INTRODUCTION BY THE BEGGAR KING

King is how they call me, though of a King
I don't really wear nor the bling not the grin.
I could be called instead
a springing fountain
or a Zen beggar,
leaving very much unchanged
the way the world spins.

Words don't stick nor bear resemblance
to the things they name
simply by blind chance.
But if I had to decide on the pertinence
of things to their names,
I would command, for instance,
the rain to be called happiness:

I wonder if it wouldn't fall less unruly
if only we made it wear a longer dress.
And the same if we renamed sadness
and called it smile, I can already fancy
that at the first glance at our clumsy faces
all sadness would be erased
by putting a laugh onto its face.

Yet, to be called King of anything,
even of the bums or the dumb,
is no small thing.
Frankly, it doesn't flatter me,
for I couldn't care less
if in the crowd I blunder about
as the prince or the beggar.

However, if you called me a fountain,
you wouldn't be completely mistaken,
because placed where I always lay down my head,
in the middle of a square,
I'm a fountain,
but one that spurts
words instead of water.

And if a beggar is not the whole,
it is in the least
a part of what I am,
since I have no roof of my own,
and so the number of walls
that give me shelter equals
the rims on the roads I roam.

Beggar or fountain
are common names,
they refer to classes,
not to individuals.
In the end, this is how I prefer to think of myself:
non-specific,
plural.

In an universe so full of beings,
proper names and numerous offspring
are just not feasible.
We are like sand, packed to such an extent,
that none can make out any longer
the shouts of the drowned amongst
an ocean awash with siren songs.

A tramp is, in brief, someone that seems
very much like anyone else, except that he kept
from turning into another thing
in a world of things,
things that used to be autonomous beings
as we dream we keep on being,
but by which we ended up enslaved.

And the path I walk on
is my sole’s mate
and shifting traveling companion.
We have both the aroma
of the warm moist earth.
And, like his, my destination
lies at a crossroads.

This little one, which strides by my side
sniffing the morning light,
is Diogenes, the dog.
I dubbed him so, tongue-in-cheek, but also
because he is by nature a dog,
not solely as a term of abuse
or a figure of usage,

and hence the name fits him by birthright
of one whose all occupation consists
in strolling all about.
In addition, I benefit only
from the company
of a backpack and a doorstep,
and those are all my so-called belongings.

But the stick I pick
up from the ground
and carry around as a stick
builds onto me,
for the better weather or the worse,
all that chatter from the birds
buzzing on the trees.

I DON'T DISMISS THE COMPANY OF WHOEVER

Populus me sibilat, at mihi laudo.
(Horatio)


I mentioned I usually walk all by myself.
But I am more of a loner than a hermit
and never really dismiss the company
of whoever tries to keep pace with me.
Even those who look down on my habits.

Whatever they bear on their minds or tongues
is thin air, how could it weigh on me like a burden?
They talk so many words that I wonder
if there are so many things out there
just enough to fit under.

Hence, it is no cause for concern
if they can err in what they utter.
The world is far too crowded, we better not still add
to the number of beings that there are already,
and leave all that job to God and good looking glasses.
Yet I confess – I am fond of men.
Humours, tics, burning cigarettes.
I particularly cherish women and children,
though, if I had known, I would have stoned
who damn invented them in a binge of boredom.

And when the kids or the booing chase me down,
when I am spat upon by the dignified champions
of work-morale and public duties,
I take on their hints as a compliment.
Because I can still laugh even when it's just not the case.

Then, if I burst out laughing for no apparent reason,
I don't mean to tease who happens to be listening.
Remember– I am only the fool laughing at reason.

I DON'T HAVE A FACE OR A NAME

È come se una nube
arrivasse ad avere
forma di nube.
(Valerio Magrelli)


I don’t have a face or a name.
Don’t expect me to churn out
from my pocket a greeting card
after delivering the same speech
in the middle of an empty street.

I don’t deserve the constancy of a faithful name.
To be perfectly honest, I never bothered to be the same.
Though I seem to keep
running after my tail,
I never keep us on the same trail.

I’m not the grown-up from my own child,
nor am I the guy I left behind ten minutes ago.
The very same time which creases my features
and bends my shoulders
builds me up once more.

I am my son and heir, shaped
out of nothingness after my sheer unlikeness.
The same naught that gives me stuff and meaning,
for I realise that I just keep on living
as long as I serve as fodder to oblivion.

But they think me as a point to pin down
on the Cartesian ground,
and ask for my credentials
from the union of clowns.
I who am only where I ain’t or where I still can’t:

as that ship which can’t be seen from ashore,
but drifts onto us wrapped by the distance,
a rough bulk deprived of form,
it is, so as to say, a mountain of mist,
but a thing, no, it still isn’t;

or as love before love,
betrayed in a whim or shiver of hand,
squeezed between conventions and machinisms,
but, once enquired, you promptly deny it,
because love, no, it can’t still be it.

No word could fit me, since, as those of my kin,
I am solely made of flesh and bone,
and have never known
anyone composed of sterner stuff,
of ideals and high-flown goals.

Names
we can only deserve when
we grow mute so as not to need them,
as soon as we are finally through
with all the things we're long overdue.

DON'T YOU AIM AT THE STONES

Don’t you aim at the stones,
for they don’t know what they fly for.
Behave on fair terms with earth
and all of its freakiest creatures

that you in one of your future
lives may already have the fortune
to proudly have been before.
Don’t make complaints about the plants,

don’t demand amends on how you treat
or go treated by the beasts.
They have no clue as to
wether they bother or better you.

Your expectations have no room outside you,
and nature is,
in your exact similarity,
neither vicious nor virtuous.

Nonetheless, if on a hot day, the whole sun
starts to weigh down on your back,
go fetch under a tree’s hat
a grassy rest.

And feel how cozy in this hug
you find no cause to grudge.
Then lie there for a brief
lap sleep.

WHEN I FEEL TIRED

When I go exhausted and it feels like I only plod along pointlessly,
when the road furrows my feet
and I begin to find flaws with
whatever happens to surround me,
I close my eyes and conceive imaginary realms,
though more real than the life we people lead,
weaved in phantasmagoria.

In such worlds I crash from my own party a meal all of mine,
I serve my own water and pour out my own wine.
And the feast lasts as long as I can last,
for the usher rings the bell whenever I tell
and only hushes it when I can't tell any longer.
I don’t miss other resources or guests,
a dog and a moon are as good as it gets.

Then I open my eyes and understand
that all I dream about, regardless of pretense, I own already,
and I don't long for another life or deny the longings
that amount to make this one up, I simply believe I can get
them all resolved without resort to anything heavier than thought.
And they know how to wait patiently
for the moment of their invention or discovery.

Fed on my elusive banquet,
I don’t blame chance but bless it minutely.
Through all the odds and ends of impossibility,
I pray with all my lack of faith for it to stay
with me all along, for without it
the world just doesn’t know
which way it should go.

Thus, no source and no thirst,
neither hunger nor abundance
shall lead me astray,
come what may.
Flinch, I sure can,
just not today.

A TELESCOPE

Who said I feel resentment towards the selfish?
Nor do I despise the pristine or late-anti-liberals.
I am not even taken aback by the morally handicapped.
As all the afore-mentioned,
I also sustain that there is no fact of matter
to constrain us to be righteous or too goody.

If I were the invisible guy (as I am on closer inspection),
I would not refrain from kissing the florist’s lips,
substantial as a rich dish.
I would also collect myself from the church box
the amount of my own due alms
(well, it is more fun done than said).

I concede that it is only strictly reasonable
to do or not to do
what we are previously agreed on.
We are all free
and for atavism solely carry along
the so-called social gene.

That is why I dream about a city exclusive for them.
I suggest that they should leave us behind
and go found with their vast talents and resources
a country all for their relish and profit,
on an unreachable mountain range or far-off island
in safe distance so as to keep our peace guaranteed.

