I must put forth my unconditional gratitude to the US Social Security Death Index.
I write, you don’t write, you read.
You may ask yourself why I write.
How does it work, this something I write or why have other people read me?
Before you did, I read.
I read those who wrote from Noibla
And believed in the reviled value of literature
In a time where libraries proliferated
As drunkards attending their own wake.
What a distance between what I am
And what I write, but nevertheless,
Here they are... aren’t they?
A defying, consummated act I’m finished with.
In those nights when I imagine my death in Noibla
Only these nubile symbols come to me.
I write because news arrive that I died across the Serpent,
In Brooklyn and the Bronx
And I regret not having called myself, back then, say in 1949
Just to confide: you will die and they will forget you.
“Poetry will never mean a thing to us!” Noiblese say,
We forget as we forget to unlock with new eyes!”
Someday I will write about my 106, and seven, deaths.
But you, Reader, can read my
Last words and take a gleeful look at it,
Or read what I plagiarized at the age of five
And laugh your black mold.
The boy knew how he would die,
He said was not afraid of death because...
I write, you don’t write.
I could write myself up till the end,
Only if that Raven would stop fleeting...
Whenever I twist his neck there is no-one holding the line.
Here, Reader, it’s no surprise:
Nothing has ever happened, here.
I write, and could write one of those mild gilded pieces:
This desolation… I wouldn’t be able to say what, or how, It explodes in the sockets of the front lights of buses. Lifts itself up over pragmatic billboards: “BUY”, “SELL”, sadness.
Never mind, but yes, yes,
I know there will always be someone
Ready to pierce somebody’s eyes with snails,
To word him a shot out of piety.
Reader, answer this, will people think of me:
He was one who used to lope in the Cemetery of Signs?
But hush... let us wait and never name whom we desire,
Better stroke the trifles,
If you relate me my last
I can retell my one hundred deaths.
Hush... let us imagine, for desire, it is only in absence, away, away.
Well, yes, what was I saying? That I was speaking from Noibla:
I tell you I died in Albuquerque, and my breath faltered in New York,
But of course, sure not! Reader I don’t care,
Put this on a scale to measure a pebble,
The value of a voice decoded
On the wake of its last death:
In so many places, Dear Reader, I’ve already withered away.
Noibla, April 1922.
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