Odilia Rivera Santos
Sometimes, I make straight, rigid immutable plans and almost always, God laughs. There is a sort of unity, balance and return to the beginning in a poem or good story, and what is life but a poem or a good story?
I am in the thick of my life-poem, life-story with eyes open and a meditative calm heart.
We play the trust game as children knowingly and as adults, we play the trust game unknowingly.
In both, we close our eyes and let part or our selves go lax.
I was talking to a friend yesterday about how in the ghetto there are two kinds of people: those who run toward the guy who's just pulled out a gun in the middle of a crowd and those who run away from the gun.
One time, while at an underground club in the South Bronx where I had gone to see Kurtis Blow and met Run DMC, a guy pulled out a gun. I didn't wait to see the object of all the excitement. I ran out into the cool of the night, sky blacker than I'd ever seen, a glow cast across burned down buildings by streetlights, no yellow cab to be found, my shoes borrowed from a friend and too high for my taste, red lipstick still on cause I hadn't kissed anyone, black velvet dress clinging to me from sweating while dancing half the night away, friends scattered to wherever they were going, hair exploded into a curly afro, and I said . . . if only I'd brought my camera.
Will the South Bronx ever be this dark, this cold, this still again?
I am sitting in a remote outpost, playing the trust game with the universe while listening to Ali Farka Touré and wondering where they all are -- the people populating that night.
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