from Little Humiliations!

On my way here

I found what was left of a bird: its little corpse
with yellow feathers still on stretched out almost in the middle of the sidewalk.
I tried to pick it up with a cardboard card
but picking up its head a bloodstain
and something like pus glued some feathers to the ground.

I brought it with my foot over to a bush. While I went crosseyed
to not see it rotting and I covered it with leaves,
other birds were singing, above my head
with nothing to do with death at all.




Poem

The roof at the foundation is closed,
so today I went to the nearest park
(half a block away) to smoke, but it turned out
fine because I went at the best time of day
(5:30 in the afternoon)
it wasn’t hot anymore and it’s spring
and the jacarandas brighten up the sidewalk.

While I watched them and smoked
hidden from the police, I had for a second
the same thoughts as a Chinese poet
of the Tang dynasty. For example:
“after rain, in la Juárez, the flowers weigh heavier”
or “I see in the jacarandas a philosophy of fleeting moments”.

(Every time less so, but it’s still April 10th:
your birthday is in 12 days and the petals are so close to the branches!)

Even though it’s a normal spot, in a moment like that,
it was amazing that everything in the park would disappear,
my feelings too, invisible to any passerby.

But it doesn’t embarrass me anymore to confess
that I only wanted to talk about jacarandas
to arrive at you—

because I know how much you like them
and because after looking at them for twenty minutes, under their shadows
I could only think of you.

Spring does that kind of thing to people:
others sneeze from pollen. My heart must be
sick.




Embarrassing poem

There are speakers for 200 or 250 people
but only 7 people are there
office workers in folding chairs
in the conference room.
The music’s intensity is proportional to its unsatisfied
desire for dancing or fun.
I watch them for a while from roof:
the drunkest one tries hooking up
with the only woman at the party
a lady who agrees to dance reggaeton
though neither of them know how to move
gracefully. Two mammals
drunk and sad in captivity:
even so, with the unexplainable urge
to reproduce. But they’re too drunk
even to dance.




I would prefer not to

Work, stand in line, buy toilet paper.
Just loving isn’t enough to keep you alive.
There’s always something else you have to do.

I’d like to devote myself just to sweeping the street
you live on or some other easy thing,
near someone I love.

I only like living so I can love
a few people, a few animals. The rest is
wasted time. But it’s not enough.

There’s always something else.
Just loving isn’t enough for anything.




Song (Frank O’Hara Cover)

Did you see me on ave. revolucíon?
i was thinking about you
having a coke at the taco stand
it was your face i saw
in the movie magazines
heaped up in the metro
i thought of you
while the last bus blended
into the first one at dawn
i was thinking of you
and just now too




Bougainvilleas

We came to the corner of Melesio Morales
and Felipe Villanueva. Here we said goodbye.
Every day the rain comes harder
and the only bougainvilleas you see
are on the ground. They were lilacs
and they’ve gone red like a sky, ending.

I write this down and it seems as if there were unity
of senses in things or in their movements:
as if changing seasons, squashed bougainvilleas
and ourselves had something to do with each other,
some meaning (or as if the weather were trying to
tell us something
through this last week’s rain)
but it might just be the poem’s optical illusion.




Two ways to see an abokado

1
As if it were a sun plant
you buy at the market
i put an abokado in the window
nestled in newspaper
—waiting for it to soften up

2
It looks sad. It’s been days
since I forgot it in the fridge

half of it, going black
and brown (as if inside it hated

me) though there’s no such thing
as hateful abokados




One day, around 5

When I had finished the broth
the owner of the food stall came up to me.
I looked like a hungry man to her,
but I’m really just a sad and skinny one:

“If you want, you can order the main course,
young man. Don’t worry about the money.” I thanked her, embarrassed.
I didn’t want to be rude,
but the melancholy mammal I am eats just enough to not faint.

Outside,
the wind
knocked over a little metal sign.

The noise turned our heads and we saw that it was raining
on the opposite corner,
but not on ours.

The daughter of one of the cooks
went running to make sure
we weren’t dreaming. I followed her.
So did the owner, the cooks,
and the customers who were still around.
We stood there for two or three minutes, dry
watching the rain.




Contribution to nothing

I was riding my bike thinking a poem
—that talked about some friends’ window
from which they watched the gradual demolition
of a building. The builders (or whoever those men were)
went on disappearing it bit by bit, with metal hammers,
without explosions or evil dustclouds—
but when I arrived I’d forgotten it!

I only remember the end: “I know losing your dad
                                        or your grandpa isn’t the same
                                        as watching a building disappear,
                                        but in some way the poem
                                        brings them together”

It ends like that because at some point it also talked about my parents
taking care of my grandparents, seeing how life fails
a little more each day or just how each organ goes atrophying,
so natural and constant and punctual
but that’s exactly the part I forgot

and only the end stuck around in my subconscious

(sometimes poems occur to me in the shower too
but when I dry off I don’t remember anything)