PANIC

                                                                 "The revolution for its sacrifices affirms superstition."         Charles Baudelaire

"Given the fact that human beings tend irremediably to create systems of thought to alienate themselves, and frequently admire their world view more than the world itself"--opines Ronald McDonald--"I see nothing wrong with a system of nurturance that keeps everyone happy and occupied.
     --Then consciousness shouldn't exist at all--I sleeplessly reply as I wait for my coffee.
     --That's just a detail--he says and crossing his legs gestures in his favorite pose.  As I've told Rousseau, Plato, and Descartes, a conceptualization is always more important than what's experimental.  Furthermore, if through the means of some mechanism the species were preserved, which is what all ethics attempt, including Marxism, I see no reason for offense.
     I am suddenly possessed by the spirit of Satan, who boils the coffee held between my hands and with my mouth I answer.
     "Maybe what Mr. McDonald has forgotten is that mechanization of human activity doesn't override the existence of Reason which can replace itself with its own infirmities.  Whether or not sufficient technology exists and with the perfectionism of unconscious mechanisms solely can speed the mass suicide of humanity."
     And as he's speaking, a line of miniature Tupamaros march forth from my cup of coffee.
     --Nor is it necessary--he goes on saying--if it requires weaponry our system of control is completely secured and moreover very persuasive.  The actual problems of violence will simply pass.
   But out of my coffee streams a tiny army:  Mambisean warriors carrying machetes, Cimarrons with silver hats, and Guaramies in force, dispersed across the table like an anthill.
     --About rationality, I believe it can be aided through genetic modification we've made speedy advance in that field, you know?
     Now I see coming forth in arms the Aimaraes, Jutus, Yawas, horses, eagles, and tigers gathering in a legion near my cup.
     --And if you don't admire mass suicide what do you propose for a change? Would you prefer it be one at a time?
     The miniature army continues flowing from my cup:  Mandingo, Ambudu, Kombe.  Finally, a complete Mujahadin force of warriors.  Then the demon replies, "not suicide but Homicide!"
     Ronald attentively observes the cup, that far from flame continues boiling, and reaches his yellow glove toward me.
     --Oh, sorry, I didn't know I had the honor.
     --I watch him without an appetite and unable to speak think of my extreme fatigue with just a cup of coffee in my hands.


 

BLADE SESSION

"What we say are truths
our shattered souls
and our intentions
are what become criminal"
     Margaret Atwood


Before beginning with all of this, it's necessary I speak of the pain.  I don't say so because you've arrived here with suffering, if not to let you know that pain is nothing more than a defect in our senses, just when we try to learn of new things.  And, you've arrived beneath the promise of experiencing something of newness.  Don't worry.  There will be no pain that can harm you here.
     Do you recall seeing light directly for the first time like a burning arrow that pierces your head?  Think of the first time you breathed in and it was as though your chest were filled with broken glass?  Now the pain forms a part of your life and is inextricably woven in it.
     Repeat after me:  life is a part of pain and vice versa.  I'd like you to repeat it as we learned to repeat things in school.  Like that.  Over time you'll comprehend pain of a magnitude that exceeds existence.  Now do you see the beautiful, inevitable, and transcendental results of suffering?
     Remember your childhood pains.  Have you ever broken a bone or been seriously injured?
As a child you would cry.  For cold or hunger.  Then you believed that pain arose in the body, but I assure you you suffered more over your abandonment. Then you discovered all at once how remote the world could be.
     However it's been so long since you cried over that and nothing something else:  what you suddenly found in the nighttime, like crashing in the darkness against dark stone.  Think of the last or the first time you cried over a word or a gesture by someone you love.  When you found that there are other walls, more distant and painful than your own skin.
     Skin is an organ of pain.  Haven't you heard that proverb that states "trust the person you'd touch a flame for?"  Don't reverse those words in vain.  You should learn by pain what you lack so that you'll learn what your true necessities are, pain is also a signal of something lacking, one that weighs on the stomach, which si not that of the body and it bleeds, bleeds heavily every time you see, hear, or feel.  To that goes mutilation.  Skin only looks for the equilibrium between the inside and the outside.
     By chance is there a sleeping soul, damaged and cold in the engine of the vehicle known as a body?  Necessities can't be ended without increasing suffering.  Without this pain there'd be no will.  You should recognize palm to palm that walls of your crypt so that pain doesn't take possession of you and turn you into its instrument.  It's important that you see the walls of your solitude.  For due alone to solitude your pain has own name:  yours.
     Sometime in your solitude there raw harmonies:  the reflection of autumn light, summer foliage, the certain music of the rain...I see much through the wounds.
     Loneliness and suffering are all that actually belong to us.  We own nothing beyond our own body.  Blood is in the end a principle.  Haven't you been heard saying that you'd rather lose a leg or have an eye poked out before losing a loved one?  Now let's see if that's true.
    


 

ASGARD

"In the
white room
marble teardrops
endlessly
fall silent."

