Things to release

By Rod Ugalde De Haene

Dark Days

Dark days, and how beautiful to feel the low light,

cold days of sweaters and socks with sandals,

and then warmer days, with wrestlers,

and how long the hours are when night arrives,

and how necessary they are, and healing,

and there is even fire in the streets,

and blood on our feet,

and writers who tear their books apart,

and writers who are torn apart by stabbings,

and we are just readers, who love the writings of those people,

and how valuable and brave is the act of writing,

and in the end to understand that words are immortal,

that they are eternal.

All the Heartbeats

I can feel all the heartbeats as if they were one,

the divine takes advantage of the times we don’t listen to it,

it follows us from behind, slowly,

knowing that from the back we are mirrors,

remote landscapes,

filled with choirs of wind,

percussions of grass,

and inside us: a howl.

Things to Release

I came because I want to think about death, and for some reason it feels like a dark and complete divination. I came to speak of death knowing that in recent days I’ve done little more than wash dishes and cook, and the truth is that right now I can’t do much else—the dull grinding that comes from my chest won’t let me. I’ve even had to turn off the music. There is something that wants to come out, forcing its way from my center. If I keep silent and observe, it feels like a hot, sticky smoke, black and bright, something that wants to devour everything; something that at other times is a malleable, golden light, a kind of spacious vapor that only wants to be enormous. Neither of these sensations can come out. For now, I’ve decided to keep them inside, contained.

Sorry—I set out to talk about death, and maybe it’s easier if I think of you, with whom I held a dead body for the first time. Maybe it’s easier if I think of your sleeping face and the face of the dead man, side by side—his face that also seemed to be sleeping, but clearly wasn’t. There was something forbidden in his posture. The moment when I touched you, alive, and then touched him, dead—how different: he, grown; you, young; he, still; you, moving. And then, when we lifted him, he felt fragile, and precious.

The strongest impression was tying his jaw with the red scarf to keep his mouth from continuing to open—that extremely-open mouth that seemed to want to communicate something urgent. I didn’t understand it then, because I didn’t take the time, but that open jaw was very beautiful, because it was different, because I had never seen it so open before. That openness was unique; it was real.

I still don’t understand much, but I know that what lives in my chest is preparing me. I feel it as clearly as my memory. And I only understand a kind of faith: knowing that one day it will also be mine, and that one day, brother, it will also be yours, as it was his. The faith I feel now is that one day it will arrive excessive and fragile, different and still, forbidden and precious, unique and real, even beautiful; and that perhaps there will be things to understand there, and that maybe, there too, there will be things to release.

Rod Ugalde De Haene is a Mexican poet, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges the raw texture of the moving image with the precision of the written word. He is the author of the poetry collection *El silencio existe* (Editorial Caburé, 2026) and the founder of **Editorial Espíritu**, an independent publishing project dedicated to experimental literature and anthologies. Deeply rooted in Butoh dance and media archaeology, his poetic practice treats language and the body as sites of visceral exploration, capturing the threshold where memory, identity, and the subconscious collide. https://rodugalde.com/