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Poetrylife

Yaxkin Melchy
Translated by

Alice Whitmore

for Juan Salzano


and NaKh ab Ra*

Poetrylife
Fuera de Serie Collection
First edition in Spanish: Kodama Cartonera, 2011
First revised edition in English: Kodama Cartonera, 2015
(CC) Yaxkin Melchy, Alice Whitmore
(CC) 2015, Kodama Cartonera
Tijuana, Mexico
Blog: kodamacartonera.tumblr.com
Facebook: kodama.cartonera
Twitter: @KodamaCartonera
Collection design: Nstor Robles
Editor: Aurelio Meza
Cover illustration: Julio Mara (elcuartovacio.tumblr.com)
Cover design: Jacob Steinberg & Yaxkin Melchy
Collection logo: Talia Prez
Kodama logo: Careli Rojo from a Mononoke Hime character created by Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli, 1997).
In Japanese mythology, kodamas are wood spirits. Their name can
mean either echo, tree ghost, small ball, or little spirit. In Miyazakis film, kodamas would only reveal themselves when the wood is
pure. When it is polluted by men, they die and fall from the trees
like ghost leaves.
This work is under a Creative Commons license
Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International.
Some rights reserved.

* This book is part of Los planetas (Mexico City, Literal, 2012), a series in Yaxkins poetic project El nuevo mundo (The New World).

01101001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110100


01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101110 01100111
00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101
00100000 01100010 01101001 01110010 01100100 01110011 00100000
01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000
01100100 01101001 01100111 01101001 01110100 01100001 01101100
00100000 01110011 01101011 01111001

it is the song of the birds in the digital sky


01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101
00100000 01110000 01101100 01101111 01110101 01100111 01101000
00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101
00100000 01100100 01101001 01100111 01101001 01110100 01100001
01101100 00100000 01100101 01100001 01110010 01110100 01101000

and the plough in the digital earth


01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101
00100000 01100100 01101001 01100111 01101001 01110100 01100001
01101100 00100000 01101000 01100101 01100001 01110010 01110100
00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100010
01101111 01111001

and the digital heart of a boy


01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101
00100000 01100100 01101110 01100001 00100000 01101111 01100110
00100000 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101000 01101001
01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01111001

and the dna of his history


5

WHEN I START LOOKING AT THE MAYAN CODICES


THE DRESDEN CODEX THE TRO-CORTESIANUS CODEX
I START TO IMAGINE THE POEMS IMAGINE THE WRITING THE
SKY IN THE UNDERWORLD INTHE WATER
THAT WILL BE ERASED AND IT WILL BE UNINTELLIGIBLE
I WANT TO NAVIGATE THE POEMS OF THE WORLD AND OF
NEW WORLDS MADE OF ENERGY WHAT STARS WHAT MAGICAL
SIGNS WILL VISIT THIS UNIVERSE

EXPEL

WE MUST EXPEL OURSELVES TO PARADISE

National Young Writers Conference1


Nothing ends everything flees and sprouts again as a horse sprouts
from a wave or a rabbit sprouting from a flower or a fish from a bats
wing or a planet from a blob
Adam or fractal DNA

1. There will be no-one behind desks but on top of them, under them,
in front of them... movement
2. Participants will hitch-hike to the event, or, alternatively, by any
means which represent an adventure, a personal challenge
3. The event will take place in a natural setting, whenever possible
4. Authors will venture headless, groundless, yet living ideas
5. :) :x :( :D generate emotions
6. Sharing = orality, intensity = recital, invention, improvisation for
others who, in turn, are others
7. Sharing is learning
8. Eccentricity has a thousand and one paths
9. Perhaps a periodical reunion of loners, synchronised with the
eclipses
10. Children are the Esperanto poets - Walid Tijerina
11. Rebirth or replanting, sowing real possibilities of death
12. Camp for a night beneath the storm and the next day celebrate
in the royal box of a palace: feel that nothing is mundane in this life
13. There will be an open table for all independent and personal publications, fanzines and manuscripts
14. Some themes will border on utopia, composition and dreams,
but this is purely speculative. Speculation is the theme of reality
This is what I learnt during my travels to the There will come a day
festival in Aguascalientes, Mexico, and was read during the Second Young
Writers Conference in Monterrey.
1

