“Would I find La Maga?” Horacio would say,
As he walked down the bridges of Paris all gray.
They never would look, yet they constantly met,
In a game of the streets that was tangled and wet.
She lived in the jazz, in the smoke, in the stream,
While he lived in logic, dissecting the dream.

The Serpent Club gathered to argue and drink,
To listen to records, to suffer, to think.
They spoke of philosophy, art, and the soul,
While the room spun around them beyond their control.
But Rocamadour, her poor baby, lay dead,
In the cold, silent corner of Maga’s own bed.

Horacio knew, yet he kept it all still,
Letting hours crawl by with a terrifying chill.
When the truth came to light and the weeping began,
The circle was broken; Horacio ran.
La Maga was gone like a ghost in the air,
Leaving only the chessboard of search and despair.

[…]

The narrative fractures, the chapters align,
By the whim of the reader or author’s design.
You can read it straight through till the end is in sight,
Or hopscotch across it from left unto right.
From Paris he traveled back home to the heat,
To Buenos Aires, and a different street.

There Traveler waited, his mirror and friend,
With Talita, whose face made the timelines append.
Did she look like La Maga? Horacio swore
That the ghost of his past had walked right through the door.
They worked in a circus, they played with a matrix,
Living life as a game of absurd, hollow tricks.

Then they moved to the halls of a manic asylum,
Where shadows of sanity split and beguile ’em.
In the courtyard below, on the tiles of gray stone,
Horacio drew out a game of his own.
The lines of the hopscotch were chalked on the floor,
A path to the “Heaven” he sought evermore.

[…]

He sat by the window, up high in his room,
With a bucket of water to ward off his doom.
He taped up the windows, he cordoned the space,
Convinced that his friend wanted death in the place.
Was Traveler coming to push him away,
Or save him from jumping into the bright day?

Talita looked up from the courtyard below,
Where the hopscotch was waiting, a square in the glow.
He balanced a foot on the edge of the sill,
As the music of madness grew sudden and still.
To jump or to stay? To complete the design?
The book leaves him hanging right over the line.

The chapters may loop or continue to spin,
There is no final place where the truths can begin.
Just a pebble that rolls through the squares of the mind,
For the heaven we seek is the heaven we find.