There's rain in the streets. Broken branches and sad-colored leaves on the ground. The snow hasn't quite made it here yet. I've been thinking a lot about cities and rooms. Something in me wants to be kept. At the same time, something resists confinement.

I found a porcelain doll the other day. We used it for Christmas decoration. It made me think of how wonderful I used to find this bric-à-brac when I was little. There was something irresistibly endearing in the shapes and colors. And then I remember how much more useful shapes and colors were when I was little.

Today there's rain in the streets. Broken branches and sad-colored leaves on the ground.

I see nothing beyond the net of my skin. The net of my fingers. The net of my love. I feel nothing beyond the net of my feet. The net of my heat. The neat of my frost. I see nothing beyond this Winter of love. Lingering both, lingering both.

A fragmented world leads inexorably to decolonization, that is, an erosion of tradition, wherein the conscience of the self is subdued by the historicity of the subjective. This is, in short, my current line of thinking. I do not expect you, reader, to approve of it. I just thought I'd let you know.

I've been asked by a respected Spanish-speaking hack whether the title of my blog means "The Turret of Brassieres", fortín apparently being Spanish for turret, and bras being surreptitiously taken for the name of those useful but at times unpleasant depositories of the mammary glands.

I am sorry to say that it's not, as much as I'd like it to be so. As every possible hint thrown around the luminous reality of this blog suggests, the name Fortinbras comes from Zbigniew Herbert's poem "Elegy of Fortinbras". The poem shows Fortinbras, a Norse King, addressing Hamlet at the latter's deathbed. Of course, this interaction was suggested to Herbert by the characters in Shakespeare's play.

So there.

Besides, bras are such a petty and obtrusive thing I cannot conceive of having a blog dedicated to them. Though I must admit that the contents of said bras -and their beholders- are the source of many a tragedy, including, to some extend, that of our good boy Hamlet.

For some reason, Fortinbras has made its way into the Eastern European imagination more conspicuously than Hamlet. One can only wonder why. But at least it explains why a Spanish-speaking deviator would not grasp it.

Now that we're alone we can talk prince man to man