Weep living tears! Weep gushers! Weep your guts out! Weep dreams! Weep before portals and at ports of entry! Weep in fellowship! Weep in yellow!
Open the locks and canals of tears! Let us soak our shirts, our souls! Inundate the sidewalks and the boulevards, and bear us along safely on the flood!
-from Espantapájaros, Oliverio Girondo 1932
The city looms over streets, lights, and machines which transport its inhabitants. It is towering ever skyward, reaching for eternity. Through cold and grey, there are bright splashes of colour and sound, blaring from nightclubs and billboards. A woman walks her dog, an old man and his wife go to the theatre, a professor marks a C. The city towers ever skyward, above sewers and offices, garbage facilities and churches. It is built of desire and dreams and science. It is built of steel and glass and brick. Behind a restaurant, a man and a young girl reach for eternity. Streets flow like veins, carrying people to new places, old places. Far away, beyond the limits of human sight, the sea gently nudges the shore, as it has always done, oblivious of the city towering skyward, reaching for eternity.
I would not say that I am mad; rather that I am cursed with moments of terrifying lucidity. Humanity has no right to criticize my violations; I have seen their killing fields, I have stood beneath their hydrogen bombs and showers of black rain. I have caressed the deformities of war; the bloodied stumps and bullet-holes, I have thrust my hand deep into the wounds of the fallen, fingers amidst their slimy entrails, marveling at the silken slide as they grow cold. I have sucked the cooked flesh of children, I have cradled the cesspool of human filth and bathed in its rank excrement. In the end, all is putrescence and blood, and my disgust for mankind as deep as the bruised sea.