Man confronts light and shadow, a perennial tension echoed in literature
All people keep a hidden demon, yet there is a child inside who laughs and trembles at the same time. The history of literature is full of this tension, as children grow through burning pain and sometimes never fully heal. That is poetry’s essence, a wound that does not fully close and keeps reminding us of what we are each time it bleeds. There are countless examples. This is why poets question life. Metaphysics and its conditions drive the urge to write. The writer becomes the historian of both the obvious and the subtle, revealing what lies beyond the senses. As an explorer of worlds, the writer lifts the curtain to show what exists beyond our ordinary sight. There are other worlds within this one.
In Times of Suicide, a collection released by a Valencian publisher, exists as a chronicle of disintegration. Confronted with his shadows, the narrator questions what happened to him. The collection opens with a poem that acts as a foyer for what follows: I live closed and alone. I confess my atavism in images that do not belong to me, and that I sustain. I fall asleep in despair, and sometimes I am fortunately ignorant. When I wake, I smile. My days consist of castor oil and horse holes, and I grow spider webs. There is despair and a vision shaped by existential thought, where the glass seems half empty and the surrounding world lacks breath. It reflects how life and circumstance dissolve into what is happening around us.
Yet the poet does not surrender. He acts like a notary of his experiences, then filters them into verse. The book moves through tones of gray and ruins, as seen in a poem about ruin itself: The world is a cage. To continue. Living is a settlement, one breathes, and the part of oneself that is not ours remains. The world is a spider with hairy meridians that make the skin tingle, not because of a kiss, but because that gray scent exposes the weakest links; the ones who enslave us and condemn us also reveal themselves. The poet feels condemned to live, and life does not fully satisfy, yet existence persists despite the ache. Existentialism emerges from poetry because language begins to doubt what can be named. Everything that is named exists and endures; what one keeps silent is forgotten and hidden.
The poet is not the voice of failure, for there was no true failure to begin with. Circumstances colored the life and gave the poetry its gray undertone, but darkness is not all there is. Like any good writer, the work is not pure autobiography but a filter through which other lives pass and reveal what happened and what burned within. Like a medium, the poet writes down what is heard, seen, or felt at moments. This is the testimony in times of suicide. Through poetry and beauty, tragedy wears a mask, and poetry becomes the tool that helps unravel what is hidden. The final lines suggest a world that carries the scent of hours, leaving behind an empty footprint, with the human story of living and dying intertwined in the end.