15. Texts may be published in short-lived editions; such as texts and


books in the process of re-elaboration, in the face of the school of
the everlasting
16. This list is incomplete, and I will re-write it when I am 52 years
old and again when I am 25 years old and so on...
17. At the conclusion of the conference we will have the opportunity
to photograph our auras, we will remember once again that when
young people get together they form all that is postal and astral in a
century
18. in the past -and- in the future
19 In reality, we wont be anywhere

1962 The Celestial Twins


They were the crew of Vostok III and Vostok IV
cosmonauts who launched into orbit at the same time
at one point they were the Gemini constellation
that someone had seen appear in the sky two thousand years ago
life is dark
it rolls
as
you
already
know
open
our
head
with
scissors
the unseen constellations will come out

20. Anymore

Dear space precursors:


I sometimes think that all this business of reading
and referencing and quotes
is like having knives
the knives are good
youve got to have good knives
the knives might come from different places
you have to sharpen them
shape them
aerodynamism technique
more important than having a set of knives
than having a quiver full of arrows
is having a plan already up your sleeve

10

11

Dear Near Future


When I was a child I wanted to invent (I was certain I could do it)
a machine to videotape dreams
I was nine or ten years old

The last universe ended


when it stopped being built by consciousness
our universe was born
from the decomposition
from deneuronating the infinite tower of consciousness
and today
we are building it again
The end of time

when I was 25 I saw


a mental photograph from the twenty-first century: we were children
or perhaps we were cyborgs at the foot of a volcano
a forest flooded with garbage is as sad and beautiful
as being buried for hundreds of centuries beneath a rubbish dump
someone in the future will press play on this memory and then they
will delete it

After Manuel Capetillo

Three creatures that live in the leaves of the shrubs


told me to follow them
not to listen to my friends
they were the signs of the forest
I am sure that I died a second time
(the first was a slow death between the ages of 17 and 22)
now
I am a dream in green
I do not explain what I do, this way of life explains my
poets persecution:
the krebs cycle
and the calvin cycle
are part of a dna
that will discern the writing of the forests
my dream
is to know and then
as a friend of mine once said: to plant seeds on the moon
12

13

A Century Called the Whos Who Century


A big book can become a very big bed
almost a country I would say
a big bed for selfishness and pride
we could leave our friends squashed like footnotes or in the
basement of our house
A poem can be a staircase of bones and skeletons to rob a grain of
gold from the Sun
What Im trying to say is that a book will not transform the world
if we cannot transform ourselves for we are also made of cardboard
and newspaper: we are fragments
We are alive in every horizontal sense of the sky And there is no need
to climb a staircase of bones or a mountain of garbage or a rubbish
dump for the good of the first world of language Because when we
turn things around it is very simple We are already in writing heaven
And the text and the staircase are no longer towers and they are just
a bridge or a path to another century like the 23rd or the 24th A
century is a place
What Im trying to say is that we didnt come to steal golden images
we Vibrate filled with sun
We are made of meteorites like an alphabet soup
A book
can be a very big bed
a very big throne for self-complacency and vanity
But it isnt It never will be again in this waste century
and masterpieces might also descend into the subsoil and bury
themselves forever
I am going to plant this book this poem which belongs to my friends

14

david
lauri
raya
mavi
yohana
javier
zara
hctor
jorge
and many others
and after Ive buried it
I want to be born
2.0.1.2
Tecate, Caracol Poetry Festival

15

Dragon is a book
A genius is a kind of dragon, a strange thing that erases its
outline
the return to the air
a book
a dragon
a hurricane
good
great
am the disappearance
little dead poem

There are things that I will never forget


among them narrating and turning into a river
I used to leap among the boulders when I fell
laugh like a waterfall
poetry
what happened to my body

16

The human zone


of the american woods
like breathing
intensify life
life is fire
retain the fire
dont lose the heat
the poetry
transmitted in the breath
is the awareness that we are living creatures of air and fire
we transmit and in reality the poem carries away an intense heat
universal
cosmic
laughable
urinable
expandable
until it disappears
For Jerome Rothenberg
and Cecilia Wikua

