I
Poetry
has failed because this is not its battle.
It
was dragged into this like a mortified soldier
who
yearns for absolute silence—
a
silence that is only possible in the absence of
everything.
Still, poetry continues to
appear
on
the front line—shivering, starving, tirelessly
resisting
death.
It is the only way to keep on
living,
the
only way to go back to the ones who count on its
survival
more than they count on its victory
so
that the real fight can begin
on better terms.
II
The
long-awaited fight has yet to start.
None dare to cross the line
for fear of repeating the same mistake,
for fear of hitting the
enemy in the same spot,
right in its steel numbness.
Redundancy
is more frightening than death
because
being redundant is being needlessly repetitive
and
needless repetition is admitting defeat and
death
is always preferable to an undignified loss.
To use a metaphor as if it were a
toothbrush or a pair
of
old combat boots is to use a weapon on oneself.
Suicide.
The
fight is over for lack of fighters,
leaving
poetry in a pool of blood,
leaving
the wind
no
choice but to carry the news of poetry’s premature end,
and the whole world will
know that it
did not survive the war.
III
Wars
kill as often as they pull darkness out of humanity’s womb—
which is a metaphor—
and
if it is true that metaphors kill as often as they
bring
the unnamable to life in Language
how should we continue to test the
resilience of poetry
in the midst of societal
disintegration, economic chaos
and political surprises?
IV
I
dreamed of a verse that contained all the answers,
though only doubt followed me out of bed the next morning.
I
spent the whole day trying to remember it but
I
ended up writing a completely different poem
that
only revealed my obsession with hyphens.
My desperation was greeted by a cold silence
and in that silence
I
fell asleep.
V
It
appears that sleep does not solve much—
neither
does staying up all night trying to figure out
which
of the following banish poetry to obscurity:
symbols,
unexpected verbs, foreign words, adjectives,
character, feeling, lies, near-truths, assumptions,
indefinite conclusions, the absence of punctuation,
too much punctuation…
VI
Is
the success of poetry just a dream?
Does
it exist to toy with our discontent and aspirations until
the
end of time? Repeat
repeat repeat repeat
repeat repeat repeat
it
all until the words merge into a giant cloud of
incomprehensibility—to
the point that whatever
is
left of meaning gets rained on, totally drenched in
madness and despair: the ultimate
nightmare.
VII
But
nightmares are dreams too,
ones that urge us to consider the
best alternatives
for ourselves.