Omar Pérez

Four poems from “Common Nonsense”

Mega what?

I never understood, do you
understand?
War, they say, is
the naturalization of politics
whereby
all criminal designs
are voted yes by the victims.
Justement, energy,
that buzzword of commerce,
carries both to the sewage
of conscious intercourse.
Do you know
what i would do if I was god
if i were prime minister or
jesusholychrist of the united nations
under heavens?
I swear
i don’t know.


Archi –angel

Arkaios angelikos,
poli megalos Megalópolis:
all our diseases
with passionate detachment
interpret our desires:
the city and the angels, Sun City
L. A. Atlantis, St. Augustine, Las Vegas.
Suppliers of high qualities
classic or popular musics, epistemes,
tea, phones and phonemes,
philosophemes and emeralds
or makeshift virtues in loco delivered
like burned paper, softly blown
to our chest. Crazy angels?
Now that you say it.


Seeds Have Flowers

So says the book
one reason to believe
in evolution
transmigration
or rehabilitation
though i’m not exactly
a criminal.


It’s with the mind

It’s with the mind that i converse
endless revolution of the jaw
wild-horsepower of the brain
chewing eternity in a word:
my mind mine
no rhyme.

Omar Pérez grew up in Havana, the city where he was born in 1964, and earned a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Havana in 1987. From his early twenties he was an active participant in the city’s varied cultural scenes. Since then, his poetry and essays have routinely appeared in anthologies of new Cuban writing from the island’s capital city, where he lives today. Currently Pérez is a percussionist for dance-theater performances, and his interest in artistic collaboration informs recent writing projects. So does his experience with translation and multilingualism: he wrote these four poems in English. Jacket 35 carries an extensive feature on Omar Pérez collated by Kristin Dykstra.