poet

eleven short cantos

contemporary_poetry_blog

I

Around my neck who knows how history made a voice out of silhouette.
From my lips a hand tore
away in tragedy
the chord
that screamed for more.

II

Time was a pebble I threw into the bucket of space.

III

Today the pond was patient.
Swallowing from the hot dust
the stupidity of the shadows.

IV

The light was hanging from a branch,
bending space like the surface of
a habitual dewdrop.

V

The mirror is red with rage.

VI

The world is still glowing, next
to an enormous fire.
I picked up a shadow that was untouched.

VII

I was just waking from the misery of being born in a place so big, I’d never see it all.

VIII

The streetlight turned red.
Grass burning
through the wings
under the sight of the moon.

IX

No one dead has come back
to tell us
anything.
It’s nearly midnight,
there’s no exception
to that.

X

How decisive is the blindness
of the storm
& the twigs are still shivering
in memory.

Xi

When murmur is no longer a labyrinth,
when I see the teeth biting the dark
and how the depths of earth
have been waiting for me
behind a cluster of
soft sorrows.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

first time

21st_century_poem

 

Remember the beginning
when even purity was a hot coal
in our hands.
The waves of genesis
and we built a clock, a molecule at a time.
We followed the river and
craved of its skin like white fur and foam
to be annihilated as beams and ripples in the sea.
Society was a coffin where we learned a dialogue of echoes.
But now this ear of mine hears the throat of time gutter
so timeless motion of reiteration
its old blossoms of fine appearance.
Now the distance is glazed with my breath.
The elements are trapped in the hard wombs of words
but everything else crumbles as shadows being
faceless in the ash.
Memory, remember when memory was a fruit we had only
tasted once?
I’m frightened because the sky is immense
and I am naked in its clouds
like a prostitute in the
wind.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

thirst

windows to soul

Sed is Spanish for thirst. Cyrano de Bergerac sat one day to write his tragedy, La Mort d’ Agrippine, for reasons no one will ever know or understand. He wrote, perhaps before midnight:

Ces beaux riens qu’on adore et sans savoir pourquoi….

Beautiful nothings that we adore without knowing why. He was referring to the gods. So there is thirst for absolutes, some people sense it and yet die athirst. For centuries mankind has looked for this totality through a window they’ve called the soul, which is rather unfortunate that today it has been reduced to myth. Not because the soul is an actuality, but because we need the image of the cosmic window. Alma is soul in Spanish. But I don’t want to say, tengo sed de alma (I am thirsty of soul). It is peculiar that in Spanish “to be thirsty” is expressed literally “to have thirst”, as if thirst were a possession, an accretion to one’s being. For this reason I prefer to express myself in a double language: I am sed of soul. That is to say that I AM the thirst of soul, I am the empty dark room desirous of an aperture, of the link between my personal darkness and total illumination; I am the emptiness craving a flood of light that will inundate the cavity of my cavernous being.

In the same play, Cyrano wrote:

Une heure après la mort, notre âme évanouie sera ce qu’elle était une heure avant la vie.

One hour after death our vanished soul will be that which it was an hour before life.

That is to say, the window will soon be shattered.

So quick, let’s raise the curtains of alma.

Contemporary Poetry

This is not an experiment.

postmodern_poem_about_mortality

This is not an experiment.

This is an animal
slowly dressing itself
with a garment of stone.
This is a shadow
shedding its bone
in a camouflage of change.
This is a sister
opening a drawer
to hide a wonderful thing.
This is antiquity
growing thick with mighty
buttresses of steel.
This is a mouth
inhaling sweet
movements of moonlight.
This is a perception
flapping in the silence
of the air.
This is a drunk
stealing a plume
from the waitress’ perfume.

But above all,
this is another hand
clinging to the edge
before the fall.