It would be exhilarating to probe through a telescope
how they would come out
living together.
I guess it would make stuff for a broad gamut
of gags their joint capacity
to conjure up disaster.

I don’t intend to make out of them
an object of lecture.
It is only too natural
that they aim at their intents,
why should they be prevented?
Just don’t count on me as a target.

I simply regret
that as long as they don’t take their leave,
that land of theirs
turns out to be precisely this.
It’s the old saying about the rotten apple
that ruins the whole basket.

Therefore, don’t reproach me,
all too dignified members
of our good-scented and manicured
time-honoured society.
Don’t feel annoyed if my fashion-unconsciousness appear
to intrude upon your taste and your penchant for the superior.

Because if I reek to the disgrace of all social-graces
(and much worse than my remaining teeth),
and am too far from handsome
(to the point mirrors look abashed at me),
I only repeat with my poor means
your great looks and your grand manners.

IF YOUR FRIENDS ASK YOU ABOUT THEIR FAILINGS

Make up at your friends’ request
minor defects in case they ask.
Such that any good man
should smile at compassionately.

Never censure
an act whose practice
did not belong to you,
even those that nagged you.

Our circumstances, we alone know them,
and even that is no big deal after all,
as a tree never knows for certain
where all of its fruits may fall.

And thus, each of us
only by herself can deserve
punishment
or solace.

ON NOTHING

Tãchons d’entrer dans la mort les yeux ouverts...
(Marguerite Yourcenar)


I am not like most guys, who feel stalked
but pretend not to notice.
I understand I can do nothing without nothing,
which leads my way and waits
for me at the end of my days.

Likewise, I would go lost without the hours,
which confer to the space routines.
The hours also march to their last, and drag me with them.
If I fail to keep up, then he slows down his pace:
he is a courteous old gentleman, quite fond of waiting.

In sum, I know that the small shadow
that was born with me,
feeds on my body
and goes on growing relentlessly,
till one day it will clog me head to toe.

Nevertheless, it is good policy to spare an escape route up-sleeve.
Not to attach to life is the preserve of the sick.
Even if I miss any new tricks,
I still believe I won't see anything coming
as long as if I keep the eyes wide open.

During the period we dwell under his wings,
all lack of care can only elicit an early visit.
There are no such things as accidents.
Accidents only confirm the blunder of retirement statistics
and add to the bulky profits of insurance companies.

When I sneeze without enough reasons,
when a psychotic-looking hasty commuter hits on my devious ways,
or when I, following a cloud, step on the zebra stripe
without looking both sides,
I know he is somewhere around.

I know he spies on me
from the blind side of normalcy,
drawing closer and closer
until nothing is all that you
can hardly notice.

WHAT'S IN A NAME

when I say babe your eyes
impersonate the very beauty,
I don’t mean your two or more legs
are not just as bewildering

when I shout out come over here o boy,
I call that brat approaching on a hobbyhorse,
not his brother who skipped class the day before
and stayed home today grounded for his joy

when I mention I feel the utmost pleasure
every occasion I hear you singing,
I hereby don’t waive other merriments
that may drive me equally content

so it goes: every time we say anything,
we have to keep quiet at the same time
the sum of all the other beings
a single word summons in

and, at the end of the day,
who knows how many silences
we put to say
just what we mean?

AMOR FATI, MA NON TROPPO

1.

I refute those who don’t think
and those who think I’m a thinker.
I never sought for truth.
But, if you are fond of lies,
I can spin off more than a tale.
So I leave you to your philosophy.
Just call me back, then,
as soon as you are finished.

I have never inquired after directions.
If there really were such things
my feet would always consult me
on the way they should go.
Nor am I driven to the gleam of gold:
no money pays for my share in time.
To have mine and throw it away
is good enough to make my day.

And I sing and dance as any severe worshipper of wine.
But I don’t celebrate what I got or will attain.
I’ve long given up any pretension or pretence of perfection.
So don’t imagine that I'll take part in the guys’ quest
for things which needed mending.
All wrong and pain are the by-product of men
or else exist only before our unclear conscience.
I can go delirious more seriously.

Don’t ask me either
if we are flesh besides fire.
One life is much
too much already.
If there is another death after that,
it is not likely.
But who knows for certain
other than the dead?

I guess I’ll be happy
to make their pleasurable acquaintance on due occasion.
But if it happens that nothing else happens,
why should I worry in anticipation?
For the time being, I feel fully satisfied
with this plain though transient certainty
that at least for the time being
I’m still very much alive and kicking.



2.

I admit that my anti-philosophy is also a philosophy.
It is just of a kind that won’t have us attached
to the orderly bundle
but would rather let us hang freely.
Since there mustn’t be other reasons to the world
than those it doesn’t care to tell us already,
I insist we should give it the final word.
Our idols are all very fine
but they won’t outstay us.

I don’t mean we should take our fate at face value.
For those, like me, that unfortunately nestle
much beneath the food chain’s safety level,
and who only for tastelessness or distraction
haven’t been so far devoured,
beyond any controversy,
life stinks.
And no poet or thinker might adjust or reengineer
our innate skill just not to fit.

But I also misled myself by seeking
too deep for grounds,
until one day I got myself buried
in foolproof doubts.
Later, when my remains were returned,
my recyclers found me not just the same
but also as dissimilar as before.
My essence has become that of the mirrors:
it is all of them or none at all.

And the world as a split glass repeats me.
Like a shattered Dionysus, my shards
walk for me and scatter our voices all over.
Those echoes are the brood
I was not able to make for myself.
They are my providence that chance
will not fail us. I sing only as a means to assure
that miracles, if they deign to ensue,
might ultimately favour us.

But I won’t grieve for my late substance.
Everything changes or may get changed.
I imagine it must be really great
to wake up every day having our old lady by one side,
but it sounds even greater only to realise
that each new day may bless us, god Grant,
with a surprise!
Best gait to take is wandering around
without any fixed ideas or steady grounds.

I live in all the things that once assaulted me in my wanderings
and since never again wished to go all by themselves.
As a matter of fact, I’m so small and vacant,
that I barely exist on my own.
But a city multiplies me.
All the roads in the city cross in my feet.
A city leads me
much beyond my loneliness.
With me a city makes love.

A city: myriads of stances that coalesce into unity,
like those small colourful bits
that juxtaposed in a certain arrangement
compose the bittersweet mosaic
of all what there is.
A city gathers me together.
I find and lose myself. I am every man.
Because there must be a love even bigger than the city:
the love that makes us want it ever bigger and bigger.

I HATE WHAT IS RECALLED

μισῶ μνήμονα συμπóτην


Dump the remains of my past
on the underneath layer of time’s embers.
What has become of them? Don't ask
- I hate the one who remembers.

The street horns hail my child’s wail:
I have been born only recently.
And if by chance I meet an acquaintance,
it seems I got a seizure of déjà-vu.

Joys, I had plenty.
Aches, better not to mention them.
Both I have abandoned entangled,
consigned to the same grave.

Don’t request references.
I don’t hold advice, no offence.
I have no science and no experience:
I just let the way keep up the pace.

I want to let go, move from, feel free
I don’t know how or when or what for.
I want to go, to become, not to be.
I have no hereafter and no before.

THE GYPSY SONG OR ON FREE WILL

One afternoon a gypsy,
who long stalked on me,
tugged on my shirt,
asking if she could treat me with a read.

I replied in bold terms
that given the contingent event
that future could be told beforehand,
there was no point in my responding

whether in the end I would accept or rebut
a proposal whose result she claimed to own
however to me altogether unbeknown.
Without flinching, she said I couldn't possibly resist it.

