Poetry By Juan Garrido Salgado : Australian poet

…’For myself it meant solitude in which wounds were healed until country voices reminded me I was a foreigner (Flaws in the Glass-p1)- Patrick White
 
We visited the country yesterday at noon.
Yankalilla.
Patrick White’s book: Flaws in Glass
(Defectos en el vidrio).
was in my bag. I hid cash in one of the pages
Yes, each page contains a self-portrait of White’s life.
After finding and paying for it
I put the cash on page 39 (two $5 notes and a $50)
And I read this paragraph on the page:
 in spite of some disturbing personal clashes
with the Nazi’s mentality, the burning of books
while I was in Heidelberg, Germany.

1

I can see myself as a young resistance poet-militant.
Passionate about literature and poetry, reading by day and night under curfew
Finding my solitude in the collective silent places
Where on streets and corners there was only time for a short message, a whisper of bees
Going back home like a wounded bird healed by clouds and stars of that night.
With soldiers of Pinochet’s regime on the streets and banging on doors,
taking out books and burning them in full view of the inhabitants of each house.
My street was Fourth West Street.

2

However, arriving in Australia with only a bunch of English words
I bought an old bilingual dictionary.(my smart phone at that time)
my accent still gets tangled up in the words
I stumble over vowels and consonants
that fly between the cage of the tongue
and in the sound that kisses the metaphors
in the ink that soaks into the paper I write on in this country.

3

By accent, voices remind me still I am a foreigner
By verses and struggle, voices remind me I am still human, a citizen of the world.
By love and friendship, voices remind me
                     that racism still
poisons the souls of the inhabitants of this country.
By Juan Garrido Salgado- Australia. 2025
 
What is desired on a 30-degree night?

Here in the city of Adelaide, I enter my room,
Digging through the pages of yesterday, as I sit on the bed.
Almost naked, I think of you.
Capital takes no account of the health and lifespan of the worker'*.
My eyes are anchored on the classic of Marxist theory:
The three volumes of Karl Marx's Das Kapital.
I feel that at some point I will read them again.
As at that time in Moscow, on those cold and snowy afternoons
the pages of the first volume set me ablaze with burning fire.
The utility of a thing makes it a use-value.*
My carnal desire is lost in the disuse of its value
the night is an industry that uses our being,
the illusion of a kiss and the reading of 100 pages of Das Kapital,
I end up exhausted, believing that Marx
is a ghost that wanders within the class spirit
and that the revolution of the soviets still needs
to study these pages, even at midnight,
almost naked outside a bar sitting over a "Red Book for Lenin".
 
Today, September 24th, 2019

I'm tired today
A piece of paper
In the pocket of death's pants
A number I don't know whose
Some phone that I no longer dial
Will it be the age of a kiss?
A street without numbers or names
Where the door is an abyss
That with a single blow blood becomes a glacier.
 
Today I am nobody for anyone
Tired of everything
Disconnected from all galaxies
Longing to be reborn in a vaginal fluid kiss
Where I was shipwrecked without finding air, nor forgetting
Only absence, a sentence of what we will never be.
 
I return to childhood, aborted childhood of what we were in 1973.
We ran out of places like birds fluttering smoke and horror
The trees were cut down and our hearts bled from downed bark.
 
Tell me, what to do with this ocean void?
I am a fetus learning to cry in agony about who we are.