Life with zero mileage
Life with Zero Mileage
On the strings of letters
writing music in words,
chanting, chanting
newer worlds.
I sew us, I sew you
on the tapestry of time.
Amateur man, amateur woman
we are all amateurs at life.
Some professional livers
monks, mystics, poets.
Some, but not too many.
Most don’t have time
to answer the big questions.
Busy as they were with the trivial:
“What do we eat today?”
This eternal adventure
where man is reduced to a hungry mouth.
Amateur at life, amateur at death.
In between the bip bip beeep
of a cardiac monitor
and two pouches of morphine with sugar.
All they will say: coma.
Technical term for a clean death,
an amoral death.
Sickness was the culprit,
old age, a stroke,
insipid death by clogged pipes
after insipid life
by always filling the chequing account.
Insipid life lived
with a screen not bigger than your palm,
dreaming your life like a mirage
where you were what you could never be,
living by procuration.
“How was your life?” will God ask.
“Well, you know,
I was a white chicken fed up with hormones,
I matured in three weeks instead of three months,
lived my life in the fury of action,
never took the time
to ask myself the questions
I was running from all my life.
Had no time, God,
had no time to think.
So I soothed my soul with illusions:
I was Maximus the Gladiator,
I hippy happy ed like Jagger.
Prepackaged, like from the shelves of Walmart,
coming from nowhere, the son of the rain,
Abandoned,
No place to call home, I howl at life like a wolf in a cage, seeking to be heard, but there is no one.
I thought I wasn’t enough and had no strength.
My soul drowned in illusions, I indulged in lies
to cover the sorrow of being myself.
Pharrell Williams made me “happy”
but inside I was bleeding
with tears of loneliness.
I was electromagnetic joy
passed through wires…
And you know, God,
I Rocco ed in my imagination the asses
the beauty of the universe
naughty beauties that left me empty,
more empty each time,
so empty that I didn’t have enough ink
to write the word: love.
I had no time, God… no time.
Then, when the powers told me
it’s ok for them to murder innocents,
I watched and passed by.
I had to catch the train,
the plane,
the rocket to Mars.
I had to go to a seminar,
to listen to billionaires in a TED Talk
explaining how you can arrive like them,
how you can be a super runner in life,
living la vida loca,
having yachts and planes and homes
and full of empty homes,
full of empty cars,
full of food to send to the trash.
You know, God,
these people have no time
for the hungry,
the poor,
the homeless,
the sick.
They have no time,
we have no time,
we have to run, run, run
until we also can catch a yacht and a house
and live la vida loca,
totally forgetting this world,
your world, God.
That’s why we want all to be rich,
to escape from it.
Your world is pain and misery.
We build skyscrapers
so we are sleeping as far as possible
from the street,
the ground zero of hell,
where people lie in their vomit
with a syringe in their arm.
No, God,
we want to be rich,
have the penthouse.
From there, suffering seems small like an ant.
Who cares about ants?
Oh God, you gave life to us,
but we didn’t have the courage to live it.
The courage comes from us.
We didn’t have the courage
to reach the sea like little turtles.
You gave the life,
and instead of living it through our heart,
we did everything to numb our senses.”
He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t fuck,
paid his taxes,
he passed through life without any sound
like a thief in a train station,
nobody ever heard the sound of his fart.
Amateur from birth,
never reborn into a professional,
living the life without a scar,
like a new car with zero mileage
thrown by the compactor in the junkyard.