Barely objective, as I started to question the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ in my life.
The point of the painting goes beyond these reflections, it is just there, the colors, the lines, the shapes, the non-evident meaning.
Author: Pablo Saborio
fifth floor
I decided to live on a fifth floor
because I enjoy viewing things from
afar
most afternoons
I watch down
on the swaying of the city
the moody strangers
the angry cars
a fifth floor is a nest
seated on the branch
of a decaying tree
sunsets are my favorite
when the ooze of night
drips over the frightened lampposts
quickly the children of the day
retreat to their smaller caves
on a fifth floor
there is not much to do
but watch the ambiguous expressions
of pedestrians
and listen to the tired screams
of ambulances
while the cool autumn air
sinks
between the concrete-walled
canyon
I moved to a fifth floor
so I could have thoughts
like these
and to never
become
one of them.
en la poética ciudad
Permanezco en el capullo de abundante privacidad
las textura espumante del pensamiento
¡muévete cabrón!
en las delicias de un oscuro sentimiento dominical
envejece la piel a párpados del reloj
¡a la mierda!
con los húmedos relámpagos de aquella tristeza
vibra en humo la vecina nostalgia
¡me pisaste idiota!
tanto la música y el desorden enriquecen
las fructíferas venas de mi recorrido
¡detente, esta es mi parada!
coloquialmente colocando los adjetivos
sobre el manto del vaivén de rosarios
¡suelta mi billetera, ladrón!
porque el lustre de cada minuto
es sinónimo de la más pura poesía
¡aléjate comadreja!
así en el caótico zumbido metropolitano
trato cada cosa con su merecido nombre.
todo nace absurdo
Que soy uno de muchos
muchos yos que fueron y serán
los mundos que pueden haber
por la increíble plasticidad de la energía
cuantos universos y seres hubieron
cuantos sueños inimaginables nacerán
todo nace absurdo
siendo en su fugacidad
portador del tiempo
siendo en su cansancio
hijo de grandes eternidades
nada basta
es insuficiente ser humano
un elogio al que se detuvo
pensó, sintió, abismal incertidumbre
la lenta muerte de una vibración
todo nace absurdo
aspecto oscuro de la beatitud
fragmento sucio de la infinidad
dejo hoy de ser hombre
para unirme con la oscilación de los dioses negros
vacío entre franjas de luz
potencial
posibilidad
alcance al ambiguo
vida eterna sin ojos
demencia por los corredores de la sustancia.
unuttered world
The sky: my desperate dispersion
an expansion creeping slowly in
the autumn fields of my lost war
manifest the gesture that condemns me
to seek lavishly the sighs of unnamed
saints and mystics
heavy with the saddle of onrushing years
seeping the dripping paint
like the dance of mechanical yesterdays
the grave of my birth and burying
thus a multitude of poems – astray
halfway
detached from the events of time
isolated in the nirvana of untouched perception
sky, fragment of other lives
or why November and dying
that last sullen word behind chaos
a return
a miniature spot
whose own language
cannot participate in its description
thus the sky and the lesser me
thus a slow sleep in an immense unuttered world.
A modern crisis
We were born after a whole deal of postures and attitudes had been tried and dismissed. It seemed to me that this was the first time in human history when life was unbearable even while we have all the basic conditions for survival and a surplus of commodities. We live in the absence of a raison d’être and our very lives could actually be defined as the search for that sacred reason. We would and probably will travel around the globe and consume every possible experience in search of that elusive understanding that could justify and make sense of all the seemingly senseless gyrations between birth and death, hunting for that catharsis that would erase our feelings of inadequacy and insufficiency.
If I am allowed to make a stand on the current emptiness that governs the modern rebel (and I must state that this rebel is even reluctant to assume this label), I could place him or her within a crisis of value. Let’s formulate this crisis. The ‘fortunate’ human being that is born in a middle-class or higher family is bestowed an excess of leisure, which is occupied with an endless parade of distractions, vague and short-lived entertainments that do not provide deep-rooted satisfaction. This repetition of material hedonism is deceiving and can engage the individual in a merry-go-round of renewable pleasures that are futile in their long-term effects. What an overwhelmingly urban and global society presents as the content and purpose of leisure is more often than not a distraction, a veiling of our impoverished consciousness. The value crisis in which we are situated stimulates thus, within the rebel, a sort of antagonisms against life in general and humanity in particular. Is this a wise human race encumbered by trivial pursuits?
