Today, I’d like to recapture all the wasted time:
Years, months, years,
Days and moments.

Of having culminated with success the escape from home
when at 11 hormones and edens ambushed me
My name would not have been clumsily scribbled in the obitual logs of bitter police officers without umbilical cords or with the right to suicide
Suddenly I would know how to drive a vehicle with ungrateful mastery more than the steering wheel of life
and the sinuous Beethoven would have forever lost a sad lover of his sonnets

If at 14 Amilcar had not set in heaven loaded with poems and songs of protest
I would have stayed planting home gardens in some nameless jungle
I would have unavoidably fallen in love with
a country girl
with her silent light
with her gracious tongue
with her licentious sweetness
with her fragrant hair like a flowery cascade
I would have become rich with a piggery
and I’d respond to the name of “Violeta Parra”
with horticultural bibliography or something similar

I was a good soccer player. I even blessed myself
with each blow of the whistle

But life is round and it crushes us
wherever we go, whomever we are with,
for the simple reason of being amidst the grass

With girls I never had luck:
since I was 17 they enwrap me with their ways
and make me question myself things I never knew
With them the best is silence:
silence when approaching them, when enwrapping them,
when loving them with all the senses .
Much silence not to wake them up
and more when tiptoeing out of their lives

I wanted to be a guerilla man but I never killed anyone
Every time I shot I was the only one hurt
I am a veteran of a war where God was a prisoner.
And where Satan was dead in the first skirmish.

Time is over, I do not pretend to be immortal anymore.
The body gets tired and backpacks tend to rip:

through the holes faith slips in,
the books we wanted to read disappear
the emotions that we clumsily left under the “Amates”,
the skin of the drums that never mixed with my skin,
the gentleness
of the kiss that my mouth died in

So many times death lost against me playing poker
and what did I win?
Drag my steps through cemeteries,
fill a lost trunk with love letters, shout under the rain my resentments to the Creator, who only answered with illegible thunders, with insensible lightings, and dead birds.

I wanted to be more than a man
and for a shield I was given words
and for enemy everything pronounceable.

No more nouns and adjectives!
I don’t want any more verbs: I want blood!
Blood in the hummingbird, blood in the river
green blood in the rude mountain
blue blood in the grayish sky
blood of light in the sewer-lagoon
blood of angels on the edge of children
blood of red love in the demon
blood of immensity in poems
blood of God in the chest of men

blood
in the name ,
blood
in men:
in the name of men: I want blood!
and in the name of time now gone
that will never come back
that is now in the past
remains the blessing of the hollow of someone’s hands
that warms this surviving love
that brings from the poet his dreams
from the warrior his wound foreverburning
from the priest his infinite consolation
from the delinquent
his swearing honest words
and from the comical drunkard his wise science
of protesting against everything with laughter

Anyway

life

always begins.