Aquí Escupo: an inventory of rage, broken heels and resistance

Dry. That's what these lyrics are. Four lines per verse, phrases of two or three words and a single action repeated like a blow: spitting.

Aquí Escupo (Here I Spit) is the closest thing to a poem on Planeta Gayfolk. It doesn't tell a story with a beginning and an end. It takes an inventory. And what gets spat out is everything a person carries inside and no longer wants to swallow: the semen, the rage, the broken heels, the stained skirt. The tongue, the fear, the twisted laugh, the scream on the floor.

It strikes me how it mixes the sexual, the physical and the emotional without hierarchies. Semen and fear go on the same list, because in the lives of many working-class queer people they go together. The body is a battlefield and also a place of pleasure, and the song doesn't separate one from the other.

Four verbs

At the centre there's a verse that works as a backbone: «Aquí vivo. Aquí ardo.» ("Here I live. Here I burn."). And then, here I keep going. Minimal phrases with a crystal-clear progression. You spit so you can live. You burn, yes, but you keep going.

The last part brings images of dark copla, of fairgrounds and working-class neighbourhoods: fair blood, nights of dust, dreams of stone, a neighbourhood love and a broken chest. It's the portrait of someone life hasn't treated gently and who, far from hiding it, lays it on the floor for everyone to see.

It isn't kind, nor does it try to be. It's cathartic. It has something of an underground cabaret performance, the kind where the artist ends up barefoot and dishevelled in the middle of the stage.

Listen to it when you're fed up with everything and don't want anyone to comfort you. When you need, literally, to spit.

I'd dedicate it to all the travestis, maricas and locas who have pulled through in broken heels.

The full lyrics are further down. Listen on Spotify