THE SADDEST POEM IN THE WORLD

For Ozair Tavera Fragoso

I

We made a pact,

the kind you only speak

too late,

with an open bottle

and death sitting at the table.

If one of us

ended up full of tubes,

the other would bring cyanide.

No warning.

No remorse.

With the loyalty of wounded dogs.

He used to laugh when he said it.

He had that worn-out laugh

of someone who has understood everything

and no longer wants to understand anything at all.

He said life was a long joke,

a job without pay,

a room with no exit.

And the body—his favorite prison.

For years he let the tumor grow.

He treated it like a guest.

He spoke to it with tenderness,

as if the illness

were his final art project,

his ultimate performance.

He never saw the point in getting treated—

why make the effort

if the world

spits in your face anyway in the end?

By the time he entered the hospital

he was already almost a pencil sketch.

Skin clinging to bone,

the metallic smell of the end in the room.

He begged me to honor the pact.

To help him leave.

To give him a gentle ending.

I carried the vial.

My heart was a blade.

I couldn’t do it.

Not because I believed in life,

but because fear made me human.

And the State, with its laws of legalized torture,

would have made me its perfect criminal.

If only mercy existed outside of books.

If only letting someone die weren’t a crime.

If only pain didn’t count as proof of love.

He had dreamed for years

of getting into La Esmeralda.

He lived from rejection to rejection,

drawing on napkins,

painting in notebooks he couldn’t afford.

And just when he made it—

when they finally accepted him—

the cancer had already begun writing his name

on another list.

He entered only to die.

For art to open the door

and let him fall inside.

All that human glory reduced to nothing.

All that tenderness undone.

The body turned into an unfinished sketch.

The system looking away,

as it always does

when art smells like poverty.

I kept the vial.

I put it in a box with his drawings.

Sometimes I look at it,

as if his breathing were still trembling inside.

It’s easy to talk about dignity

when it isn’t being torn from your bones.

It’s easy to believe in life

when death hasn’t called you by your name.

I’m still here,

trying to write the saddest poem in the world—

the one that begins with a pact

and ends with a silence in insomnia.

II

They burned everything.

His sculptures burned like bones.

His clothes turned to smoke in the yard.

His story was swept away

with brooms made of silence.

His mother kept her eyes on the floor.

His father shut the door.

They preferred the crime

to rust in secrecy.

They preferred his name

to disappear.

I have two of his pieces left.

Some photos stained with dust.

Fragments of someone who no longer exists.

Remains of a deliberate fire.

I remember his confession at that party.

Beer, LSD, broken music.

His words fell into my hands like glass.

An uncle abused him

and his grandmother.

She almost blind.

He just a child.

Everyone knew.

No one stopped it.

I think of his body in that bed.

Skin stretched over a skeleton.

Eyes without air.

A mouth begging for dignity.

The vial in my pocket.

My fear turned prison.

They let him die surrounded by tubes,

as if pain were mandatory,

as if silence were inherited.

They let him go faceless,

without work,

without justice.

So—

I write this poem so he exists.

So the fire doesn’t finish the job.

So the art he wanted to make doesn’t disappear.

So they can’t erase his face.

My friend—

so that at least your shadow

keeps breathing here,

with a broken heart.