Dead Music, Open Music

The night is not kohl,
but your lips are kohl.
Morning is not a pear
but my mouth is a pear.
Our love is coal.
Our friendship, gas.
I bite the lettuce of your ear.
There, open, are my oysters.
Green sun on my hair.
Green salt on your legs.
Parched, I look at your bird eyes.
You look at my horsefly arms.
Heel on a clog, that’s you.
(Seeing you walk into a room is a nightgown)
The sky kisses you.
The sky weighs me down.
The police rob your mouth.
The mafia get into my dreams.
I like Otis Redding, what phrasing.
You like Otis Redding, what swaying.
I am hyperboles.
You are litotes.
I am a sack.
You are a hand.
You are better than Gandhi, but you wear Armani.
I am worse than Homer. I am worse than Homer.
Your love is pan by the handle.
My love is the Parthenon.
You sound like the country.
I sound like scuba diving.
You are the refrigerator.
I am the magnet.
You the water,
me, the empty swimming pool in the old GDR.
Funky junk.
Yuca in Yucatan.
The flowers of all the Evas in the neighborhood die in me.
The sweat from muddy arms dies in you.
My sex: bustard.
Your sex: eraser.
You are the scent of gin on top of the car’s hood.
I am the scent of gin on top of the car’s hood.
Don’t think: Cilantro.
I don’t think: shaft.
Mine are umbilical unions.
You have twenty fingers for love.
You say: Let me suck my coca leaf.
I say: Let me eat chicken lung.
In fact
poetry squints:
something frees the apple
from being a yellow sun.
Something frees you
from being me.
In fact
poetry sees fairly:
Something pushes the apple to
be a yellow sun.
Something frees you
from being yourself.

Translated by Curtis Bauer
“Dead Music, Open Music” is from La tierra nos agobia [The Ground Oppresses Us] (Pre-Textos, 2011).

You can read and listen to the poem in the original Spanish here.