The War of Creation
The War of Creation
They called them fascists and Nazis, the ones who wrote with blood on walls,
they stood them before the firing squads, the ones who dreamed too loud, too clear,
and bullets found poets in gardens, in Spains that bloomed with death,
for the word is a weapon too dangerous for those who sleep in peace.
Some chose the rat poison, others cut their veins in warm bathtubs,
for warm water receives the blood more gently than the cold air outside,
and others threw themselves from bridges or into propellers and sharks,
choosing to be torn apart rather than to die from within themselves.
Electroshock for those who wrote too true about the wars they'd seen,
and still they found a way to pull the trigger, in the end, alone,
for creation kills, not metaphorically, but literally, with hands of ink,
and madness is just another name for lucidity too sharp to bear.
Some drowned inside their own vomit, drunk on life and drunk on death,
and others drank until their livers became a poem, black and final,
and the sun of some was black before it ever had a chance to fade,
for artists wear eclipses on their chests like decorations from the war.
You want to be a writer? Step into the trenches, soldier, don't look back,
for on this battlefield the wounded lie everywhere and no one's coming,
some make it to old age with trembling hands and words still breathing,
but many starve like Vallejo, with unwritten poems in empty stomachs.
It's a kind of war in which the enemy is yourself, multiplied,
and creation is the grenade you throw and catch back in your arms,
and when they hit you from the blind side, from the angle you never saw,
don't come to me with your regrets, for I told you from the start.
Now I'm going to smoke a cigarette in the empty tub, no water and no blood,
and I will fall asleep with all the dead poets floating in the fog of my brain,
for to write is to die every single day and be reborn inside the words,
and the survivors are only those who learned how to die beautifully.
The trenches of literature are full of skeletons still clutching pens,
and their unfinished manuscripts are white flags waving in the wind of forgetting,
but we keep on writing, keep on dying, keep on throwing ourselves to propellers and sharks,
for this is the calling: to bleed ink until the paper becomes sky.
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