Name: Don Rafa Churchill

Country: Nicaragua

Shape: Parejo

Size: Churchill (7 inches x 50)

Strength: Medium

I woke up with a hangover,
ready to work on another hangover.
I am like a Sisyphus whose bottle refills
every time it is emptied.

This is my life, then.
This is where I am now.
Madness cannot be very far from here.
You can see that in my sunken eyes —
how exhausted I am!
And burned out. And bored out.

In between hangovers, there is some
suffering
and a lot of drinking.
In between hangovers, there is the life
that I never wanted… except
the love story that’s being written.

I smoke cigars, too, when I drink.
Most of the times, the cheapest cigars I can find.
Sometimes,
cigars that burn like Shakespeare’s plays in a fireplace.

And you can smell the fire in my beard
and all the verses I have burned
under the open sky.

When I drink, I like to have a pen
and a notebook in close proximity, too.
But I see how this may mislead the onlooker.

You must never mistake me for a poet
even if you see me scribble
and spit out words like active volcanoes spit out lava.

Where I come from, poems give birth to themselves.
The poet is the drunkard who happens to be there when that happens.

Where I come from, the poet has not mastered the language.
On the contrary, he has given up on language;
he merely uses it out of boredom,
distorts it, abuses it…

Where I come from, the poem is only read by the poet
who will forget
everything.

In the morning, nothing will exist but a hangover
that means nothing at all.