I burst in laugh, repealing never and never
had I felt tempted at tampering with a business that
was of sole concern for a flock of planets.
In sum, she had been unfortunate in her fortunetelling,

so could she please release my sleeve and clear the way?
I saw then her recoiling in a clangor
of glaring veils and false gold,
only wondering what had gone wrong...

Yes, I lied to her, though it is late for self-serving repentance.
She had claimed that in all seamless fabric of time-space,
nothing could ever happen to her ignorance.
And I, a pedestrian Faust, would have gone in grace

if she had unveiled me a glance of what’s in stock,
were it fact, were it fraud.
But, on second thoughts,
I would lie time and again,

for, if I had consented, in the end,
I would have lost not only the argument,
but also, addition to my temper, the will
to believe in a free will.

ON FREEDOM

That window roasted spinning chicken
at which we stare with watery mouths,
my dog and me, must think of itself
as being freer as compared with
his peer specimens. I guess it surely
considers it noble to fly orderly
in the usual anticlockwise direction,
spared from the wind’s whim
and the migratory lure of nurture.

So they say I could only benefit from revamped liberty,
if only I opted for a style of living which provided me
with wider informed choice and selection.
Gibberish: the most relevant resolutions come ready-made,
I am not the author of whatever I amount to be,
nor is anybody I know or ever heard of.
I could have been born a workaholic,
becoming good for even more nothing,
without none having ever experienced the urge to decide
when or how well I should kill my time.

But I am the first to grant myself all the trite curious
petty treats to whose election one is entitled
and I am the very first to defend them against
your naturally too good concerned intrusion.
For instance, I would never change my prerogative
to sleep each night anywhere I feel like
for the fade discretion to pick out once in a year,
having coffee with Joe, the dealer,
a brand new car to drive
(as though I had no feet of my own,
able to drive me when I don't feel tired
in order to wish I also got tyres...).
Similarly, why should I resign
to waking up and choosing among some pieces
the cloths I will put on,
when I am able to gather from the freshest washing-line
all those I want,
and have them dry on the warmth of my body
while I run for my soul
from a raging former owner?

Liberties, as truths
don’t hang on peacefully together.
Then why ought I to get married and grow kids,
allowing all that people to besiege me
with the sharp claws of their wills?
They say a guy's freedom concludes
as soon as someone else's starts.
I claim that a guy's freedom bids its leave
as immediately as the other guy's too.

But I understand there is indeed
a deeper sense with regard to
a man can be told his own master:
it is when not even our own company meddles in,
and we can move about all by ourselves,
released from the tyranny of our likings
and from the very necessity of having likings,
watching as perfect strangers
each gesture clinching by their own initiative
onto the barren bareness of our fingertips.

IN THE BLACKBERRY SEASON

Every morning, as soon as the sun shakes me,
I up and go, gathering each flower I encounter
on the paths all along I loaf.

Sometimes, I found them in such plenties,
they don’t fit in my hands as fingers
or like sweat flowing under my arms.
It is so when I bump into a cherry tree
which has had an early blossom.
I just can’t refrain from scaling
its harsh trunk, full of bumps
as any road anywhere I've roamed.
And, taking hold of one branch with the legs,
I straighten up and it is as though I began to ride,
one grip pulling the silky mane,
the other palm sheltering my sight
from the early promise of light.

It’s good to see things from a height
– my eyes glide over the electric poles,
the split between the buildings and the commuters' traffic
as a fleet of pigeons. But even more enjoyable
is to sense my weight warping downwards,
my body slowly dismounting
until we land on earth just safe and sound.
For the trees are even more beautiful
when you see them from the ground.

So I resume my journey, now assembling
the fruits that seduce me
from the fences on a lane.

Sometimes the harvest is so handsome,
I cannot store it only in the eyes,
and have to swallow a heavy share.
It is so in the blackberry season,
when, after a rich feast, I opt for a rest,
burying my belly beneath the terrain,
as loaded as a bulgy basket.

It is delicious to realise that something has returned
the element’s stubbornness and the summer’s stolen fire
in the species of such sweet juice.
Even more so is to feel all along my flesh
trickling down the lymph perfume,
filling me up till I’m like a plump berry
fallen off the branch just because so ripe,
only anticipating the time when shall arrive
the oncoming pomegranate era.

And so I go on crossing the mornings,
now amassing the shadows
the leaves drip on the autumn-fields.

Sometimes they are so numerous that a mattress of leaves
muffles the voice of my footprints
– the trees meditate sleepwalkingly,
better not to disturb their well-earned sleep.
Then I lie myself down for a nap
as a leaf over older leaf layers.
But after a brief relief, my fool-bells wake me up,
rung by all the things I met in my travelings,
which still surround and hug me as the moss
that affectionately envolves the tree that matures,
and warn me that I will never be material
for becoming anything without a company.

It mortifies me to know there are so many
who mock of my shadows cropping.
As though it made no difference if the leaves flew away,
since they are so many of them and would lose hold anyway.
They still can’t see the sodden simile.
For we are ourselves like those leaves
that clutch at the trunk tenaciously,
although we already know all attachment and pain
are just vain, later or sooner or in-between,
the seasons’ spin will swirl us in its wind,
and all we will manage to carry around
is the very dust which clung onto the skin
we now dress out.

And then I follow on the same story
always and always gathering
new mornings.

SELF-PORTRAIT BY HALF-LIGHT

the evening dims on me,
and stones
bend the way

everything that exists
lie only
outside of us

I am a road
someone else roams
to no purpose

and all else lies inside us,
we only
no longer

FOR ELIZA

ô toi que j’eusse aimeé, ô toi qui le savais!
(Baudelaire)


I know when you will on walk past me:
it’s sometime right after I’m warned
by the birds’ chatter, or briefly before
all sunbeams gather in a single dusty whisp,
then the glare is so strident that I simply
can’t go on sleeping.

I stand up.
My hands clean up
my ungainly rags.
You’d say I try to look my lousy best
and run to the square
where Eliza is about to pass.

I kind of love you, Eliza, though you don’t
know of me, and though I don’t
know who you are or how many.
There are so many voices and faces
wrangling and tangling in you,
that it is impossible to wield unity in it.

All I know of is that you come by rigorously
at eight and forty seven, and your name
I sort of overheard from the cafeteria waitress.
I reach you while you parade with your twisted leg,
my own copycats, raising those squinting eyes
in your medusa head, which can drive one mad.

And the buildings crane forward their petrified necks,
and windows jostle and take turns to watch you stride,
while you smoothly glide even more high-heeled
than the statue dressed in moss and patina,
which from its heights
examines the passer-by's.

I learned you work as an assistant
at the pawnshop, and since then
I’ve been living on the shadows you drop.
I can distinguish in the pitch of your breath
if you are upbeat or if the day
has burned earlier into ashes.

I can predict your humours because they flow
all along all what surrounds us, thus, if you smile,
the morning also leaps aflame, but if you whine,
the taps hush just not to compete with your crying,
and the colours all of a sudden go all shy and bleached
as though hidden behind a thick drizzly mist.

I follow you up every and each morning
for seventy-odd steps, no matter if you stumble on a pebble
or stop up in a fit of coughing. And I go on in pursuit
of your scent of ironed linen, whereas in your forehead
a crease goes on increasing,
splitting you in two:

the one who you were once,
and the one you can hardly notice.
But I adore you even so, single or multiple,
in your transit
or project
of an unknown earthly object.

But you never perceive me, Elisa,
and don’t have a clue as to what you lose
or whether there is nothing to lose...
Save that one day when you perceived on your way
my feet stamping your shade.
Then, as you turned your face

(having thought of running away,
but refraining,
having considered uttering a word,
were it not for the timid temper),
Eliza listlessly
smiled at me.

