"Speaking for my diversity"
I am not Pasolini asking for explanations
I am not Ginsberg expelled from Cuba
I am not a faggot dressed as a poet
I don't need a disguise
Here is my face
I speak for my diversity
I defend who I am
And I am not that strange
I despise injustice
And I distrust this democratic ballet
But don’t talk to me about the proletariat
Because being poor and gay is worse
You need to be tough to bear it
It’s avoiding the boys on the corner
It’s a father who hates you
Because the son comes from another parish
It’s having a mother with hands broken from bleach
Aged from cleaning
Who rocks you while you’re sick
From bad habits
From bad luck
Like dictatorship
Worse than dictatorship
Because dictatorship passes
And democracy arrives
And then socialism
And then?
What will you do with us, comrades?
Will you tie us by the braids like packages addressed
[to a center for HIV-positive Cubans?
Will you put us on some train to nowhere
Like in General Ibáñez’s boat
Where we learned to swim
But no one reached the shore
That’s why Valparaiso turned off its red lights
That’s why brothels
Offered a black tear
To the queens devoured by crabs
That year the Human Rights Commission
[doesn't remember
So comrades I ask you
Does the Siberian train
of reactionary propaganda still exist?
That train that crosses your pupils
When my voice gets too sweet
And you?
What will you do with that memory of us as children
That we masturbated and all the rest
During vacations in Cartagena?
Will the future be in black and white?
Time divided into nights and working days
Without ambiguities?
Will there not be a faggot in some corner
Destabilizing the future of your new man?
Will you let us embroider birds
On the flags of the free homeland?
The rifle I leave to you
Who have the cold blood
And it’s not fear
The fear has passed
From dodging knives
In the sexual basements I frequented
And you don’t feel attacked
If I talk to you about these things
And I look at your package
I am not hypocritical
Don’t the tits of a woman
Make you lower your gaze?
Don’t you believe
That alone in the mountain
We would have done something?
Even if later you hate me
For having corrupted your revolutionary morality
Are you afraid that life will become homosexualized?
And I’m not talking about putting it on and taking it off
And taking it off and putting it on only
I’m talking about tenderness, comrades
You don’t know
How hard it is to find love
In these conditions
You don’t know
What it means to carry this leprosy
People keep their distance
People understand and say:
He’s gay but writes well
He’s gay but is a good friend
Super-cool
I am not super-cool
I accept the world
Without asking it for this coolness
But they still laugh
I have scars of laughter on my back
You believe I think with my dick
And that at the first jolt of CNI2
I would have spilled my guts
You don’t know that virility
I didn’t learn in the barracks
My virility was taught to me by the night