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A Sugar Planet
Sometimes I feel like I am part of a community that rewrites stars
constellations pieces of shining brain
because I come from insanity
darkness
is the passage between the occurrence and concurrence of light
A we should
B we should place
C we should lose
or the world will always have more cheek
than answers
sometimes I agree that literature opens a compossible eyelid
to distribute past routes
from the most maddening past
which was a beginning

DNA is the conversion of dis integrated data into a montage


DNA is the reversion of a cataclysm for the cataclysms history
what do thousands of trees say in the jungle
that the sun is disappearing
Burning a forest is also an immense datastrophe
but not as immense as the sun which was an old bundle of roots
the writing of the solar god
or a genetic code
Neither better nor worse
a star passes from one computer existence to another
the sun that follows
will create recognisable or unrecognisable dna
depending on the life it has to compile
And so
other suns represent other datastrophes
other autotrophic possibilities
Those of us who feed directly off the sun
recycle part of that software in our stomach
We compensate for the second degree of our dependency
With a mental autonomy of crisis
Cerebral Software 2.0
And the sun disintegrating
looks like the greatest consciousness of its silence
an incoherent computer
speaks
de scribes

18

19

Fruit of fruits
Like a flaming orange
To be an animal or a plant or a seed
Is to be generating thousand of partial sequences
Chains
Dna = cosmic recycling
Perhaps only heavenly bodies know what it means to complete a life
To generate it while it is extinguished
To illuminate = to illuminate
And thus are
the stars and the hearts of black holes
Close your eyes
and inhale your own
thought disintegration

of defense
and of counter-attack
puncture infect propagate
Happy endings dont exist
lets take the laughter out of storage
were starting a new century
the most fr(eez)ied weve ever seen
Im going to the sea
Gerardos already on his way
hitchhiking
Godzilla is an angel
the biggest star in the sky
Im going with my infinite book
the one thats always missing pages

Mutate
from the genetic usury that you are
be reborn
illuminate 150
D,
We are not defending the fact that we are human
our inhuman right is to reinvent humanity
poetry as effort
and respiration
listen
nothing is so far from earth
not the stars nor the seas nor the black holes
nor the hearts of men
poetry is a genetic means
of attack
20

Mexico City
is my Third World Tokyo
Who is poetry
the lively
the affection
that sentient-thinking-creative beings explore
Who is poetry
I am Chilean poetry (Hctor Hernndez)
see: trans appearancy
Poetry is ME
but I AM
in the last instance the Universe: Unite verses
gestures, features, faces...
1 and 0 delocalising digital memory
converting the sequence
into routes of neuronal, cerebral poetry
21

creation of a mutant version


the real plan: monstrify the programming
digital can be intense
then disappear (D)
Let yourself be infected by
very final terms
feel yourself possessed by them
get to know them
get to know yourself
be poetic
lo mexicano must come to an end (D)

Mexico means frustration


More:
ore
fracture
states of upset
sudden values of sexual violence
daily
state-endorsed
ental
exico

You are in deep shit


as Dante said
emptying
give art the madness of smiling erroneous words
Piece of shit: little machine
Drink from there
all the words like an arch like a flower around your neck
yrteop
to the M to the M
totem life totipotency
tutti frutti in potency
flavour
friction
waves of freshness
pink power
pink loss
pink polish
yrteop
to the M to the M
22

23

The Book of Banners


The idea is to hang them in your school, your university, from the
busiest bridge, or wherever you think this message will reach its
audience
Allowing vocation and chance to be a part of the plot
Incomplete banners will be like the white pages of a book
The Book is a constellation of kites landing on the metropolis
this countrys forced landing in times of crisis

with one or two lines that locate where it was placed, and a
reaction or anecdote
signals: are memory
The records of this action
Will be written
in white
and black
like sheets of paper or screens of a book
of a country
when we were zombies
November 2010

against the shootings and massacres


a weapon of destruction against the old and outdated
of regeneration
The idea is to involve the idea of the book
the idea is poetrylife, general
respond with an emergent urgent voice
They l i k e t h e i d e a

The Poem Lives Us
Live Long!

exico

Write to us with the details:


