on losing

If you enter that place
you can close the door as you go
so the wailing winds behind it
won't slap my skin
and crowd it
with early wrinkles.

I'm not attracted whatsoever
to the snowy peaks
to the hazy mornings
to forgetting my name
when the ruthless night approaches
but if you keep crossing the line
I'll forget yours
at least when it is done bleeding my heart,
at least when it is done attacking the dreams of the poor living dead I'll become
if you go.





I've turned myself into a seer.
I see the darkness,
I smell the candles,
faraway.

Let it stay that way.

If you don't cross that filthy doorway,
look up, for there will be no roof.

If you choose that, I will stay.

Forever.

I will help you up.

© Text: VICTORIA BARDOT 2013, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
    Image: Egon Schiele

swindle

            Extracts I and III from "Swindle", by Victoria Bardot

                 I.

wash away the poisons,
for your lips are stained:
my fingertips got bluish
while blending all my meds

and I mourned for all those who thought
their pain had a meaning but didn't

                        III.

Maybe we prayed to the wrong gods
we prayed to Rimbaud and to his hash pipe
we prayed to Thompson and to his bullets
we prayed to Burroughs and to his needles
we prayed until our knees got sore and weary,
and the warm winds brought nothing but flu
and the heaven above would not open for us.



© Text: VICTORIA BARDOT 2013, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
    Image: from "The Basketball Diaries" (1995)

above the influence

I hear you reminiscing about
your sweaty lovers in the 80s
and how you were a skinny chain smoker,
a street girl with a lice tiara.
One of them used to
push your head down,
and you enjoyed it and thought
you were betraying mum and dad,
you were betraying that smiling old lady who gave you a crucifix
you were betraying the suffraggetes,
you were betraying your 8-year-old self.

·

Boys in their summer clothes.
Aw, you observe them.

You know this part by heart:
one of them will approach you,
and reach for your lips.
His breath will be smoky and hazy,
like a warm and damp jungle,
and his mouth carousel will get you dizzy, but still
you're betraying somebody, some day
that nice lil old lady who told you nice words and now's dead,
some day and some where
betraying the ribbons in your toddler hair,
but you keep kissing him.
You're dizzy.

©Text: VICTORIA BARDOT, 2013, all rights reserved.
©Picture: Paz de la Huerta

little oxford shoes

his black and white wrists were studded
with the Edinburgh liqueur,
his mum would try delouse him every morning I
tell you it was a wonder, to see him walking one meek leg
and then the other he craved for
the HAZARDOUS TIME right at the edge his
little oxford shoes,
sweetly sinking in the puddles sometimes
there is no way back home nor home
but a mildly exciting place for the numbness to be privy he would
live here and there do this and do that talk to
usandto them and his
lil' oxford shoes
sweetly trampling and crusing his first drag he
would say the coughing came out from the worst howling winds
I believed him for he was HOLY,
and the noisome and musty cigarette ends they would play on
the cobblestone pavement his ramshackle ideas his noontide saliva his cinnamon freckles
would cover my dreaming and while feeling hazy
up and down I would hear  his steps in the morning I tell you,
it was a wonder, seeing him moving and burning the soles
of his oxfordlike shoes, bitting his coal nail tips looking
for a three tongue three way kiss in a nook
at the playground I tell you,
it was a wonder.



© Text: VICTORIA BARDOT, all rights reserved.
© Image: source unknown

cheers to cirrhosis

[...] On October 21st, 1969, some of Jack Kerouac's stomach veins exploded like those yellow Roman candles he used to talk about. His lifelong heavy drinking lead him to a painful death, however he probably knew how the whisky ways were. Of course I do not know what happened in his house during that last night, nobody knows it really, but I can only hear Stella Kerouac screaming, witnessing how her husband was leaving this world - Kerouac, drowning in a bloodflood at age 47, Kerouac, finding a dead end to his limitless road.

