A weak wind
being bent as silent structure
on the margin of the hours
by the beach
a walk through the empire of rock
after death
love sits
with legs cold
and the storm of the sand
every crash
is wrath
looped in symbol
of being alone
with others
older in the corner
of mosaic
mystery is a heavy mist
pounded on our eyes
love sits
with cold legs
and the emptiness of the sand
those fingers
to carve in the skin of this earth
the folded name;
the forgotten
labyrinth of him.
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.
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.
To peek within,
through artery,
like spying through
a window into a room
with two armchairs
and a book of chemistry.
To capture within
the vaulted length,
the sinuosity of entrails
like a mountain range
that forces trees up toward the sky
with perched birds inside them
looking down toward the earth
for the head of a worm.
To glance within
through dilated ache,
while standing outside a café
in front of a mob that clothe
with invisible meaning
the earth and pretend its
burning bone will survive
the excitement of light
as crystal memory
in the pockets of their hearts.
To visualize within,
through hot telescope,
the distance of our truths,
like studying the clusters
of emptiness inside
an amoeba of hope.
To see within,
through the gate of the mouth,
a deeper hole that is glutted with silence,
like a threshold that opens up
not to soul
but to something even more
lost.
When Midas asked Silenus what fate is best for a man, Silenus answered: “Pitiful race of a day, children of accidents and sorrow, why do you force me to say what were better left unheard! The best of all is unobtainable—not to be born, to be nothing. The second best is to die early.”
– Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
Whose torn bolt
was released
on the curvature of time,
who left this mass
of obscurity as a stone
in the sky,
have I begun
to carve enough
misery
from this chunk of night,
or designed
a chorus of smoke.
Its slanting invasion
made us embrace
like twins of twilight
and the irony
of it all
we are abundance
in its thirst,
dancing like swirls
of sweetness in its mouth.
To be happy mud
smeared
on your breasts, I said.
But I could hear
you muttering
the wisdom of Silenus.
Unable to rephrase
the meaning of silence
we laid still
like two
immobile spots
of darkness.
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.
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
While these hands
have broken bread,
caressed drooling
lips of pleasure,
while grey wax streams
down these cheeks
for soon the path is fog,
a dotted line of street lamps,
lumps of light
doses of darkness,
nothing but cold in the event
silence in the hour;
a particle swinging between cars
and the busy lives of chimeras
this shadow amongst transparencies
this elevation without certainties
I navigate like lost wind
through edifices and glow
seeking a new contradiction
a newer totality
or the last
dust of god.
How a book
of history and deep time
carves to certainty
the doom
that is inches or eons away
we subsist
clothed & saluting
as speck, blip
so this is a cosmic process
love and civilization
the means to forget
the end
I think of sex
and a daub of paint
on loose sandstone
I wonder,
the pride of grass?
as mankind climbs
like vine
weather slackens
the skeleton merely
scars the brick
my words,
how strange they hunt
the vanishing core
of things
these temperamental chords
that tremble momentarily
and regress
to sole silence
I hold
the final ache
that fragment of ash
shrouded in perception
the wind passes
through the world
wrinkling it
as a docile flag
when did I cease
to believe that
I exist
now all this movement
wanders ownerless
without a pivot
these loneliest eyes
still gathering
the last details
of the vanishing earth
it is so sad
to lie
and pretend this
will last
the canal’s waters
are fleeing from
the light of the sun
I hold
a flake of pain
tight within
my clenched fingers
it is not my hand
but a boat
carrying illusion
till the horizon
as its wake
Beyond Language 
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