Citi-Zen

 

By Jefferson Alfonso Mejia (undergraduate Social Communication student)

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life"

Virginia Woolf

I need to drink at least two cups of coffee, smoke three cigarettes,

have four aspirins for breakfast or I can’t decently begin another day.

It is the war of me, against me. With no headquarters or possible deal.

I have learned how to walk in this race of ants

from the masses in the stations, the buses and the cabs,

walking like cattle to the slaughter, in indifferent lines,

jumping from this ship that is sinking, like desperate rats.

One must talk on the phone and ignore the noises:

the beggars, the starving people, the junkies.

The neighbor and his pet, the barking and the trash.

One needs to hear tunes even in a talk,

cause it cannot bear silence even when silence

means the weeping of a sixty-year-old man.

One needs instructions on a screen,

the least possible steps to do something.

One doesn’t want to think.

Is it the shadow of a building or is it the night that has already come?

I am dying among people that I can’t stand anymore,

in conversations that I don’t want to hear or know about.

Smiling at faces I don’t want to see.

Monsters and angels that I love but that kill me.

Does anybody remember the meaning of silence?

Is the fly staring at the glass beautiful?

Or the fearless dove that looks like a rat?

It that the call of an angel, or is it just the horn of a car?

Is it a star that shines with such little brightness?

I’ll die in combat, I know. I’ll prepare my death.

Just yelling at an officer on the street with a gun,

slipping from the terrace trying to breathe free.

Crossing a corner without hearing or seeing...

But still,

I prefer this violence of the streets

the sigh of the rotten breeze,

than the peace of an impossible green

that my body and my shrink

think I desperately need.