Txema Rodríguez

A naked bonzo burned to ashes upon my retina, kindly agreeing to pose near the book stands.
Within that brief time lag I was a nobody, too. We barely talked. Nothing personal, nothing cardinal, nothing transcendental along with the click of the shutter, although he left a fading scent of selflessness, the dust of pilgrims and a silent, subversive trail of questions behind.
Would you erase yourself to write, to do or to give a poem?
Would you agree to have a disposable name?
Would you chop off your feet not to step over other people’s shadow?
Would you reject any private right or comfort if it not shared with everyone else?
Would you throw yourself into the candent abyss of the unthinkable?
Can you set fire to the house of incest?
Can you do without the countless gains of your affliction?
Who would you be without the ones you blame?
Are you daring enough to drop your parent’s dogma?
What if not finding what you are looking for means finding yourself?
What keeps you from letting everything fall away for things to be as easy, wondrous and simple as they should be if words didn’t exist, if you didn’t have a name or even a life to call yours?
If all wisdom could be merged in one koan or mitzvah, capable of answering to the basic human inquests, kindling good deeds and random acts of grace, maybe his life stance would suit the universal bon mot: just be poetry and give it away outrageously, blazing up through every moment of miraculous possibility.
Then he answered an incoming call to his cellular.
Ordinary, tenderhearted, unangelic, ready to be no more.