Featured Poem 4/29 – “Anarchy”

Anarchy by Carlos Oliva
     translated by Anthony Seidman

On these streets where love is a word
which one doesn’t see
anywhere
I discovered a state of being as beautiful as
a flower that is yellow by night: Anarchy
I had to lift myself above that dawn
and take some leaps as beautiful as a triumphant Nureyev
I had to rip my heart over the asphalt
drink alcohol at night
moan atop a body that was also moaning
my consciousness was the diamond that cut the waves
of a hellish sea drawing memory:
demons like angels sculpted in precious stones and fire
carved in bloody rubies
paintings extracted from some Dali delirium /
I have the voice of lost years
poetry is an integral state and verses are born in springtime
like precocious children from this era of intense velocity
your open spaces will be useful for containing the overflow
of my imagination that streams like bubbles in the blood
of my wound open to your eternity, O poetry
you’re a mountain chain of beholdings
technology of an aesthetic chipped into memory
passion
sleeplessness rage time
and so each verse has its past present and its future each
verse carries memories emotion hopes that wrack
my bones robbed like a fruit from the past
and the past is the recollection of a girl I loved
erratically and
with the psychotic lucidity in the nights of Athena
when she stripped
intelligence and wisdom from a body as beloved as a poem
I have yet to write
and so I will go in search of that infinite verse
I will go like radiation in this restless night
like a brothel for the rich wherein pretty adolescents
are tried out for the first time /
everything must be destroyed
only I can intone these verses over the silence
because the perfect recital is found in solitude
without any listeners apart from my images
clinging to the present
where the ill-fated years hold off against the thrusts of the water
of these stormy seas from which
I emerge as pure
as a dinosaur that outlives the past.