SLEEPWALKING

sleep
sometimes grips me
at the least suited hours

I was standing, and self-closing lids
seduced me all of a sudden
into a numb slumber

night has hidden itself on the false underside of dreams
on which memories get fixed
(my repressed thinkings taking a glimpse)

I wage a race with my shadow
and lose it, my body gradually detaches
in a narrow escape line goes out of sight

I fling my eyes without a wink
the sun the sky the sea
it’s me it’s me it’s me

as my image in a glass
I can only talk
about myselves

and all communication is impossible
the world outside us
well things are just not there

then I try my hard luck
and second-guess a password
beyond the doors of self-deception

it goes amiss, no panic,
there ought to be just plenty of
new false starts from which

to blunder around, never bother,
I have long been daydreaming about
some early dreamwalking

TODAY I DON'T LIE THAT WELL

today I don’t lie that well...

when the guard on the rounds asked if
I go on sleeping on the bench in front
of the florists’ stand, then, without the wit
to make up an alibi, I confessed that I
don’t, instead became lately rather fond
of the shadow from the man in bronze,
exactly on the spot in which, in half-sleep,
a couple of hours later on, the same idiot
scolds me off

today I don’t lie that well...

THE BEGGAR JESUS

Since they'd offered me something to drink,
I settled down on the kitchen porch,
between the cardboard boxes and the boys’ brawling,
as he stretched in the hand a sweaty glass of water.

Then I saw (if one can see among believers)
that my hands were bare and I had myself
nothing with which to pay them back,
except, maybe, with a sun (like this)

sparkling behind clouds.

A THEORY OF IDENTITY

Je est un autre
(Rimbaud)

1.

for what use language puts us into use?
what see things that see their selves through my eyes?
most mornings, when I gaze in the glass
it is a fortune I can notice my own features

in the mirror my face faces me as a sphinx,
and since I can’t escape my own maze,
its mouth full of void
swallows up my voice

I presume we must all be but rivers of Is and yous,
whirlpools that revolve around no nucleus,
shadows that can’t be fed and feed the hunger,
friends that won’t be met and can only wonder




2.

my name is throng and I talk in all the tongues,
I walk in each and every feet and squeeze
in my thousand hands the hands of all that greet me
by my own name, for my name is every man’s,
and I see even through the eyes of those
who go past pretending not to see us both

I never follow without a company,
and when I say what I fail to get over,
my friend stands for me,
and when I ache my aches and pains
my brother offers to my proud or shame
a sheltering shoulder.

Then I feel like melting our communicant souls together,
but soon realise I cannot help carrying on by my own,
and each day I use I feel smaller than one day ago,
for I can’t attain what dwells out of the grips
of a greedy but limited memory, and so am unable to reach
for whatever lies beyond the brinks of one single body

And thus each person amounts to
no more than one closed book


3.

on occasions I feel utterly bewildered at
the unfailing richness of this universe,
wishing I could only deserve
all of the gold squandered at dawn and
all of the copper to be robbed from dusk

I almost forget that my eyes never guard much of them,
that I've already seen so many, but even if I strained my best,
I couldn't possibly shake them with my hands from their rest
and might as well remain trapped inside my own inside,
like a reflex stuck in the looking-glass

for I am no matter what I am told
my own bored prisoner of a body
which controls me like an automaton.
one day, if Death comes,
it won’t ignore what it came for:

Death shall extinguish
just my flesh - and, in the end of the day,
who knows if I can only be found
there
where I will never be met

A VISIT TO THE CHURCH

But superstition, like belief, must die.
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
(Philip Larkin)


There must be no sadder creatures in all innumerable creation
than those church figures of saints.
The niche they dwell is also a sort of cell,
and if they could I suppose they would fly back home,
bound for the high sky in the dome,
for which their eyes long without ever reaching.
They ignore that, much beyond it,
another Sky, sometimes all blue too,
nestles birds whose singing clings less faded and manageable
than the one from those hand-painted on the frescos.

Six on the hour, the believers jostle
in search of God before the altar.
I find it weird that they call this place the house of God.
As if He wouldn’t feel more comfortable in distinct whereabouts:
sleeping on a doorstep with other street boys
or playing dice behind closed doors.
It’s no bad thing that they look for Him where they please,
it’s only as though they had taken the wrong car
and rode much beyond the stopping point
at which they shouldn’t have gotten off from the start.

There must be no sadder creature in all creation
than this church God.
He owes forgiveness to everybody,
but will never feel the glory
to deserve someone’s apology.
He has no history,
nor can he yearn for perfection,
because He has already got it.
He can’t feel love as an unremitting passion,
beyond good and evil.

There is death in the world and God lands on the Earth
in the hope of gathering one pure soul.
Poor devil! Goodness has nothing to do with
our willingness to be virtuous.
I don’t know a sole creature,
in full possession of his faculties,
who doesn’t consider himself a man of principle.
Goodness outruns our perceptive senses.
We are like those wooden saints,
which ignore the boundaries of their own transcendence.

THE PLUNDER STOLEN FROM TIME

Vejo o outono caindo.
(Paulo Mendes Campos)

I was tired and sleeping on my lazy bed,
imagining that all the work was finished.
As I woke up in the morning I found
my garden swarming with flowers....
(Rabinadrath Tagore, apud Ivo Storniolo)



when a sly spring
sneaking from a window slit
come to load me with unbidden flowers,
and I, taking pains to carry them,
mistaking my new burden
for the lot of former nuisances,

stop and spy inside of me
only to notice that melancholy,
who had been my prisoner,
my captive broke off the
intricate maze of my ways
and flew away for never to be traced

then I will dare be proud of having loved this world
which never gave me anything I could show around,
I will feel happy for having squandered my days
celebrating it with the ragged lyre of my words,
and my heart will roll as the drum-works
of my triumph naked of prizes

I will finally be ripe
for picking up the fruits that grew
from the blossom of a bleak season,
those whose seeds I was told
wouldn’t unfold: that is the plunder I stole,
my crop out of time

but I will not keep anything for me,
I, who did not earn or deserve them,
but shall give them all to the ones
who wasted those of their own,
and by so doing, had them returned
to the hunger of the earth

THE CALLING

O taumelbunte Welt,
Wie machst du satt,
Wie machst du satt und müd,
Wie machst du drunken!
(Hermann Hesse)


The others headed for the market
or enjoyed themselves
with the taste of public debating.
I didn’t, for my sole pleasure
was to hang around these solitary paths,
mixing the dark pebbles to the rattling
of my old rags, listening to the leaves
whispering the will-o’-the-wisp
of my useless music.

At times I boast about having flirted
more than anybody else the flowers in this garden.
Nobody could have picked up as alert
the scent of these fruits.
No other lips drank with sharpest thirst
the chatter of those birds.
None was able to follow as closely the day
as a child with whom you go hand in hand
and try hard not to lose of sight.

Now that the afternoon declines and colours
slowly retire, now that exhaustion,
more than the darkness, numbs my pace,
I can hear from the distance the call from home.
I am a loner, but there is no fear, and I would refrain only
if I had not finished my workings.
However, laden with all I found on my journey,
I take my leave, and the garden still blossoms.
Night has fallen, but where I go the day also follows.

THE NAME OF THE GAME

God, I know I am your favorite toy.
The one you hide from yourself,
so that, if by play or by chance you find it again,
you can bathe it all
with the gold of your smile.
But, if one day I grow tired

of praying to ears that appear to be
indifferent to getting this twisted world fixed,
and I start ignoring you like a broken doll
which cannot either speak or listen,
I guess you will take me out with your beaming fingers
from the shadow where I quietly lingered.

And then the oldest brat
will whisper in my ears his secret:
he will prevent me from telling his parents but
the whole world once belonged to him
and yet he has changed it for the treat
of one single poem.