How many banners do you plan to make
In which places
(a banner is a traffic signal)
It would be wonderful if we could compile the book of banners and
wander it through the states like an old parchment traveller
Or better yet, wander ourselves like parchment travellers
But as it is possible that some banners may be destroyed
taken down, stolen, etc.
We mustnt lose sight of our milestones (Juan Luis Martnez)
We must have a good photo on every banner, and a transcript
of the text
24

25

BUT MY DREAM
WAS NOT MINE
I neither work nor study
heads with wheels
fuck them
let them rot
two lines in white
two lines in black

AND:
No, I regret nothing
Edith Piaf: Non, Je ne regrette rien
LAST DAY OF 2010
GAME OVER

kid: theyre lying to you


mexico is a M
ountain of garbage
2012:
aaaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaa!
dont write
dont accumulate strength
force entry
EMERGENCY ENTRANCE:
impossible tenderness and infinitely biting the national stars
THIS IS WHAT I DREAMED
Black shadows
THAT I WAS A POEM
All in a day / Joe S.
26

27

A library is a physical state


the burning library changes physical states
the running ink changes physical states
to read is to burn to change physical states
Today, 24 February, the poet Gonzalo Rojas is dying in his home in
Chilln.
thousands of kilometres from Mexico he is also dying or is already
dead, and my heart can be nothing but my tomb and a grenade, I send
this letter and these poems from Cerro de la Estrella where I have come
to study.
Today at five in the morning like writing like books, like countries, like
poems and libraries, I will begin to erase myself.
Sincerely:
Yaxkin Melchy
24 February Mexicant no-flag day, 2011. Letter read by
Zyania Melchy and Manuel de J. Jimnez in the Palacio de Minera

Contagion has a non-origin


Naco culture is contagious
and in this respect
the Universe would have no origin
it would be the contagion of another Universe
(creation = decomposition

perhaps there was no Big Bang)

But lets stand on the brink


lets give up
lets allow this universe to be another universe
and another and another
multiverse of hosts
Literature per se doesnt have to say something
but it does
because literature is something
something recognisable for its participation in the shitheap
and what does not participate does not generate
and what does not generate does not participate

28

29

I.AM.GE
I propose two poems
which are just one poem
A. My friends have entrusted me their books
B. and the best I can do is go camping with them
A. The mind returns
B. its a myth that recognises itself
A. I cant see it
B. neurons
B. brain
A. empty space

it doesnt matter what will become of this new universe


I have had a premonition

AB2. inter stellar


where is what I think
travelling among the stars

Dear Blue:
everything is meaning
today I got up to look for you
I travel in buses through the streets of a droplet

AB?

comet is what happens in the mind

The future dies every day


and the past
is being born
A monster has not been born, but it is here
it is here but it has not been born
it is an external product
It shouldnt be here
it contains only forces (D)
it is a box and its punishment
is to contain the radiation that will annihilate all life
thats why the present is not a gift
but a monster

30

31

Blue Boy:
heed the premonitions
take them
a poem a life
without premonitions
is not exciting
because it is a poem fulfilled

it is not poetrylife
Humanity has a premonition: we are the prehumanities

for geneticist friends:


all of the madness
the overflowing
celestial collision
multiple
and abominable
begins its betrayal
with language
with the intangible
with what you suppose
before you see
and un listen
it forms a funnel
thong effect
(luxury is a thong)
counts droplets of imagination

I am Luis Cardoza y Aragn


sliding through the sacred valley of the Incas
I am going to Asia
(Europe will shut itself away into a stronghold)
Small poems: light from the traffic lights
Every day and night that you dream
you increase the temperature of the planet
32

33

Following the Head Aitch


What a wonderful thing to be talented
you are because you have learnt
the form the door the keys
now set this for yourself:
something that is not good
but necessary
says Mercedes Sosa
singing is what can
singer is what must
Set yourself the chaos of a second
and of billions of years
in a spring
that transcends skill
without god : feel it
without literature : hear it
those works are exceptional
wonderful
you will recognise them
by the silence that surrounds them

But
and the galaxies
and the universe
Might well be in the sea
Perhaps the true cosmic era
is in the sea
(Poetrylife)
Space exploits
are faraway hopes
whose sheen
will grow dull
will be extinguished
when that happens
Change

is a glimmer!
New era = novel
novel era
new is:

to be a star

What is now earth


was once a mountain
the important thing is not to know
but to understand it
To write is to begin
to dream
or was it the other way around?
Poetry has swept us to peotry
poessession
an infinite periphery
(Poetry)
34

35

Electronic-Poetics

on paper carries with it a History of literature and a body which is


the material itself: the history of that page. Poetry on a screen is neither better nor worse, it has a different mode and other ways for us
to access a perception of the poetic; Im talking about interactions
like the Internet which allow us to access via the screen content that
would otherwise be almost impossible to read due to its geographic
or historical remoteness.

