Presentamos, en versión de Will Stockton, dos poemas de César Cañedo, quien recientemente publicó en Valparaíso México su libro Inversa memoria. César Cañedo es uno de los más destacados poetas mexicanos de su generación.
I Speak
I was born without an ear
and my grandfather’s hands
presenting me to the world deformed
and my mother saying, We have to fix it!
and my father saying, I’ll pay for it!
and my grandmother, alone, How beautiful!
and that deficient child grew up to write
poetry deficient.
Here is my sulfuric canticle:
Mercy came from my ass
and lit up the night
in which my body
deficient
my love
deficient
my face
deficient
incarnated the body complete
in which kindergarten insults
and the queer expression of Jesus
battered in compassion
like Dumbo at the circus
Come see the spider woman!
Come see the human wreck!
Come see the neighborhood fag!
Come see the hunchback!
stich a skin of fear
nightmare of ridicule
flower of revulsion
three-pointed star
a sashay
plucked from heaven, from perfect
symmetry, from the Greek
monument, without edges
with pieces cut
into lines always faithful
as a copy of the incomplete
as the Lord says
you were cuir before you were queer
before I knew you
gnarled from natural selection
from the lineage of the men who bury you
in long hair to hide your faults.
Poetry opened to me like the lotus
flower in which I felt unoriginal
unstamped with made in Olympus©
because it would be too much
for me with all my scars
to seek heaven
in the absolute of an ass that doesn’t fart,
in the constellations of the Ocolome night
in the Río Fuerte, which is always the same
river because the dam never opens
and I begin to speak with the voice of imposters
slivers of others’ lines
of Dario, of Novo, of Bohórquez,
of dry entrails, of winter cornfield,
of the sad princess of lips of a clitoris
of strawberry, of the shepherd boy who came, came,
of the martial who ran, ran,
of the shitty and sweet tenderness
of my favorite homemade dildo
and in the middle of us
my mother smelling of Dior
and I don’t know what else
that no that no
Noah Noah
shall we go?
There are so many metaphors in the world
that I should recycle.
I make such perfect birds
simple jobs
and sell them at the fair.
You bring money?
One peso for something baroque
five for a sonnet
three for ten special on Vallejos
the César who won me
the right to be César
César with my face
and my poems and my men
whom I also don’t recycle.
They taught me as a child
that a rib, a chewy piece of cartilage
(more Genesis than it sounds)
could be an ear that doesn’t hear
and I don’t appreciate the irony
of stuffing myself with pubic hair
and the fastidious construction of a smile
that betrays its secret
like my syllables:
verses born of my ass
that come to give in the giving
plaisir from the petit mort jotuá.
If one day you weren’t a daisy
what would you be?
A butterfly.
Everything between the bugs
and the flesh
and the drum.
If one does not understand me
they can fly to Sinaloa
where they break men
where I was born broken
and decomposed
amidst the silence of drug dealing
that lulls children to sleep.
Gulping poetry
like cum
with flicks of my red tongue
one afternoon delivers
another morning
to so much love
on the back
and blankets my fears
and all my broken faces
so my face twists the verse
and my contorted smile
is that pearl that grows from loss
of scraping the pain of so many jokes
of dreaming to be a poet
and to be dead
and to find joy there.
Next Station
I.
From this temple of Aztec incense
burnt tire of orange centipede
final car of a male sacrifice
in this inverted hunt for the origin
where the last shall be first to come
I have come with a new offering
the cash of one
who expects the same here
as on television.
You, no, you got fat.
You look like a fairy.
The pockmarked never sell.
You have the face of a prostitute.
And you have what I lack
between the legs
the beauty of the offer and the demand
that in each station
each new shop window,
you play your luck.
Five peso entrance
into a scene of supporting actors.
In the next, perhaps, someone appears
who explains The Truman Show to me
in the quick slide of anonymous sex,
sex twisted through the sex of men.
In this way, the kingdom of silt surrenders.
II.
But now, in the corner,
buried away in their discount love,
two older men share
in seventy or so dead dreams.
They are the proud Hydra interlaced
In the memory of time’s terror.
As Gorgon, their gaze freezes more
than the statue of salt you expected.
They are the witnesses of the pandemic,
the fear, the rejection,
and they are here together, erect.
Giving each other what remains
of a dignity despoiled and death and salt.
They learned to cruise without maps, bareback,
touching their cocks as a sign of invitation
with no more radar than institution, without Manhunt.
They distill the patient certainty that there is no tomorrow,
no better future,
for men like them who seek to be sanctified in the light of men.
A hand strokes grey hair
the star of David.
What does it matter that you are young?
These men are your horror and your reminiscence.
These men are your Remember, Queen!
Their hour will be the now for everyone in this station,
a future quite rosy and quite fucked.
You will grow old, like them.
You will get a rash on your balls, like them.
You will get crabs, like them.
But you will marry, unlike them,
who found their profit in promiscuity.
III.
You check the cost
of your clothes
and with your finger tap
the teasing ping on your smartphone
so that virtual and live
you can find a man hirsute and soaked
who dilutes the salt of the future
and gives you hope in each thrust
so that you are reduced to pure orgasm
so that you think with your ass and do not feel
that the night is not a night if you are alone.
IV.
Tú rú rú. Correspondencia con if it’s Garibaldi
you do not want to know.
