Necropolis
*
I return to them again confronting
…………minutes sometimes hours with the books
opposing them
…………to the reality of purgatory’s time
I chew on words become verses chapters turned
…………cadaver chunks that only ever
…………brought bread to a publisher’s table
I live in a necropolis
surviving after catastrophe and roving
…………its illiterate city
Here some titled spines there the ribcage
…………of a classic turning the corner I find
…………a stockpiled purchase mistake carried
…………through countless relocations illegible in vain
The number of writers has been excessive
…………for the readers in this world
Their memory also a library
…………pierced by mistakes feels like
…………an inhuman weight
I am a reader if anything has survived within me
…………it’s this
I carry the enormous weight of ink
don’t know what else to do on this road
…………toward the utopian inane
I live in a necropolis I said
Some will include me in theirs
and we will unknow each other in the desert
of our day-to-day streets
The world has labored against paper
The world has belonged to others
Understandable, the weight of the written
…………is unnecessary for those who think themselves kings
I am a gravedigger
Building a worthy tombstone
for tons and tons of pages
Another someday will live in the necropolis
Another will read dates and names
Families friends generations
Buenos Aires
*
Conversations with men
I’ll never see again
in this straight lined long city
where can I find the South?
Avenue walls disclosing
words from all over the world
and someone has scratched: “What’s
the dish of the day?” next to a Doric column
The brotherly voice of my mind answers
with the number of your steps
with a momentary memory
of the way you rub your eyes,
foreigner’s alchemy
But don’t lie
and tell me what you’d want to count
with this useless notion of distance
Occident
*
Insatiable inclination to silence ample payments to philosophical
possibilities Malaise inflicted by the extended reach of the writable and
the cartographiable Poetic prose Scholarly Metastasis Listed shameful
ethnocides Impossibility of forgetting personal circumstances
Ravenous annihilation of autobiography by history
Unend
*
The Occident is always neoOccident: the introduction of a novel
exploitation strategy. The “end” of the Occident is a new Occidental
manual; reiterated threat of literature’s demise.
I’ve travelled the biggest mall in the Caribbean from one end to the
other without buying anything. Unconsumption: liberty.
More than thirty years with writing as my tool. Becoming silent,
becoming unemployed, godless, without ceremony. Returning to what I
know is unique to birth and death. That which chokes on air or spit.
Writing, then, until I lose my breath.
Certain writers can be understood by examining the room where they
lived. They were animals in captivity. Writers of a table, a bed, books
stacked on the floor. Large devices for life and debris. Scandalous that
after death their name was stamped on anything. They were what paper
could withstand. What they withstood.
The night as alcohol reflected in alcohol. Exquisite mix, giver of the
word. Alcohol, the blank page, night is ink, the pen a vehicle for
displacement. Writers, even the most sedentary, are all travel writers.
To disappear as a result of confronting the page.
To self-betray so as to think.
To disappear: to discontinue the appearance of waiting. To understand
that nothing is needed despite the persisting desire. To dis-appear: to
accept life despite the abundance of fathers uninterested in procreating,
without their sons in mind. To conquer disappearance itself as the will
of power. To consent to voluntary and voluptuous unsalvation. To be
the living-dead of writing. To be ominous.
Two roads to enjoyment: the creation of neologisms and the gentle
displacement of anyone who feels threatened by new words that show
the insignificance of all language. Redefinition of liberty: to thwart the
operations of the profound marks of life. The ability to live as if scars
were drawn on sand.
Enjoyment: the redefinition of redefinition. The end of unending.
Deoccidentalizaton of the mind: the definitive abandonment of childhood.
Poetry beyond verse.
Philosophy without bent knees before the geography of philosophy.
What happens on a page as genre, as discipline, as
ascetic.
The intextual, indisciplined, inOccidental.
Poetry as the practice of unending.
The liberation of everything amassed and named by Occident. Not the
end of history but of dehistory.
The subject refusing to answer to his given name.
The liberation in reach by tonight. And by tomorrow, its oblivion and
past reindefinition. This unvictorious body. This limitless satisfaction.
Untitled
*
poetry:
What space exists today for this letter?
