I see a man praying.
He’s begging, worshiping,
believing. I see a man that wants
to disappear from this world of weight;
I see a man that pleads to blend,
to unite, to be one with the absolute
meaninglessness. I see a man praying
inside a Hindu temple – speaking words
that only he hears and yet he is able
to convert this sight of flesh to fragrance,
from bone to beatitude, from blood to blossom.
I see a man waving to his idol and I keep walking
towards the heart of the jungle.
You now
must know
what it is to crave a glass of water
or to sip a kiss;
to be so reckless as to flood
the heart because it is a crater of chalk
and you’re tired of its empty dusty frame.
I don’t remember what
kind of day it was.
Full of sun with
musky winds, dark with
impalpable clouds, perhaps
flat and drunk in sapphire.
I don’t care what kind of day
it was; a day to forget like all
the rest had I not begun to count
the breaths I’ve taken in despair.
I began stooping like an imbecile twig
that bends with every paddle of the wind
as if an essence had broken into milliard
tiny mirrors on the sidewalk, and I had
to count and sew them back into a remembrance.
I plead for the pallid crust of light that envelopes me
like a bulky perfume to melt into a song of shadow
or even for a single mindless mote of dust
to land catastrophically on me and pierce
this ferrous mold, I want to watch my holy skin
fall away and leave a naked and unwashed soul
standing erect like a pagan odalisque.
But don’t show her mercy, kick her out
of this world drama, let her run barefoot
back to her incomprehensible origin.
It could have been a year ago, while getting on
a bus that I conceived of grabbing silence
by its throat and squeezing out a peep;
I had been so innocently prone to believing
that the world was a gigantic bird suffocating
me with its kaleidoscopic feathers but
now I feel at home because suffering
sets as a sun behind the panorama of knowledge
and even if it is reborn every day I dream
at night of being a thin echo of fiction.
Amen.
I lift one eye
above the rim of shadow
but retreat as a coward
the clouds of amnesia
still billow above
this younger year
I’m lying under the sanctuary
of breathlessness
the moon crosses the sky
like the dew
of a forgotten dawn
that night
was a reign of
untamable fragments
the air steers
its somber fumes
it is still
night out there
where the world
is a collision
of consequences
to brood
is to invent the
shape of expired time
I am hinged
to the pleasure
of forgetting,
my mouth is the grave
where I buried
mystery.
Somewhere out there one may find a horizon. But I do not talk about edges or inventing balconies to oblivion. I drink wine and swallow sensation indefinitely. I believe to be one whirl of smoke that spins upon the axis of habit. Sometimes I peek through windows, as if they were encyclopedias of the beyond. I am a romantic. I go outside and say: I see a single star reflected inside the thick glass of my endless wine. A slow logic eventually wears down the brilliance of the sky; and for nights I camp under a starless proof. But today a pound of purple strikes my tongue. The thickness of a dream goes down my throat. I begin to feel like an atmosphere of veins. Like a slab of fiction that crumbles to illusion.
here is my ear
curled up
like a journey
it is still
like a window
a vehicle
to a blind
landscape
some birds
come by
to peck on
my blindness
I hear a
cacophony
of impossible
counsels
whorled noise
that I accept
as the shade
of sound
here is my ear
hidden within
the source
of silence.
I wait
for structure
unguided orbit
‘round pitch black
eclipsed
purpose
I wait
for algorithm
gate through organism
a master-slave
relationship
between weightlessness
and me
I act
while belonging
to a higher order
of improbability –
fixed to the pillory
of a future
watch me
bicycle below
a clouded sky
unaware of the
the zoology
of experience
look
how a baby
embraces
a flock of details
but I still
lean against
a solidified flux
yes I
wait
for a self
to chain itself
to this body
like a saint
anchored
to
a pool
of feathers
But to sit
inside to mourn
the faint flame of the tongue
a domain bursting with curl
don’t move these eyes
they soon thunder
behind two happy lips
asleep
to sit uprooted
of her hairs not beatific
by the window
to mourn, winter, the weight
sentenced to be borne
by a few final thoughts
they encircle waves around
minutes
to sit certain
of a scene, dream, or green unhappiness
I could roar like a hallucination
inside the tiny mount of my sleep
but to mourn
in the morning
without a second chance to
kiss
to sit
and the heart
shivers like a wet bird
to mourn
unblinkingly
like twigs of rain
towards soon of old
tomorrow
A loosely transcribed prose poem based on my Spanish poem earlier tonight.
There, something like a stain, was once a sky. Some aberration of smoke and light, of cloud and fire; a threshold. Was it even my decision to intertwine or to blend with destiny? I am governed by the first desire that slithers between two hesitations. I disown the vehicle of my body, the possibility of choice. I raise a hand like another Pessoa to hint a goodbye, but to what? The cloud? The sun that I never knew except for its light?
There was a man that could not continue today, he stood in front of a horizon.
He said: goodbye.
He said: I return to the unknown.
I observe man
as an attempt
as pantomime
as desperate confabulation
to be what it knows
it cannot be
a perfectly trimmed
beard
a perfectly shaved
pussy
a chameleon’s last
color to camouflage
its lust
and most importantly,
its fear
I conceive mankind
as if it were the most
embellished monument
and while I walk
under its cool shadow
I reflect:
its brevity compels
me to hate it
its meaninglessness compels
me to love it.
I wake like a slab, like a musical note covered in rain, almost aware that the pause is a chair where I sit and imagine being other than a man. I cannot escort any more sighs, they glide alone, solitary, rootless, like planets around a distant star. But it is day, and I drink its cave. I sit staring at the wall and feeling like leaping into a pure confident fire. But time is a rock and I cannot conceive its opposite. Should I return to the mad pillow, to the deaf simplicity of sleep? The anticipation of more tomorrows, of new memories opening up like meadows, is not enough. I am fragile, perishable, disconnected like the multitude of particles that make up smoke. I need to disperse slyly as a faint perfume, to be carried away by the slightest wind. I dream and rest from meaning. The earth recedes, and I return to the lucid extinction of sleep.
You must be logged in to post a comment.