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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2023
Saraband, poems by Omar Pérez .
Saraband
Tremble, hoarse city, lame city, ramp city
spin fortune wheel of rats and rupees
malicious city, I look at your ceilings,
your garbage bins, I look at your tits
and on a dishonorable corner
I could swallow 12 croquettes.
How much is a rumba of competing jingle-bells?
how much is an ice cream, a smile, a patience?
How much is this dark moss that fills everything with glitter
from the timely past?: bibles, shackles and castanets.
I know that you’re fond of mambo, that you want to be part
of the ordeal, I know that you blow and suck,
suck and blow full of rebelliousness.
I know that you sing “Havana” as if it was a paradise,
sheer marihuana dreams licking asses for a permit.
Crawl down snake, run away deer, turtle shut up,
let the small birds chirp and the kid dance with his rattle,
my tongue gets crammed in a prehistoric rigmarole:
the prisoner gets his cage and the guard gets his doughnut.
Translation: Pedro Ruiz
Partake & participate
Partake and participate
the singing bird lets go of his gut
blowing on the edge of actualities
the Pan flute of festivities.
Partake and participate
in the voltage
communicate with the nymphs of potage
novels of parallel underworlds
group monologues of telos, melos,
jealous and signals.
You see yourself soaring over channels
above an Eden of schools and clinics
partake and participate
in the pipe without peace, peace with no pipe
Gazing at the lowlands of carnival
mechanical parades of special troops
licking the saltpeter of monuments
rusts the hinges of sentiment.
You see yourself soaring over channels
above an Eden of schools and clinics
partake and participate
in the pipe without peace, peace with no pipe
Cardboard Integrity
Did they promise you a law
or do you promise it?
A solar hole
fills the molar with salt
did they promise you a law
or do you promise it?
A million meanings are offered to nonsense
your stock price falls in the market
the bankers would mumble whatevers:
“Common sense is the cheapest way
to adapt ot chaos.”
Every pigeon in its hole
only if they pay, fly for the goal.
The protagonist is a blue child
with a carboniferous brain
in which you can observe
exhausted guerrilla fighters.
Every pigeon in its hole
only if they pay you, fly for the goal.
Have you seen the astrological bonfires
have you participated in the Olympic Games
of self-acquired mental retardation?
Every pigeon in its hole
only if they pay, fly for the goal.
A complete civilization
is a society displayed in lines
of five dollars per spatial minute,
lonely planets, here we come.
Every pigeon in its hole
only if they pay, fly for the goal.
Little bird
If you can’t let go of the life you have
you cannot take back the life you lost,
when they play for the dead, you don’t know how to cry
when they play for the living, you don’t know how to dance.
A little bird who never fell from the nest
never learned how to fly.
You don’t want to die to make it to heaven
don’t want to suffer, yet you find no consolation
when they play for the dead, you don’t know how to cry
when they play for the living, you don’t know how to dance.
A little bird who never fell from the nest
never learned how to fly.
If you cannot forget what you have learned
you cannot learn what you have forgotten ,
when they play for the dead, you don’t know how to cry
when they play for the living, you don’t know how to dance.
A little bird who never fell from the nest
never learned how to fly.
Little bird, i want to fall
so that i can learn to fly.
There is no theorem
There is no theorem
it’s the same addition
ten thousand years beating the bushes
i write regueatones and forget the subject.
There is no theorem
out of the same fog
come down the primates
in search of phonemes
make your own regueton and treat the system.
There is no theorem
with the same lather
we write song and poem
everything i hear sounds like a motto:
to be or not be, i think therefore i am
God loves you, it’s not over till it’s over.
There is no theorem
it’s the same lather
that drips the fog upon the subject matter,
o granite syntax, conceive your problem
as just one law tainted with infinity
which says what it says and what it says is red hot.
© Omar Pérez
Born in Havana, February 19th, 1964. Poet and translator. He has published six books of poetry in his own country: Algo de lo sagrado. Unión, 1996. (Also published in the U.S in 2007, by Factory School, N.Y.; with translations by Kristin Dykstra and Roberto Tejada. www.factoryschool.org/pubs/perez) ¿Oíste hablar del gato de pelea? Letras Cubanas, 1998. (Translated by Kristin Dykstra and published by Shearsman, London, in 2010: Did you hear about the fighting cat?) Canciones y Letanías. Extramuros, 2002. Lingua Franca. Unión, 2009. He has also published a collection of essays on poetry and translation, La perseverancia de un hombre oscuro. Letras Cubanas, 1999. Crítica de la Razón Puta, obtained the 2010 Nicolás Guillén National Poetry Award, and was published also by Letras Cubanas. In the same year and with the same publisher, Omar Pérez offered a second collection of essays, El corazón mediterráneo. In 2016, he published Filantropical, with Letras Cubanas, and Sobras Escogidas, with Silueta, Miami, Florida. In 2018, Station Hill (N. Y.) published Cubanology, a book of days, while the Alabama University Press printed The race, a poem collection; both translated by Kristin Dykstra. Omar Pérez has consistently translated from the English, Italian, French and Dutch languages.