Jose Maria Eguren


I felt something like a tumor in my cranium, or as if my body were stuffed
with damp cotton.  Eyes opened in the darkened cold.  Laying there for
some uncertain reason trying to fathom why.  Time passed, a little or a lot.
Waking him screaming, shouting, exhalations, whispers, things that may
have been within him before but that he'd only noticed that second.
     Calls of alarm worse in the darkness, and they opened the door; nurses
entered and they removed the one who had been shouting.  Later the "kids"
began crying for parents who were inexistent and together made the velada
intolerable.
     Behind the door steps, doorbells, the whooshing of the women striding
in shoes of rubber soles. Suddenly feeling like a thorn shooting through
the middle of her chest.  Tightening fists, the pain grew and grew then
passed and was no longer there, a cool sensation covered her skin.
    
Sentia algo asi como un tumor en el craneo, o como si tuviera el cuerp relleno de algondones humeros.  Abrio los ojos: oscuridad y frio.  Estaba tendido alli por alguna causa que no podia precisar .  Paso asi algun tiempo, pudo ser mucho, o poco.  Enctonces lo hicieron reaccionar los gritos, los gemidos, pujidos, susurrus, cosas que quiza habian estado alli desde much oantes, pero que hasta ese momento notaba.
     Unos alaridos mas en la oscuridad, y abrieron la puertia; entraron unas enfermeras y sacaron al que gritaba.  Luego empezaron los "ninos", llantos clamando por padres que aca eran inexistentes, y en conjunto, hacian insoportable la velada.
     Tras la puerta escuchaba pasos, timbres, carreras de mujeres con suelas de goma.  De pronto sintio como si un cardo se deslizara en medio de su pecho, algo que le desgarraba las visceras.  Aprentio los punos, el dolor aumentabe y aumentaba.  De pronto dejo de sentirlo, una sensacion de frio se cenia a su piel


 

MUSE

     A man is walking at all hours of the night through the most sordid neighborhoods of the city.  He walks lost, desperation like a rock, hangs from his throat.  He stopped for some moments facing the red doors-ajar and foul smelling--of the bordello: he exchanges some words with the women waiting on the threshold.  He looked sideways at the street with eyes filled with nostalgia, and continues his march, ever faster.
     His hands squeeze the money in his pant pockets, the last that remains of his miserable salary.  The dogs bark behind him.  A window suddenly pops into view, from the street there can be seen a married couple talking over dinner.  The man turns to himself and thinks of his own evenings, his own dinners, and his own home.  Scenes such as these weigh on his soul.  It must seem unending, his long solitude.
     The individual is fairly young, his skin is creased and profoundly dark circles under his eyes due to a lack of sleep lasting weeks.  His shoes, formerly elegant and presentable, leave a permanent trail through the streets of the city.  His eyes have a yellow look to them like a frightened child. He has also been tired, he waits a while until he sees a door's threshold of scattered rose petals and a finished bottle of liquor.
     

How It Was In the Beginning

That hot afternoon the doctor drove his car without a destination.  He had finally made his invention work, and been congratulated by everyone at work.  However, the sun falling through the right window and he here escaping the city: the feeling of going, like others, to an unimaginable place.
     At times the survival of humanity tormented him, not for the "survival" of "all" but that portion that connected us to others with just a drop of life to dedicate to individual survival.
     He decided to head out early, he felt a strong urge to go toward the plains on the occasion.  "Is that why he worked'  Solely to confirm of a former occasion?  Now having passed the large highways on the outskirts of the city, the plain extended endlessly in the windshield. Not wanting to know where he was going...but sooner or later would come into that pueblo.  What's it's called?  A place where nobody asks questions.
     He kept on for many kilometers without seeing a thing.  There were no men, no cows, no ranchers, as it looked in the movies.  Just as the sun brightened, the pueblo arrived.  He looked for a small hotel, one that only has one plant and one client per year.  He asked for a room with a window and he sat down on the bed to watch the birds pass by.
     He would've liked to have had the plain before him like a singular certainty, but the enormous distance and the small pueblo have him at the sea.  Perhaps it was on a boat, a boat over the shadowy waves, filled with contaminated people.  Each one feverish and delirious in their cabin.  No. No he wasn't a doctor nor a captain of that ship.  Hallways and aisles.  Perhaps the captain's already been dead.
     He sat down to dine at a table next to the window and closed the curtains.  It was already dark outside.  The wind whistled out there.  From a distance, it seems to him the sound of the gallop of a horse.  It'd be better if tomorrow he had nowhere to go--he thought--. However what came to his memory were the people at work. Not one was happy but they were always smiling. He wasn't optimistic, but he believed in the right to tranquility and leisure.
     He ate the dinner already cold, maybe he felt he was getting older; he felt his head numb and his muscles ache.  Or it could've been the fatigue and the nights without sleep.  At times, he imagined himself like an infinite old being inhabiting an asteroid.  

