El Poeta Halley [English translation]

You’ll catch me in mid-air, never against the wall,

And if you let me breath, in your lines I will sleep,

Words from a muse on maternity leave.

Maybe they’ll know me really well at last.

If my quirks were grey dots, every fool who thinks

He’s tracing them with a pencil; you’d see my face on the paper in the end.

That’s why I’m around here again,

Combing my store for that weak shy word.

I wish I could find the way. I better do; I have a song to finish.

If it never turns up, or if I know I didn’t get the right word,

And when I finally find it,

That mire of doubts arrives;

If you stop me when I’ve made my mind up,

You always

Squeeze me right here.

You say no, my loyal treacherous inspiration.

When you appear, I am less.

And I am myself.

You’ll fall asleep, what a surprise,

My geniuscide is worse when I don’t let you speak.1

In life’s motorway, if you miss the slip road, you must wait.2

I might not have learnt to accept

That squadrons of Judeo-Christian morals with their guilt

Will follow us through land, air and, above all, for loving.3

I might be slowing down the action.

When I was twelve, I had a dream where I was winning, but sleep got the better of me;

Since then my defeats are the footprints of a certain I’s ID card.

Listen to me now. I have found the right word.

You better get ready – It’s got something that scares everyone.

Yes, I am going to release it. I want to release it.

I will pronounce hope; I will shout it inside me

If needed.

I will write it a thousand times.

I will back away.

Perhaps by repeating it, there’ll be something left.

I can’t allow your refusal,

My loyal treacherous inspiration

With sporadic appearance,

Like an angel found in a lift.

You work so well as a memory!

I give shelter

To words I’ve found cast off in my wasteword basket 4

I search each cage and there, recounting vowels and consonants,

I find soiled verbs which are crying after being deserted by a

Subject that was once their owner,

And was so vain as to dispense with a predicate.

Only this week they found a couple of deranged adjectives,

Three shivering adverbs

And the same amount of the pronoun race

In their cages, dreaming of being a child’s shadow.

Those words living as strays for longer get called

And I carry them home,

I give them the rabies jab,

And comb their hair my way,

As if they were my only daughters,

Because all of them are really unique.

Right after and before enrolling them in a nursery for stories or songs,

I give them an inky kiss

And tell them that if they want to get some respect they should never forget

The accent marks in the playground.

Sometimes I make my words wear coloured hairband-looking umlauts

And I only watch them play in a poem’s playground.

Almost always, they leave you too soon

And you listen to them in other people’s mouths

And are pleased

And get angry with yourself, as with everything we love in a selfish way.

And you stay at home, lifeless and a little bit empty,

Caressing that voiceless term called silence,

Always loyal, always with you.

But everything is a fact of life.

As the poet Halley said to me once –

If words are attracted to each other, let them get together

And go shine, that’s two syllables. 5