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This piece is about 6 printed pages long. It is copyright © Omar Pérez and Kristin Dykstra and Jacket magazine 2008.
The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/35/perez-lingua-franca.shtml
Everything turns to water
The canto as a martial art
Acts of eccentric dandyism
Boatparty
Santa Bárbara
Mi cárcel es azul
I bought eyes
The hands that are devout
Everything turns to water
You’re right, son: eleven and I love you sound similar
— portentous language —
well, every word encloses
a teaching and a trap.
I become decimals, omelet thousand verbs
coffee three cents at the waterfront.
“Coño, acere, everything turns to water!”
The discontinous dialect of the deities,
common tongue of fruit salads,
a world in placid erection
whose female part is
relativity,
transforms in name: everything turns to liquid,
guitar accompaniment and the one
too slow to act
loses the liquid of the language.
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The canto as a martial art
With what remains of you inside of me
With what remains of me inside of you
Let’s do some combinations:
That’s the canto as a martial art: sonnet
the silent soldier from paradise
who on his quest embarked with hope
phosphoresce: to strive, through distant scope,
for truthfulness: brothels built with rice.
Vacuously vanitesse
A God, a god, Body, body, Spirit and spirit, and so on to the very end
capitalizations flow from the inside of the song
sonnet by the window burned nirvana
with the rhyme of an elusive cadence
sarabande, welcome and the sentence:
it came out criollo in La Habana.
Vacuously vanitesse, how the preacher man settles on the
punctuation marks and not the other way around. To live is the important thing
I seek flowered forest to get at an early end
house anew, of many colors, house a cave
a lot of sleeping with no fear, well a certain cowardice
is the burden of all the patriarchs
And it all comes down on you, said the preacher man: Give me the writing
One feels the need for stillness
this stays in my recollection:
the intense need for some reflection
where I see myself it’s soundless
I believe only in the stillness
to make a place for self-reflection
if it gives me something for my inspection:
I believe only in the stillness
Vacuously vanitesse, said the preacher man.
Worldgetter
abracadopener
for the song to slide,
the butterfly
in its beauty
is not immortal
and if through living it’s lost
and if through living it’s lost
With what remains of you inside of me
With what remains of me inside of you
Let’s do some combinations.
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Acts of eccentric dandyism
Acts of eccentric dandyism
acts
of an eccentric
at midnight your beard appears
down yourself a drink, Pierre Leroux, buddy
smoke a cigar, that’s the first thing
and the last is never invite the monk
to play witness:
“Smoking, drinking through an ocean
pruning roses and cultivating your beard, allah akbar”
the bird of the breaking day, the nocturnebird
hardly a whistle.
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Boatparty
Continent of glass,
communicatingvessel:
nothing changes everything flows.
Drinkscraft a crossing arrow of the oceans
ouzo: ooze, to exude narkotikos aguardiente.
In the duty-free zone
continent lost the marinated writing
is pure as if no thing
is as if swimming;
tipota allasi, panta reis
tipota allasi, panta reis.
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Santa Bárbara
The heart knows how to wait,
the heart knows that it waits and what it waits for.
Hey, brothers!
let’s get that Persian gypsy down
from the raised grave that the Christians built.
They only studied theodicies
but never the thunder or the lightning
or the sword in the scabbard made of palm;
they collected fables from the pastors of Dalmatia
or is it Croatia, or is it Serbia, or Montenegro
just like others created the Thousand and One Nights
from a handful of Turkish stories, if those Turks even exist
Mamma, li turchi! they say, in Florence.
All things are pastiche. Times that rush onward
from the atoll to the fish, from the brothel
to the iron grave erected by procurers
for that pretty daddy’s girl
monogamous virgin dedicated to the infinite
dictatorship of traffickers in arms and homilies:
condoms.
And let the gold-standard patriarchs judge illusions
of the proletariat to be trash: savages!
worshippers of icons: Michael Jackson, Ruud Gullit,
same thing: war is there in the Balkans.
But she, who possessed a little, just a few inches tall,
Santa Barbara of dyed wood with sword of gold and ruby
confessed to me that the sainted lady
wanted to live and to die eating plaintains.
So says my grandmother, Balkan, volcanic,
offering reverential thumps on the ground
when it thunders.
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Mi cárcel es azul
My cell is azure
over it run man-o’-war birds
cirrostratus rapidly revolving
down the line
what color
is your cell?
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I bought eyes
I bought eyes and
picked up a fear of eyelids;
I bought fish
the always restless fish
from the reality
that flows toward no place at all;
I bought fear
fear of the eyes
fear of the eyelids
fear of the fish
and I gave out its parts
like a criminal
gives out a quartered body:
from everyone according to their eyes
to everyone according to their fish,
from everyone according to their fear
to everyone according to their eyelids.
I bought eyes
I bought drizzle at the expense of flowers
I bought winter at the expense of summer
I bought freedom to have a refrigerator
and I bought that at the expense of the fish.
Fried fish, with your open eyes
you’ve seen me, and you’ve spoken.
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The hands that are devout
The hands that are devout
the hands that sound out
king king kiking kinking kikinking
The hands that are devout
the hands that sound out pa pah
pa pah pah
The hands that are devout
the hands that sound out
cumba kin king k’un
cumba kin king k’un
hands that know how to heal
to ask, to give, to welcome,
the hands that are devout.