I have always thought that our minds are way too big for our bodies, and that that is the greatest problem an artist has to face. Our heart, a tiny blood box we have to rely on. It stands there, sunk in our chest, and til the final betrayal comes, we usually forget about it, we just wear it like a rhinestone, a piece of scrap whose story we have listened to too many times. Someone next to me is enjoying a whisky glass - my mind drifts to Kerouac's body rebelling against him, his blood vessels bursting, blowing out, I hear his voice calling his wife and his wife rushing him to the hospital and thinking how far away are now the careless warm nights on the road, in a synthetic place - a hospital where hope is pricey, with people coming out from aproximately thirty wombs everynight and aproximately thirty people getting into the earth's womb every morning.

I think about Kerouac's forehead, decked in morning dew, his lips slightly open, his saliva still liquory. There seems to be a strong relation between poets and self-destruction, between pain and the ability of seeing beyond. Hunter S. Thompson killed himself while listening to Mr. Tambourine Man, by Bob Dylan, and now everytime that song makes its way to me I know he is listening, and the lyrics are soggy with his loins, he is there.

Life is the greatest masterpiece, the mind is the universe, but our body is limited and an unreliable partner in crime.
It is easy to get lost, it takes twenty seconds and a fool to do it. That is why becoming a seer is crucial. We need to survive in order to see beyond. Between all these corpses there is a way, but do not you expect it to be paved in yellow cobblestone . A poet is a wisdom robber, but somehow, somewhere Mr. Tambourine Man keeps on playing [...]

© written by VICTORIA BARDOT, all rights reserved
© image: Jack Kerouac by Tom Palumbo

Algunas imágenes del proyecto "Objetivo Doble Dos" / Some images from the project "Objetivo Doble Dos"

Mesa redonda: José Vallina, Victoria, Rubén Rodriguez, Manolo Abad y Pablo Lorenzana (1 de noviembre, Oviedo)
Presentation of the project "Objetivo Doble Dos" in Oviedo (Spain)

El mural en el que aparece mi poema, junto a la fotografía de Álex Piña - Plaza Porlier (Oviedo) 
Posing next to my poem in Oviedo

         

El pasado día sábado 1 de noviembre, con motivo de la presentación del proyecto "Objetivo Doble Dos", se celebró una mesa redonda en Oviedo para hablar del origen y el desarrollo del proyecto.

"Objetivo Doble Dos" aúna la creatividad de la palabra y la imagen. Los paneles de la exposición se encuentran en la Plaza Porlier  de Oviedo (junto al Teatro Filarmónica, y bajo la atenta mirada de la conocida estatua de El Viajero).

La instalación estará allí hasta el día 23 de noviembre, ¡así que aún estáis a tiempo de acercaros a verla!

Los poemas de la exposición han sido publicados en el catálogo de las Jornadas de Fotoperiodismo de Oviedo en una cuidada edición:

Este es el libro en el que se han publicado algunos de los textos e imágenes que forman parte de las expos de las Jornadas de Fotoperiodismo de Oviedo / A collection of the texts and images can be found in this book

Mi poema "A todas las nínfulas", que puede encontrarse en el libro
My Spanish poem "A todas las nínfulas", which can be found in the book

black liquorice

Blending my time,
it won't be long until the first bruises appear
and cross out my skin as the wanderers.
there's no relief but
the one in the pavement
petrol leaves rainbow puddles
at the car park.
Daylight and all I see are
people swallowing death juice on the corridors
and their blood, all stained, makes the floor get sticky
and it floods my heart as it is with them
caressing their stabs with my sharpened tongue.
once their lips were for the motherly breasts
now they shape the words that cut as blades
but still, they scream like the newborn
and the nurses are all gone so I
tell them the truth and the truth rots my teeth
and my hands get all rusty, they tell me
sit down their
black liquorice makes me dizzy,
and my nerves, blue violet and swollen, embrace my body
and I'm back to myself: keep up blending my time as it were water colours
darker sorrows
to come,
my quartered lips still singing the songs of the damned
the sores of my mouth itchy with the citrics
that grow in the lands of the arcadia
there is a pair of torn tights in the middle of the street if you
follow the giggling you will find the owner
but I no longer
move and my
liquory eyes are dropping
some alcohol tears on the veils
of another night, another time.

