Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Dante Rocío Jun 2020
I live in some way on the edge of the world of the senses. I prolong my life with books, minute thrillances in the honourable existing through consciousness, Poetry, and I live from feelings, reflections. I barely spend time with my peers, I go to the city only when it is necessary, I don't know how to use Snapchat, Tik Tok, I don't listen to pop music, and since I don't have Facebook, you may not even consider me real. I don't engage in news, top trends or political issues. To put it in a nut shell, I am quite secluded from the global civilization.

However, something grave has recently been ignited and only two days ago did I realize what kind of slander is really happening in the country I currently am. Repressions against those who love/act differently. For what we feel, who we are with, that one wears pink or rainbow, that they are not what tradition or the wont of others expect. I saw the proud "LGBT FREE ZONE" boards on the photos. Joyful cleaning of the streets after pride marches, as if the plague of Albert Camus had passed there. Seeing non-heterosexual people as ****, like pariahs in India. That a student of one of my teachers cannot even give a new person their email due to fear. And a large part of Poland is even fine with it. To put it short, in humanitarian terms, we went back to the Victorian era or the Spanish conquests in a sense.

I do not know anything about politics. Sometimes I do not even remember who is the Prime Minister of Poland. And for many who are reading it now and don't know me, I can be nobody. But I know that I am in a way a pilgrim here and a heraldry of freedom for the world, now or later. And I have to do, give something from myself, because although words sometimes fail to express so much, at times, like dreams, they are the only thing we have left. So I write, I do what I can. Because someone has to say something more specifically.

In 2015, Chris Pueyo, a Spanish student from Madrid, published his poetic novel "El Chico de las Estrellas" ("The Star Boy") where he wrote his autobiography through his eyes and those of the third person. Without shame, he described his loves, ups and downs, the harassment from the hands  of the world surrounding him, and all the tears and his own blades of guilt and glory he had experienced and born, mainly because of his homosexual orientation, also to support others like him. So far no one has translated it into any other language and it is stuck in Spain and the countries of the South America. But I will change that. I've decided to be the first to do it. Although I'm not after any studies nor am I more than 18 years old. But I do it wonderfully, I have determination and love for the language as a person. And I have a goal. At first I thought it was because of my admiration for Chris's work and my desire to simply show it, but now I know that's not the point.

I'm doing this for You. Because in this country we lack books that free love from definitions, frames, books that discourse about our bodies or passion with their due admiration, truth and purity. So know that from now on I dedicate my work to You. To those to whom are clipped wings, words and hopes, to those who hide and want to love madly and without boundaries. To the colourful girls from my class who are not afraid to be all the shades of the rainbow with piercing and who supported me in difficult moments. To the aforementioned student of my singing teacher. I'm almost halfway through the book, I'm still waiting for an answer from the next publishers. I won't rest till I publish it for You and other personalities, even if, like J.K. Rowling, I have to go to 12 of them, because maybe those people are afraid of publishing it.

Less than a year ago I didn't know anything about LGBTQ+, I still haven't experienced any romantic perturbations in my life or ever fallen in love with any human. But thanks to the work of writers like Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Becky Albertalli, Chris Pueyo, many fanfics, articles or my own questions, I have seen how beautifully infinite, complex and simple love is, that there is nothing in it against the nature. I study God in the world, the Bible or the Koran, and I’m telling tell you that even there, in the depth of the verses, there is no absurd condemnation! I have gone through the issues of  defamed *** or nakedness into taboo and I’m saying to you: it is not unclean, forbidden, it is simply a corporeal act of devotion, our naked body is pride, not shame! Gender equality is not only the equality of man and woman, but of every person with the rest of the society. I have never experienced any serious harassment, pressure in the matter of my objects of affection, I admit it, but I do know what it's like when society wants to nail you to your biological age, body, gender, name and other ephemeral content on your ID card. Literally existential ****, in blood-stained handcuffs.

The main part of my being is The Poet. To be more precise, a "non-writing” one - poems are only a necessary medium to save my Poetry from the time, and the real one are my gestures, the doe eyes that the sky is clad in, thoughts, breath and feelings. So my task here is not forming rhymes and things into empty beauty yet bearing myself again and again in intimacy and metaphors more literal than the prose, between the verses. It is not a job, yet, for me, the most honourable identity. The path to my Home in the tears, grass, the Sacrality of Life, Myself. For this is My Love, Lover. I’m not joking. This is why I know such love and devotion though I’ve never been with any human in an intimate relationship. This doesn’t have ***, borders. Ergo I’ve never gave myself any name of my orientation, I don’t know what it would be and I don’t need to name it. I’m also a revolutionist at heart, I adore the vocal expression of the rebellion, therefore this is why I’m here. And I hope that I will be given the honour of being seen as one of You. Because this is pride. In the pride month.

