It seems that the deepest intention of Javier Cárcamo is to take us from the limit of things reached, of past times, to the lasting renewal of the same ones, from the impossibility of the irremediable thing to the innovation of what begins again.

It is a book of love in present time, which wisely is interwoven with a past history; with the tragedy and the fright of a romantic war where the field of battle is inside one of each of us.

 

"... Her love is desires punishment ,

the response to the lustful prayer.

A sheet of petalsunder a guillotine... " VI"

 

... A massacre of feelings,

a massive suicide of thoughts

and the uncontrollable abortion

of possible expressions... " XII"

 

... your song was sad,

it sounded like a forgotten war... " XXX

 

A book of poems, especially if harps string is very taut, is always an invitation on a trip that takes us through transcendentally alive, rigorous, magic, educated words and, simultaneously, with an enormous load of blood, ingredient without which a poem is dead.

 

I have always said that the art is the king of the have-nots, it is to throw itself into nothingness to wallow in the abundance of spirit, where the walls collapse, where the knots that always hold us to this reality so-called life come undone, the passive and the everyday, the perfect and the imperfect, that which is well-said and that which is poorly expressed.

 

The poet, as you know, does not use words, the poet invents them.  Because when Javier says rain, rain falls on the ground for the first time.  He gives words a new life, a new significance that is exact and multiple at the same time.

 

"... Havent you already noticed

that the path to heaven,

begins at the toes on your feet? ". XVII

 

In this way he opens our imagination to a unknown world. We are transportedto these spaces, to his spaces. It invades us with loaded feelings, in this case, of love and lack of affection, of life and of death, of faith and despondency; he allows us to know it without even having seen it. We are close to him already.

 

Change is imminent; today Javier has taken words and has painted with them.I am a witness, having discovered him in that art school where he studied, he is, if not the best, one of the greats of this decade.

I never knew if his paintings became text or if the poems inspiredthe pictorial works, but with him, every text was a picture, every picture was a poem where his angels and his demons walked; his approach to artistic expression arose just like that, simple, pure.

Occasionally it you could see him executing a ritual of his own misfortune, with multiple personalities which in any other person would have been called madness, making a ceremony out of art, in which the material and the spiritual take communion.

 

Assuming artistic thought of this kind leads us think of high-risk situations, with his exquisite way of quoting thedivine passion suggesting human passion:

 

"... I was again

the body of misery

thrown into a borrowed grave... " XX

 

"... This last supper has no sacrifice,

only the treacherous kiss

and the conspiracy of broken things... " XXVII

 

"... With the blood that spurts

from the center of my hands

I am leaving footprints on your ribs... " XXVIII

 

"... I believe my eyes are injured,

a kind of sponge in the mouth... " XXVIII"

 

"... Then you will come to me,

complaining, because God does not

love you... " XXXIV

 

With this peculiar style he narrates a loneliness which is difficult to decipher, because it exceeds time, rationale and seems subject to a constant idea, and having studied the reading in depth I start creating a figure with the elements that this cruel tenderness, fierce but melancholy, which characterizes him, offers me.

 

"... For her thin body

and the indescribable beauty

of the grotesque thing, the obscene thing

and the textures of marked skin,

burned and molded... " XXI

 

"... Princess of worn pewter

between the subtle domestic outlines... " IX

 

"... Maiden of the half nights... " XLI

 

"... It is strange to be here

writing for someonethat

does not read a

nd that does not listen... " XXVII

 

He is a furious artist, who transcends moments of a pure romance, expressed subtlety in the the XXXVII poem, but who also is determined by this distressing emotion that makes him achieve fantastic ideas.

 

" ... and the fact is that I do not

understood

Until this night,

that I am a necrophiliac

of my internal cemetery

where all of the old loves lie/

XXXIII

 

"... Tonight I would like to leave my body

to move into yours,

a magic possession,

as if tied together at the soul

with a wire fastened at its head... "

XXXIV

 

In this way Javier Cárcamo brings us close, in this book enriched with the most poetical, most metaphorical, most similar language of our own feelings, to discover a new way of writing, which, like compass, shows us the way towards his truth.

 

Jorge Corleto

Guatemala, 2008

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