Four Poems

Gelsys García Lorenzo

Waiting

In the dream there is a house with a gable roof. I have a premonition that something will suddenly start to fall. Amphibians? Blood? Dismembered bodies? Plastic dolls? Canned meat? Plastic wraps? Newspapers someone has slept on top of? All the dream, I’m there watching. The house is the Revolution: immense, with a fake gate, with caryatids, with fluorescent bulbs. And all the time, I’m waiting for something to slowly fall: like a baptism or a desecration, I don’t really know. Nothing ever falls, but I know that at some point it will happen.



The dictator

The dictator as a nineteenth-century invention.
A beautiful invention,
magnificent,
attractive,
but useless.
An invention that’s beyond the laws of the marketplace,
to be admired in a museum of wonders,
in an exhibition of curiosities,
to be seen for a few seconds,
and be left behind
and forgotten forever.

The dictator as a wind-clock or a steam piano.



Don’t stop it

Imperialism is a gum
vending machine.
Cigarettes stubbed out
after three puffs of smoke.
72 small plastic stars.
Paranoia.
Blue and red rows for playing hopscotch.
Little old ladies crossing the street
with a shotgun for a cane.
Imperialism is a meaning-making machine.
Unstoppable.



The three automatons

The three celebrated automatons of the eighteenth-century seem crude to us today, their mechanisms simplistic. However, they still speak to unalterable conditions. The act of writing is immortalized. No one doubts that we will continue to write eternally, no matter on which surface or what characters, or what code we use: in essence, the act of writing will be the same. Then there’s the drawing one: the visionary, the sublimation of the visual sense: an affirmation that we have to continue looking in search of what is here below. And finally, the feminine figure in the ensemble, who, most generalists have affirmed, plays the piano, or others, with a little more specificity, the organ. In truth, she is a harpsichordist: she is the performer of an instrument that very few of us now know. A figure that forces us to redefine the world again and again each time we listen to her notes.

translated from the Spanish by Maria Grau Perejoan and Loretta Collins Klobah