your new holes.
Angels trained as snipers.
Saints with white beards and shiny halos,
the insignia of generals sewn on their epaulets.
You must have an organized army
to protect the new Heaven.
Daily, thousands of souls and molluscs,
thousands of slimy paws emerging from soft bodies,
their own shells buried somewhere.
They call it Eastern Heaven,
this new Heaven,
that place surrounded by a large wall,
covered with graffiti and phosphorescent urine,
the spattered colors of souls left out.
You can see the whites, the blues,
of their mortal imagination.
The old Heaven,
the one with ancient paintings and
gothic cathedral windows;
the one populated by cherubs and archangels with eyes on their wings;
the one full of clouds, full of silence.
The one without the traffic of teeth—
outside, off the wall—
of giant barracudas,
with their bloody silver-scaled skin,
wallowing in that ocean of Hell.
The same predators who nip at human flesh
in real life, for a lifetime.
The same monsters, with jaws much larger,
are here
in this expanded Hell.
RED MONSOON
To Aisha
Chiku is thirteen.
Her hair is full of knots and sand,
a gift from the Kismayo monsoon,
carrying everywhere
the crumbs of the Indian Ocean
abandoned on a large elliptical bay.
Chiku has big eyes,
lined up with the equator, accustomed to large spaces,
but now they are in the darkness
covered by a black cloth.
Chiku is a whore now, for the law,
raped by three camouflaged soldiers,
Somali wolves with helmets.
Herds of anger that never sleep.
The stadium is packed.
Chiku is the main attraction,
buried in the ground, only her head exposed.
The executioners are ready to strike,
to cut off her signal,
slowly.
A truck roars, raises its green back,
and dumps out thousands of stones.
Chiku looks at her black equator,
which is now red and hot
after being hit by the first stone,
and her bones crush,
slowly.
The monsoon stops.
It’s tired.
It comes from Mogadishu;
sits in the stands of the stadium
and cries for Chiku,
ignoring the applause of the wolves
and their adrenaline kettledrums.
The monsoon becomes small, narrow,
and it runs into the girl’s mouth,
still alive.
Chiku swells, more and more,
and then explodes.
The executioners are disappointed.
They remove the pieces of her
from their faces, from their arms;
they mumble, blaspheme.
The little whore
who denounced three wolves
has not suffered enough . . .
The monsoon, now free,
takes a deep breath and, with invisible nails,
sweeps everything away,
tearing black-tongued spectators
and bodies in uniform.
The equator is tinged with red.
This time it’s true;
only the stones and the wolves’ teeth remain,
scattered over an empty hole in the ground.
A MODERN BERSERKER
Even here—at the checkpoint,
waiting for a bastard
stuffed with bombs
under the cursed sun of this city of sand.
“Jack died yesterday.”
His head landed on the hood
of the armored truck,
bouncing on the American flag,
faded.
Still here, waiting for the tricks of Death,
hiding beneath old rags,
in children’s eyes,
inside baskets of dates fallen from the palms of Babylon.
Matt is busy on the radio.
It’s time to sniff my white poison,
my Eden powder.
Yeah, now I feel good,
as strong as a bear ready to fuck Death
and all its invisible creatures, big and small,
appearing from nowhere,
with C4 clenched in their damned teeth.
She smiles.
Her fingers are painted purple.
She wears a black robe, a veil on her head;
you can only see the eyes, two oil wells,
through the slits of a golden mask
that covers the nose and mouth.
She looks like a ghost.
The bitch approaches Matt.
My bear blood boils.
I jump down and take her by the neck.
I’m drooling, and the sand comes up in my brain.
I take the knife from my belt to open her belly
and let her give birth to the bomb.
Matt cries—he pushes me away—
I fall to the ground and stare at the yellow sky.
My companion doesn’t know that I am a bear now,
one of those you can’t fool.
I get up, I feel like a god, I’m his fate.
The hairs on my back stand on end,
my paws raise up,
and I stick my blade into his forehead;
all this happens in seconds.
He looks at me, surprised.
“Why?”
While Death pulls down his pants.
“Why?”
My ghost gets back on the bicycle.
She smiles again
and then disappears.