I find myself alone.
The sound of a cracking backbone is the last thing I hear.


© Text: written by VICTORIA BARDOT, all rights reserved.
©Image: unknown source

"Objetivo Doble Dos" Proyecto conjunto de fotógrafos y escritores.

Mañana a las 12.00h, en el Centro Cultural Cajastur en Oviedo, (al lado del Teatro Filarmónica), participaré en una mesa redonda junto a los fotógrafos Pablo Lorenzana y Miki López, y el escritor Rubén Rodríguez. Hablaremos del proyecto "Objetivo Doble Dos" que hemos llevado a cabo entre veinte escritores y veinte fotógrafos con la idea de explorar las relaciones entre la poesía y la imagen.

La exposición está ya inaugurada y podéis visitarla desde el 1 hasta el 23 de noviembre en la Plaza Porlier de Oviedo (La plaza del "viajero", frente al Teatro Filarmónica). ¡Estáis todos invitados!

Tomorrow at 12.00h I will participate in the presentation of the project "Objetivo Doble Dos" ("Double Two Objective"), wich will be held in Oviedo (Asturias, Spain). Twenty writers and twenty photographers have worked together on this idea of putting words and images together. Tomorrow I will analyse the project in a roundtable session with photographers Pablo Lorenzana and Miki López, and writer Rubén Rodríguez.

La exposición / the exhibition. Foto: Pablo Lorenzana

The exhibition is already inaugurated and you can see it in Plaza Porlier (Oviedo).

Algunas imágenes de la exposición:

Some images from the exhibition:

Instalación de los paneles de la exposición en la Plaza Porlier. Installation of the panels for the exhibiton at Plaza Porlier. Foto: Pablo Lorenzana

Pequeña muestra de los textos e imágenes que podrán encontrarse en la exposición.

Examples of the texts and images that will be found at the exhibition.

Fotos: Manolo Abad.

cigarette burns lullaby

cigarette burns lullaby

Your chest was full of scratches
and the couple upstairs was punishing
our trembling ceiling with their angry bed.
Oh, the sour love-making and the heavy sun,
light's fingers were bruised and sticky,
the spring outside, nebulous and white
 was just as bad.

I could feel
my nails
growing and breaking,
my jaw cracking
my runaway blood stream,
going away with the horses.

everyday was
another sack of dirt to our coffins,



a gloomy Sunday meal deal on a desert mall,
a pregnant mother
smoking,
a tearful schoolboy taking gum
out of his hair,
black mist in our lungs,
mirrors on the ceiling in a roadside motel,
soggy bread for the pigeons,
a baby covered with cigarette burns:
all that occupied my mind those days,
the ultimate and supreme
pursuit of peace,
while the faraway moanings kept getting louder
and the ambulances started to come my way.

Text: ©Victoria Bardot, 2013

Image: ©Inka and Niclas

Timba poética en Gijón / Poetry reading in Gijón

El sábado 19 de octubre a las 20.00h se celebrará en La Manzorga, Espaciu Cultural (Gijón, Asturias) una timba poética de autores jóvenes. También habrá música en directo. ¡Yo seré una de las participantes! Os animo a todos a asistir :)

I'll be reading some of my poems in this event, which will be held at La Manzorga. Espaciu Cultural (Gijón, Spain) on Saturday, October 18th at 20.00h. Live poetry and music. You're all invited! x

Este es el cartel promocional:

Blackpool Lacrimosa

Blackpool Lacrimosa

(Text written in Blackpool, Northern England. About a wanderer I observed on the beach).

At the colorful pier,
the rotten big wheel still clanks
like it did fifty years ago.
Those teenage sticky kisses
oh, they still find their way

through the rusty screws.
Young wandering hands are in no-man's land
rolling over the gloomy sea,
and they come and go like the British wayward tides,
soft and rosy as the cheeks of a saint
the waves go,
and so they go teenage trembling hearts
sailing in the dawnlight.

It looks like the candy floss sellers
are announcing your death tonight.
The sick lights and it all
takes you back
to the old maid's song of old-fashioned weddings.


