted lefts and rightsin the early morning dark, neither of us kept count.Anyway, I’m too young to see a well-rounded pictureof the world, eye-level with the seatbelt strap,my feet kicking the pebbled, cracked and plasticdashboard of.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1654370/ I, too, have forgotten how to be a man. Somehow forgotten how the hinges of doors workso stay outside in night’s cold protecting my heart. Quaint houses with windows and tired drivewaysand their shoulders make me breakdown and cry.     The taste of cooked meat is like a mean nu.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1556191/ In here, I can say anything. I can demand a half-hour more in bed in the morning-- before the inevitable paper taped to my door, before public scrutiny, before having to give some dry plausible excuse. It’s always been my dream to marry rich.In here, I can tell you the truth: living is expensi.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1533617/ I am a piece of creased paper forced to encounter its own edges. I fold back toward odd configurations. Crumpled face wrecked by wrinkles and faults. I cannot be made smooth again, cannot be used. Those straight blue guides and ruled lines blur. I am crooked, because you have misshapen meinto a ball.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1530183/ Doesn’t matter that I brought you dance with any man who advances on your elbow nudges at your sides or beckons the well known secret beneath firebrush hair a pellucid neckbecause its the beat in the house in the back alley we’re packed too tightly to be concerned with bodies’ arra.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1518949/ In the stairwell where the servers store extra tables and chairs, I hear, two men started fighting midday, the lunch shift, with the restaurant at full capacity. One fell down the cement steps, broke his neck, the other had a black eye whenthe cops hauled him away to prison,which is why there was an.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1438445/ Autumn. The day’s last light lies down with mein unkempt fields of coastal grass, exhausted. This strenuous season makes far-off dogshowl stray sounds they assume will soothe.Late summer herons landed on my roof.Their spread wings expose thin white chestsas if to say, embrace the change these .. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1435921/ when the moment comes, when all its attendant feelingsstretch, rise from the too-small bed of your mind, when all your approaches and false-starts, all apologies must snuff out their half-smoked cigarette, get in line,find their seat: when it finally comes, the moment is gone. because a.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1422048/ Your tongue is an amber lake at sunset. I walk around hearing it’s lapping edge.You’re the first mountain and me, I am an arm of fire against the first frost. If you are the seam in the back of the nightI want to be the zipper attached to the front. If you became an ocean side opera hous.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1399590/ for Emma Oliver http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1399588/ You hate to admit nothing cosmic has happened today. No alien race of Amazon women crash-landed in your backyard like in your 13-year-old dream.Your thirteen year dream. Because you are a manjust like every other man, only more so. Your hands scrounge around from lack of something metallic to swing... http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1397228/ How should you tell the morning what you’ve seen?Like a bride, bring your life nervously to bedwith its mutual longings nonetheless foreign.Have your tea with milk, turn the lamp,let the body take its leave a great distance.From closing windows, half-heard music,shots and scattered flashes.Mem.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1371824/ Outside a Union-Pacific locomotive of poets I dream, a jump-cut sequence compressed and stored from old Westerns: an overhead shotof bandits riding in an explosion of dust, projected over their piston saddles, afraid the horses’ legs might break to keep up with the steam engine.A glove reaches.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1361020/ What else do we open this recklessly, when even the gloomcedes its last hesitant lightfrom the garden’s tin canopy?Our struggles today broke freelike an algebra of pigeonsmaking obscure vectorsup into the falling sky. Just past the still sturdy walls, wholly intact, all our questionsloom, seis.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1349165/ Fasten History’s seatbeltlike a drum’s tight wire gutsit’s gotten too high tonightand cannot be trusted to drive.Lower the window some and yes open up your home. Is your tongue quenchedwhen he calls out your name? You become more fluidthe way exotic elements dissolve. I was a cloud.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1345851/ after Octavio Paz http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1345839/ "Ergo vivida vis pervicet et extra processit longe flamentia moenia mundi atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque." Lucretius, On the Nature of Things http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1313378/ Her full weight balances gracefully on my nervousknee. I remember perfectly that motionless pullher aroma offered, her hair draws me in a quiettrance - keep back, who's the snake charmerhere? She talks to our friends nearby, nonesurprised by her actions, alighting like this on me,none upset or makin.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/1258020/ Down King Street’s rope lit restaurants and Christmas decorations we maze underneath lobby canopies, by antique valet standsfaces half-turned from blinking bulbs as if cameras grew in bushes. What is this obsession? Everybody slapped in the face with morals. It makes me tint my windows, fret .. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/736022/ “O Liberty! What crimes are committed in your name!” -- Marie-Jeanne Roland http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/736014/ In a kinder world you and I would be separatedby barbed wire atop concrete walls with smooth raked sandbelow, so trespassers stand out to the tower guards.Wearing army helmets and flak jackets, we would issueour news statements in plain sight ofthe war’s front lines:no-man’s land, entire.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/695141/ (Dialysis, Spring 2009)In my blood garbage crowds the imagined streetsthey refuse to pick up. No onecomes to cut the branches,which thrash against my every power-line. A buzz runs through this stalled city like a strike. This and many other failings I oversee,but to whom should I complain? Gathering.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/695136/ Please do not forget how it sounded,when the thirsty, power-starved cityswallowed every light pool it owned,and, in that leaching, our shadowyapartment cracked it’s dry hardpan back. We tended toward that cavernous silence.We stayed within a range of voicesbegging us nearer the waining broadca.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/695132/ Let that monster scream its entire length. I haveno right to wonder what life is like under the train. On the news a drunken woman fell onto the trackand, into that darkness, wrestling her from herself, two unknown angels followed. Was she stonedvirginal, meant to be sacrificed? I avoid the Metroand.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/695131/  i told my secrets into your cupped hands,you poured them back into my woundslike a salveand used your hair as gauzewrapped about my bodyto caress the scars my hiding created –because all these tears have dried intosalt stains of hieroglyphs on my chest,i thought it im.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/59269/ summer hands the reins of my lifeback over to me again, apologetically,driving into the sleeping townwhere their eyes raise and lowerlike dreaming dogsor scattered showers,the road was once blocked by fireand rain, monstrous illusions quite realbefore this:white plastic bags wit.. http://slow.writerscafe.org/writing/thecoldpoet/48244/