PREGNANT

Sunday we sit
side by side
by Sunday’s heat

she fumbles and combs
through a purse from which surged
a change maybe a cigarette stump

says in frustration any
plastic flower has got
more life than ours

as if life were a burden
that one carries
in a bag in a pocket

and I am an empty urn but
we are glad to inform
pregnant

AT SUNSET N. 1

Observed from this height,
the city and its thick web of lonelinesses
seems so fragile that a sole sleight
of hand could cause it some damage.
Therefore, I guard it as a vigilant watchdog,
only fully aware
that If I dared look any other way
in a single instant the whole day
would vanish into thin air.

I believe there are more things to a sunset
than just the wincing breeze sweeping from all corners,
or the procession of walks of life that leave their precedence
to others of less coy countenance.
It is the horizon itself, nearing from the distance,
which slowly takes on and contagions.
And all beings gain those dim outlines
of an aging word, worn out in the brims,
painfully resisting from getting entwined.

The same way I waver in swerving the sight from the city lights,
it seems the day has trouble leaving behind those who will stay,
as it gradually gives away, bound to be substituted.
And, while it crumbles into dust after bleeding in the dusk,
and the world as I know turns into a ghost before my eyes,
I finally realize, without epiphany and without a fright,
that this twilight takes its leave only on my inside,
or else we both have
never existed.

BEGGING BOWL

Ich schreie um eine Kleinigkeit,
Die Dichter schreien um mehr.
(Rilke)


I learned to walk awry, squeezed between shades,
just to avoid being trampled by their pace,
and do all of my talking without a voice,
begging only among the narrow choice
of what you deny or doesn’t really matter.
Therefore, I beg for the love from the dogs,
and encore from those birds that chatter.
I beg scorn from my flocks of mockers,
and huge silences from a range of mountains.
The space I ask for pace,
and beg breath of the air.
I plead with sleep to set me in rest and then release,
and with rain to quench my thirst (first things first, please).
The heat I expect to come unbearably near,
and death as possibly unfamiliar, quivering with fear.
Of those who don’t hold it, I only ask for faith,
and of will, well, what it may.
With the shadows I may have shed, I beg pardon,
and from light that extra bit to read between the lines.
In the beginning, I hope for itchy feet,
and, in the end, wings would be fit for a king.
Of answers, I beg to differ and riot,
and beg questions to beg so they never go quiet.
When time passes by, I shout, hey guy, slow down!,
but of life all I wish is that we both keep on swirling around.
By the moon, I long for its loony moods,
and, by sun, noon as soon as it's always produced.
Who might so prefer can toss some dough,
for there is always empty room in my begging bowl.
But in the event I fall by accident short of failures,
then I will beg my tongue not to falter and insist
on longing even for things that won't exist:
like coins on my squalid saucer
or discretion from a protesting militant rainbow.
I'll order all Caesars to deliver what belongs to earth's creatures,
and fend myself all fences from off the firmament.
I will have decided by decree that stepmother impossibility
ought no longer to intrude on the likings of me and you.
Fits or overbrims the top of my hat, I shall beg for the very blue
in the sky, and have my bath with it next Saturday,
till I go so light, you won't believe your own eyes
when you see me flying. But never mind.
Thus, as the stock markets thud
together with the shades on the dying day,
it is me again you will see
escaping with the angels from the church frieze,
shitting on the tourists.
Then I will only beg you to mind
you don’t slide.

IN JAIL

Would you deign to follow me? No.
You know who damned you are talking to?
Sorry, but I can be of no help, Sir.
Probably we were not introduced before.
But if I meet someone who could tell me your name,
Next time, I will be most pleased to inform.

Arrested for contempt.
I ask to take the dog along.
By himself, he pisses profusely on the poles,
craps on the sign that reads dogs forbidden.
He exhibited little concern.
But I earned an extra slap for the dirty wording.

Damp dump! The hair grows all curled.
The boys ask me to unfurl my revelations.
Well let’s get something straight here:
I’m no prophet, but a poet, and the things I won’t disclose
are so important I totally forgot them.
Never bother, from now on you sleep on the stone.

O naughty tongue! You speak for me,
while I take the blows!
But if it were you to be beaten up
every time I shut me up,
I guess you’d make up stoic reasons
for your duty to lick them boots.

PARRHESÍA

I am insane and dare say what gets in my head.
None takes notice if I blame or disparage.
I am insane and got no reason to dissent.
I might as well stifle on the stuff I stutter.
Nobody cares whether I hush or utter my mutter.

Each man has a glass ceiling, but since I’m nuts I’m forgiven
without right to trial and appealing. From child we learn
everyone should better turn to mad-songs a deaf ear.
They say people can’t hear what displeases them.
Then crazy is someone who can only listen.

INVITATION TO AN ISLAND

The aftermath of the morning’s surge
froths up in the furling waters.
The sea deluges from the sky
and pours down on the Earth
which looks even bluer
from a close-up stance.

A friend drops in and shakes me up,
suggesting we should show up on the shore.
But I, well I still sluggishly flow
in a slow sleep undertow,
I say yes maybe I go, but not in these small hours,
don’t wait on me, I only follow along later on.

Midday, the blaring webs
of sunbeams pack in tangles
and on an infinite arch the day dangles.
As a ceaseless loaf, the horizon brews,
and the glass dome over a deep blue
looks like a capsized cup.

My folks dust off the shadows from their clothes,
as though only dressed with their very nakedness,
they poll in unison for a beach stroll.
I say I might as well go,
but right now I feel like some more quiet,
I just want to leave as soon as the sun retreats.

The sea roars, calling for its prey.
The colours multiply in spirit shades
that barely fit the palette plate.
The leaves grumble about the sultry haze,
and the heat, like an impertinent tramp,
frightens the birds from off the branches.

The girls from the neighbourhood
turn up to inquire if this afternoon
I won’t let them down, but will provide
them company, a bit more and the sun will hide.
Not just yet, I still prefer to wrap in my laze,
but in the event it gets soothed,

who knows if I end this evening
also wrapped up in sand.
After the day has made its time,
the wind brings a far-off voice,
but there is nobody nearby:
it is the sun sighing for me to see it bleeding,

pretending it is going to die,
but I shouldn’t take it so seriously.
And there I up and go on my own,
traveling the darkened paths
that all have stamped and abandoned.
I can finally part because now I know

my eyes will not get distracted
by the crowds of colours
the day has enacted onto the world.
And so I will able to be all ears to
the waves’ choir, and as fluid
as the leaves and the lumping shadows,

light of all the things
I didn’t want and don’t lug along with me,
I will be the very first to arrive near there,
where the sea takes stock and fares
towards the beach that lies on
the other side of horizon.

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE TO THE LOST SOULS

I also went after the goal of life
where it was nowhere in sight
and got myself lost.
And yet, by gaining the same track
which had zoomed me and dropped me back
to another point in the space-time fabric,
I finally realised that all my non-finding
in a really strange coincidence,
now pointed down to the path
I had long been tracing by blind chance.

I met another insane who would swear he was Napoleon.
He believed that his ultimate design in life
was to cross the imaginary ocean stretches
which would retrieve him from his inner island.
But the poor devil would always go missing
before the little pissing pond bridge.
If he passed away without much trespassing,
he did not fail to assign a meaning,
lame as it was, to his dim existence,
and so clear his appearance.

As in his case, meanings to our living do not locate outside of us.
Rich or barren, they are stories we keep telling
to our private believing.
Their significance does not exactly belong
to the realm of meanings,
but to the will to have a meaning.
As in all narration, they convey more of artifact
than just feigned fact, and so their tallest truth
falls by definition short
of our craziest ambitions.

A SONG BY CHANCE

I always laughed my head at chance’s tricks.
She is an old lady whose fickle mood finally made her lose it.
But who am I to say anything? I sure am less sane,
since I lack the rhyme or reason to crack
and even so am nuts in the looks and the guts.