The moanings of your first girl
are your anthem.
And you quietly hum it while you sew your ulcers
on the cobalt blue shadow.

41 years old and you still think about her,
and about how you and the sun teamed up
to clumsily kiss her shy tights,
to awkwardly love her fussy ways.

Your life - an unforgivable mistake! just like a tattoo at 4 a. m.,
it is bathed on alcohol and early regrets.

Your life:
- sour-milk mornings,
- mourning nights.

An easy ride across the green mile.

You are a sad memory,
as sorrowful as flowers tied up to a guardrail.

Somber like that tiny lace ribbon
tied up to her twelve-year-old ankle
that still makes you choke everynight.

© Text: Victoria Bardot
    Image: Abduction of Ganymede

"Mossy name"

Have you ever imagined your mossy name engraved on a headstone,
your grandchildren caressing it with their young little fingers
all trembling, cause your surname
will remind them that one day their candlelight will be just as weak
as yours was
when the last winds came?

I am asking you this because, you know,
the full moon makes our blood feel thick and heavy and
during those nights we are bewildered about how life comes
and goes.

Do you think we will be able to watch the roses grow
from our deathbeds?
Will we close our eyes and hear the mourners
or maybe the daffodils blending with the heavy rain outside
because, of course,
it will be raining.

I am scared of the blindness that the last days will bring.
Is it bad if I want to live forever
and feel
that in the everlasting sandstorm I'll be breathing
and seeing beyond.

Ah, I only wish that it all
will have something to do with the sea
because life seems to be rolling with the tides
such as Ulysses' journey did.
The waves are the ocean's heartbeats
if you think about it, we are the same thing.

Whatever it comes let me go back to the waters
for I have always craved liberty
and on its roaring arms I will find
both the motherly craddle
and the violent passion
of the anonymous lover,
and there will be no name to caress and no place to let flowers rot,
no mud on the cloudy days
and no pain
and no gloomy reminders on the news
no church chorus but a seagull chorus
                                                              and a secret place to keep sailing...

© Text: Victoria Bardot

   Picture: source unknown

one-way ticket

I like the idea of divinity.
Divinity of the soul, divinity of the body.
The idea life can flourish in my womb and in my fingertips.
I like it.

Buddhism states that we have to remove pain from our souls in order to reach nirvana.
It also claims that the origin of pain is desire, so in order to erase pain we should erase desire.

But I do not want to erase desire.
Pluck it with tweezers, no...
Desire is divine.
I believe we can reach nirvana
through it.
Desire
and its sour and juicy flavour
of blooming blood.


There is not an only way to paradise,
do not let them fool you...
There is not
just a big golden gate
to the biggest of pleasures...
To enter paradise maybe we could
make it through the cat flap...
as long as we go
happy-go-lucky as drunk flappers,
as long as we
go hand in hand,
desiring as sinners do,
with our dancing feet like the hanged,
with our dancing hearts like the loved...




© Text: Victoria Bardot, 2013 
   Images (in order of appearance): Dior 2011, Hedy Lamarr (unknown photographer) Gautier 2007.

"Shocking! I'm 15 and I've slept with men over 300 times! Shocking!"

There is a youtube subculture that brings out the most striking stories that really look like literature - and that is the greatness of reality, or at least the greatness of poorly-staged talk shows.

There is something fruity and appetizing in these low-rate urban stories of weary mums and live-fast die-young teens that haunts me when marble-bust writers lower their guard on me, and I think I can explain why.

Some years ago I got across the story of Victoria Thompson, a 15-year-old nymphette who had unprotected sex with more than fifteen men over three hundred times. What was really remarkable about that, was the way the presenter filled his mouth with such numbers, as if they were chocolate-flavoured. He would repeat over and over again "THREE HUNDRED TIMES" in the most sensationalist way it could be uttered. His mouth was stuffed with amazement and dark joy, and it all was as disgusting as appealling.

