modern poems

Against finality

savage_offspring

 

There must be beasts
that crawl like moons
behind the city buildings

I stare at their fumes
that spiral toward solitude
and the streets like swollen
veins struggling against
the violence of light

I have not spied them enough
nor have I done fair scholarship
to deduce their silences

I am more of a theologian
deducing with furious axioms
their temptation to laugh
and recording the syllogism
of wings that chisel
the silk of decay

they are beasts of atmosphere
and dawn and the noise of eclipses
and in one ambitious hallucination
we coexist with their rosy disasters

who are they, the monsters
these vehicles of modern destiny?

I cannot answer.
There is no final system.
The roads are covered with
the round tears of the desert.

The news has not reached paradise.
we are here to stay – on earth, at noon –
with our blue and sentimental beasts;
whatever savage offspring of our dreams.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

carnivorous cosmology

carnivorous_cosmology

Don’t be shy
I’ve suckled that nipple
called sky

the universal figure of smoke,
whose body I call yours
and time’s standstill has been glimpsed
in the trunks of blood
that our tongues have enacted

what then is not an instant
but creation that will swell either
like an echo or a myth

don’t pretend like you
don’t understand
this carnivorous cosmology

don’t pretend like your
intelligence was flared and pure
and bubbling like open
lawns of lava

return to me tumultuous
and with gales amongst those
fluttering eyes
and and – and turn
your cold torso
towards the permanence of
the flare

don’t be shy
I’ve conquered without
logic the theory
of your lips

this is the only day left
for us —

to spill
like assassins
the bleeding cup
of night.

Contemporary Poetry

book of hours

book_of_hours

This is the book of hours.

It starts
with something
much earlier
than life.

Brighter than
a halo,
shorter than
a sigh.

As you begin
to flip the pages,
there is
something of elements
and monumental drift.

Every letter
glides as a cloud
in exquisite detail.

It is all there,
frail and impermanent,
the stones and
the race.

It is an exercise
of contemplation
within this verse
of sight.

The mother
holding
the pendulum
of her breasts

and the hours
careening by
as dry

leaves
from nowhere.

This is the book of hours.

Contemporary Poetry

earthliness

earthliness_poem_pablo_Saborio

One drop
of
commonplace,
one drop
but completely
silent
within
empty engrossment.

A sole drip
of the mundane,
a trickle,
tingling
through
the minute
sense of being.

One gentle
course of earthliness,
a splash of it,
but soundless
echoing like
wings,
as a
boundless alleluia.

A speck
of prosaic,
a solitary
wandering
mote
concisely panoramic,
wordlessly grasped.

 

Contemporary Poetry

Travel: Here, is the clamor.

sound_of_india

Here, is the clamor.
Totality crackling.
I gather every seed of noise
as grains of rice
inside my cupped hands.
A nomad hymn has travelled
as a fantastic bird
through an atmosphere of time.
Its reflection is a worn
anatomy of ripples:
moving slowly like a full
moon pulsating on a lake’s surface.
The song and the silence
have become animals
savagely wrestling for
a piece of creation. I’m
watching their pristine
movements from a land
where gods sit next to
man, woman and child;
where we all sit
rapt and perplexed
by the howl of the light
and the course of silence.
This is a land where even the gods
confess not knowing their origin;
much less the nest
from which the primal rhythm took flight.

Contemporary Poetry

home and eternity

pocket of emptiness

We rest our heads
on the pillow of judgment
from there we dream
all the objects of sense;
our waking sleep is
coterminous with time’s throb
but a grey cloud
is home and eternity
and this life a quick illusion
that we nurse as a minuscule star
warmly wrapped in total emptiness

When I finished whispering this into her ear, she turned to me and said, ‘ I want your throbbing illusion inside my pocket of emptiness’.

And so philosophy ends.

Contemporary Poetry

about a poem

noticed how
a poem
stirs the dead
of objects
to flap
like vital wings

how it
splits
the feeling
to a pair
of mirrors

wonder
how the metaphor
is an empty cup
we fill with
suffering & immensity

observe
in a fleeting liaison
the sun waiting in the dark
the dream burning the skin
the blue tasting as salt

have you shattered
a poem
to bathe below
the surface of the flown?

Nihilistic Poetry

echo

draped_in_echo_21st_century_poetry

I have a bubble
of music
swelling inside:
the silent walls,
the cold
structures of silence.

It is a tiny
flame of sound,
a flickering leap
upon the smooth
slabs of concrete.

I saw the snow
today fall
like an army of silent
white deaths.

And I wanted
to join its
fragile thaw.

I feel.
A minor chord
aches,
yes it resonates,
inside a minor heart.

I pressed down
decadently on
the piano keys.

The dark is draped with echo.

 

 

Nihilistic Poetry

against the city

against the city

when some disease erodes
the asphalt
a newer skin
to sow
our crooked shadows

when some orbit of dirt
surrounds
the hunting heart
where some twig
losses a single
leaf

when a step no longer
interred
in a busy old grid
but to settle upon
the new element
of pause

when everything
imitates memory
and wreck
pick up a stone
and imitate its
barbaric sleep.

…

This was, of course, a fictitious escapade. To flee from the constraints of the invisible system by leaping onto a wing of image. But the hard aphasic stone of man’s city is impervious to our poetry. We must drag our heavy bodies over predetermined paths. Poetry is drunkenness. And tomorrow we must awake scarred, shaken and as fixed as the streets we nauseatingly tread.

Nihilistic Poetry

awakening

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.

 

 

Nihilistic Poetry