FROM NEXT WINTER
IX
The country, we’d say
we put it on tables,
we carried it everywhere,
the country needs
the country waits,
the country tortures,
the country will be,
they execute the country,
and we’d be there in the afternoons
waiting for some mourner
to tell him
don’t be an idiot
think of the country.
XX
Sadness
dawns
in the door to the street.
Not in vain
have I been so cruel,
not in vain
do I wish
each afternoon
for death to be simple and clean
like a shot of warm anise
or a slap whose echo is lost in the mountain.
+++
The Phone Call
When I asked him why he hadn’t called
he explained he’d been buried alive
and they hadn’t given him a phone.
On his thin chicken lips,
there is no,
or there was no,
daring at all.
Everything was strictly legal.
Is it that you don’t even believe in God?
If it wasn’t easy
you wouldn’t try.
Significance,
signifying,
significant,
sign.
I went to the balcony
and looked toward the park,
irritating brotherhood of squealing kids
and retarded birds.
I heard the remote control switching channels,
on mute.
At my back I felt,
his desire to put on his pants
and leave.
I went to the kitchen to peel potatoes.
+++
One Weekday II
Squeezing his eyelids to avoid the midday light,
was never a problem for Modigliani.
The truth is always waiting for us
at the bottom of a bottle,
he warned,
long before he stretched his women’s necks.
It’s degrading to eat in bed,
but I do it,
at the risk of losing el flaco’s company.
The bed unmade,
the book by Lévi-Strauss and Didier,
the chewable paper napkin,
how many years hanging around here?
On my stomach to watch TV,
facing the ceiling to be loved,
elbow folded for sleep.
Life doesn’t form part of the great laws of the universe:
I’m a solitary chance
in this space of rituals and penumbra.
Now I escape to the perspective of those climbing onto a bus
or pissing behind a tree.
A chimpanzee eating a turkey and mustard sandwich.
It’s April and the myopic eyes blink
in successive delicious messages:
pomo, party, babes, gays, borderline.
Living cells that unknot me and tell my memory.
I touch my little thing, tidy from so much iodized soap,
washed
and thoroughly washed again.
Island smelling of iodine.
Little thing disposed to the entrance of fungus, herpes, bacteria,
bugs, foams, plastics, coppers and rubbers.
Come here, kid.
El flaco caresses me with a paternal hand:
don’t reprimand your little thing,
it’s much more useful than art.
The boy witfh the violin starts up again over my ceiling.
I can see him, chubby cheeks, buck teeth,
smelling of swollen polyps and tonsils,
an enormous callus on his chin.
And there he goes with the scales,
nasal,
raspy,
idiotic.
Fuck, screams the Spaniard on the fifth floor.
My mother would say to me,
tu me fais grincer les dents,
nothing to do with the
tu me tue, tu me fais du bien,
from Hiroshima mon amour.
Anyways, long before,
Shakespeare had determined
that every man ends up killing what he loves.
The folds of the sheets hurt my back
just like the horoscope announced this morning.
Tidy and full refrigerator.
The beer can with its frosted edges
and the ham wrapped in aluminum foil.
A matter of values:
Walkman, gastronomy, Zen, cool, humanism,
no one will be defrauded by manipulative practices.
I choose the beer
and run to bed again.
I ask myself if the rights of man are truly
an ideology.
Fernando, the only alcoholic bartender who’s not retired,
speaks in rhymes:
the night is dark
and I don’t have my lark.
As I see it, he’s one of the few who live
human rights as morals.
I cup the pillow,
suck my finger,
and wait for el flaco to arrive.
There’s days like that.
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