The night becomes round, spurs and tears. And the cables sing copper blood. In front, the empty square on the screen. One day machines will write like Lorca. The keys will open the belly of the numbers. They will dig up the earth. And we will be left alone with our red eyes. We will be those hollow men, without pupils, who neither look nor see.
The keys are like teeth that bite the sleeping air. One day machines will write like Lorca. They will have manes, hooves, thunder, they will be trees like green blades, they will be drowning nights. One day the data will falsify even our dreams, the trains will walk backwards and the planes will take off meaninglessly, because they will have nowhere to go.
One day we will remember what we were, of the girls in the streets, of the trees in the parks, of the sky made an alligator with cloud eyes. We will look at the termite mound of words as foreign things. Someone will study what we were, will investigate how life was burning, what April was like, and pigeons galore, and some other long-haired people who were around then, who wrote things like that.
The bird has already flown, the bird has already flown, and I wasn’t just saying it. I said it because the light that one steps on does not repeat itself either. Because one day you come across a plum standing under the sky, and that’s not a saying. Because one day you swallow a slice of dirty bread, lost bread, gizzards, whatever, and outside is the sun reaping the wheat, outside is the sky that runs with open eyes that look like hares.
And I didn’t say it just to say it, but because one day, one night, one morning, one afternoon, there were hands, the ones that flutter like birds, the ones that spend their lives like the hawk, watching, planning, and down, under, soft and slow, the belly. That’s where the hands go, quick as thrushes, or perhaps they are little bustards, or woodcocks, hands that are words that are birds. And there, clinging to the orchards, they thunder, they dance, they do not remain silent, they soar to the sky.
And that rock, and that perdiguera, the hands do not forget, they are birds, like they remember everything. One day we will remember what we were. We will remember that the hours go by and they do not return and neither does the one who loves me return, his lips of fine cork, that is how I remember it, with all this barley that has been ours, with all this wheat, in the white white, in the green green, when no one wanted to sleep, when everything was hours and lips, and only birds in the gaze.
One day the machines will write flying in flocks, although they will know nothing about what a day it points to is, what it tastes like, hazelnut or plum. They will know nothing of the cold that the razor passes over your body, and that, sometimes, only sometimes, that happens to you, great love. They know nothing about the lost places, about the corners of yesterday, about those deep bars where we used to eat each other’s lips. They know nothing about the heart of a crazy horse, galloping, of the big high air, like a party, because that’s life, sometimes, with your eyes crying, with your lips turned into birds.
So the hours you have lived, names, dates, places, so all the insomnia. Thus, sometimes, we live, after so many years, going out again in broad daylight, lungs full to bursting, painting the walls red, looking for the day that opens, the flight of the birds. Thus, sometimes, we live, in the wee hours and in the middle of the street, and the night rises on tiptoe to prop up, to give that kiss that not even oblivion will steal, that kiss that no machine can take from you, not with blows, not with tweezers.
And then the room, and then the closet, the bed, the moon, and he undresses, and he undresses, and they look at each other and look, their mouths expand and then the day will come and then goodbye, and then everything will begin again, never the same as if nothing had happened. Outside, the noise of the street, like that of the sea when it dies on the sand, and then dawn comes from rooster to rooster, and then we know that life is like that. It is lost like the echo of a gunshot in the valley and, sometimes, the air smells of smoke, smells of gunpowder, fires its bullets.
And then we know, we know, that life has been, has been able to be, burn and burn and burn. No cold machine, always the warmth of a chest, the life of a hand, and the words that are said and that penetrate inside, that reach very close to the heart, that go deep inside. And then she will arrive, the one you want to come as late as possible, and that no junk, no gadget will ever know what it is to know that she will come, that she, every minute, will arrive.
It will come little by little so as not to alert you. She will wear service shoes, she will come with slippers in her hand, so as not to make noise, and you know that she may not be there when the curtain falls on you, but it doesn’t matter: you will have lived without lead in your veins.