He stopped the drugs
to console himself
with the open
lengths of countries
and the silver
fever of mountains
and when he left home
to return to thick everything
and books galloping shadows
fiery in the minute of knowledge,
in the day of life, through the wind
to a place where history
is built with azures
heavy in the hand
because to be born
here I am
like a quartz
inside the stomach
of the sun.
For poets make sad mechanics with their lyric lore
– Byron
A rock is heavy
hard supposedly static
with jagged edges
and deaf surfaces
like a stone or a pebble
in fact they are the same thing
language is light
flimsy supposedly manifold
with soft melting angles
and loud exteriors
like a concept or a word
in fact they are the same thing
poetry is buoyant
insubstantial supposedly spontaneous
with brilliant measures
and reiterative layers
like a sadness or a depth
in fact they are the same thing
Preferably soft,
jelly-like
but resilient to heat
and the precarious nuisances of the jungle
tender but defiant
able to camouflage among
stones and clouds alike
its softness must be delicate
but decisive not necessarily static
as it can be allowed rigidity at times
equivalent to that of taut velvet
not too colorful nor flaunting
the impenetrability of black or white
capable of evaporating without dispersing
(i.e. losing its cohesion without sacrificing its wholeness)
different from the rest of its kind
without becoming an example of freak
it should waver at twilight at the risk
of turning ambiguous but never incomprehensible
its upper part magnificent
and evasive like the current of time in a dream
its lower part glorious and ubiquitous
like dawn in a desert’s sky
preferably sophisticated without being pompous
straightforward without being wholly divested of enigma
and existing mainly between
the eternal and the transient.
If you tell a kid
that can’t remember being born,
you were born of your mother,
from your father’s seed
you come from a line of lovers
that started way back
before the instrument of love
when there was only form
forming flux and
the structure of diamonds
everywhere protruding
from the mystery
of dark pulsation.
I am a man
that learnt
at an early age
that I cannot
hold in my hands
the entire world
like a little lovely thing.
I could have had that thought
anywhere in the world,
but it came to me
while I stand here against
a random wall in Berlin,
any wall.
I am a man
that not long ago
considered Thales
the first theoretician,
but fundamentally
wrong as I saw
everything behaving
as smoke.
After a while
things seem sad
fading like a cloud
the world is like a ghost covered in mud
and all our words are pointing at it
like guns
and we’re watching
waiting
for the ethereal blood.
In the pissoir I am a man.
(look above)
some sort of distant collision,
where totalities remain crumbs
see those tiny galaxies
crushing their bones
without emotion in a faraway
dissolution of waves.
I am a man leaving the certainty
of proud world.
I thought I knew the world
when shapes were its body
and chaos its breath.
But even that is a view.
The violence of the mass exists
like pink throbbing in the
dynamite of perception.
I leave the toilet and confront
a scroll of measures and a bunch
of mirrors masking the smoke –
at the core nothing is known.
The sky – like a word –
turns black.
And there’s silence,
like a shadow,
following me home.
There will be no more.
I will close my eyes
and shiver
as a wriggle in timelessness.
No tomorrow.
From the table
we put in our mouths
the last lesson of the bread,
we close the door
and the familiar unknown
disappears together with the
city noise.
There was no explanation
for this history of glimmers.
There will be no more:
injustice – no more form
and ideas will be lost
against the sounds of the bells.
The eyes will become simple silences,
clouded by the color of the music.
Everything will be resting
at last
under the warmth
& patience of the shadows.
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.
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.
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.
Beyond Language 
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