Written by Álvaro Revolledo Novoa

                                                                Translated by Norma Gonzales Pastran

1.    Bloom

Open your mouth as if it was a door. Open your mind wide. To whom belong these voices sounding like crickets? Open yourself to the world without showing the teeth. To whom belong those gloved hands? Cold and neat hands, almost transparent. This is an insect larva. They are waiting something from me. I have a warm feeling in my neck that makes me sleepy. But there is someone knocking on the door, scratching it, stretching it as if it was an empty balloon. It makes me open my new-born eyes and cry softly. But my skin is wet and wrinkled, stretched and expanded. “I am the whole universe”, “I am the whole universe”, sounds in my head. Then I climb the walls of the hospital, open the doors and windows and run away. At the bottom of an escape ladder, I read:

Don’t blow your mind with whys.

2.    Morning Mr. Magpie

I was paralyzed, angry and furious. I do not want to look behind but the first has taken my leg. I see my father’s face blinded because of those flashes as lanterns. Now, he stands up and faces me, arguing and talking. He said his eyes hurt. While he throws carbon, the first man trips over me. He asks and observes me, but he has taken my leg strongly and now he holds my neck. His arm is an airtight tattoo, a lever without family, a crankshaft that presses my column and shakes itself. The second one was distant but all set. My father was looking at me, although he was not speaking I understood him. “I know what you are thinking, I realize that now”.

Now you´ve stolen all the magic

And took my memory

3.    Little by Little

This is the house we stayed for so long. We fell asleep and smelled out. I remember pieces of cold food. Afternoon stopped us with a basket of dirty clothes. I do not look through the car windows and do not stop before stepping on the sidewalk. I stop to think seriously about myself as a sitting man. I pass the hand on the sofa and kill flies with cushions. The innocent piece of furniture does not move. I stretch my arm all I can and kill every fly that comes close to me. There are two flies flying near my face and I hit one till it falls to the floor. It dies very slowly and then I hit the other one till it falls to the floor and both stay there for days.

Obligations

Complications

Routines and schedules

A job that´s killing you

4.    Feral

[Mute] She has looked at me while dancing. She is whispering sabotage in the floor that I cannot hear very well. She bows behind her arms as sunken rowing. She looks at me over the pretended back of her shoulder letting me with a wet ball. This time, her look says to me that she wants to look at me again. I find myself looking at the seeds of her long neck, the tip of her back that extends and floats. She has confessed something in my ear and I look at her with a smile.

5.    Lotus flower

I am quivering my wings over the reef. Fingers like worms as baits that distract predators. Submarine waves against petrified clams. Deep inside I see a brilliant mirror with the same image: a shoal is not a tied fish. Hundreds of ancient coins that sink from the decomposed oak. Upstream. There is a treasure of a visionary man with a small mouth: a raw herring.

Now I set you free

I´ll set you free

6.    Codex

The leaves that darkened my hands do not shake anymore. They are together like warm seaweed against my cheek. The sun sets above my head with white clouds. The foam of my mouth tells a cloudy prayer, a backward insolation. In a bend I see tiles that feed bolts of lightning in the morning. In my memory, new bathers still enjoy summers far from the beach and new visitors go in search of water.

The water´s clear

And innocent

7.    Give up the Ghost

We believed in showmen but not in show. White stores divided in symmetric sticks that formed an ancient street: neat in its details, loyal in every foot above the pavers. The garden where we shaped them bore a crazy wind from a summer that was covered for the foliage and shaken branches. A recorded song with no bird leaves in swirl with no top. Ignorantly, we tried to quit the dust with dry bushes and replaced a soft feather from the hands of a florist. How do I come back to the trunk that gave us life? Ancient flowers in the peak of a bird. We returned to our palaces at night and we affirmed ourselves in the dissected vain of our window, the nest in which we possess each other. In the backroom, there are pieces of a lumberjack who sprout a tree to protect us.

In your arms

In your arms

8.    Separator

Walking. High lights lengthen my neck uncovered to the cold after the helicopter passed. Coats that go through the streets without touching its shoulders. Anonymous walkers in their outfits. This is the city, the old recipe that settles our eyes so that we cannot look at each other. Here we are from the beginning, cultivating compliments and keeping distance. But there is another city that we live in. A dominated village. Characters created in assaulted mornings, cats poking around in humiliated corners. Young soldiers got laid in the roost, pregnanted melted dolls that knew how to love with urgency and make-up. Peacefully asleep because of the breeze in my cheeks I let outsiders outline my neck and I sink in my warm socks free of pockets and formulas, and I walk discreetly over the asphalt of my tuned ears.

Just exactly as I remember

Every word, every gesture

I´ve my heart in my mouth