Rails of Drowsiness

De: Gerardo Brauer

Narrado por: Arlette Cohen, Charly Ferrer Junior, Scott Lopez London

Three of us shared a room at the University of Southampton. The director considered three would not allow the conspiracy of two if the third party always creates discord, and he would learn about the plans of the other two. And after those two would become the third in discord.

Not in our case. It was the only room where the betrayal did not appear.

Time passed, and one of my companions fulfilled his dream that he always shared with us: to have his own airplane, piloted by him. One day, the gales of tempests swallowed him to never return him. The other of my companions swore to us to take over the sea, and when he finally had his own boat, after several misfortunes in his life, he decided to loose himself in the immense ocean to never return. They joked I only wanted to travel by train. "Someday, you will disappear," they told me. The trains that I had idealized have not died out, but they are in agony. I have traveled in some when I have been able and now time and modernity have left behind them and my friends have disappeared, but I continue traveling in them and will forever. Forever and as long as I have a collection of poems, unique in it's genre, like the one we crave in our hands, you and me.

The trains have become one of those places of the most sensitive humanity, having represented the union of the world that, together with the steamboats, connected it as if, for the first time, individuals appreciated each other to never forget. But nostalgia and abandonment have tirelessly pursued their demise to make way for sophisticated technologies. They have become the junkyard of our most intimate feelings of abandonment and evocation. The book in your hands recovers them to a protean level; remembrance that will inevitably make us eternal passengers of the interminable journey, with its hymn of smoke and distant sounds.

The Rails of Drowsiness makes us feel, not merely listen to, verses that are the sensitive source to remember with there capability of joining essential meanings of life. They transport us to the places where the feeling travels in the company of the words that sensitize them. The verses of Gerardo Brauer have been characterized by the most significant metaphysics and magnified by exquisite metaphorical constructions: They are the rails of somnolence, heading to the nocturnal journey that we prosecute every day. That is why, he has the ability to provide shape to all poetic matter and reveal its hidden essence. That is why his images materialize in each of our senses, and they verbalize the mysteries of the world. Because, if a simple object is magnified at verses of a distinguished poet, we can imagine the flight of the huge rusted contraptions and its rails thick with vegetation.

I feel like the tram collector, evoked in the verses of this book, checking the ticket of all those who have decided to travel in the exclusive wagon of those without a name or direction. Where have they chosen to travel? It does not matter, either. They only wish to be all of them together and at the same time with the necessary solitude that inspires uncertain travel. To attain those unfathomable places of the extended meanings of life, it is necessary that a poet, like the author of this book, redirected the sleepers and rails to that deep state of the soul: the daydream. And the path is through the transition to sleep: drowsiness. From the read verses, the destination is not to arrive, but to contemplate the untouched landscape and if we wake up from what remains a dream: the seen will have taught us to truly see. If we already know the world is a book that we are reading and someone in turn reads us, what better place to read but in a train abandoned to it's rust and to the disdain of new technology and that, however, we put it back on track and returns to depart because of how much we have to travel in life.

Thanks to the present collection of poems, never a train will be in the abandonment of the cemetery of memories.

©2011 Gerardo Brauer (P)2017 Gerardo Brauer