I’m giving to You support greater than the word “YES” does it. My stance. And, finally, my poems. I dedicate them to You too, written partially especially due to the events taking place right now. I’m giving to Your hands my confessions entitled “And Who Are You To Be?” and “Of Feminine Touch, Of Masculine Sight”.

Don’t you ever let any being constrict your incalescent beauty of wonder. Don’t you ever let anyone claim you to be only a part of scheme, your job or any other miscellany in the bin. Just like You, I am the greatest wonder the history could have ever seen. Each one of us, on our own.

And one more thing, in reference to “The Star Boy”:
In this dead world, where dreams come
barefoot and unkempt to Nowhere,
let’s dance, like Lady Madrid,
with anarchy in the hair.
This time I'm not writing in poems or any literary style. I'm giving a discourse I want to share with all the LGBTQ+ people and many others who might need it, even if it seems to be little to some. Yet I gave something from myself. This is my English version of it since the original one was in Polish due to all that macabre taking place in Poland right now the most. I invite all the eager to read it and keep it in their heart.
I am with You. Wish you all the greatness. Hope I did well.
Dante Rocío Jul 2020
Penciliving and other meltdowns
on the beauty of the sad boys,
those who keep in their pupils’ intensity,
a terrorist’s extremity,
on the one who can’t choose between two
paths and in the middle prey becomes,
on the mouth full of salt
and the sea’s cries that for its remembrance exalt,
on a mouth that stings from no return,
from the inside
and inwards,
this is the only way of writing I know.
Gather your broken heart,
and confess yourself:
make love to your battles,
submerge into poetry
like an impostor holding their breath
in an amphibian world,
vow to yourself (and thereby, the most worthy
of all the loves) the eternal freedom.
One of Chris Pueyo’s poems from his poetry book “Aquí dentro siempre llueve” (“Here Inside Is Always Raining”). The author is a talented young Madrid student, a fresh writer, with poetic and musical approach to life.
Own translation by me.
My translation of selected poems of his: N*1
Dante Rocío Jul 2020
Look at me.
I have my side soaked with these sparks
melting away so many veiled winters.
There’s ivy in the songs I listen to
at nights
and that thin line that separates (interpreting us)
the want for each other
from the want to ravish one another.

I don’t know.
Nostalgize me.
Let’s go back to blinks and look at us
right before you end us...
“Able or unable?”
Madrid was burning yet there was a kiss
in which we didn’t care about
dying in flames.

Take out the camera and capture this:
The Moon cries as well
knowing it will never
be able to reach the wolf.
One of Chris Pueyo’s poems from his poetry book “Aquí dentro siempre llueve” (“Here Inside Is Always Raining”). The author is a talented young Madrid student, a fresh writer, with poetic and musical approach to life.
Own translation by me.
My translation of selected poems of his: N*3
Dante Rocío Jan 2021
A cardiac flush paints just respiratory
via ivory of ribs name to launch, bear, ovulate,
an explicit painter your mother would never count acceptable like
a feather's charcoal flight
a whitened bow of silk for your neck to gush with,
in a mess adorn,
Pueyo's nomad or form turned poem I take
greater than any body's gifted *******,
but enamel of guitar's caramel my bonfire took for granted chips.

Let's imagine we identify
****** for David's curls on doe eyes for a woman in return.
Let's imagine we identify
peach marble ways of men tinting what as agender stars in ashes lie.
Let's imagine we identify
*** at last as nameless liberty for home.
Wounds, impeccable fire platter, a night holds.

Once in her time a nightingale nurse held lone for corridors light,
might my clacks and nervous chirps on a lantern in a tea for someone
rushed my fingers bless just like her alone...

An empty gaze. A late clock.

And I and Christ perched with a washing bowl at someone's feet,
we meek but at praise, unattainable,
And I a statue with silk black at my end of curves' robe.

