In 1964 there was a man called Jotamario who used to wear a
top hat.
People said to him: Mister Jotamario, what do you mean with that
top hat?
And he said to them: Dear People, what do you mean with that question?

It was 1964 and he had not realized that poets who wrote for the
future were out of fashion.
It was 1964 and he had not realized
that in the United States the Blacks were killing Whites with the
White's arms.
It was 1964 and he had not realized
that if someone opened the doors it was for him
to smack into them.

But he had heard about the californium bomb
in the embassies' Easter parties; but he had donated half a liter of blood
for anemia in hospitals in the tropics;
but had read in Playboy
that Malcom X maintained that Jesus Christ was black;
but he had looked back in the mirror of his bicycle
half a million dead scattered in a horrible siesta.

Sometimes walking on the streets under his canicular top hat,
he savored ice creams that were a pinacle of tastiness
and his greatest desire was to piss from the top of the Eiffel tower.
He did not have a wooden desk
but people said he had a writer's manner,
he did not have a typewriter
but whenever he had it in him he wrote typewritedly
and when people listened to him they applauded as if with gloves,
as if with a single hand.

At school they made him memorize Pascal's Pensées
and he loved the bitterness of the philosopher.
Then he switched Pascal for Pascale Petite
and bitterness for marijuana.

He never had ideals.
Ideals seemed to him diseases of the idea.
He had instead ideas of genius.
Like that one.

He ate popcorn
which was the only thing he loved.
he booed if the movies
did not satisfy his whims.

Only on Sundays did he not look at himself in the mirror
but at his photo published in the newspaper
and it was not because they were his that he thought
his poems were really worthy of him.

He had a police record as impeccable
as a perfect crime.

Fortunately his father
was the same size as he,
fortunately his lover
wished the same things as he,
fortunately people
thought differently from him.

His parents threw up their hands in horror
looking at him receiving the sky's broth;
his friends shook his hands two or three times a week,
there were always rubber shoe apostles at his table
and in the city terraces they asked for a meteor dish.

He was a rebel against fashionable walls
and his bed was the only ring in which to fight.
His bed with ballerina's feet,
with milking cows's sheets
His bed as soft as the earth's crust
when the earth was like an orange.
His bed with a microscopic fauna
in which he devoured his morning biscuits.

His wife moaned under his feather weight like a pair of scales,
under his weight and his flamethrower's presence in the night of
hospitable thighs,
and he laughed as he put the black collar with stones of
different colors on her neck
and his laughter broke the pale orange crystals.
He was a useless poet and he was called Jotamario,
like Buddha.

Translation: 2006, Nicolás Suescún