How could I be of harm? I bet my shadow
that no offspring will spring from my siren-singing,
laden with laurel or unsung by the fools’ choral.
So I leave these leftovers on behalf of the resilencing workings
of undercover backcopies’ bookworms.

What have I perfected by trampling on earth
so that I could expect eternity in return?
I happily fed on my joys and aches, and still
got nothing to make up for it. Except the shallow
lightness of my shadow. Then, take it, as you will.

WHAT I WOULD SAY TO MY SON, IF I HAD ONE

as the sibyl
the things I know
I don’t know precisely
how to get them in the outside

reckless syllables
jump
without belt or a net
from one abyss to the next

the bigger knowledge
I lost by wailing born,
from now on your own lessons
you unlearn on your own resources


***

find a chick
and close that book


***.

please let the chick breathe
and go read

FAREWELL

It was a bug that climbed
its branches onto my air pipes
and slowly drained my gasp
or freed it at last.

Now I lie on a street bench.
No bird, no cloud, nobody
will take heed of it.
They will sure suppose
that I only proceed with my conspicuous sleeping,
until the first stone flung from
one of the boy’s catapult toys
will miss its aim at snatching me from my dreaming.

Goodbye spinning planet I leave behind,
full of all the beautiful things we found out
or have them invented for our amusement.
Goodbye unfathomable oceans, blue mountains,
seaquakes, cheesecakes and misguiding myriads of stars,
rapped and ragged rhymes, telegraph and dotted lines.
Public and private doves, the skeleton keys to open
enclosed skies. Goodbye to you, streets, my second natures.
All of you were bits of me and still surround me on the brink now,
though ground seems to have grown so thin, it barely fits my feet...
I have never really gone anywhere without a good company.

My steps just echoed other steps
that stomped along my way,
not only from those who haven’t been born yet,
but also from those who have switched off already.
Thus, from the lamp in my hand trickled
not only the glare which tied my feet to the ground,
but shades were also shed all around,
and this way between the visible and the invisible
my path could tread its hard-won balance.

That is why I know there are no margins in the world.
No walls put up between a side in and an inside-out.
No boundaries of time opposing today and yesterday.
And margins really make no difference
unless we hang on one of them.

I join the ones who long crossed,
in the country where we are all lost,
naked and nameless,
as we used to be before finding
our way out of silence.

But among all the creatures in the world the man alone
sorts out the stirring from the still in an ambiguous whole,
as solely we men walk our deaths all about
without ever knowing what we gain or miss,
we should have noticed better that whatever
we gain or miss can always only go amiss.

Goodbye big archaic capitalistic city,
pimp and rachitic,
my still sneering
fool-bells salute you!

O sweet morning without me!

As I bid farewell, I hope as I had always promised
to have collected all the memories I have ever aroused,
leaving everything just the same way I encountered
on being allowed. Thus, be sure I will disturb you no longer,
abandoning here only this worn backpack
with my non-belongings.

(Please observe that I am an old man by now
and old men do not usually earn acclaim
for the force of their recollection.
In case I forgot any, blame it on chance,
and keep clear my own remembrance).

Now let my words go to the dogs.

LETTER OF FRANCHISE

I open a door that gives way to
a closed room

I open the room that sets me apart
from the door which opens
to another room

I open and come face to face with
the thickness of space
the limitless breath of blue

I open a closed
door as secret and
teasing as a new friend

I open a door
past or behind it
how many worlds

A CHESS MATCH

the pawns are like forwards,
attacking as if broad majority
in apprehensive order,
well, they are truly more of
cannon-fodder

the horses swing
via swastika springs
as politically impolite
old Arian knights

the castles, so isolated and stupid,
must lodge poets and/or politicians
banished on duty

the bishops move
in devious ways

the queen
under those veils
cheekily trails
all about the scene

and the king
is a poor thing,
squeezing in the corners
with his wanna-be mourners,
severely bound to have
his head severed

RAINBOW

jets red orange
in the open launched
yellow air green
indigo purple falling
on the mid-afternoon
washing blue
the blue sky clean

DIE GOLDENEN PFERDCHEN

Andar é verbo
na freqüentação de um presente
em que só temos o que perdemos
(Alberto Pucheu)

Zwei Pferdchen aus falschem Gold auf dem Tisch
fressen die Stille ihrer Hufeisen und lassen sich
zaumlos wandern, nicht nur im Raum,
der sie passend bewahrt und festlegt,
sondern auch in den Augen und Ohren
wo solche altmodischen Schmucke
eine Nostalgie des Bleibens erweckt.
Ihnen gehört also diese Todesart: ein rampanter Stillstand.
Kein Traum jedoch, denn so ein halbes Verlassen ähnelt lieber
den stehenden Tiefen der schuldigen Schlaflosigkeit
als dem obenliegenden Schatz eines reinen Gewissens.
Und das unvermeidliche Aufstehen zersetzt nur
was gut eine Ruhe sein könnte.

Wenn auch träumend, trotten sie weiter,
obwohl wie bei irgendeiner Figur,
ihre Gebärden scheinen sich versteinert zu haben,
sodass keine Dämmerung und keine Geburt
in denen abzulesen sind. Ihre Schritte
nur vermischen und verwischen sich,
als die Perlen einer Halskette, sobald der Faden zerrissen ist.
Und ein neues Zug wird nie die bleichen Gesichter kratzen.
Meine Stimme gibt diese stummen Tierchen wieder
und meine unmögliche Geschichte widerhallt sich in ihrer.
Meine Bilder lassen sich auch nirgendwo irren:
ich bin der Spiegel ihres Goldes und schaue uns nur durch,
unbewegt aber unberuhigt.

EL SENTIDO DE LA PIERDA

Un rojo desde el suelo se levantaba hasta tocar el cielo.
El día, mal dormido, ya se despertaba.
Pero las casas, parecían pintarse de nuevo las caras
de humo y bermejo, para vigilar desde las pestañas bajadas
la llegada de un nuevo visitante al borde del barrio viejo.
Zapatos huecos besaban la tierra como si bailaran
al sonido de las guarañas que desbortaban
sobre las puertas, unas más viejas, otras novatas.
Un rojo sólo rojo como si lloviera sangre sobre el mundo entero
nos ahogando desde la vigilia hasta las pesadillas.

“¿Quién era el tipo que Le acompañaba?”.
Ella tenía algunas décadas, la espalda curvada,
sobre la cabeza un blanco recalcado que quisiera
explotar de su cabellera. Dijo algunas cifras espantadas –
no bien comprendidas para un intruso en portugués,
fechas, direcciones, números de pasaporte,
de quien se contestaba, nada guardaba,
sino en la boca una copa de besos
echados a perder, más nada.

Pedro Juan Caballero: de éste me acuerdo,
un yermo lleno de brasiguayos y de chicas guapas,
demasiado guapas para nosotras de más edad.
Mi habitación la compartía con vasos sin ganas,
que tendían en los dedos sus cigarrillos muertos,
había un devano heredado, ¿o tendría sido hurtado?
sobre el que también volcada y fumando me creía
colmar de falsa sofisticación el sin-hacer del día a día.

Porque estuve menos hermosa, menos lista al amor,
yo misma, la callejera, conduje desde la china
Ciudad del Este, hacia Curitiba, la polaca.
Tal vez porque el mar a todas nos invocaba serena.
Y todas las ciudades por donde pasamos
nos ofrecieron sus virtudes venales:
en las tiendas, bares y hospitales,
y todos los sitios donde estuvimos,
con tal de que pagáramos el precio establecido,
fuimos muy bien acogidos.

Poco a poco - más gente, coches, ruido,
más mundo bajo las estradas.
Desde Paraguay las ciudades se concentran,
luces se encienden, las cosas pesan.
Tal vez porque Paraguay es el margen,
y Pedro Juan Caballero,
el margen del margen.