I might wish to serve one of those corridor nights
without a cover tugging at my edges
yet a hopefully audacious male David gaze in intent,
for a wayfaring soul on my couch,
for glorious shame their touch would put on my ways
of the acrylic of ***,
for brightening bland stars agender into honey,
and my work for bare choices
errands
picked.

Gasp.
Renovation of mixed approaches of my agenderness, transmasculinity, chilly nights of blazing guitar plays outside, becoming your family's silent night saviour even though you're ready to depart from clothes or Mind like Florence Nithingale with her loyal lamp and just how much I wish for my special someone to be born into that space where I'm all naked, not ascribed to femininity, and burning holes in their soul with my eyes of devotion just like Christ washed our feet grandly yet humbly, with no one maybe seeing him acting
Dante Rocío Jul 2020
[...]
He walked to my left
so as not to stop brushing against my heart.
He settled down legs tired from encircling my head
right next to mine
and whispered to me things that I’ll take with me to my grave.

He left ink in my mouth,
undressed his back
and beckoned me to write our story.

Disgusting.

I saw him smile and I understood that my whole life
had been a mockery,
as if love could be drawn
and weren’t a boy missing the bus.

He saved me from the jaws of a dragon,
put a coin in the fortune’s hands,
drew a song from his underwear
and we danced together in French,
he stripped to stop the taxis,
forgot about his house,
and when he found a way to warm up my feet
my head fell asleep on his thighs
and the world
was a bedroom drenched in stars.

**** it,
it was prettier than a dolphin breaking through the waves,
hands wrapping up magic, preceded by his tongue,
a scarf in the clutches of the wind,
it was a ******* kiss in the middle of the war.

Then he went away
because this is what the people we will love forever do,
and when he did it, I understood everything:
“Love is a cage opened towards the sky”
Ever since that moment I haven’t opened a door
that tends to close itself.

You spunky *******...
I fell in love with you,
don’t you ever dare to forget that
One of Chris Pueyo’s poems from his poetry book “Aquí dentro siempre llueve” (“Here Inside Is Always Raining”). The author is a talented young Madrid student, a fresh writer, with poetic and musical approach to life.
Own translation by me.
My translation of selected poems of his: N*2
Dante Rocío Sep 2020
Like breeze caressing in its
trap a feather grey in air’s
flight so have I
been caught
in un fulmine dei pensieri di
appena circa una dozzina
di minuti
fa.

And I have to most urgently
capture Me in this
flight and non-tormenting
air bubbles coming
out of my watery
&
treelike sight
by
breathing this moment
of realisation
gently
yet hard/strongly
while I’m at it,
at Shepherd’s meaning
of Treasure in
Coelho’s work cast
especially on me
& my antics of Now.

And that letter
here to be
shall be
lost
for a moment under
that pencil:
scribbling on sun-scorched
plane passing,
logophilia
and greater future to come
and
be
done.

For when you
finally
drink from a little bit
of Life itself in
you without any stimuli
foreign to you,
you’ll see that
It
is it that’s the most feverish
in what’s the best,
the sufficing binge.

I’m giving into
your hands this
redemption of mine till
I
AM,
for currently it
is the biggest truth
given to me
by
Allah.

I sense these Signs
as they find each other on Me,
like they make me insert
all the answers,
intentions,
with a hard semblance
and the durability
of the terrace wood
against my worked up skin,
in my lungs.

To where will my Own Legend
lead me?
There are certain
premonition
and in-depth
in this moment,
in the castle of the epilogue,
of the book,
in crystal blue,

in how all the world now
persists in my head
desiring to leave
a trace somewhere here
so as not to let go
of my hand
from its.

And the Sun
that parts almost at
dusk through
a hollow in the clouds
stormy-like
behind my back
seems to be winking, glance throwing,
of a foreboding,
of its presence,
waning,
on what will be able
to come.
And it’s gone.

And how Pueyo would say it:
“May no one deprive
me of living.”
I say it to all the pop culture,
and these false suns
“I’m not yours to take”
as much as I can.

And should we not listen
to understand
instead of
to reply?
Aren’t constant thoughts
that replying,
and pure being that
taking in (all the striving),
like when facing forest
in a
cold
prickling
air
to encounter?

Hold me like that,
that as I am,
in your hands
for a while.
Noting old taken in Eden-wise sight,
heat yet persisting of a sodden fight
done
thanks to “The Alchemist”‘s trials
And the epilogue
Sent by letter
To Italy

— The End —