Tell me, Jessy Jones,
don´t you think my hatred is analyzable?
I am given appointments.
I am checked.
I am dosed.
Tell me, Jessy Jones,
what are the roads that lead to Bridge Town,
Cinnamon City, Orson Gate,
where I fall flat before the word,
which is ultimately “he”,
and then the rage subsides.
That’s me:
rage comes with boredom.
Is my boredom my hysteria? as Barthes said;
to avoid it, I take pleasure in ash burning the center
[of my neck,
in nothing, frail detail.
That’s me:
I look up your name in the phone book,
call and hang up.
Forgive me, you recognized the sound of the crickets in my room,
you knew it was me (it was one a.m.),
I jumped up, took a shower and I cried into the mirror:
I’m in it, I live in it,
I slept gently, with resolve.
This is my internal logic:
suicide has become my amusement , my
[vocation:
days ago, I took fifteen medications and called to tell him
it was the only way to make sure that he saw me.
That’s me (manipulative):
I make up names of cities, not because they mean anything, but
to give the poem some rhythm.
Jessy Jones let´s go to Bridge Town, Cinnamon City, Orson Gate,
where the anger subsides and I’m wearing boots, a coat and
blue jeans and go to an urban café. There, several poets discuss
suicide as a personal choice of death.
These bars, paradoxically, are tremendously insomniac,
insufflated with life.
In short, no one is able to decide.
Tell me, Jessy Jones,
don´t you think my hatred is analyzable?
Please blame the context,
break the limit.
That´s my rage:
it haunts me, makes me go from the apex of good to evil.
I hate,
manipulate,
I call myself crazy bitch, crazy bitch,
I call and hang up-
when it disappears
I say thank you.
Tell me Jessy Jones,
don´t you think it´s actually the doctors who are limited?
This poem has a secret history:
born from a very personal dream,
a dream-book.
Plot, ending, paradox-
conclusion (which almost never happens).
Was it you, Jessy Jones, who told me to take more money
[to school?
As a child, I became very skillful at stealing from my
little classmates.
School, home, park.
Was it you, Jessy Jones, or was it the spectrum of rage, love,
or mother?
She:
sought love through medical confabulations,
exchanged roles, broke the limits to devise an impossible
formal love relationship.
She:
has no criterion of reality,
desires beyond the desired,
cannot tolerate frustration.
She:
first fell in love with her boss (commonplace),
was lapidated because she was crazy-
that was the cause of the first depressing
consultation.
They raised the curtain,
raised the symptom: her failure to meet expectations.
She does not tolerate being denied.
They gave her a world of comfort, marble and gold;
she throws tantrums,
bangs doors,
hates being ignored,
though sometimes she wants to be completely absent and when
she commits suicide
she forgets that there is nothing more forgotten than the dead.
People, said Chaplin, ask me how I
[come up with all these
ideas. They are born of an incessant desire to have them.
You are the word:
The more it rejects me, the more I seek it;
when I find it, it might comfort me or abuse me,
it stays for just a while, and then it leaves with another woman.
You are the word:
you stone me for being rude,
I take literary advantage of you,
I want to fuck you.
…
Martha Kornblith (Lima, Peru, 1959-Caracas, Venezuela, 1997) was a Venezuelan poet. She studied literature at Universidad Central deVenezuela. Her books include Oraciones para un dios ausente (Monte Ávila Editores, 1995), El perdedor se lo lleva todo (Fondo Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 1997) and Sesión de endodoncia (Grupo Editorial Eclepsidra, 1997). Her last two books were published posthumously.
a new venezuelan poetry 