Citizen K

To Diego Maquieira

Who are you really, K?
An angel with two defective wings
Or just an unlucky young woman who early one morning learned to fly
You translate my gesture into the dialect of silence
You take each word by the hand and lose it in your sex
Your affection is an absurdity that slithers between your wounds and that which dies
My palm believes it can catch you
But it is your sweat that misplaces my blind touch
I can’t say anything about you
Or your bare feet
Because my tongue traps your captive sound

Who are you really, K?
Barely your deaf opposite
Perchance my only virtue
Spread on my lap
I cannot but smell your humid wings to fight with the darkness
You lick your feathers
As if you loathe your own species
And I will not betray you weeping until you finish
Who are you really, Citizen K?
A young woman who has deciphered the atmospheric triangles
Or the vengeance of that crow with a shattered heart
Who gazes at your enslaved shadow
And desires it for its brood
Excuse each burden of my doubt
For each question consumes more of your light
Your silence utters that blindness is my song
And I cannot but smell your wings soiled with dew
A pair of swabs to clean the stench from the sky
I want to be a sightless bird
Who mimics your loss by crashing to the earth
And then rises like one of your feathers
Silent
Free
Alone

• (Translated by Piotr Kozak)

The seer

The seer dangles from her rope
Over the abyss
Keen to let me in on her odds
She’s determined to entrust my sadness
To her obsolete prayer
As if luck were a disgrace
We lie face to face
In her intimate burrow
Close to the galleries
As usual, she ties my hands to my feet
My neck to the rock
My eyes toward the intermittent fluorescence of my eyelids
Informed of my fate
I fight to hurry the inevitable
To best her at her dirty game
Hearing her song in the echo must be poetry
Her smell after sex is a self-extinguishing torment
The seer puts my blindness up for sale
The black tunnel calls for a certain language
Demanding whispers even of the silkworm
Spellbound by her lack of light
I dampen everything that sounds
Like the seer
Until she is mute

• (Translated by Erin Goodman)

My teacher

To Renato Sandoval

If my teacher died
I wouldn’t know what to do
I’ve already been to that country
On the other side of the world
And back
Where he sent me to look for what was already forever gone
In the purposelessness
I’ve learned my lesson
I was an early adopter of his technique
Grounded in anguish and suggestion
And I acquired, as my vocation, silence and the inclination toward perfection
Even so, he slaps my cheek when I forget passages and obvious notions
And to educate me without humiliation, he conjures metaphors about the light
that I’m slow at understanding
He says that I’m his best student and maybe it’s because I’m the only one
My teacher knows of my problems and limitations
And with tenderness he stows them away for later resolution, once the main lesson has been learned.
I worry about what’ll happen to his legacy
And that despite time passed
I still won’t suffer from hunger, lack of desire or hope
If my teacher died, how could I curb my excitement at smelling fresh lemons,
as his heavy heart desires?
My hair still isn’t long enough and my beard doesn’t even reach my chest
If my teacher died part of me would be freed:
“Freedom is a euphemism for memory, slavery an expression of the forgotten,”
he said once, climbing this hill
My teacher knows that I ran away once
And he fears that when he dies I’ll do it again
He worries that one day I’ll succumb to the widows’ passions
To the encumbrances of politics
If one day my teacher died,
I would dedicate myself
To forgetting things until I no longer knew anything at all
Like he does
Maybe then I’d be closer to that stubborn immortality
That’s caused him so much harm

• (Translated by Erin Goodman)

To Enrique Verástegui

We feel better now
But last night perfidy overwhelmed us
Nothing was enough for her boredom
And we went from one perfidy to the other
Making love to them the best possible
Running out the sounds
Combing her hair from the neck to the abyss
And drawing her shadow over the steam of the sink
An orchestra of gasps and silent perfidy before nothing
The faint nothing
Canticle of the rooster in the early morning of space
When leaving the catechesis
When rummaging on the rock
When licking the peasant’s blue nipple
Perfidy was the bird over the hope of my shipwreck
The verve in the golden tooth of the usurer
The elastic liquid that fell from the ego
The sexagesimal stone of the drink
The hook on the lips of the buccaneer
The acid taste of modest intercourse
The urine and blood on the cusp of the toilet
The boy’s tisic kiss on his pleura
And all that overwhelmed us last night
But today trascended,
We lag in the void
Healthy and without money as wrong about each other
Lost in the history irreversibly lead to harvest
Perfidy is the intake of the fruitful stem of the avocado
Determined to loose us in their sulfates
Perfidy is mi nose on your hair
Revealed by the sodomite of the gospel
Perfidy offered last night an ascension to Venus
Of that there is hardly a mortuary lesson
To fuck us paradise

• (Translated by Santiago Barcaza)