/0 0\
01011001 01001101

[0 0]
Cyberspace offers: a territory, a satellite, a sun, an earth, a mars. Starting with languages, hybridising with cyberspace means learning to
sow seeds within it, and that suggests that our criterion of poetics is
amplified and enjoyed as a part of diversity. Cyberspace is perhaps a
future part of our brain; still under construction, and its not a matter
of simply being there, but rather moving there, living there, coming,
going, impregnating our poems with cyberspaces, and inseminating
cyberspace with poetic content, poetic language, look at it as a new
planet on the horizon, which challenges us to learn from it.

(0 0)
Poetry read on a computer may be accompanied by video, audio,
interactivity and even immediate feedback. I believe that poetry read
36

Avoid monotony. Be brave and imaginative, like it says in one of the


Hora Zero manifestos: submerge themselves in the chaos and have
the courage to return from it, avoid the rule of meaning or form; all
meaning is a contamination of meaning, literature as contagion. I
believe this is why turning to hyperspace for example goes beyond
having a common presence or subject matter with the Internet, it
implies gaining access to a form of creation that belongs more fully
to this movement, which occurs via access routes, links, it is precisely finding new routes, clicking on the most eccentric links of life
and literature. Surely there we will find the old mysteries of the word,
but with new ways of perceiving them.

|0 0|
Poetry as a word of empathy has the power to summon and unite
us. We might reunite to speak out against political parties or against
the life each of us carries within us, to pro-pose new political dimensions, challenges, projects and the means of coordinating them.
Also, poetry as a word of pleasure summons us to join together simply to get to know another, to listen to each other to start a revolution
or transform life, our own life, something that to a certain degree
always occurs when poetry enters into action. What do we want with
language afterwards, be it words or HTML. go from there.
37

_
Dont say things that might change the world, let the world change.
Thats how most people have been educated, even in Philosophy and
Literature faculties, but writing online or moving our writings to the
Internet is just that: never relinquishing while there exists this universe of expressions that appear and disappear, that are created and
erased. The web is a riddle waiting to be written; why write online?
to make the world of literature even more savage, more beautifully
savage.

/*\
write poetry...

Live in discovery
is there really any better meaning to life
than having the non-existent in front of us
Discovering coming out from beneath the fallen leaves
the humus
the humidity of creation
the big humid bang
where everything decomposes
read from 99 to 0
it was just counting backwards
read from 0 to 99
it was just a consequence of the big bang
read: humus

To mutate, to deprogram ourselves from the old code which is the


code of accumulation: the accumulation of power, the accumulation
of wealth, that old code that has led us to war genocide or repeated,
daily suicide: death by boredom (for which literature is largely responsible). We think about more than writing than wording more
as the poet Cecilia Vicua says, language can give us our faces back:
those of the future, and it is not idealism, nor hippie vibes, but rather
the point of departure for a magical day-to-day language. Opening
ones heart to poetry would neutralise poets as authoritative figures
and return them to the tribe, honour them; like neutralising books
as priestly objects and re-reading them as objects of intervention:
scripts, manuals. Writing poetry is like taking to the streets in protest, but the streets are inside us and in our heads and in our hearts,
and there are still many writers who enjoy the luxury of mental and
spiritual hermitism: they are the filthy priests of literature, but every
sign, every word is a placard. Why write poetry, what tasks are left
to us. Mutation, protest, poetry is the adventure of poetential. It is
wonderful to know that it belongs to us, to all of us, to everyone.

38

Dear space
Robot

39

Written in Chilango-Mayan-Peruvian-Chilean Spanish,


translated to Australian English, designed in Qubec, and
published in a US-Mexico border city, Poetrylife was finished
in January 2015. Kodamas will account for it.

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