Like vessel shards like myths
carved into tibias these words
are partnerless Passion and
pastime of the pained
seeking understanding from a distance
longing for nights that were true
nights and the voices of warriors
I’m here attempting to tell myself
I cannot accomplish a we
Ink is the abandonment of faith
All atoms are in my
hand all of the world’s past
would not exist without this verse
They are lies of course images they say
but this blackened page remains
this visible and tenacious failing silence
Untitled
*
Life fits into hands
and is carried inside mouths
Fingers and bread
navigate the road from work to blood
Like light the rain
the roads like
wisdom and the dead’s ashes
life fits into hands
It can’t be found inside luggage
or in the places no one has seen
that life fits here
is enough and is excess
this life
these hands
Untitled
*
The journey and the rupture
your letters pass departure
a verb in pieces the
horizon coupled to spilled blood
Throughout history
men have feared you
in the faces of their wives in
the scents of their homes
Air won’t be the same
where being is a fractionless fraction
where only registration forms
give faith to belonging
To leave cruel sound of the branch
torn up trace split
tongue
No suitcase can fight you
enough with the clumsy sadness of downpours
you expect to erase time’s passing
enough as if there were another fate for
the foolish fondness for transparency
of your two letters
which aspire to the fright of limits
to the stubborn hollow of the end
enough what?
as if anything could be past as if
this verse or any sneeze could culminate
Columbus hasn’t left yet
People still die in Auschwitz
enough as if anything could conceal itself
destroy itself forget itself
enough as if forgetfulness was a newborn
and we weren’t our grandchildren’s nightmare
Untitled
*
1
Pain of the stain of the stemmed nation
stain of the pain of the nation stem
Furious future outcome
…………of dice
of the hand who rejoiced for us
…………when the previous embryo
misunderstood the fire’s numbers
Pain of the tongued pains
…………gentle succulent lament
the liver’s vesicular remainder
condition of our epic famines
Fundamental functionality of the detained
…………in principle principally a cease
Oh radical enervation
of the coarsest elements!
Slow slowest construction of paralysis
Oh it’s Pa! Oh it’s father!
2
It’s Pa
Yes Pa
Anagrammed
disorder
of plural flags
Children’s tongue strict
milk diet
willing to follow
the previous and occult order
that joins us
By not knowing how to disown our father
– the absent present
the remaining absence –
we turn duties into
hysterias maternal fervors
into fulguration
Oh tongueless family
where words
…………capitulate to call themselves celibate
Yes Pa
who has never been with us
the edge of your monosyllables
is horror
and we work to fill the hole
that you have made us
repeat in vain
following your will
for centuries without logic
Oh country without parricide!
Oh terrible simulation of
the fatherland!
Untitled
*
Paper from the where where
I say the chaos of saying
which is and isn’t the place
that brought you into the world how unfortunate
are the plains of this where
of unnumbered places
without frontiers or vehicles
to scatter the where among nations
like the seed of a fruit
premonitory cycles
or fixed days
Where doesn’t know where knows
its limpid incursion into hermeticism
the attractive scar of its origins
the foggy wordplay of its given names
like placed places
like stars or molecules
like flooded lands
aspiring to be places
or the hopeful wait
of arriving
at where where isn’t said
and where where might be
Untitled
*
You’ve discovered how smoke
pours its previous meaning into words
that name things in the world
There in the not-place of the not-sound
…………of the not-word
are your causes
the slow rocks of silence
and there is where you’re entirely
unknown by yourself still
like pain like a wound
unable to imagine its scar
There this final sensation remains there
…………its beginning identical to its end
And if this is what you are: the terrible simplicity
of what you don’t know how to say
or cure
Untitled
*
At night
I discover the verb’s cruelty
Tied to me I resort to my hatreds
to the days of pure ire
and nothing but this whisper remains
for the wind circling the hours
My fury bites
during the night of my return
to the circuit running from me to me
to the restrained inertia
waiting to face the storm
with the size of its indifference
Untitled
*
I am the island the island island
I am life battling history
Populated by corpses anonymous imposters
authors of the badly said
voracioustimidgrandiloquent agents of the country where no one believes
I am a cemetery for verses
an open vein sipped every morning by the sea
but I stay remain I remain
within monstrous sameness
in Latin America’s extreme frontier
and life is not littler here
in the fade-out country
Here where monuments are mistakes cast in bronze
texts are mistreated objects
But I stay stay stay
in the communal ditch of the days of my town
so that all words aren’t swallowed into worthless words
Untitled
*
This is the house
the place where life waters indecipherable land
something that doesn’t name me
and overtakes the history of the unworld on which we stand
I remain inside the house
…………during the night of the night
where death will not be called news
where I dip the tip of my pen
into a glass of water
and drink the pain like indulgence
which is scandal
and is peace