Drinking With Márquez Poem by Niko Tiliopoulos

Gabriel was sitting on my left,
a gray archangel fashioning a tired moustache
under his alcohol-crying eyes;
a kind patriarch in his solitude.

We spoke in Spanish,
we joked in Italian,
we argued in English,
and we thought in Whiskish.

And one hundred years of riddles passed in a night.
Riddles of love and illness,
cholera and la violencia,
under the irony of Fidel’s shadow,
the censorship of the cohiba ashes,
and the curfew of Pope’s colonels.

But when he asked me:
“¿Porque estás aqui? ”
I became a little child baptised in mud,
running barefoot through the alleys of Macondo,
carefree yet in fear of the evil in my hours...

... Gabriel had always been sitting on my left;
in a storm of thoughts we scribbled our pledge
to the chronicles of our heart
that foresaw our fate,
forgave our past,
and foretold the adventures of our minds.