THE HALF BRIDE
Cold flesh
hanging with diamond cuffs
on asphalt veins,
capturing headlights, metal sheets,
rushed and braked eyes.
Winter skin is on show
on the road for free,
under the feet of the pines,
under their latex roots,
arching their backs
everywhere,
like white-blood alien snakes.
The half bride
lives behind the last curve.
Her dress is alive,
sewn from hundreds of pairs of wings
of motionless violet black moths,
You can strip her simply by blowing.
She’ll guide you to her plastic altar.
A priest will emerge from the ground,
his head breaking
the winter garden, your Eden,
covered with snails and tin crucifixes.
“Are you sure you want her?”
Her golden hair jellyfish
is already between your legs,
clinging to your skin,
injecting
poisonous clouds and Venus’ proteins into your mind.
Now you will see with three eyes.
It moves up and down,
stretching its tentacles,
leaving you to drown
in the ocean of sweat in your used car.
It’s too late to say no
to her siren tongue.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
The rotten priest smiles at you;
the wedding is going to be celebrated.
A pink butterfly
with yellow, radioactive skulls on the wings
comes out of his mouth
along with his blessi
ng.
The ground regains its priest,
swallowing him with all the magic caterpillars
growing in his stomach.
The half bride
spits something out of her mouth
and shoves a black ring on your finger,
a ring which burns.
You resist, thinking of the ice,
the North Pole, your wife’s limbo.
Hit by a truck, two years ago.
You dig in your smashed pockets
finding a holy card
and fifty dollars.
They are hers now.
You come home on foot,
no money for gas,
no bride by your side.
EDEN UNDERGROUND
The man continues to dig.
His hands are blistered
and the shovel is too small.
A crow watches him, shaking its head,
drawing straight lines in the air
with its sharpened beak.
The bird tears a feather from its chest,
which falls, slowly, onto the shiny skull of the man
who continues to dig.
The hole, wide and deep,
swallows the man up to the neck;
that place is not a cemetery.
The man pierces the skin of his garden.
Green blood splashes out,
the shovel’s iron tongue
cuts the veins of the roots—
bowels with head and tail—
What is the man looking for?
Finally the ground reveals
what it has in its belly—
continually trampled—
a carcass covered with white fur.
It shows itself, again, in the eyes of the master,
deflated, held together
by a frame of ribs.
The lungs are full of moths,
underground wings and nests;
they’re breathing instead of the animal.
The man crouches next to his dead dog,
barking, growling,
spitting out his humanity,
drooling turbid, poisoned memories.
The bitch that left him;
the factory dismantled, closed,
the metal powder still under his fingernails;
the soft fat of indifference;
the python of unemployment around his neck
which, like a bastard brown and yellow tie,
tightens, getting stronger;
his overdue fifty years,
the ghost that continues to mutter, “Too late!”;
his mother, a wobbly pudding
without muscles, bones, thoughts,
following the routes of her madness
aboard a flying wheelchair
driven by a Romanian Amazon.
The man looks at the sky for the last time.
He has a dry throat now.
He stands up in the middle of the pit,
pushing in mounds of soil from the edge above him,
over his sleeping dog
whom he had called Eden,
the only creature among many useless bipeds
that had never stopped believing in him:
its hero with thousands of pockets,
its god with a sad smile.
CARLOS, DIEGO,VAMOS!
Fat red-faced gravediggers
feel their hands burning
when the ropes run between their fingers.
The coffin is lowered into the pit.
Mr. Time, with his blue beard,
throws a handful of earth
in that model abyss.
Nobody believes what happened.
“How can Death die?”
“And now, what do we do?”
Mrs. AIDS pretends to cry,
takes a handkerchief
from her crocodile skin purse.
She blows her nose, hiding a smile.
She had always hated that fat bitch,
her too-demanding employer,
her thick neck, encircled by fake pearls
wide as the mouth of a volcano.
Mr. Plague, almost extinct—
nobody recognizes him—
makes the sign of the cross
while his wide-brimmed hat
crumbles.
Mrs. War acts as the first lady, as usual.
She wears grenade jewels,
her long hair in a bun
held together by two bayonets.
Her red lips seem to whisper—
count—
the souls ready for the napalm.
“Where will her children end up now?”
“The bitch has left a will?”
