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Rafael Barrios, Café Quito, Calle Bucareli, Mexico City DF, May 1977. Our visceral realist activities after Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano left: automatic writing, exquisite corpses, solo performances with no spectators, contraintes, two-handed writing, three-handed writing, masturba-tory writing (we wrote with the right hand and masturbated with the left, or vice versa if we were left-handed), madrigals, poem-novels, sonnets always ending with the same word, three-word messages written on walls ("This is it," "Laura, my love," etc.), outrageous diaries, mail-poetry, projective verse, conversational poetry, antipoetry, Brazilian concrete poetry (written in Portuguese cribbed from the dictionary), poems in hard-boiled prose (detective stories told with great economy, the last verse revealing the solution or not), parables, fables, theater of the absurd, pop art, haikus, epigrams (actually imitations of or variations on Catullus, almost all by Moctezuma Rodríguez), desperado poetry (Western ballads), Georgian poetry, poetry of experience, beat poetry, apocryphal poems by bpNichol, John Giorno, John Cage (A Year from Monday), Ted Berrigan, Brother Antoninus, Armand Schwerner (The Tablets), lettrist poetry, calligrams, electric poetry (Bulteau, Messagier), bloody poetry (three deaths at least), pornographic poetry (heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, with no relation to the poet's personal preference), apocryphal poems by the Colombian Nadaístas, Peruvian Horazerianos, Uruguayan Cataleptics, Ecuadorian Tzantzicos, Brazilian cannibals, NÔ theater of the proletariat… We even put out a magazine… We kept moving… We kept moving… We did what we could… But nothing turned out right.
Joaquín Font, El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF, March 1977. Sometimes I think about Laura Damián. Not often. Four or five times a day. Eight or sixteen times if I can't sleep, which makes sense since there's room for a lot of memories in a twenty-four-hour day. But usually I only think of her four or five times, and each memory, each memory capsule, is approximately two minutes long, although I can't say for sure because a little while ago someone stole my watch, and keeping time on one's own is risky.
When I was young I had a friend called Dolores. Dolores Pacheco. She really did know how to keep time. I wanted to go to bed with her. I want you to make me see stars, Dolores, I said to her one day. How long do you think stars last? she said. What do you mean? I asked. How long does one of your orgasms last? she said. Long enough, I said. But how long? I don't know, I said. A long time. You ask funny questions, Dolores. How long is a long time? she persisted. Then I assured her that I had never timed an orgasm, and she said pretend you're having an orgasm now, Quim, close your eyes and imagine that you're coming. With you? I said, seeing my chance. Whoever you want, she said, just imagine it, all right? Let's do it, I said. Fine, she said, when you start, raise your hand. Then I closed my eyes, imagined myself screwing Dolores, and raised my hand. And then I heard her voice saying: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, and unable to keep from laughing anymore, I opened my eyes and asked her what she was doing. I'm timing you, she said. Have you come yet? I don't know, I said, it's usually longer. Don't lie to me, Quim, she said, most orgasms are over by four Mississippi. Try again and you'll see. And I closed my eyes and at first I imagined myself screwing Dolores, but then I didn't imagine myself with anyone. Instead, I was in a riverboat, in a white, sterile room very much like the one I'm in now, and from the walls, from a hidden megaphone, Dolores's count came dripping down: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, as if someone were radioing me from shore and I couldn't reply, although deep in my heart all I wanted was to answer, to say: do you read me? I'm fine, I'm alive, I want to come back. And when I opened my eyes Dolores said: that's how you time an orgasm, each Mississippi is a second and no orgasm lasts more than six seconds. We never ended up fucking, Dolores and I, but we were good friends, and when she got married (this was after she graduated) I went to her wedding, and when I congratulated her I said: may your Mississippis be full of joy. The groom, who had been an architecture student like the two of us, but was a year ahead, or had graduated a little while before us, overheard me and thought I was referring to their honeymoon, which of course they were going to spend in the United States. A long time has passed since then. It's been a long time since I thought about Dolores. Dolores taught me to time things.