A Boy

He’s ten years old.
He’s lying on the bed, awake,
at night.
During the day sometimes.
He erases,
closes his eyes
and erases the world.
He’s able to think about inexistence,
the world’s and his.
He’s able to see the smallness of Earth
in the Universe.
His plausible
inexistence.
Black
inside the black.
The verbosity of all psychology.
The futility of suffering.
The contingent of his life:
his school,
his family,
the things that cause him suffering:
the scratchy wool pants,
the nightly enuresis.
A hole that sits down.
A hole that stands up.
A hole that sleeps and eats
and falls…into a hole.
Dark like a pile of urethras.
Easily everything
could not exist.
Like this his heart moves away
from Earth.
Until he has no feeling
and doesn’t feel himself.
He does it
when he can’t anymore.
It scares him to do it.
To have the power to imagine
the truth about nothingness.
His imagination scares him.
His intelligence.
His nullified real power.
He ends the world
because he is a boy.
It eases his mind.

Translated by Curtis Bauer
“A Boy” is from La tierra nos agobia [The Ground Oppresses Us] (Pre-Textos, 2011); this English translation first appeared in The Indiana Review, (Winter, 2011).

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