bandit robbed flowers for the house umbrella poet 
In memory of Ricardo León Peña Villa, the poet squat on the Lower East Side.
[April 8, 1960 - March 11, 2011]
remember: The first time was in Vieques in 2002: I just smoked all we were smuggled to the island and I still marveled at your brilliance, your sauce, your cumbia, your pace, your flow, your orange scarf, your white hat. There were also Pedro Pietri and Angel Pont. I was a university student and our common enemy was the navy of the United States. The world was beginning to be colored poetry.
remember: The second time was in 2003, I had just moved to New York and I met by chance on the street, half a block from flying home. Poet, come to my house, told me, and I opened the door to the hall of mirrors. Were most important of my years in New York. You, from home, I learned to read poetry aloud, I learned my voice. After you took me by the hand to meet your friends in Medellin and thank you published my first book (the children's book full of hair that gives me shame now). The best parties, best unfaithful lovers of those days, the snow longer, drier gaps, rice infinity, tango hairiest, most secret complicity, bitter nights, the laughter more honest, my favorite house . Your house was our home, our so many people. I dare say you were the father of poets and artists who migrated to New York in two thousand, of poets and artists speaking we got lost in that house from -21 to 23, Avenue C, New York, New York, Umbrella House- the yellow house of the poet who spoke squat in so many parts. The underground poet, infinite and generous. Sometimes you get mad that we were many and we felt so good and we could not go. But I know that I loved being the king of house, king host, taking coca-cola and whiskey like a madman, looking at the young away naked in the morning, two by two, threes, more and more to the roof released. Ricardo as a memory, used to say, Peña as a rock, flirting even with the shadows of the brooms. Sometimes you were lucky too. These days the party lasted longer. All I remember of you is covered with magic and freedom.
remember: I used to steal flowers from the china shop of the corner to take a gift. There was nothing I could buy that was worth the same as your joy. I brought flowers stolen, I said, then put on Nina Simone, you asked me to go to the kitchen for a vase to put flowers in water, take them to your altar and to light a candle to the picture your mother. Were full of faith. That faith magic that can only have accessible poets. Of you also learned the faith.
remember: Long summer evenings writing and editing articles for our beautiful magazine tests of Latin culture in New York, Casa Tomada. Cultural journalism go outside to talk with the craziest people in the city. At that time I saw a man committing suicide by jumping into the subway tracks in Brooklyn in the morning and afternoon I went to your house, printing shocked to tell you everything. I loved going to your home in the evening, leaving work. There could forget that I too was a slave voluntary system of capitalism gear. Since that time the snipers FBI killing of Filiberto Ojeda in Hormigueros, and we weighed so much that I fought with my other friends because he could not or did not have anything to say about the terrible news. Being close to you gave me strength, your way of being in the world was a living example of that could be otherwise, even in the most expensive city in the hemisphere, and that more needs to be lived, there was no need jump to the train tracks.
remember: That summer we ate magic mushrooms and we went by taxi to Central Park dance like two butterflies brutalized. remember seeing the end of the world on that trip, the end of the world and lots of muddy children. (Whenever I see end of the world when I'm traveling). I got lost for hours in the park, but then spent a parade, had a show and you showed up with laughter, floating.
remember: In your house (or thank you) I met many women who have impacted me most: Tanya Torres, Elisa Montesinos, Natalia Aristizabal, Claudia Karina Betancourt, Nanda Arias, Marielkis Lledias. were always surrounded by creativity and beauty, you were lucky enough raw.
remember: Meeting of Poets in New York, consecutive years. In those days we were inventing the wheel again, we in newspapers we festivities lasted a week, write poetry collective, we did a lot of people travel long distances, we met a Palestinian poet who published her poems in a newspaper that after they threw me out, because the owners were Jewish. Your words generated movement. all, somehow, we wanted to be a bit like you. A lot of young artists illegally in the city of New York, poets full time in after hours, washing dishes or waiting tables, as long as that city living is, in the four streets of the Lower East Side or the long multilingual avenues Queens, Masalegre, my twenties.
