21st century poet

3 Poems in Posit Journal

Delighted to have 3 poems published in the 35th edition of Posit journal. A special thanks to the editors for the brief editorial note accompanying my work:

Pablo Saborío’s poems sing with music and meaning, burning with “the fire / that only a human mouth // can ignite into language.” With stunning economy, his mellifluous words create worlds as intriguingly strange as they are resonantly familiar. Each of these poems is like a “house [that] hosts / an ecosystem of desires.” These poems of heart, hope, and subtle ideation expect the reader to be “writing / this by reading this” even as we embrace “uncertainty / as a tangible thing: // more actual than the mist / that blurs the horizon / after your thoughts arise.”

 



Poems can be read here: https://positjournal.com/2024/01/23/pablo-saborio/

 

 

Feb. 29

feb29

The house is now in order.

The voice in my head
suggests that I add a slice of avocado.

I follow diligently the suggestion
to leave the stones out of the foundation.

You can wreck it now,
bring back chaos: it is only a pet.

The description of what is,
without category or detail.

It is only a beetle stuck to your eye.

Whatever is achieved
should not always be remembered.

There are two types of masturbation,
related to time.

The closer you study a situation,
the more strenuous it is to establish a fact.

It has never rained so much in 150 years.

I used to think
despair was the only answer to life.

There is a great wave approaching us,
nobody can predict what kind of light it will bring.

I have never before struggled so much
to ignore harmony.

I think we will sell the piano
and start a new dream.

It is the essence of life to be occupied;
water is often involved.

The avocado falls to the floor;
tears swell up.

The kids arrive and the logos begins to tremble.

It is still raining outside,
since the beginning of the day.

I wipe off the first word
and then say: hungry?

The girls like the way
we have styled the living room.

This sentence evokes a sensation of existence.

People are picking up the news
with their bare hands.

I said I love you,
but concealed a parcel of shield as I blinked.

The heart has a necessity to explode,
regardless what surrounds,
what obscures it.

 

 

 

21st century poetry

other ways

beyond_language_poetry

 

There are other ways
than language.

Let’s observe
simply
the fire before us.

The way a match
ignites to startle
a moment.

Look for the softest light
a distant wildfire
quiet because it is
involved in night.

The kind of surface
that melts the sun
into a tiny
puddle of gold.

This is more of
primeval voice
returning its wind
to the rain.

This is mouth
allowing for song
to water its
valley.

This is still
earth living
behind a window
seeing its ground
swallow
pregnant fruit.

There are other ways
than ideas.

Let’s dry the story
and blind the
behavior.

See the strong
shadow stumble
to break its
shell.

The ground
fertile
with the patience
of time.

This is more
of the ocean
leaking its body
to closely
understand
the sand.

Once we pull
language
as a thorn
out of the world.

This
and only
this
will remain.

over days

21st_century_poem_2018_pablo_saborio.jpg

I stretched light
into knife
to cut the cloud
one strong drop
of eternity
ensued.

What hand
faster than sun
to slice illumination
into tool
and then apparently
disassemble time.

Answers
like feathers
suspended in that dream
after pillows exploded
and silence so hypnotic
it resembles symphony,
the feathers and your eyes
vibrating like strings.

Then back just minutes
before the tree
enters the sky
with dark veins
into the night’s
quiet body.

That was suggested
by mind
whose story is pinched
from the perfume
illusion prepares
from time.

Was the world
a seat
old me
weaving yarn
after yarn
light, sea, dome, thorn
bit by bit
thing after thing
into a language
of surface

once
spoken
the saga of silence
returns
deepening as strata
to cover
the hills of the toes

and the eyes
those shores
curling back
to their source.

Being illuminated in one act

21st_century_poems_pablo_saborio.jpg

 

The dark enters the scene (left)
to crush the last day
into trim of twilight.

You sit sensing the wall
watching your mind
being sponge
absorbing gainsboro
from the wall’s last
paleness.

You must be struggling

the ocean the sea a shelter
in some mountain.

There is a crackling
in the woods,
a decision to move.

The wind
not an object of pain
travels through the pines.

Needles trembling
thin creatures
not afraid
but as a web of wave
through which
you already
in awe.

The wall reemerges
(mistlike entrance)
to become a window.

Drawn
ashore by the emotion.

Drinking the ocean,
thoroughly
drop by drop
until
the mind craves its break.

