Poetrylife

Yaxkin Melchy

Translated by

Alice Whitmore

for Juan Salzano and NaKh ab Ra*

* This book is part of Los planetas (Mexico City, Literal, 2012), a se-ries in Yaxkin’s poetic project El nuevo mundo (The New World).

Poetrylife

Fuera de Serie Collection

First edition in Spanish: Kodama Cartonera, 2011First revised edition in English: Kodama Cartonera, 2015

(CC) Yaxkin Melchy, Alice Whitmore

(CC) 2015, Kodama CartoneraTijuana, Mexico

Blog: kodamacartonera.tumblr.comFacebook: kodama.cartoneraTwitter: @KodamaCartonera

Collection design: Néstor RoblesEditor: Aurelio MezaCover illustration: Julio María (elcuartovacio.tumblr.com)Cover design: Jacob Steinberg & Yaxkin MelchyCollection logo: Talia PérezKodama logo: Careli Rojo from a Mononoke Hime character cre-ated 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 Miyaza-ki’s 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.

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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

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EXPEL WE MUST EXPEL OURSELVES TO PARADISEWHEN 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

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National Young Writers’ Conference1

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 pub-lications, fanzines and manuscripts

14. Some themes will border on utopia, composition and dreams, but this is purely speculative. Speculation is the theme of reality

1 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.

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 bat’s wing or a planet from a blob

Adam or fractal DNA

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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

—Dear space precursors: I sometimes think that all this business of reading and referencing and quotes is like having knives the knives are good you’ve 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

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 won’t be anywhere

20. Anymore

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—The last universe endedwhen it stopped being built by consciousness

our universe was bornfrom the decomposition

from deneuronating the infinite tower of consciousnessand today

we are building it againThe end of time

After Manuel Capetillo

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

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

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 poet’s 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

14 15

davidlaurirayamavi

yohanajavierzaría

héctorjorge

and many others

and after I’ve buried itI want to be born

2.0.1.2

Tecate, Caracol Poetry Festival

“A Century Called the Who’s 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 I’m 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 I’m trying to say is that we didn’t come to steal golden images we Vibrate filled with sun We are made of meteorites like an alphabet soup A bookcan be a very big beda very big throne for self-complacency and vanityBut it isn’t It never will be again in this waste centuryand masterpieces might also descend into the subsoil and bury themselves foreverI am going to plant this book this poem which belongs to my friends

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The human zone of the american woods like breathing intensify life life is fire retain the fire don’t 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 Wik´uña

—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

igoodgreatam the disappearancelittle dead poem

—There are things that I will never forgetamong them narrating and turning into a riverI used to leap among the boulders when I felllaugh like a waterfallpoetrywhat happened to my body

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A Sugar Planet

DNA is the conversion of dis integrated data into a montage DNA is the reversion of a cataclysm for the cataclysm’s 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

—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

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of defense and of counter-attack puncture infect propagate

—Happy endings don’t exist let’s take the laughter out of storage we’re starting a new century the most fr(eez)ied we’ve ever seen

—I’m going to the sea Gerardo’s already on his way hitchhiking Godzilla is an angel the biggest star in the sky

I’m going with my infinite book the one that’s always missing pages

“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” (Héctor Hernández) 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

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

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

22 23

Mexico means frustration More: Ʃore fracture states of upset sudden values of sexual violence daily state-endorsed Ʃental

Ʃexico

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)

—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

24 25

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

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 country’s forced landing in times of crisis

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!

Ʃexico

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 mustn’t lose sight of our milestones (Juan Luis Martínez) We must have a good photo on every banner, and a transcript of the text

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BUT MY DREAM

WAS NOT MINE

AND:

No, I regret nothingEdith Piaf: Non, Je ne regrette rien

LAST DAY OF 2010GAME OVER

I neither work nor studyheads with wheels

fuck themlet them rot

two lines in whitetwo lines in black

kid: they’re lying to you

mexico is a Mountain of garbage

2012:aaaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaa!

don’t writedon’t 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.

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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 let’s stand on the brink let’s give up let’s allow this universe to be another universe and another and another multiverse of hosts

Literature per se doesn’t 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

—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 Chillán. 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 “Mexican’t no-flag day”, 2011. Letter read byZyania Melchy and Manuel de J. Jiménez in the Palacio de Minería

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

it doesn’t matter what will become of this new universe I have had a premonition

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 shouldn’t be here it contains only forces (D) it is a box and its punishment is to contain the radiation that will annihilate all life that’s why the present is not a gift but a monster

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. it’s a myth that recognises itself

A. I can’t see it B. neurons B. brain A. empty space

AB2. inter stellar

where is what I think AB? travelling among the stars

ø comet is what happens in the mind

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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

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

I am Luis Cardoza y Aragón 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

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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

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

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)

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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 nei-ther better nor worse, it has a different mode and other ways for us to access a perception of the poetic; I’m 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\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 pre-cisely 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 di-mensions, challenges, projects and the means of coordinating them. Also, poetry as a word of pleasure summons us to join together sim-ply 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.

Electronic-Poetics

01011001 01001101

[0 0]Cyberspace offers: a territory, a satellite, a sun, an earth, a mars. Start-ing 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 it’s 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

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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

Dear spaceRobot

¬_¬Don’t say things that might change the world, let the world change. That’s 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 uni-verse 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...

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 re-sponsible). We think about more than writing than wording more as the poet Cecilia Vicuña 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 one’s 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 pro-test, 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.

Written in Chilango-Mayan-Peruvian-Chilean Spanish, translated to Australian English, designed in Québec, and published in a US-Mexico border city, Poetrylife was finished

in January 2015. Kodamas will account for it.