It disgusts me
to keep being a man.
The night drags its curtains down like a tired whore
who once, long ago, believed someone would stay till morning.
Every house kills its lamps, one by one,
obedient, cowardly, already half-dead.
They crawl under blankets,
they dream small dreams of bread and rent,
and common sense, that fat jailer,
whispers: lie down, forget, rot quietly.
I spit on common sense.
Yet I remember my mother’s hands folding those same blankets,
her palms cracked from work, still trying to keep someone warm.
I rip the sheets, I tear the night open with my teeth.
I walk.
I walk through barbershops that stink of corpses and cheap cologne,
through cinemas where love is sold in cardboard kisses
that taste like the first kiss I ever stole behind a school wall,
already knowing it would not save me.
My shoes are full of fury,
my eyes are knives that have forgotten how to close,
but somewhere under the blades my pupils are still
the black astonished eyes of a child who once looked for stars
and found only the ceiling of a room that smelled of onions and sleep.
I am sick of roots,
sick of being buried alive in my own skin,
sucking wet earth,
shivering downward like a worm that dreams of wings
and remembers, dimly, that wings were promised once
by a voice that sounded like a father’s, before the voice learned silence.
I refuse the tomb they call a life.
I refuse the clean shirt, the polite smile, the slow suicide of days.
Still, I carry in my pocket a button torn from my dead brother’s coat, a ridiculous small thing I cannot throw away.
Monday comes howling,
a burning wheel dripping blood and gasoline,
and it sees me (jail-face, prison-heart)
and screams louder because I scream back.
But the scream also carries the lullaby my grandmother sang
to stop the bombs from falling, the one that never worked
and that I still hum under my breath when no one is listening.
Look:
Sulphur birds hang from balconies like hanged men,
guts of houses spill into the gutter,
false teeth grin inside forgotten coffeepots,
mirrors puke when they see what we’ve become,
umbrellas rot like black corpses,
navels drip poison into the air we breathe.
And yet, in the cracked window of a tenement
a single geranium keeps trying to bloom, obscene, heroic,
red as the mouth of someone who once said “I love you”
and meant it, even if only for one afternoon.
I walk past orthopedic shops where bones beg to be free,
past yards where underpants and towels hang crucified,
weeping slow dirty tears that taste of every love we murdered,
and of every love that refused to die and embarrassed us by living.
I am done being quiet.
I am done being human in their way.
Let the whole city burn if it must.
Let the night rip itself apart.
But if it burns, let something be saved in the burning,
even if only the memory of a hand that once touched another hand
without asking for papers, rent, or tomorrow.
I walk with my heart on fire,
beating golden wings against the cage of ribs,
beating, beating, beating
until something (god, devil, love, chaos)
finally hears me and answers with thunder
or with rain
or with the small cracked voice of a child asking why the sky is black tonight.
I am not asking anymore.
I am coming.
Carrying both the torch and the tear.
Carrying the disgust and the impossible tenderness that will not let me put the torch down.
All of it disgusts me,
so all of it must change
or all of it must die.
But if it dies, let it die in my arms,
the way my mother died,
the way every small tenderness dies
when the world keeps refusing to be worthy of it.
Then, only then,
I will set the fire
and I will cry into the fire
and the fire will be beautiful
because it will be the only honest thing left.
(Homage to Pablo Neruda)
:: 12.02.2025 ::
E.P. Robles | Poetry 