Peregrinamos torpes como quien buscara
sentido o respuestas, pero sólo escuchara
el silencio de la taza de piedra calcárea.
Ella me miró con sus ningunos ojos como si me preguntara
y me calló con sus millones de voces como si me contestara.
Yo no sabía qué decirle ni más me detuve,
saber es peligroso y no suele premiar sus cómplices.

Al fin del periplo, delante a nuestra mirada agotada
por el lucero de los anuncios y el humo de las fábricas
se alzó fálica la Ciudad Abstracta.
Ciudad sin horizontes, toda muros,
ajena a la Tierra como una palabra.
Ciudad hecha de aire y de nada.

Yo no intenté leerla, pero se diría
una epístola de amor remitida
a hombres qué, por hábito de no verla,
nomás la hubieran devuelta,
pero cuya indiferencia la convirtiera
en mítica condenación de todo lo existente
culpable o inocente.

La claridad difusa en la tarde magenta
se nos echó sobre la cara
como agua olvidadiza que nos lavara
de certezas más antiguas.
Se consubstanció en nube espesa
que todo empañaba,
trayendo una promesa de opacidad
a manos cansadas de objetos distintos.
Después se disipó en su ubicuidad de pulpo y polvo.
Y los pasos quedaron pastosos, y las calles
daban a esconder sus destinos
como a secretos mal guardados,
atravesados constantemente
por una apurada gente.

Pero donde, quizás por olvido, se continua
manejando las cosas de siempre:
se hacen compras,
se produce gente, se llenan almacenes,
se miente al mundo,
se calcula lo que se pierde, y se conciben
pretextos seguros.

“¿Usted no acompañó los policías mientras sacaban
el narcótico desde el coche que conducía?”
Ella sabía y no sabía qué decir.
Todo le parecía un desierto de sentidos:
no lo sinsentido de la contestación,
pero la pregunta que se contesta,
no la memoria de lo ocurrido,
pero lo vivo detrás de la memoria.

Pero se me olvidan los caminos de volver.
Me olvida la muerte, mi condena es vivir
entre calles y rostros apagados, que disfrazan
un sin-rostro por detrás de los rostros.
Y nada quedan de historias nombres humores
que antes rellenaban cuerpos enteros.

¿Por que me persiguen sombras de las sombras,
como a una criatura rechazada,
si no traigo culpa, no traigo contado
para que les dé o que me roben?
¿Qué ojos de almas amontonadas
me ven desde las desechos?
Hay curiosidad en la manera como acechan,
ternura en el cuidado con que intentan
ajustarse al nuestro desprecio.

Más nada no se me acuerda, les digo.
Pierdo todo lo que estuvo conmigo.
Los días me dejaran como los novios,
citas, fechas, autobuses que pasaron antes de lo previsto.
Pierdo todo lo que he tenido,
incluso el olvido.

Y si hubiera al menos un momento,
que puntuara la lógica de los eventos…
Momento hecho de sueño y materia,
antes de la preclusión y del remordimiento,
momento para el recuerdo o el invento
de una música de esferas.

Pero no hay más tiempo.

Pero no hay más tiempo.

UNENDING SONG N. 1

water of the world
sizzling river bound for
smooth silence

music overheard overhead
despite our forgetfulness
and the forces of habit

never calls for a halt
aims at the blank of no ear
gushing from all our sushes and voices

fountain even barren
in the void
springing

UNENDING SONG N. 2

this throat
of cracked cane
won't convey afloat again
a flute's solo mute

this tongue
of inner drill, instead of speaking
only slowly keeps on pricking
a escape-proof pit

this mouth
of forgetful wings,
plunges in the dungeons of the wind
an echo which I can't retrieve

this speech
brewed out in bellows of clay
falls short of breathing
before having its say

NOTES BY A SHUT-UP

through my pores I outpour
a cement of my own,
outside a wall wells up
made of sound silence,
whilst inside the universe
fades into forgetfulness

to watch death from an outer stance
or time in an out-of-time glance
equates with sensing the aching body
apart from feeling the pain
which makes it the body I am

drop by drop the thread wears off
towards the exit from the inner water-spring
whose drinking brings
an increasing deadening
of our most treasured recalls,
and oblivion is someone talking
behind a double-glazed window

I don’t lose myself where I can’t be found,
I simply stay where I run out,
I’m unable not to want and won’t,
nails and hair may pull on and on,
as to the remains, they also still thrive
despite of me, what is left to be said:
all matter aspires simply to rest

ANTI-BIOGRAPHY

I can’t remember what I have just said
no problem
in all I speak nothing can grasp me

I don’t think there is someone else aside from me
nor do I feel inside me
someone of a kind who feels and thinks

I don’t halt where I am stopped
everything passes by I don’t keep in sight
please don’t count on my waiting

I go round around
what can’t be found
I can’t just stay or try my way

a shadow’s dream
or the dream’s shadow
other’s shadow dreams of me

I walk along the borders of bewilderment
I don’t remember where I mislaid my name
and unlearned each and every fear

ON TIME AND SPACE

1.

Funny the way time
seems to have a good time
going stuck.
Most often
when you were having most fun
doing nothing.

There should be no time spun
when there is not a thing to be done.
And stacks of spared time
in case you need them
precisely when
you were only looking.





2.

So gross the way space
seems to inflate
whenever you have a haste.
Or the style how distances
tend to stretch apart
if you are tired or just too far.

I don't go fussy about the impracticality
of building a time machine
(we travel in time just all the time:
see, these lines scratched on my skin
tell you exactly where I have been).
What we really need are manners to speeding.

ZDEUS, GIUPPITER IN GRECO

Anche se io fosse mai stato
Un fannullone ancora più sfacciato,
Non mi sarebbe mai capitato
Di aver concepito un simile reato:
Zdeus, Giuppiter in greco,
Era il nome del mostro di cui parlo,
E l’aveva da poco messo a punto
Un conosciuto a metà pazzo a metà lucido,
Che, al tornare a casa, visitavo
In un pomeriggio grigio nel grigio
Permanente di San Paolo.
Mi spiego - si trattava di un programma da computer
destinato a essere di utillizzo per chiunque
capitasse di volere comporre versi.
E attesto che, con un premere di bottone,
Ne sprizzava, ed in mucchi in effetti,
Come l’orgoglioso inventore
Ha insistito in quella stessa occasione
Con vera virtuose in fare dimostrazione:
Dammi un titolo, lui mi aveva detto,
E in due o tre minuti, oppure meno,
L’artefice poetaccio ne avrà tutto un testo
Con un unico tasto di ditto prodotto.
Di pure, pensi adesso ad un argomento!
Ed io in sfida ho sfortunatamente proposto:
Come ti pare ZDEUS, GIUPPITER IN GRECO?.
Ed ecco quassù verbatim riprodotti
I versi che ho visto con i propri occhi,
Ve lo giuro, in uno solo sputo,
Venire dal congegno stupido composti.

NON-SMOKING CAR

Hello, Stranger.
Do you perhaps smoke?
No? Oh, I was only hoping
you were also in for some danger.
Sure that I saw the sing and know
this is a non-smoking car,
then tobacco and similar
are totally disallowed.
But it is allowed to talk,
or don’t you talk to strangers?
I was only helplessly hoping
you were also in for dangers.

You hear some music.
Would it sound abusive
if I just sat to your drone?
Cause your headphones,
you know they hum,
one can’t help hearing them,
the same with the noise from the engine
or the announcer's voice saying some name.
Or if you prefer I sit here and also yodel,
would that for god’s sake get you upset?
I myself wouldn’t resent
if you patted on my elbow

to the beat of that song.
Let´s try this way: you twitter to me that track,
but in case you feel ashamed to do so,
you could just click your tongue
to the rhythm from the phones.
Or bring me from this train
and the broad choice of its bans
to hear you sing in some other place,
is it where you go?
I would not strongly oppose
to you inviting me home
by mistake or in the know.

