Easter Sunday

I write and live, to give testimony to a silent jury; always hung, forever and never deliberating in their crimson marble chambers, with their white hair, their crooked ties, their half-cocked redundancies, their sworn blood-soaked oaths. I woke up this morning with a thorn in my side, a dagger in my rib cage! São Paulo is a gritty, steamy misty miasmic labyrinth—everything is wet, soggy, dilapidated, thrown together with the randomness of the stars. To live is to give testimony and to be of witness; to witness a broken city, on a broken planet, in a broken galaxy, in a broken universe, praising a broken God with a broken prayer, perched on a broken crucifix and forever belching out our broken songs.

The old Chinese twins just several doors down fill their entire house with black bags of wet trash, debris from the street. The soggy newspapers have turned to oatmeal and the fruit skins have all turned black and liquified and are oozing like crude oil on the pathway toward their home. One could try to climb the stairs, on a dare—you would not see your feet nor one inch of the ground. You would sink into the bags, the soggy trash, I take it, like a horse in quicksand. They must be in their 70s now. Their shoes half on, their slouching kyphosis has the gravitational pull of a dense planet. One day, their chins, stubbled in white hair, will reach their shoes. They smile kindly as they trudge along their entryway, which has no perceptible path. Mounds and mounds of trash, compacted into grease, into soil, into sludge, have been built over the years. They roam the streets at night, they gather useless, nonsensical garbage by streetlight, moonlight. They are never without bags. Do they do this in praise? What are they praising? They have made a pact, it seems. They will gather trash forever, live inside the disgust until some designated event, which is likely their mutual death. Trauma is perceptible, subtly lurking around every shadow, inside every object of their passionate, never-ending collection of pure detritus. Once the place is condemned and excavated, layers upon layers of trash collecting will be revealed; the layers of compression will communicate their timeline like when counting the rings of a tree.

Walking with my wife, a mad man on a motorcycle, shouting obscenities to nobody, races up and down the street. Who is anyone to question my life, he threatens to the turquoise sky. He disappears. He reappears like a bomb, this time looking at me, at us. He positions his motorcycle head on—I reach for my pistol—a gun that I do not have, do not own. He fires off on his motorcycle once again yelling, and we head indoors just as quickly as he came and disappeared—in his uninvited, unprovoked rage he has expressed the will of the night completely—the night is saying it is shattered, and anyways, there is nothing left to do but love one another at home.

These dolts, today. They think I am a starving artist. If they only knew how I ate like a king and drank like a rich, irate pirate. If they only knew how wealthy I was. Whatever I want is already mine by the time I even summon the desire for it. I have not sold a real painting in some time. I have not had an exhibit in decades. I have no money. I don’t see the difference, the art that hangs in public is a mockery, a flagrant constellation of poor taste, poor choices, unrelenting confusion, persistent neon colored vomitus pulled from the celestial garbage can of mucky shit water. The artists’ hot breath and their nonsensical self-praising bellows out of their dumb mouths without one iota of awareness. They claim to be genius, they claim to be revolutionary—well, get on with it then—but there is no genius or revolution in their work. If they would learn to speak honestly, they would do themselves and their viewer a big favor—these words of self-importance only lead to disappointment. If they would just lay it flatly, as a fact, they would be better off, too. They speak in a stilted language, one that says so much and so little at the same time; one that is at once grandiose and visionary, but is betrayed by its commonality; it mimics itself into the ground.

I am always willing to sing for my supper—gravely, nasally; I have the demeanor of yesteryears, yester epochs. My watch is forever dead, stuck on my father’s birthday. My wedding ring, as cheap as possible, is starting to slide. Soon, it will be tossed into the bin with the others that have lost their luster in the sunlight of splintering, lashed out days. Spending a fortune on a wedding ring was a dumb idea, we had known that all along.

I am hollowed out, full of fire, saturated yet unfulfilled. Stories flash and flutter, enter and cease with a ferocious but temporary power. I could write out my grievances with this world today. I could list them one by one. Where every flower is evil and plucked from the dank soil of Baudelaire’s private garden. Every drip of rain water, whether collected in the overflowing basins of slop, or falling from the rooftops of clay tiles, is poisonous and carries with it a bitter venom; every ray of light beams into the chest with the heat of white-hot electricity. The core of one’s true nature is flaming and howling and at the same time silent and frozen. I am building my present now, to blink is to miss one thousand years, to sleep is to die one thousand times, circling back into the black Raven present, chewed over and over in solemn mastication, and then spit out in regurgitative portions into the mouths of Raven spawn.

Yes, the dagger I sport is showing its teeth, in the bladed reflection, eye-sores, deep pocketed wounds, pot marked scars resemble the blemishing worn-down pavements of the city streets, which are forever doomed as golden avenues of glory, but still, are gridlocked in thundering, ceaseless hyperthymesia.

Every memory is but a fluttering bird, locked in its brass cage. Every turnstile of every metro is a spinning entryway to an unlocked paradise. Every rail car is a blast into the icy future.

The future. I am afraid we all want it too quickly. As if the whole of mankind, from the Ancient Romans to the Babylonians, from the pharaohs to the here and now, are all possessed, lined up and in synchronized formation are marching steadily to their futuristic demise. We have become a robotic death march to an illusion. We never needed to fear them, we ought to have feared becoming them. And with all our toys, all the accessories of the present day, we are still locked inside the cave, shouting at the wall, mystified with fire, afraid of the dark, curious about our celestial company, and still sketching out brute portraits on the cave wall with blackberry ink and formulating our symbols inside tribes of no escape.

We are married and loyal to forbidden desires. With lazy eyes and dangling tongues, we seek the orgasmic quality of every object, every interaction, every inhalation. Every spoken word is both love letter and grenade. Absurdity and inanity are the mechanisms of my own defense. If I cannot use them as a safety barrier of a kind, I am an open vessel. As the vacuum seal is released, the hermetic seal is shattered, and so enters all of the contents of the world—every betrayal and heartbreak, every trill of birdsong, every man with a bullet aimed at his brother, every greasy politician, every cold businessman, every winking hobo, every smooth talking salesman, every death rattle, all comes rushing in with the force of every black ocean and every red river, as if it were exploding through the open mouth of a teacup. I digress.

I digress from all things. Nothing is needed now. The apartment has turned a bit chilly. The summer heat is fading out fast, the cold is rushing in. Jazz music fills every room. The wet kitchen sounds of the neighbors doing dishes, rinsing and clinging and occasionally laughing are quite cozy, inviting even. In Vila Mariana, we are surrounded by structures in every direction. Rooftops stack inside and top one another, as though they were constructed on a frozen wave. As I write, my wife reads. All around the city everyone is full from lunch. Therefore, they are slow and docile, satiated and lazy. The neighborhood is quiet, peaceful and we are tucked away inside it, nestled in its cubist bosom. Everything today is patient, pleasant, grateful, generous. On this Easter Sunday, the moveable feast is right on the nose. The sun has finally come out from the clouds. The dripping and the mist have all ceased, evaporated. Today everything, finally, feels brand new. On this Easter Sunday, the afternoon has been given a second chance and everything feels absolutely, completely resurrected.

JSV

2025

Dear Friends,

Dispatches from Bohemian Splendor is a small but growing newsletter. Becoming a subscriber is an act of supporting the work of a lifelong, dedicated human artist. I aim to make my work as free as possible so that all can participate in the conversations surrounding authenticity, courage and making your life your very own. Please consider subscribing or becoming a paid member. If you read my work, know that I would love to hear from you and am very grateful for any support that you may be able to lend.

Judson Stacy Vereen