☀ Today's Poem: "Chamomile Tea" Miyó Vestrini

My friend,
El Chino,
once wrote about how women sit
and walk
after they’ve made love.
We never got to argue about it
because he died like an idiot
of a heart attack treated with chamomile tea.
Had we had the chance,
I'd have told him that the only thing good about making love
is men who ejaculate
without bitterness,
without dread.
And that after doing it,
no one wants to sit down
or walk.
I named an old palm tree
planted near the pool at my apartment after him.
Every time I take a drink
and I greet him,
he shakes his leaves,
a sign that he’s furious.
He told me once:
life’s a massive happiness
or a massive outrage.
I’m true to my childhood dreams.
I believe in what I do,
what my friends do,
and what everyone like me does.

Sometimes we stay up together
very late
talking about the worms that hound him
and the wicked heat he feels all day
in that aridity and sand.
He hasn’t changed:
hungry,
dispossessed,
he can sit down and befriend Mallarmé.
Lautréamont joined us one night
and said El Chino was right:
poetry should be made by all.
And then the others came:
Rubén Darío leading Nicaragua,
Omar Khayyam with his parties,
Paul Éluard uniting lovers.
Together,
we dipped El Chino in the pool, under a full moon,
and he was content
like when he had a river,
some birds,
a kite.

Now he’s worked up again,
because they bring him flowers
while he’s trying to scare off cockroaches.
He wanted to be interred in Helsinki,
under eternal snow.
He went around the world,
passing through London where a woman waited for him,
and on his way back,
he drank chamomile tea.
He,
who loved the shadows so much,
could no longer stay up all night.
Lucid and very hypocritical,
he had a horrible fear of dying in bed.
I know
because he wrote me a note
that the line he liked most was David Cooper's:
a bed is the laboratory of love and dreams.