Flammable, Leonel Juracan, Editorial Cultura, Guatemala, 2008

it's time for stone to flower,

time to pity unrest

time for time to be time,

time for time  

Paul Celan

On this planet, in this country, and city, it is harder everyday to stay alive.  I don't say that it's physically difficult or comes of injustice, lack of health, or the violence to which we are already accustomed.  It's another type of pain, the insatiable want of collective tragedy, the immense desire between vices, and the moral absurdity of talk shows to undo consciousness; let it all be taken away by media including the end of the world, and destroy life forever.
     An afternoon walk, surrounded by fruit trees, rusty machinery, gray skies, desolate people, a heavy sensation, like a clear road to death, underlying the actions of hundreds of thousands of people on earth sinks in.  It's like it was already programmed, like every action were part of an execution without appeals. As though someone had filmed in detail the last days of humanity and we are only ghosts in its celluloid, transpiring through the inertia of a machine: from the quartered remains of a cadaver in the morning news, to the competition for a million quetzals on a flyer, then the insane detonation of a combustible and a new cadaver maimed on the television. Life's been mixed with death in the eyes of agony.

     Maybe it's the late arrival of the sensation that fed the strange dreams of Europe at the end of the 19th Century, the somber decadence, the premonition of the graveyard wrapped in Symbolism, then onto Postromanticism and  Expressionism, an ill-defined scent of death over each and every thing.
     Taken lightly it can't be seen, but each day of reality is more horrendous.  There's people walking along the street, business activity, diners in all the restaurants, patients in weight loss clinics, and tourists in recreation every weekend. However people die daily for the most banal reasons that can be imagined, people religiously seeking any pretext for violence.  At night there are burglars in humble neighborhoods, beggars in parks and church atriums. Any would readily agree that this is normal for cities, for what should be seen as a clear sign something is off.  Putting aside the particulars, visible signs don't abound.
        There are lonely men, anorexic women, people in love who pity themselves, for whom it's impossible  to have sincere friendships.  Said "serious persons" are "enterprising" solely for turning resentment they have for others into an inspiration for monotonous and thoughtless work the machinery offers. They break into tears by coincidence or when the evangelical pastor "moves" them and they remember how alone they are.
      It can be seen  in the young, a myriad of students and adolescents without a future, not because they're committed to survival, but because they'll never even know what it was they would've wanted.  Aware of this departure, they waste time at corners, discos, bars.  Shouldn't this be taken as the "unconcern of the immortal" characteristic of youth?  Now even fun is part of inertia.  All are sure they throw their lives away, yet that doesn't make them happy, for the moment they're destroyed they were closest to tasting freedom. 
     There are lonely wives and husbands who jack off, people tuned to a screen for more than ten hours a day, and if not at a screen than at anything at all: a radio, an exercise apparatus, whatever machine blowing inevitable contact on its victim, who is in this case, is oneself.
     Art has become a perpetual scream, put down on paper, over scenery or multimedia supports.  To scream is the only form of evoking some spirituality.  There are also parasitic priests of ignorance, who seeing themselves at a crime that ritual hides would like to have the faith of those they take advantage of.  And there's no road out.  Concepts of the past century that have sustained us so well have been replaced by a practical application that's been made of them.  Dignity is no longer a state of moral probity, but instead a state of indolence to pain and crime.  Honor is no longer a model of frankness and psychic stability, but an excuse that permits us to harm others while preserving a clean conscience. Respect is not what we owe each other, but a taboo that is penalized or prized for the power acquired. Honorability is not a principle that deliver to each what they're owed, but a disguised resentment for justice.  On top of everything else, sensibility is an inherited right, a responsibility among bothers and knowledge in simple Machiavellian craft. 
     Something grave has happened to what was once known as love: now it's an agreement to focus on patently mutual aggression: weddings that devolve into cruel histories of familiar tragedies.  Young couple remain happy no more than five years, porn addiction, psychological sadism, pride without dignity, evasion even of collective placebos for individual frustrations. Farce suits this purpose, all of a constellation of superstars not missed by anyone.  For each known vice there is a "star" fighting to fulfill the image that has been commercialized through them.
     In the midst of this, there are the inevitable biological cycles: daily hundreds of children are born, thousands.  And there remains nothing to support life. Today children are a box wherein the echo of the conscious frustration of the parents resonates. "Better would it have been to never be born.  I never wished to give birth to you.  The entire time you grew I prayed to God that you would die, then we would've avoided pains, as much for you as for me."  In school it's raised against them, where they are told that they're alive solely to function; that life has been programmed and the slightest fault leads to prison or death.  In case any thinks of escaping, there will always be a use for you.  Singing out defeat, demise is glorified.  With empty stomachs applauding gluttony. To stop martyring ourselves, we are contented with being indifferent to unknown pain.
     It's always been this way, but to say it now is necessary.  It is necessary to raise people resented so that humanity may self-destruct. 

 

 

Portrait of Poet Verses the Critic

Giaconda Belli read poems from a Tank
in the Nicaraguan Revolution
or one of her Poetas Hermanas,
Claribel Alegria, a Remarkable Woman
....How Sandy loved her over at Curbstone.
Cordially, as Poets love Each nother,
those Critics...what do They Know? ALl they care
about is Who slept with Whom for a Night
for they view their Objects as Love--Carnate
and ERotic. I AM! (Love of Selves they Lack)
And with Reason for they are Self-Supplied
narcissists who hate Rhyme. ABC's they
Employ as does a Flyswatter, Killers of Thought.
A Poet is wise who Immunizes her Verse.