Victoria's mum, called Vicky (powerless version of her little one's name), appeared on the screen whining about her daughter's unstoppable sex drive, humilliating herself before the eyes of millions of Americans. It turns out Victoria wanted to have a baby no matter what, and we all know there is not enough birth control in this world to stop such desires. This lady's mum said "I caught Victoria not one, or two, but three times, naked in my bed, having sex". I mean, was little Victoria supposed to be wearing her underwear if she was having sex...let's get our facts straight. And what about that marvelous "not one, but two"... Would Shakespeare be proud of that?

Troublesome Victoria showed up on the show. She was booed by the audience the minute she put her feet on the studio, but her "I don't care" attitude sustained her in a nearly heroic way. She was a blonde-bleached Julius Caesar! facing her mum! facing the world! facing morality! What a joyful contradiction she was, this barefoot mistress! this shooting star, this son of a gun!

Of couse, she added drama to the story. A tearful Vicky cried  while a photo of her daughter, dressed in white, probably in her First Holly Communion, was being projected on a screen behind her. Where were those days when her little daughter's libido was still asleep? Where were those "ew, boys" days?!

Victoria defined herself as a "player" and confessed to the stunned audience:

"I have had sex in public places
over a hundred times
I have had sex in a park 
in a mall,
in a playground 
and even on a staircase.
You don't care what people think about you?
I don't care what people think about me
I am who I am
that's all there's to it.
Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

And it is not a Charles Bukowski's poem.

Videoblog:"The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski, read by Victoria Bardot

Little French poem

The subtle sensualité of French makes it a perfect language for poetry and whispering.
Probably inspired by the surroundings, I wrote a series of untitled little French poems during a trip to Lyon (France) in 2008. Of course their grammar is far from perfection - I am sure about it - however I did not intend to create flawless French poetry anyway - I think that little mistakes from a non-native speaker are charming, or at least I find them remarkably charming when a foreigner talks to me in Spanish.

Liberté, egalité, fraternité... et poètes maudits et révolution!

                                             ·

écrit a Lyon

quand j'ai quitté la ferme,
tous les animaux ont péri comme des saints,
un par un, le sang déversant sur ​​le sol,
le sol qui était vierge comme moi.

et pourtant, quand je suis retourné à la ferme,
et au jardin interdit et au blé flétri,
J'ai vu ma maison, encore embrassé
par la fidèle vigne.




Text: © Victoria Bardot, 2008
Image: movie still from An Education

brothel-in-law

I got my neon-lights baptism
the day I turned 21
and had sex at work,
in a second-hand wedding dresses shop,
my fellows telling me to do anal.

We are all love and rape offspring,
aren't we?
In this frantic dance of circumstances
sometimes you win,
other times you lose
but you are always playing.

I think of life as a vast minefield
where settling down means death
Anyway, boy, I have always liked bloody fireworks
I have always liked explosions under my knees.
Between twenty-pounds twenty-minutes love affairs
I chose to think about it as a minefield.

 -  © victoria bardot, 2013

pak choi dinner

pak choi dinner


Heavy hearts, heavy desire
He says he wants the kids-dog combo
But I just want the surprise box.
He talks and talks in his mumbo jumbo
But all I want is to hit the road.
 
                                                  - © by victoria bardot

Firewalking

Firewalking




These were the words of the prophecy:

Your body will become a cathedral.
And the truth will tickle your velum.
Rejoice in the inventory of the happy days 
that await you.

I will fill your hands with stones, your mouth with sand
so you caress the coastline with your fingers
and remember me.

This life is just for you
I knitted it in motherly ways
Stop air-kissing boys
stop cat-calling love
And be my masterpiece.

I am waiting for the buccaneers
and his golden coins and his swollen cocks
Venus, why have you forsaken me?
You gave me a sweet name and a sore uterus.
May rotten dusky butterflies grow from it.

                                                                     

Text: © Victoria Bardot, 2013

 Image: source unknown

Overnight.