You look up.

Enter moon (right)
conscious of its own silence.

The moon
casts its light
an echo bare
washing your chest.

Your deepest response
allows a pause
first to savor
and then smile.

You close your eyes.

Curtain.

golden

21st_century_poet_pablo_Saborio.jpg

 

The message
enters the room
without a body.

Pure cave
round as
echo
undulating with
transparency.

The air is crust
hanging from the walls
see that fruit ripe
tremendously heavy
about to fall,

the light
makes a moat
just around the edges
to leave an island
of shadow
in its center.

The message
thicker than voice
makes viscous flow
of experience

as it leaves
through amaranthine
twilight-pregnant
window.

The message
golden collides
with the gold
of the streetlamp.

Some leaves are
curved still
by the curb
as night enters
as a sort of sound
muffled but total.

The ear eager
lends its arm
like a root
to the column
of the message.

The hearer
sees only sound
the world’s substance
seeping like syrup
into this music.

The listener’s body
dances first as fire
then as air
finally as
hum.

The message
and the body
meet.

The body
and the sound.

The music
and the veins.

The room
now filled with water
drowns the message.

The body
nothing but song
remains as
world.

delicate delusions

delicate_delusions_poem_pablo_Saborio_2018

 

Man
climbs
the scaffold
leaving the arc
of his head pressed
against the blue horizon.
The world pulls calmly his hairs
until clouds are wet winds of white distance.
The hand organizing, playing the music of meaning
in strong steps, structures of size, rooms the shape of moons.
The man sleeps with the night tightly wrapped around his naked arch.
The street was pixelated with the yellows, crimsons and cadmiums
of thin leaves that clung like things leaving their mother’s veins.
The mouth took in the morning and the air snoozed a minute
before it rose, a wisp of paper infinitely exiting the world.
The day held its edge lightly above the lake
where swans wrote delicate delusions
on the waters’ smoke; the clouds
glitched, errors on the screen
once the eye caught serpent
moves on the silk that was
almost as blue as the sky,
the lake, the eye
all being
one.

the swamp of volition

strange_poetry

There must be
a method
to turn off freedom.

To waste motion in a curve
and glide down the city
as cascade.

To be sunk in the fumes
of machines or dance
in front of a choir
without any bullshit.

To undress in the cold
sensations of the crowd.

To chew the furniture of words.

To fall into the sound of water.

The idea of thought
would be framed
in museums
and memorial sites.

Like an ancient artifact of struggle.

All the small things will float in the air
and we’d decorate the problem of life
with the husks of memory;

without choice
life would be a nail
deep in the crust of flux

and language      moss at the rim of our lips.

Contemporary Poetry

rockn’roll

dream_poetry

I paid
and he asks
how I’ve been
he left a shapeless mass of laughter
in the air
I’ve had a hangover for days
he says: rockn’roll
yeah it hurts
and the hard Furies strangle
each idea with a whip of flame
and in that throb
one must find a quartz
of moonlight under a window
and breathe in an avalanche
and heed the noise
dripping from the tiny tick
of the heart

sharply
the eyes begin
by the sway
of a moon drawn by wings
to sleep

and here
skirting a crater
at the roof of a boundary
I am
washed by a beam of music
pocketing the fog
and perfuming the worn rags of clouds
like in fable
or inside a final
visit.



Contemporary Poetry

					

	
	



			
				



			
	
			
			
		
	
	
	

		

			Memory has become an uncomfortable lump in my consciousness.
		

	


			

			
poetry_of_memory


It quivers

constantly and endlessly

ripens into new peculiar

shapes.


Needless to say

it increases weight

every minute,

often requiring immense

exertion to fit it in a corner

so it does not overshadow

the timid appearance of

the present.


It branches out

like a gluttonous tree

in all directions,

wavering disparate aspects

of itself without logic

or internal organization.


A primeval adolescent kiss,

a manure fight in the fields,

a quote from Montaigne

the location of masking tape

in a storage room, all mingle

shamelessly like an orgy

of bacteria in the Petri dish

of my mind.


Language is forced to perform

extreme feats of lucidity

to convey the peculiar manifestations

with which memory

fuddles the intellect.


I imagine a day

when consciousness of the present

will be completely drowned

by the swelling tsunami of memory,

leaving the brittle instant of now

floating like débris

on a flood of lifelong reminiscence.


 




Contemporary Poetry