My Life in the Tubes of Survival
Because I was a
pigmy and yellow and had pleasant features
And because I was
smart and unwilling to be tortured
In a work camp or
padded cell
They stuck me in
this flying saucer
And told me fly and
find your destiny, but what
Destiny was I going
to find? The damned ship looked like
The wandering
Dutchman through the skies of the world, as if
I wanted to flee
from my disability, from my particular
Skeleton: a spit in
Religion’s face,
A silk stab in the
back of Happiness,
Sustenance of Morals
and Ethics, the escape
Ahead of my
executioner brothers and my unknown brothers.
In the end, all
human and curious, all orphans and
Blind players on the
edge of the abyss. But all this
Inside the flying
saucer could only make me indifferent.
Or remote. Or
secondary. The greatest virtue of my traitorous species
Is courage, perhaps
the only thing that’s real, palpable even in tears
And goodbyes. And
courage was what I needed, locked up in
The saucer, casting
surprising shadows on peasants and drunks
Sprawled out in
irrigation ditches. I invoked courage while the damned ship
Glistened through
ghettos and parks that to someone on foot
Would be enormous,
but for me were only pointless tattoos,
Magnetic
indecipherable words. Scarcely a gesture
Hinted beneath the
planet’s nutria cloak.
Had I become Stefan
Zweig? Was I seeing the approach
Of my suicide? With
respect to this, the ship’s bitter cold
Was indisputable.
But still, I sometimes dreamed
Of a warm country, a
terrace and a faithful, desperate love.
My falling tears
would linger on the saucer’s
Surface for days,
evidence not of my pain, but of
A kind of glorified
poetry that more and more often
Clenched my chest,
my temples and hips. A terrace,
A warm country and a
love with big faithful eyes
Approaching slowly
through my dreams, while the ship
Left smoldering
trails in the ignorance of my brothers
And in their
innocence. And we were a ball of light, the saucer and I,
In the retinas of
poor peasants, a perishable image
That would never
adequately describe my longing
Or the mystery that
was the beginning and end
Of that
incomprehensible artifact. Like that until the
End of my days, at
the mercy of the winds,
Dreaming sometimes
the saucer was smashing into a sierra
In America and my
corpse, almost without a scratch, was rising up
To be seen by old
highlanders and historians:
An egg in a nest of
twisted shackles. Dreaming
That the saucer and
I had finished our rambling dance,
Our humble critique
of Reality, in a painless, anonymous
Crash in one of the
planet’s deserts. Death
That brought me no
peace, for after my flesh had rotted
I still went on
dreaming.
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