> be me Borges

Letra#

be me

walking around buenos aires
stopping for archways
iron gates
shadows on old buildings

probably force of habit

probably collecting details
for someone else

[Verse 1]

there’s this other guy

also me

Borges

he gets all the mail

his name appears
on envelopes
professor lists
biographical dictionaries

people study his childhood
his influences
his recurring themes

I see myself
in shop windows
for half a second
before the angle changes

he has my face
more or less

my memories
more or less

my name
completely

[Anti-Chorus]

my face when
I live my life
so Borges can write his literature

my face when
he gets the name
and I get the weather

my face when
I walk through buenos aires

and he gets buenos aires

[Verse 2]

we like the same things

hourglasses
old maps
eighteenth century fonts

etymology
coffee
Stevenson’s prose

but when I like them
I think I actually like them

when Borges likes them
it feels performative

like an actor
doing a very convincing bit
about being me

I give him a courtyard
a knife
a sentence overheard in a café

he adds mirrors
tigers
infinity
a dead theologian

suddenly it’s literature

not gonna lie
some of the pages are good

this is part of the problem

[Anti-Chorus]

my face when
the literature is beautiful

but it still cannot save me

my face when
the good lines belong to language

not to him
not to me

language gets the custody

[Verse 3]

eventually
I’ll fade away completely

maybe one moment survives
inside Borges

a morning
a fear
rain against one window

he’ll keep it

then distort it
and exaggerate it

I give him an afternoon

he returns it
as a labyrinth

I give him a dream

he puts another dream inside it
and now nobody can leave

[Anti-Chorus]

my face when
I slowly give him everything

my face when
he turns my life
into evidence that he existed

my face when
I become a source

the citation outlives the witness

[Verse 4]

Spinoza said
all things want
to keep being themselves

rocks remain rocks

tigers remain tigers

I’m paraphrasing

Borges would know
the exact wording

Borges always knows
the exact wording

that’s another thing
he stole

I also want
to remain myself

apparently

but I’ll remain in Borges
not in myself

assuming there is a myself

which feels
increasingly optimistic

sometimes I think
I am only the part of Borges
that gets tired

the part that walks home

the part that forgets quotations

the part that answers the door

[Anti-Chorus]

my face when
the tiger remains a tiger

the stone remains a stone

and I remain
a paragraph
in Borges

my face when
I recognize myself less
in everything he wrote

than in some random guitar
strumming through a wall

[Verse 5]

a few years ago
I tried to escape him

left behind
neighborhood myths
dusty courtyards
men with knives

I moved on
to games with time

infinite libraries

people dreaming other people

the universe
as one sentence
misremembering itself

new territory

or so I thought

then those things
became Borges too

of course they did

now time belongs to Borges

infinity belongs to Borges

mirrors belong to Borges

there is probably
a Borges copyright claim
on eternity

[Bridge]

so I think up new things

I keep moving

but he arrives first

already waiting
inside the title

every road I take
to escape him

becomes another road
people call typically Borges

my whole life
is running from the author

who turns the escape
into style

[Final Anti-Chorus]

my face when
I invent a new world

and Borges gets the credit

my face when
I try to disappear

and disappearance becomes
a recurring motif

my face when
he gets the metaphor

and I get older

[Outro — whispered]

losing everything

everything goes
to oblivion

or to Borges

oblivion
or Borges

at least oblivion
doesn’t exaggerate

be me

walking around buenos aires

hear a guitar
somewhere nearby

for one second
I recognize myself

not in the books
not in the name
not in the mirrors

just in the sound

then Borges hears it too

and now it belongs to him

probably

I don’t know

I don’t even know
which one of us
is writing this

my face when