There are broken people who never recover. They stay fixed in memory and, from there, permeate the entire experience of the world. The wounded mind tries to reorganize what has been lived, make it habitable again, while looking for a scar that never fully settles. Monologue with a Deceased arises from that struggle. Built in acts, as if the poetic self knew itself trapped in a private and devastating representation, the book turns loss into language. Here, memory is living matter and pain is recognized as a form of consciousness.
Zenda shares five poems from Monólogo con una difunta, by Emilio José Serrano Loba (La Fea Burguesía).
***
BURIED ALIVE
I have opened a hollow in the earth,
between the frozen peat of my memories.
Those that shape me and consume me,
the avaricious, who create and undo me.
I have dug a pit
in the deepest part of my throat
and I have seen surface forth
butterflies and ravens,
glints that fixed themselves in the softest part,
back there, in the eyes of a dead comet.
From this fresh trench
tender life slipped away,
no longer future and worth
an entire universe.
So much vanished and so little
of what my breath pulled remains
that I built a tomb for it.
Egoistic, cursed, withered
I cemented for it with bricks
from my black bones
this cistern of silence,
this buried smile
of a dead man.
***
THE JANUARY CALIMA
White lips bloom
in the land of the dead,
they shelter from your winters
my hoarse, open chest.
Feathers and bones fly,
seeking to end another entanglement.
Nightingales cradle their wind-boxes
in the bare branches and the shadows of testament,
not distinguishing what will be leaf
from what was a black summer,
so alike and ethereal.
Thus it happens in open graves,
in minds held up by hangers
and in deserted bodies.
It happens that it happens and happens again
a slow procession
of dead joys and anticipated sorrows.
You, never be a hanger,
do not pay homage
to this dead cult.
Be a strong lily, a storm of feathers,
be so light that they cannot bury you.
***
THE PENROSE CLOISTER
I have two doors left.
One leads to the convent,
the other to your room,
or only to your body.
I can no longer distinguish
means from ends.
I am about to take a false step
toward the convent where I keep
this wooden and sepia threshold,
toward the room where I find
the orange suffering with which
I write this shallow lament.
***
IT STARTED WITH A TITAN
Prometheus
in all his history
poured a single tear.
He, father
of a sterile world,
let it crystallize
and loved every facet
of that dark drop.
His craving for a panacea and a blessing
was volcanic,
the pillar with which he sought
to mend his error.
As a useless poet
who lives on rough pain
in this almond-tree chest,
from which once
the Titan
gifted us the most cursed
gift.
***
SOMEONE WILL SAVE US
They say
someone will save us.
It will be anathema,
a miracle and a proverb.
Someone will have to save us.
Disney cannot imagine
an ending so gray.
We wonder, what if no one saves us?
Disney lacked
honesty and humility.
Capital neither saves nor ever tells the truth.
But they say that
someone will save us.
To believe. If not, then what?
No one drinks such bitter coffee.
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Author: Emilio José Serrano Loba. Title: Monologue with a Deceased. Publisher: La Fea Burguesía. Purchase: Todos tus libros.