I do not understand why all poets should write about love. Take love, bring love, give it but never write about it, because silence is the best poem you could create, a sign of respect and bewilderment. My mom used to tell me “don’t you ever accumulate written evidence of your most obscure desires”, but I do, mom, and I do not really know if I want you to give away my writings to the flames when I am no longer breathing. I am drowning in my desire, all the splintered lyres are crawling to my bed.
I wear poisons as perfumes,
I drink gold,
I feel outrageous when I am naked. I do not need shoes because my feet miss the Brazilian fields.

There are those who feel peace between severed limbs, there are those horses who wander in the batterfields when the fighting is over, there are haters who think they can rule the world, but they cannot rule mine! And there is people who kiss their children good night and overnight they are wasted in the gutters.

And you want me to tell you about love.

                                                                                     - Victoria Bardot

Recital en el Club de Prensa Asturiana de Oviedo.

Este fin de semana, más concretamente el viernes 19, tuve el placer de participar en el recital que se celebró en el Club de Prensa Asturiana de Oviedo, y que fue organizado por la Asociación de Escritores de Asturias. El acto contó con las intervenciones de otros autores (Manolo Abad, Mariano Arias, Raúl Castañón del Río, Pelayo Fueyo, Virginia Gil Torrijos, Javier Lasheras, Esther López, Rubén Rodríguez, Dani Tritón y Nieves Viesca) así como con la presencia de Pablo Valdés, que le dio al asunto un toque rock ciertamente interesante.

Contribuí a la lectura con dos de los últimos poemas que he escrito y que consideré grandes referentes del espíritu que dirige mi obra. Disfruto recitando y escuchando a otros recitar, y creo que nunca me cansaré de reclamar el necesario acto de darle vida y forma a la poesía mediante la oralidad. Hay muchos poemas que he leído y que han conseguido erizarme la piel, y sin embargo considero que no hay nada mejor que ver cómo se desnvuelven en directo, cómo cada verso adquiere otros matices en la respiración de otra persona.
El de los recitales es un ritual que oscila entre la morbosidad del voyeurismo y la divinidad de la epifanía: un acontecimiento verdaderamente íntimo y mágico en el que se nos permite entrar en un mundo ajeno y explorable.
(Que no nos lo quiten...)

En esta ocasión, el fotógrafo David Steam documentó el recital con sus fotografías...Ya tengo curiosidad por verlas.

La Nueva España publicó este artículo sobre el citado acto, en el que salen recogidos los nombres de todos los autores que participamos. Aunque en las redes sociales se me conoce como Victoria Bardot, en la noticia consta mi nombre real, que es el que utilizo offline. Esto me hace recordad la ocasión en la que se publicó una foto mía recitando y en el pie de página se me identificó como Verónica Sánchez...una errata fatal, un heterónimo en absoluto deseado.

Gloria relativa. Verónica leyendo sus poemas.

"A Dying Nightingale" - Victoria Bardot.

I wrote this twenty minutes ago. It's called "A Dying Nightingale".

In the crystalline waters I have found

the revolting rage of the shipwrecked sailor,

a brother and a sister making love

 to each other

in the telltale night.

Outside,

a wronged woman collects the pieces of her midnight dress

while a dying nightingale sings a gaudy lullaby.

I found the ugly teeth of loss in the soggy gazehound’s muzzle,

And still my lukewarm heart yearns for it.


                                                                    - Victoria Bardot

bluebardot

I am Victoria Sánchez,
also known as Victoria Bardot Heller.
I own my surname to French sex kitten Brigitte Bardot and Paul Auster’s Sunset Park character Miles Heller.

In 1999, when I was six years old, my mom found my first poem, called My Brain Can’t Stop Thinking, hidden under my pillow. I confessed I was a poet, as if it were some kind of exotic illness. On that very same year, I was named superreader by my town’s library for reading more than 400 books in less than 10 months.

I then began to lose myself in the maze of growing up, and from my experiencies I have elaborated a work which has been awarded in some occasions. I have also participated in many cultural events, such as poetry readings and cinema festivals. I am crazy about travelling, I am crazy about living. But, most of all, I am crazy about the stories which make us who we are.

In bluebardot you will find information about my new projects, my thoughts and my upcoming videoblogs...