By Hugo García Michel
Wes Borland is a singular musician, an unconventional artist. The guitarist for the American band Limp Bizkit—as well as several other projects—has always stood out not only for his skill as an instrumentalist and composer, but also for his taste for performance. This has led him to wear masks and outlandish costumes that conceal his true personality and lend him an aura of mystery that fascinates his followers. He is a major figure in rock, particularly in the nu metal scene of the late twentieth century and the years that have followed, and as such has amassed an enormous number of fans around the world. Even so, very few people would have thought of him as a source of poetic inspiration, as a kind of muse capable of awakening a poet’s sensibility to such an extent that the poet would title his latest collection Wes Borland aprende a tocar de oído.
But let us be precise. Borland’s name appears explicitly only in the title of the book and in one of the poems (“Wes Borland learns the hard way / across several states of the country, / his father played blues in church / from the unfinished score / of poor neighborhoods. / The light fades in the room / where they both learn / to play by ear / those who refuse to die / like corpses / rehearse hymns that will never appear / in any book.”). Nevertheless, what remains implicit throughout the collection’s seventy-odd pages is a kind of quiet, unspoken conversation with the musician, as though Rozas were establishing an intimate communication with him that spills over into poetry and becomes the very substance of the work.
Boris Rozas is a writer born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who has lived in Valladolid, Spain, since he was practically a child—a Buenos Aires native turned Valladolid local. A graduate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Valladolid, he has published around twenty poetry collections to date, including Ragtime, Invertebrados, Las mujeres que paseaban perros imaginarios, Annie Hall ya no vive aquí, Lugares a los que volver con el buen tiempo, Rave, and the book discussed here. In 2025, the latter received the VI Juan Ramón Jiménez International Poetry Prize of Coral Gables, Florida, United States, an international competition dedicated to promoting poetry in Spanish that receives an average of five hundred manuscripts each year from more than forty countries.
Wes Borland aprende a tocar de oído is divided into three sections (“Behind Us Everything Is Gray,” “Parallax,” and “Rise and Shelter of the Beasts”). Throughout its pages—and its verses—it maintains a melancholic, introspective, and intense tone, yet remains far removed from solemnity, with touches that occasionally brush, however lightly, against the finest and sometimes bitterest irony. Perhaps in keeping with its title, the poems also possess a clear musicality that, as Henry Ballate, president of the Juan Ramón Jiménez Foundation, notes in the foreword, makes them something to be heard rather than merely read. This also relates to the other part of the title: learning to play by ear, something many musicians—especially rock musicians, including Wes Borland himself—have done. It is a method of learning that can be transferred to other forms of art, such as painting, sculpture, and literature, as well as to life itself.
Let us look at three powerful examples—a power trio, to put it in rock terms—chosen at random through the pleasurable and uncertain game of opening the book to any page.
One:
If any lovers still remain standing
waiting for the new parks,
then there are more than enough hands
to illuminate the remnants
of these days.The flower grows
quietly among its fears,
the voices
recover their sense of touch,
allow themselves to exist
on another’s
blank page.The wanderer walks barefoot
through the silent night.To gnaw without teeth
at the greasy remains of the afternoon
is like writing a poem
without the heart
between one’s fingertips.
Two:
To suppose that summer carries
the words away
on a carousel of escapes
without first or last names
is like imagining gaps
in the strange mathematics of the seasons,
a silence erected
upon quicksand
that devours one hand after another.At night,
open the book and build your church
before attempting to reduce life
to rubble.
Three:
And if the struggle seems terrible, an uphill climb,
the roads narrow and rage,
leading you toward what you were not
and have already been,
return to the cold waiting that built
the important things,
in time to stir everything up
if everything could understand you.I already find myself too alone
to carry any weapons
that do not come from these hands,
spitting insects
with lips inherited from other homes,
my turn moves on,
the poem’s sky cannot be glimpsed
when the afternoon overflows
and you cannot reach it.
In another of his poems, Boris Rozas writes about Daisy Jones—I assume he is referring to the fictional character created by American author Taylor Jenkins Reid in her successful novel Daisy Jones & The Six, published in 2021 and later adapted into a streaming series by Prime Video. Cats watch her from atop the walls as she “longs to find peace / in the mirror built / for poets / in a permanent state of grace.” She howls at the moon “above the Parthenopean hills” and “snorts the days / to the chords of her new guitar.” There is an undeniable and not particularly hidden rock-and-roll spirit running through several of the poems in Wes Borland aprende a tocar de oído, and that is one of the collection’s greatest virtues.
Because, as Neil Young once said: “Rock ’n’ roll will never die.”
Published on April 28 in Café con Letras.
