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Poems of ‘Enraged Orphan’
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1985. TEN YEARS LATER The heart I hold in my hands says: slowness of life runs through the blood, the remains of this aftemoon will go with me, my tomorrow you'll keep in your eyes like two pure, winter tears, the veins will freeze like beams of cement naturally opaque. And you'll pick up that heart which once said: daughter, mother, boy, taxi, airplane, horse black and white roses in a garden you will never remember. And like days in your purse full of pins you'll keep the laughter, the hands, your silence. And that beard you shaved so well on my birthdays. I walk the streets with the urge to kill, to renounce the sad look of my enemy and find answers in a death, on the avenue where the quiet touch without remorse annihilates and doesn't hurt, where the ravaging well-served knows that to die is to slip, to tirelessly tear up the past, it's to declaw an invented tomorrow and then sleep. * My grandparents tell me of your existence. I imagine you loving several men. With
your long skirt hemmed to the knees and one of their hands forcefully
squeezing your cherry mashing your crotch with their mills, in thrusts
cramming in the greasy pole, a finger in the wound where your hatred burned next
to the fírewood where you baked bread. Yours were the hands that kneaded each
back expertly. Your black moon face and plump ass that did not shun affection
and pleasure while you suckled the youngest of your four children and other
tempests surged. ** They say you hammered the shadows like a
ruinous mountain beast and only your baptisms saved you, your mortal
appearance of a woman drunk on furtive sex. You left your fears behind when
your face exploded in injury and your raw bosom, made no room for endearment,
it was then your desire found no chock. The sly crucifix did nothing for you, the pious
women decried your proud eyes. went to the war, he doesn't own a red tie nor mark a timecard with the intent to suck up at the table he shares. Often the mountain looked at his rotting feet, his waterlogged and muddy body, the threadbare knapsack, a rifle in his injured hand and in the desolation the faithful can without etiquette of meat stew. Beside him death walked patiently, by the barbed wire, on the river banks, under the trees. A cursed bullet burst in the blood of his left arm. There, solidarity was opaque and cold-skinned, the word compañero was epherneral for the revolutionaries, in the mountains his youth was vanishing and that man whom in 1986 I had yet to know. and drag them to the brink of your mouth, with their feet inflated and their eyes sprouting worms. I could be passive and tolerant with the flesh, show you how it captivates to see a dead man, asleep while flies swarm on his penis like meat in the market. Like the vendor who exhibits the cow's brain with its trickles of blood on the table, kidneys, livers and washed hearts that don't bleed like yours, with the seepings betrayed and slabs of meat hanging pestilent like the feet of a soldier who was your brother animal war hunter. She who sleeps by day and works the
night, tends the city lights while her children sleep. I'm the one who sings at dawn and pours
offerings in your name, the one who guards the throne and elevates your
profits. Who are you? Why do you hide your face
in the penumbra? ** The cowgirl hopes that night will coo
her swollen nipples, her warm crotch, the uterine cancer loved by a taxi
driver's snotty phallus. The headlights blind her eyes on the next corner
near where on Sundays she prays. As a teacher she gives classes with her
mornings, while the afternoon's baked bread sustains the street vendor and
the cowgirl waits for night to coo her nipples. The cowgirl loves the Easter of the
Resurrection, she adores the church and delights in mass when the priest
scales her legs with the imagination of an adolescent reaching the peaks of
the little mountains he explores, she dreams of the Sunday sermon in December
and loves each man in the name of the father. and she demands of death its unlearned dance. She doesn't know the sunsets in a painting by Picasso which she should have chewed with oil to see if her words made thunder. My grandmother, is a statue resting on the balsams of desire, a kiss in silence, insomnia and nightmare. It's time to go for a walk with my grandmother, to show her the stars. Neither angel nor devil, he was a man for my pride, vagabond and filthy with loves at cliff's edge. I knew his gaze, the point-blank voice by his chest wasn't missing, I needed an arm of his. I kept his jaundiced eyes in my numb eyes, a drop of blood on my shirt told me of the silence of a dead man, of a man equal to all who screams and vomits the blood of his mother, of his children in the same abysses, I saw a man like any other die in the afternoon.
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