Born in Madrid, Sergio moved to New York City at a young age. He studied playwriting under Karl Friedman and theater at Purchase College. After college, Sergio moved to Alta, Utah where he was a dish washer, waiter, handyman, ski repairman, firefighter and free-skier. Upon his return to New York City, Sergio has alternately been a bookseller, boxer, painter, translator, graphic artist, jazz musician, and writer. He studied creative writing at Gotham Writer’s Workshop, the Unterberg Center for Poetry, the St Marks Poetry Project, and New York University. He has studied art at the Art Students League, photography at SVA, and Jazz at the New York Jazz Academy. He currently splits his time living in New York and Madrid. He runs with the bulls in Pamplona.
Rubble
A single brick stacked and piled with mortar. There once was a guild for this kind of work. Brunelleschi’s herringbone ode to the pantheon was built from the stuff. A collective of tufa, pumice, travertine. So it is with the Aula Palatina. The Red Basilica. Roman legions travelled with mobile kilns. Fired, expanded, clay aggregate. Artificial stone. Sun dried like ripasso. Four thousand year old mud bricks still stand in dusty desert outposts. Courses and bands. Scottish bond, common bond, English garden, stretcher, raking, Flemish bond, rowlocks and shiners, rat-trap, single basket weave, pinwheel. A search for words for bricks which have stood for generations torn asunder by the great claw, the terrible jackhammer, into a mountain of rubble. Extruded, wire-cut, hand molded, dry pressed, accrington, cream city, London stock, Dutch, keyed, dry-pressed, clinker, red-brick, Roman brick, modern Roman brick, nanak shahi, Staffordshire. Hauled away by dump trucks towards radioactive Fresh Kills. Or sent into international waters on barges hauled by tug boats. No passport necessary. Bricks stacked into rigorous uniformity by hearty men in pageboy hats and wool trousers suspended by suspenders, lost to anonymous time. Ghosts appearing only in tin-hued photos found in flea markets. Three hundred years of dead epithelial tissue suffer sudden exposure to terrible sky. Formerly sheltered cans of tuna saved for coming apocalypse, splintered armoires, rags like de-boned corpses, sunning in rubble. Shattered writing desks. A vinyl tablecloth house a village of ants. Imagine if suddenly there was light, where for generations there was only darkness. Where once edifice covered the sun in a thick blanket of layered brick, a vast space of oxygen, where more often than once sheltered lovers and their progeny, now vacated to New Jersey. Westchester. Cockroaches and bedbugs search out new hosts. Rats excavate anew with eternally growing rodent teeth. I remember what life was like when staring out of a window at a brick wall only two feet away. A sliver of light to my left, where the street and the buses are, the only evidence of the sun. My flat flooded with the glow from the disk of Atem. Soon to be replaced by glass and steel looming forty stories above. I am crushed and cannot breath. I am told we have sold our air rights.