“Where are the fucking keys to the warehouse of elsewhere?”
From the trunk of a cypress
a human face sticks out.
Curious.
No, it’s Maria. You can recognize
her two-tailed mermaid tattoo,
the mark on her neck
engraved by her first pimp—
copyright Iceman Charlie.
The woman laughs.
She enjoys the scene.
She killed them—
Death and Cancer married one year ago—
their throats slashed.
The funeral is over.
Maria calls her two children—
“Carlos, Diego, vamos!”—
to go back to the Spanish district.
She did it for them: seven and eleven years old.
She learned as a child
to use the night,
to use the knife,
to cut throats and testicles
of pimps and too-demanding bosses.
“Carlos, Diego, vamos!”
THE WRATH SINGS, GODDESS
The chariot of Achilles,
dragged by two big rats,
dashes around the walls of Troy,
the trail of Hector’s blood
drawing three concentric circles.
A strige with the beak of a crow
sucks the blood,
the red shapes of Hector,
waving its purple feathers.
Hecuba, from her high tower,
shows her bare breasts,
squeezing them between her fingers;
a drop of milk—
the first milk of Hector—
drops on the sand,
exploding like a meteorite.
Death emerges from that crater,
wearing the Achaean armor,
the leather helmet inlaid with boar tusks
and a crest of black horsehair.
He strips the gold and silver plates
from his chest, pulling out
three deflated, dried out breasts,
his sharp bronze nipples,
and shouts:
“You’ll have to drink it, sooner or later!”
He throws a spear against the sky,
piercing it, exposing
the other side of the blue leather
of that imaginary canopy;
now you can see the plasma of the endless night,
the black salt of the world,
and thousands of chariots, rats, warriors, and heroes
passing by quickly,
dragging corpses with long leather strings.
Achilles continues his mad dash;
then, at the end of the third lap,
drives his rats and Hector’s corpse
into that black hole, taking a running start
on the oblique horizon,
accelerating.
The chariot soars,
penetrating that illusion of black butter
in the fourth circle drawn today
on the sand of Troy.
The hole closes,
crushing winners and losers.
It turns into a porthole, one of many along the side
of a flying submarine—
the night with eng
ines and propellers—
from which Death can enjoy the madness of war,
moving from one century to another,
pushing endless buttons,
sniffing guts of selfishness—
still alive—
animated by a mysterious power,
like recently severed lizards’ tails.
THE RIME OF THE MAD MARINER
Part I
A hand, a frozen claw,
grabs the blue coat of the bride’s brother.
The man turns,
his shape sinks into the foolish eyes of the Mariner,
who smells of digested beer, rusty thoughts,
barnacles encrusted on the bow
which cuts Hell’s waterway in two.
“What are you doing here, beggar?”
The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide.
The wedding dress has a long tail—
white—
the same color of the dust
that fries the brain of the bride’s brother
who observes the scene
and the new beauty of his sister.
He spits on the ground, trying to shake his anxiety.
White blood galloping in him,
neighing and drooling.
The party is starting; the guests are waiting for him.
“Keep off, you fucking drunk!”
But the eyes of the Mad Mariner
are sparkling, invisible hooks
that drag both flesh and soul
wherever they want.
The man stands still,
listens like a three-year-old child.
His muscles become granite
while everything around him moves fast;
a circle of fat moths
that don’t give a damn about the sun.
The morning,
which makes the worms sleep,
forms around his head.
The Mariner hath his will.
Charon loosens the moorings.
“There was a ship”—
The Mariner begins to tell—
“which cleared the harbor,
making its way between the thighs of the sea,
its mast
strong, imposing, excited;
its propellers
stuffed with chopped sirens . . . ”
The bride, her dress
sewn with generous lines,
paces in the hall.
Between scarlet glances,
the wedding guests
sniff the extinct smell of virginity,
the ghost that was not invited—
there will be no blood on the sheets tonight—
The man can’t join the others,
yet he can’t choose but to hear
the hoarse voice of the Mad Mariner
bellowing in his empty cave,
in his slippery life, in his prison.
He’s trapped behind the bars of
poisonous cocaine stalactites,
harder than steel.
“ . . . and suddenly the storm blast came,
and it was blind and deaf, tyrannical,