The rebel stands in an existential agnosticism. What can replace the insipid routines, what solution can one offer to resolve the dilemma of human baseness? If leisure represents the time humans can delve in their purpose, our reasoning would lead us to suppose that the average human lives for unchallenging and ready-made experiences. What about the higher fields of art, music, religion, love? Have these been explored sufficiently by the modern man? Do they offer any comfort? All questions with no ready answer, the rebel is obliged to ask without answering, merely pointing to the emptiness without offering a substitute.
The rebel doesn’t conclude hastily but is eager to explore any alternative. The contemporary paradigm is of a successive development from school to career, love to family, wealth to belongings, material accumulations to distractions; yet all this is seen as a deception, a reductionism of the natural potential for a human life. The rebel is apt to adopt a cynical skepticism towards the replacement of one mode of life for another. Life becomes an experiment, a lonesome journey through the limbo of uncertainty. Could religion fill this gap, could music appease this anxiety, could art express this loneliness, could love heal this wound? The experimenter enters them all and many others with caution but will urgently surrender if any of these would deliver him from the surrounding emptiness. Yet traps abound, the guinea-pig rebel still has within the seed of conformism, soon things lose their depth and life abandons its impetus. How to keep the zest for life awake without returning to the dullness of a repetition-ridden soul?
It may seem we are doomed, that any experience by force of repetition becomes insufficiently satisfying for the abyss of hunger that grows inside.
These reflections surge from a modern crisis. A crisis from our lack of meaning, our absence of value. This, in other words, can be called a spiritual crisis. But the themes of this crisis are not god or original sin, it rather belongs to practical ontology, that is to say, a transforming of the quality of being, producing a reality that becomes not only bearable but powerful enough to sweep away the myopic awareness of normal human life. A new understanding might be wanting, a new wisdom of what we understand human life to be, what we do and what we aspire to; a journey that requires a mixture between philosophy and adventure, a compendium of revolt, daring and openness.
Return to homepage of Nihilistic Poetry
madness
Madness is the
irrevocable
like the powerful sun
shining waste
over 40 blocks of metal
strings that form a braid
braids stitch on us
thirsty loneliness
a mile machines
cannot reach
find me a gulp
of eternity, an inch
of Godhead
I’ll stop the soft drugs
coffee, sugar, TV
if you promise twenty
forty years ahead
I will encounter timelessness
madness is the irrevocable
a table
with all the books of genius
and a noose
to sleep!
where my wakeful hallucination
finds its soul mate: dreams
madness the
irrevocable
two hours before two
more hours
I shit and eat
and fathom the origins
of the universe
tears come because I am
trapped between
centuries
amongst idiots
reaping nothingness
I cry because
madness consumed
all intelligence and determination –
the endless parade of perception
of one day
exchanged for 24 hours
60 minutes
seconds of oblivion
and eternity
that never kills but
transforms
madness is the
irrevocable
a hopeless trap
within the miracle
of existence
absoluta lejanía
El sol
potente
claro color
cambia hoy
a sombra
sol de noche
sal en el aire
cuando me acercaba
acariciaba otro ser
otro humano
como yo
pero, no
cielos oscuros
cambia hoy
piel en roca
vista en sombra
evento solitario
absoluta lejanía
total absorción.
aumentan los violetas y los rojizos
Corre destrucción
antes de que sea muy tarde
techados están los temores
y los vientos huelen a melancolía
llega el fin de una era
el fin de todas
ajústate el cinturón
vacía los sueños
corre a la punta
al final de una trayectoria confusa
moviliza las legiones de verbos
como el catastrófico hábito de planear –
las burbujas del vino
las burbujas de la existencia
se estallan… se fugan
tensiones se van disminuyendo
el agua de un mar sin nombre
envenenando el continente desconocido
corre, destrucción
despliega todas tus flotas
arranca el motor del sinsentido
aumentan los violetas y los rojizos
anochece paz, ahóguese la multitud
la lengua está fría
la voz no tiene dirección. Ven,
destrucción,
es hora.
thus we die
Grow because
death is a plant
these errors are twigs
more regrets
furthering rooting
if it is too late
wreck beyond repair
souls, human or other
desire demise
no help
is available for them
for us?
we wait it out
thus we die in resignation
thus we die.
Beyond Language 
You must be logged in to post a comment.