Inspired by Chico Hamilton and my house decomposing by an induced destruction process I write to you not knowing exactly why it may be to say hello or goodbye to salute you with my wine to tell you that my texts have turned yellow and the four boxes that contain them have all been torn apart in the same corner and that I would have very much liked to read them to you who endure the ingratitude of poetry one day facing down on the floor listening to you laughing which along with anthropology should be one of your charms that lead to your past and future boyfriends to remember you to imagine you or to love you like alcohol does to me immersing me in images like the fear of the first day when I got old looking for you with shame and our only trip together to Cañete as I drove thinking of how much I would have liked you to come with me to eat shrimp at this beach that surely would have made you remember that the density of water is lighter than that of honey like yesterday I remembered how much I wish that any of those fox-faced girls had agreed to help me with my moving today to I don´t know what endless path as if the traveling would never get tired of oneself the way lasting friendships do and you would see my texts papering my life in parquet and ash and how much I would have loved you to also see my photos of Huascarán’s back with Chico Hamilton’s musical in the background as now you can’t even imagine how effortlessly I’m writing to you as Chico Méndes used to do cornered by the farmers or Loayza’s text about bees or my humble destruction of the same essence of coal from which the dirty water must be made filling your afternoon with boredom inviting you to come to my house right now to see the laundry´s iron structures and by chance to see that my fear of death has disappeared along with bits of my life for you to laugh the way you laughed at my absurd way of interacting with anyone else (with you) with my loneliness with the routine that will soon be another and again another and to continue traveling one afternoon one day one night when I watched the clock the time you said you would come to see my old pot from which my ancestors were nourished until you arrived but to a boring and useless classroom from a former academic cosmetics´model immersed in the education system that is linked to the other economics and then the other sentimental one and thus another and another the nets with buoys from Pucusana fishermen where this time we passed and I offered you a sole and the Inca cigars that have never been very successful at Catholic school because wisdom usually wins a position in public contests and avoids throwing stones against mediocre stained glass and neither embrace them with fingers with the smell from erogenous zones until throwing them against the system the same as the restless kids in the classroom who have no idea how to make love to sad women when years ago you assumed the idea of killing yourself one beautiful day as if destiny was limited to biology and not to the nostalgia of not only what was but what could have been like Ribeyro said once that I fell in love with a wall in which I left his best sentence as a souvenir and as I leave you now as a souvenir many other worse lines that persecute me as if I were a communist or a horrible man with serious self-referential self-esteem self-control problems self-vehicle parked between Sucre and Junín waiting for you during some unbearable summer afternoons when you used to arbitrarily sort traffic lights and life itself so that your curls were not ruined by the whirlpool of the movement that is thought and that will continue to annoy you till the end of the day or the street as if God were a merciless folklorism as well as my helm my shame and my emotion now my sorrow my silence and my desire to invite you to look at these empty walls.

Culpa par odium exigit

A Claire, mi país

Odio solidario
como el abrazo de una parturienta
Odio que ronda tus ojos maternos
En la calle de las dalias
Donde un nuevo odio acaba de nacer en el jardín
Tus ojos iluminan
al propio odio de la noche
haciéndola especial
Asimilan odios nuevos
como proteínas que consumen la ausencia
Milagroso odio el dolor
sagrado odio el dolor, preciosa artista
Ya bajo las sábanas
También con el placer
el odio se germina
Y confundes tu sudor con mi sufrimiento
Odio a la pared y al fluorescente
A los ojos que recién se abren
Para aceptar el rostro de la locura en cada espejo

Odio materno como un abrazo inmerecido

El nacimiento es siempre un retorno
Que flota con algas al centro de la culpa
Tu arte susurra el odio a la burbuja de la sangre
Y al pigmento que me oscurece
El odio es el único patrimonio que al final se hereda
Como el olor de los sexos
O como el sonido sordo del alumbramiento

No hay mejor lactancia que el odio para reforzar el amor
Y las ecuaciones matemáticas del horror:
Odia con cariño a tu patria para ser olvidado sin rencor ni identidad
¡Huye!
(Sugieres con ternura y sutileza)

Tu odio es toda mi seguridad en el mundo
Y yo atento te escucho, artista máxima
Y yo te amo tanto como me odio
Y tienes toda la razón
Atento quiero parecerme a ti
A tus ojos artistas
A tus lunares cosmogónicos

Miro tus ojos que son lo mismo que la noche o el suicidio de un honor
(dos preciosos odios translúcidos como diamantes extraviados en la ropa sucia o al fondo del gemido)
Son la fórmula láctea de lo que una vez se amó
Son el alumbrado público de un hospital que se cae a pedazos y donde nacemos
Son el pan con té de los cimarrones que han sido atrapados
O el blanco sobre el más negro de los amantes
Son la única calle por donde no hay que perderse
El color del que no hay que ser
El olor que hay que evitar
El hilo frío de la placenta sobre el estiércol
El beso solidario del azar

Tus ojos comprensivos
Son una profundidad física y coital
Que abofetea el faro descompuesto
Que guía mi viaje

Mi insignificante corazón de odio
Mi pequeño y distraído odio histórico

Qué es el odio sino otra forma compleja del amor

Artista máxima
A dónde te has llevado a pasear

About the Poet

Javier Llaxacondor (Lima, 1982)

Peruvian poet and traveler, Javier studied Literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, business at the Universidad del Pacífico, and beekeeping and ecology in Chiapas (Mexico) at the Ecosur. Javier traveled as a professor and technician through rural South America, especially between Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia. During this period he published manuals for the production of honey aimed at rural teachers. After that, he move to Manchester (United Kingdom).

His poetry has been published and traduced in Peru, Chile, Canada, China, Venezuela, Rumania, Italy, Morocco and Spain. He is the author of Fish of the Exodus and the Vacuum, am artwork based on his relationship with sole fish and his life as a fisherman. He was a founding member of the International Poetry Festival of Lima – FIPLIMA and its manager until 2016. In Santiago de Chile, where he now lives, he directs the International Poetry Festival of Santiago – FIP SANTIAGO.