Free Scarecrow & Other Anomalies by Oliverio Girondo

disparagement,
    for all that blunts the acrimony of the hours,
    for all that lifts the anguish of the days.
     

WEARINESS
     
    Weary.
    Yes!
    Weary
    of having only one spleen,
    two lips,
    twenty digits,
    who knows how many words,
    who knows how many memories,
    graying,
    fragmentary.
     
    Weary,
    very weary
    of this freezing skeleton,
    so chaste,
    so clean,
    that when it undresses,
    I can’t tell whether or not it’s the same one
    that I used while living.
     
    Weary.
    Yes!
    Weary
    of lacking antennae,
    an eye in each shoulder blade,
    an authentic tail,
    happy,
    loosely dangling,
    instead of this hypocritical rump,
    degenerate,
    stunted.Weary,
    above all,
    of being always myself,
    of finding me each morning,
    at the end of a dream,
    there, bumbling into myself,
    with the same nostrils
    and the same legs;
    as if I didn’t long
    to breach a crack in the wet crust of the beach,
    to offer, to the dew, breasts made of magnolias,
    to caress the earth with a caterpillar’s stomach,
    to live, for months at a time, inside of a rock.
     

BLOODLESS DICHOTOMY
     
    My hand always shows up
    later than another hand that mixes with mine,
    and together they form a hand.
     
    When I am going to sit down
    I notice that my body
    settles in another body that just sat down
    where I feel myself to be.
     
    And at the precise moment
    I enter a house,
    I discover that I am already there
    before having arrived.
     
    Thus it is quite possible that I may not attend my own funeral,
    and while being watered with commonplaces,
    I will find myself already six feet under,
    clothed in a skeleton,
    enduring the boring news and floods of false tears.
     

NIHILISM
     
    Nothing from nothing:
    is everything.
    So I love you, not a bit.
    Entirely!
    For nothing.
     

PROWESS
     
    Everything,
    everything,
    in the air,
    in the water,
    on the earth,
    jumbled and acidic,
    disintegrated,
    lost.
    Water made horse before cloud and rain.
    Bulls transformed into submissive pulleys.
    The hoax unveiled,
    no tutu,
    no tits.
     
    The impudent lie exhibiting its rump
    in every position,
    on every corner.
    The voracious moths of cooked-up expediency,
    costumed as hyenas,
    as tapirs with tool kits.
    The ceilings emigrating in furtive flocks.
    The windows spitting out dentures of pianos,
    sauce pans,
    mirrors,
    carbonized legs.
     
    Therefore look
    without a pinch of moss,
    my heart of tinder,
    at what we did,
    at what we’ve done
    with our poor hands,
    with our skeletons of winter and summer.
     
    Unleash the fire.
    Applaud the disaster.
    Process,
    with rubber,
    the pustulant appetites.
    Prostitute twilight.
    Worship baloneys
    and the dried brains of softened walnuts...
    As if nothing more existed than sweat and disgust;
    as if we yearned only to nurture with our blood
    the roots of rancor;
    as if it weren’t depressing enough
    to know that we are nothing but a pale turd
    of love,
    of death.
     

DOWNFALL
     
    I plummeted,
    I fell
    among splinters and bones,
    among teardrops of sand
    and showers of glass,
    then I heard them shouting:
    “Down!”
    “Farther down!”
    and I kept falling,
    turning round
    and round,
    among stinging ashes
    and mangled screams,
    “Down!”
    “Farther down!”
    in a spiral,
    revolving,
    engulfed in demolition,
    in murky tourbillions,
    of flakes and fragments,
    of slivers,
    of howls,
    “Down!”
    “Farther down!”
    among rubble and ruins
    ravings,
    reports,
    asphyxiation,
    within a horror, within a mystery,
    beyond breath,
    beyond light,
    beyond recollection.
     

VORTEX
     
    From the sea, to the mountains,
    over land,
    through the air,
    from one mouth to another,
    spinning,
    whirling,
    between furniture and shadows,
    fretful,
    screaming,
    I have lost my life,
    I don’t know where,
    I don’t know when.
     

QUIBBLE
     
    It appears that I am living,
    that I exist amid this noise,
    that I can see these walls,
    that these hands are mine,
    but perhaps I am mistaken
    and walls and hands
    are only things remembered
    from a former life.
     
    I said