Dirty, badly dressed.

"Upon the dog´s road my soul found
my heart. Torn apart, but alive,
dirty, badly dressed and full of love.
Upon the dog´s road, where no one wants to go.
A road only walked by poets,
when they have, at last, nothing else to do.
But I had so many things to do yet!
And, however, there I was, killing myself
at the hands of red ants and also black ants,
wandering inside the empty villages: the fright
that rose till touching stars.
A Chilean educated at Mexico can endure anything,
I thought, but it wasn´t true.
My heart cried at night. The river of being, said
some feverish lips that I then knew to be mine,
the river of being, the river of being, the ecstasy
that folds upon the riversides of these abandoned villages.
Sumulists and theologians, fortunetellers
and road robbers emerged from
aquatic realities in the middle of a metalic reality.
Only fever and poetry trigger visions.
Only love and memory.
Not these roads nor this plains.
Not these labyrinths.
Until finally my soul found my heart.
It was sick, it´s true, but was alive."
--Roberto Bolaño