 

Contemporary Poetry

terms and conditions

postmodern_poetry_blog

why don’t

YOU
walk down history
as through a great avenue
to deliver the good news
to a decaying world

why don’t

YOU
speak a language
whose every word
is a cup filled
with beatific light

why don’t

YOU
become
the blossoming bud
of fire that will consume
the wasteland of the earth

why don’t

YOU
release mankind
from its immemorial shackles
and carry the heavy light of truth
to the eyes of every man, woman
and child

why don’t

YOU
reveal the gates of salvation,
or the ultimate purpose
of our petty lives

why don’t

YOU
add up all divinities
and multiply them
into one enormous entity

why don’t

YOU
unite all opposites
sensual and ideal
material spiritual
past future
life death
into a totality of all
totalities

why don’t

YOU
wrestle from the grip
of science and religion
the meaning of all
being

why don’t

YOU
lift the veil of illusion
and disclose the essence
behind this all-
embracing chaos

then, only then

I will follow you.

 

 

Contemporary Poetry

for voyages

wounds_as_vehicules

Descend aloud
into the art
of the thing,
before words with
enormous arms
bind us to awful
regions of totality

be unique
alone afraid
as the shiver of
twig, partly
shaded by
the inexact locus
of the clouds

rest in the dominion
of a figure,
aslant and radiant
like a candle
in its own silent
culture

adduce nothing
and the inner light
makes a thorn
to thunder upon
the dark innocence
of sensation

look below
as the summits
know little of
our wounds we
use as vehicles
for voyages that take
place behind
the language of order.

 

Contemporary Poetry

a poet’s last thoughts (quod nihil scitur)

poet's last thoughts

Then he’ll realize, when the last moment comes, that he never knew what life was, that he held to a truth that was only belief, that he struggled, loved and suffered in a reality that was only illusion. He will realize that he has only known his perceptions and these have been in perpetual flux incapable of leading him to anything everlasting, definable or knowable. He will realize that life is a faint spark vaguely shivering under an approaching darkness; that it was so insubstantial that the exhaustion of sleep could erase it wholly in the deepest hours of the night and that soon an eternity of profound death will shrink it to nothing, as if it never happened.

on the origin of things

origin_of_reality

There were no instructions
and everything had a gleam
with no in between.

Even for the mind
there was no concept
nothing to break off
from the rhythm
of nature’s
self-portrait.

There was no suffering
of a thousand of years
and the mountains
were idiots with hands
in the sky.

There were no rules
of proportion and
we were born
in the middle
of gray.

In the midst of howls,
the happy blood-stained
gesture, but there was no
relationship with being
and non-being.

We killed until
ethics was an abstract
form of tool. And language
built a house for
loneliness.

This was long ago.
When something came
to dance and we were its
feathers.

Contemporary Poetry

another age

happy_ash

The dichotomy of any echo,
and the complementary laughter
that stings the heaps of sad
like a muted ray of moonlight.
In the lungs an aurora fills,
nails the stars and releases a joy
that I feel breathing for labyrinth
& the sun has a vein
with the footpaths of June.
If all these years the veil
or unbinding a wall brick by brick
allowing essence to flower like a spiral,
I’ve been telling a tumbling few
of the essence tucked in the
foliage of the song, but who
waits with me for morning
for a Cluster of Sails to Seville,
for two centuries of warm
illiterate frenzy;
for nothing left, and
come back another age
to tell the world that its angry jaw
cannot transfigure our pile
of happy ash.

Contemporary Poetry

on a white couch

white_couch_poem

 

Poetry doesn’t prove a thing.
It disproves the authenticity of language,
the permanence of meaning and the
universality of reason. Suddenly,

I thought, on the couch, while
reading a history of Christianity. Christ!
what if that’s true. Dispensing order
the poet returns to a formulation
of disorder, a verbal approximation to
natural chaos. I thought,

while sinking in the couch. Silly
ruminations, I often say. But not
this time. I think I was on to some-
thing. Poetry as the last human act,
a summary of lived, thought, felt
experience, an attempt to crystallize
our plight in an image of poetic flight. I

thought, while slouching and setting
the book on the table. I wondered.
Have these architectural feats of language,
these monuments to image, any
lasting foundation other than soft voice?
That’s the question,

I pondered, while breathing deeply on
the white but dirty couch. What if this
coagulation of exasperation, these
swollen metaphors of pain, are merely
dissonant echoes drifting in the void?
I hypothesized,

while heavy on the couch. That is white
and somewhat stained.

Contemporary Poetry