THE TRIP
To
Allen Ginsberg, in memoriam
I’m fucked when I cross my arms
and paralyzed in the mold of my shoes
I watch without daring to cross the street
and take roads that might disperse me
or that, oh, don’t lead anywhere.
I’m fucked when I cross my arms.
And my dazed mind curbing my impulse
doesn’t order me to advance a single step
to get out as soon as possible from the matter
that has me fucked when I cross my arms.
And if I advance for a while it’s only a misstep
fearful that the world might come crashing down,
before I arrive at the chosen spot,
to the plaza where at sunrise
the naked people sing and dance
and where paradise has yet to be lost.
And action and the minutes
and uncatchable love in its mire all pass
detached from time that throws them
far from the place from where
within the jail of my old body I watch,
fucked because all I do is cross my arms.
Down there in the street the traffic’s chin
nuzzles irresponsibly.
And the sketch of the rain sprouts in the battered frieze.
The frondless tree seeing itself in the glass
will never trace in the map of my window
the path that would take the insomniac to the country of magic,
if like me, crossing my arms,
he wasn’t fucked for good.
(1997)
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COCKTAIL
Too many programs.
Too many cocktails meetings
conventions congresses rites festivals
Too many free agents in the market
and if you add yourself to this
you’ll end up seeing there’s
too many lazy people like you
yawning in front of a painting
barely standing each other
to later reject each other
with a superficial handshake
and a see you later. Gentlemen,
this farce never stops
and despite it we survive.
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THE POEM
Write it. Write it anyways. Write it as though finally there were nothing
to say.
Write it. Even if it’s just to show that what you had to say hasn’t
chosen you to say it.
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BARBARIAN'S ALCHEMY
Rimbaud
discards his poet’s investiture to assume his Eurocentric condition.
In the African colonies he finds, oh, his next plunder. What follows
isn’t poetry.
On
the other hand, Blaise Cendrars is a reclaimant of the colonialist Rimbaud.
In his adventures in Africa he goes in search of a photographic alchemy
of the verb. For him poetry starts to be something that’s not exclusively
in words, but in the glance, in his Kodak and in journeys.
As
for me: I’m one of those who thinks of his work as something exterior
to myself. I’m not much of a protagonist. The place where I find myself,
in relation to my work, isn’t very defined, not even in a journey to
the interior of my own self.
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OF THE TEXT
Some
have experienced the feeling of poetry to such an extreme degree that
the fact of having expressed it in their lives with the same intensity
by which they would like to have written it, has incapacitated them
and, for that reason, exempted them from putting it into words.
But
doesn’t the nature of poetry consist of the act of living it? No. As
it doesn’t consist of the act of writing it. It consists of writing
itself. This is why the true poet doesn’t have a real existence.
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