remember: Contigo I learned that the buildings and neighborhoods also have their life and their history and they change and move in place and go to war and won and lost and broken and re-grow and change value and die or survive. hear you speak was like falling into a charm. I have not met anyone like you so glib. The story of the buildings occupy the Lower East Side / Lower East Side continues to be fascinating and touching and not to be missed in the official erasure of the history of the city. Even now, in two thousand, is disappearing gradually disappeared as the Puerto Rican neighborhood in your seventies and addicted to crack and heroin-eighties, between the bars and cafes and students White New York University who now invade the same buildings that made you a neighborhood hero of the nineties.
remember: Your mood was quite seasonal. Withered tea in winter and you peleabas with everyone. I liked to visit you, even if you were in a bad mood. Then the trees began to flower skinny on the block and you straighten your back, Gajaka phone calls, you played the door of your brother Jose Osorio-accomplice, a painter of women butchered, to bring a party. Then she went out to eat chicken soup where Adela and greet dogs on the street housing project 3 and the mural commemorating the death poetry Pedro Pietri, who was your friend. Going to concerts, we went to sell your books on the streets of Queens, to talk to people, eating empanadas, we got drunk on Wednesday in the circle and went back to the home late at night in the dark local trains feed the Latino immigrant neighborhoods. your home number was 3-D. I would like to make a memorial mural as a movie in three dimensions, with special glasses to look at your bright eyes.
remember: I liked the stories of your past lives. Cereté aunts, your times of street thief, the darkness of addiction overcome, the crack cocaine Colombian island of San Andrés, La Perla, Old San Juan, Chinese women who suddenly loomed in your stories. I do not even care that your house had no heating in winter or sink water was always cold, so to hear you tell stories again. You were always like a cat and you fell on all fours despite the magnitude of the accident. Maybe that's why I thought you immortal.
remember: The first time I said goodbye to you I was leaving everything: the fucking city, the groom good, steady job. It was December 2006. You gave me a seed of myrtle tree poets were saying, and I said goodbye hand from the third floor of the building. I went downstairs dizzy. What else would miss about the city you were sitting in that chair, smoking Marlboro, cursing the winter in your bones, coughing like crazy. That cough was a shadow that you pressed the chest you life was going in that cough.
remember: In 2008 I returned to New York for a few months. was an amazing summer with concerts, amazing, creative projects, reunions beautiful, beach, jazz and lots of sex. Tanya had given me his studio-loft to live for a month, bought a bike, went swimming in the pool at Central Park. You'd become a citizen and you were starting to enjoy the privileges of the welfare humiliating "American" between doctors' offices and HMOs. The good news is that the guarantee card Benefit fed food in the fridge. I spent several days helping to clean the dust from your home. He was a pirate treasure. Wonderful things everywhere, photographs, autographs, letters, manuscripts, works of art piled behind the cabinets. Your home should be museum, I thought. That was the second time I said goodbye to you in the same way, down the stairs with a huge lump in my throat, saying good-bye to the poster of Che receiving a visit stuck on the outside of the door home. To victory always, to poetry forever, until the next party. I believed that you do not see them again.
remember: A year later I visited in Mexico City. The night I arrived, I think it was July, was leaving my life forever Lover of the season. I somatic with a terrible toothache. Choose a crummy dentist to remove my root view. You were with me again in her hand and sat in the waiting room as a caring father. was a painful extraction. After the wound is infected me and I never recovered fully. But you, who do you left your home or visits one, were out on the road. You were most special guest boarded the vessel 13, was a great honor to have you home. You brought the intention of finding someone who knew the son of Pachita, the master healer Alejandro Jodorowsky, to submit to a desperate operation and magical. Inept doctors and class in New York I had had enough. Were finally in love, at night, from my computer, I sang love songs to Tata to Colombia. This was the third time I said goodbye to you, the last embrace of the flesh we could give. (Pachita's son did not appear).
remember: Then we talked in the chat a couple of times. You warned me that I was little, that were looking ahead. I thought you were immortal, my real dad. Poets like you never die. It is now about to begin the spring and I can only think of songs about autumn, like that of dead leaves sung in English by Edith Piaf, I heard for the first time in your house, that house without rain for so many firsts: And I'll Miss You Most of all, my darling, When leaves start to fall autum ...
