Roberto Bolaño - My Life in the Tubes of Survival lyrics

Because I was a pigmy and yellow and had pleasant features And because I was smart and unwilling to be tortured In a work camp or padded cell They stuck me in this flying saucer And told me fly and find your destiny. But what Destiny was I going to find? The damned ship looked like The wandering Dutchman through the skies of the world, as if I wanted to flee from my disability, from my particular Skeleton: a spit in Religion's face, A silk stab in the back of Happines, Moral and Ethical support, the forward escape From my executioner brothers and my unknown brothers. In the end, all human and curious, all orphans and Blind players on the edge of the abyss. But all this Inside the flying saucer could only make me indifferent. Or remote. Or secondary. The greatest virtue of my traitorous species Is courage, perhaps the only thing that's real, palpable even in tears And goodbyes. And courage was what I needed, locked up in The saucer, casting surprising shadows on peasants and drunks Sprawled out in irrigation ditches. I invoked courage while the damned ship Flicked through ghettos and parks that to someone on foot Would be enormous, but for me were only pointless tattoos, Magnetic indecipherable words. Scarcely a gesture Hinted beneath the planet's nutria cloak. Had I become Stefan Zweig and seen the approach Of my suicide? With respect to this, the ship's bitter cold Was indisputable. But still, I sometimes dreamed Of a warm country, a terrace and a faithful, desperate love. My falling tears would linger on the saucer's Surface for days, evidence not of my pain, but of A kind of glorified poetry that more and more often Clenched my chest, my temples and hips. A terrace A warm country and a love with big faithful eyes Approaching slowly through my dreams, while the ship Left smoldering trails in the ignorance of my brothers And in their innocence. And we were a ball of light, the saucer and I, In the retinas of poor peasants, a perishable image That would never adequately describe my longing Or the mystery that was the beginning and end Of that incomprehensible artefact. Like that until the End of my days, submitted to arbitrary winds, Dreaming sometimes the saucer was smashing into a sierra In America and my corpse, almost without a scratch, was rising up To be seen by old highlanders and historians: An egg in a nest of twisted shackles. Dreaming That the saucer and I had finished our ridiculous dance, Our humble critique of Reality, in a painless, anonymous Crash in one of the planet's deserts. d**h That brought me no peace, so after my flesh had rotted I still went on dreaming.