This poetry collection is a journey into the year that marked the author of this poetic work. A turning of the cycle: navigating between storms and bright days. Yet it is not an autobiography, but a book in which shipwrecks and paradises that we all know dwell.
At Zenda we publish five poems from Todo ocurrió en el 2000 (Averso), by José Gómez Garrido.
***
THE INCENDIARY BARS
One eye sees. The other feels.
Paul Klee
There is something about the night
a molecular union, a blood-bound embrace,
of tight agreements, of calendula,
of toasts and malts,
of warmth and loneliness,
reunions that taste like contracts
for a second verse.
The night had something of this many times
in those taverns
with a sentence of death across the decades:
the gins watered down at the bars
of our friendships.
The charcoal walls, the dim light,
retrospective neons that stayed up late,
floors sticky as hands
behind the peach hue, all aflame
over the quarter of a century.
Gazing through the crack
left by memory in my window
leaves the landscapes blurred.
Paul Klee’s eye:
always one eye that sees and another that feels.
I am the other eye, the one that always goes
veining the cheeks with rain.
***
BOoths NARROWING THE DISTANCE
Do you remember the coin in the booth?,
do you remember counting the syllables
for every countdown?
—pesetas were never enough—.
There was no forgetting, nor any pause at nine:
time, always ours at that hour.
Do you remember the incendiary words,
love, of all that love?
Do you remember it?
Your eyes clouded
as farewells rained down,
and the handkerchiefs were turned into scarves
to dry a river.
Remember, do you remember?,
do you remember the silence behind each goodbye?
***
EMPTYNESS ON THE BALCONY OF A THIRD PARTY
To find so much emptiness on the balcony
of this third party,
is the rain the shape of the afternoon
that yields so little twilight for me
at the root of the everyday floor,
demanding and somber.
All rain
that never quite soaks the garments
of this fragile and extinguished skeleton
of its wings.
The rain that does not arrive,
as I say —never and ever—, never
to the wilted pots on the balcony,
from this balcony on the fringe
of my desires.
***
THE LEFT AXIS
To Mom
From her hand were born those afternoons
that have kept us up late so many times.
Coffee-table, our sun as refuge,
and the living room that, without her,
loses its name and its age:
a trench in a working-class neighborhood.
From your hand I was made.
You and I,
your silence,
both,
like after the thunder.
The pulse
of her broad hand
which I long for so late in this afternoon
without a hand, without a living room, without the coffee-table.
***
EVERYTHING HAPPENED IN 2000
Its memory is the least forgotten,
even as the room of this century falls apart.
Now mute, once long in verb.
With the dances the suns in their days.
Times of youth
on that bench facing the hills.
The long year that soon slipped away from us:
where the light and shadow of that ring
knocked out my weather vanes with a hook.
Remember not to forget these memories.
Do not forget to remember it.
Remember the island-colored olive grove,
the one that looked out on the journey
of my entire existence.
You know it now, remember,
there I was —we were—.
Everything happened that year.
—————————————
Author: José Gómez Garrido. Title: Todo ocurrió en el 2000. Publisher: Averso. Sale: Todos tus libros.
BIO
José Gómez Garrido (Baeza, Jaén) is a journalist, musician and writer. At thirteen he began composing poems, and a year later songs. Leader of notable bands such as Autómatas or Vuelacruz, he is one of the most recognizable voices in communication in Andalusia. Since 2002 he has been a journalist at Cadena SER Jaén. He became director of newscasts and received the Paraninfo Award for Journalism. He has also worked as a voice actor, being the voice of the poet Miguel Hernández. In literature, in 2024 he won the first prize of the Ortega y Sagrista Poetry Contest. The following year he published his first book, Otoño y el verano perdido (2025, La Pequeña Habitación), selling out the first edition in a month. He has been included in literary journals and anthologies.