Is this your life?
Is this our stopping-point
for this night?
Would you just bother
to introduce us both?
Did you study for your work
or is it just a sort of last resort,
a setback scheme?
Oh don’t tell me nothing is as simple as it seems.
Yes it is.
It’s just a question of picking the right question,
and being bold to hear whatever appears.

If I have a life of my own?
Oh, my! What you think me?
An automaton? A latex
full-size doll, fit for next sex?
Of course I am and am
what I may, you fill in the rest of the line.
What else, um, let me think how I put this,
I kind like kind guys,
this includes you, for sure,
and girls, I tried, you can bet,
but it is the differences that -offense,
make it different. Or less straining.

Did you per chance offer me something
to sip, but I went deaf and missed it?
Yes, I feel dry, parched and thirsty.
Most talking on my charge, no surprise.
Yes, I am over twenty, perhaps…
I’m not precisely
a lady, so you feel free to ask.
And some of my clothes too,
they’re in age for driving to school.
I’m broke, so the looks tries to look casual
or successfully pretend to. Cheers!
Is that your room?

You hadn’t anticipated me you were an expert.
Now I grew abashed. Your hands, Stranger,
they really got the knack.
I just made you a compliment,
you are supposed to grant
me your heartfelt thanks.
Oh, my pleasure! And I mean it verbatim.
You’re so shy, how can it be?
One can’t be like that these days,
not even if you were fifteen,
we are trained to put up an impregnable face,
right in the heyday of the age of vulnerability.

So you’re the satellite geek.
I were good with numbers and physics
right down in school, but it was never
definitely a calling. I’ve always known
I had to act, no choice was left me.
We lie all the time, shouldn’t be as difficult as it takes,
but when you know the art and have to lie your part,
then you come to understand it.
Truth becomes also commitment.
And to lie truthfully. Does that make sense?
Drop at the theater, I can fix you with a ticket,
once you swear you’re no amnesiac.

Is this the time to leave?
For I never know, is there a time to go?
There must probably be one,
even when you don’t feel like doing so.
I got this feeling that I’ll see you
or you see me, or most promisingly,
we will see us both.
And now let me kiss your cheek,
and wave goodbye.
Strangers were not supposed to meet.
Which way to the stairs?
Should I flip a switch?

IN ITINERE

I walk between what were and will be my steps
I can't see who went past or who is ahead
the way is about all there is to see

but I couldn't say I am all the way
maybe just like anyone else just halfway through
and if I go my best yes maybe

and who knows how many steps in-between
still and already, and who knows how many of us passed
between who we are and no longer

maybe they all went lost or may be just all around us
and then how many of them between us and
who knows for sure and who only wonders

but down my one or other way
anyway I can go
I go the way

DICTIONARY

leafing through you
I grow startled and speechless
at the unending richness of language

as startled and speechless as
those small mute things which
don’t have a name

IN THE DARK WOOD OF INTENTIONS

Io credo ch’ei credette ch’i credesse
che... (Dante)


I know you think that I only pretend not to imagine
that nobody has a clue that you only presume you don't know
that I believe that you suppose that I don’t ignore exactly
what I don’t think you even suspected I let you realise so.

What they can’t understand is that I
definitely don’t know precisely what
you can tell I only play not to know.
But well, who knows?

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

how much how much would be such as
to be too much too much or maybe just as
much to count as much for them to bust us?
that’s where we’ve always been
- somewhere in between –
an inn in a dream, say, like sour cream
not as hot as hell, not as freakish as heaven
but something in between –
sorbet when you craved ice cream
how dare you flee from a night in gaol?
how dare you feed from a nightingale?
for I could be the king of juice
or the lord of ringtones in Beetlegeuse
and yet reckon myself as the drama-queen
in a dancing club packed with aces
were it not for this poker grin
laughing upside-down my face
I beg you to bring the thing we need
we’d fly so high our minds would go past
our eyes would soar past us so fast
till we disappear
I beg you to give us all the power we greed asap,
I beg you to give’em all the powder to the soviets
maybe it’s high time we go
we’d be better off if we CEO
maybe it’s high time we blow
we’d be already off if UFO
if we tiptoe and I lose the rope
will you still be in the near?
if we topple and I loosen the hope
is it our voiceovers we will overhear?
at last, as the threads snap
a yell, a patrol bell, an alarm spell
our fears freezing
what the hell are we doing here?
the wellspring of a siren sing
a telltaling thing, unreal thing
what the hell we hear?

our own screams
repealing
at Bell’s theorem

REASON AND FAITH

Believers reproach me for not going along with faith.
Seculars harass me with good reasons not to believe.
But I don’t think reason and faith are as estranged as night and day.

I don’t place my faith in reason,
nor do I search for reason in faith,
quite on the opposite.

I don’t believe in those who feign to believe only out of worship -
whoever says to act in faith
has only hopefully in good faith decided to decide any later.

I don’t see either how brainstrain could make a good replacement
[ for creed
When the hour comes, it is not reason but decision
that leads your head towards the net.

This is, I hope, my belief:
that I will be in good reason
once I have a reason to believe it.

INSTRUCTION MANUAL

A) If your friends start to get you bored,
don’t leave them speaking to themselves.
Serve more wine, so that each of your silences
shut up one another. Don’t call for solitude:
loneliness is like the moon,
it’s got no image and no soul of its own.
If it drops a milky fog, it’s neither semen nor bloom,
it’s the sun’s stolen warmth that’s become
almost a gloom.


B) If you lose your way, don’t try to bring it back.
Absence doesn’t render the distances or moves them.
On your returning, the street won’t bump
into a younger you.
The stars that guide our fates
will keep on flickering indifferently
on the bottom of a mossy pool.


C) If you feel homesick, don’t think of your hearth.
You won't find in it more fire than you had already robbed.
It will rest forever on the same spot,
eternal, unattainable.
And the memories that it still brews
you brought them all
long ago with you.


D) If you feel like, don’t ask.
Try to pick out another desire
to add to the last or get it suppressed.
No point in hiding from them,
as the shadow that flees the light
unaware it stems from its fright.
The same way water and fire
have legs, and the earth’s got scents,
a soul is full-blooded desire.


E) If your yearnings are just not enough,
then provide that they are spared.
More awful than getting lost by them
is thinking you could get loose one day.
To lose desire equals as a symptom
of ageing with shedding hair.
Then let them just wear out on their own,
unveiling how strongly they preserve us
or swerve us.


F) If they contend, don’t solve it right away.
Why should you worry beforehand?
Care only by the time to select them.
Though life is made up of choices,
each choice chooses its hour,
what may delay, but never comes in too late.


G) If you see a door, don’t open it.
The greeting word and the smiling fit
often leave in the mouth a vacant split.
They simply traverse it
as a doorstep bound to an outdoor street.
Every door slit hints to another side,
but gets us as always knitted
to the same old street.


H) If light sheds all about, now don’t disclose your eyes.
Don’t expect that things will move just to get you saluted.
(Except in case the drinking binge
has rimmed you far off the edge-
and, this being the situation, first place,
sit on the sill and keep there still,
or even before that, if it can’t be waited).


I) If you encounter a letter, don’t read it.
They never lie the lies we needed to listen.
We are all full of shortages,
we just don’t always know what their source is.
Feelings never land on speech,
if per chance they feed on it,
it ends up scarcely sufficient
to put them appeased.


J) If you don’t manage to rest, relax.
Drink from the news or harvest from work,
there is value (though not too often)
even to those things we do the most.


K) If the hour moves forward,
grieve for the expiring moment
as briefly as you should. If we reckon time,
it is because we have of it a reckoned input.
But the day that left us behind
has not truly gone missing.
If it did get lost, then it was certainly because
we weren’t keeping a close eye on it.


L) Don’t waste
the remains of the day
on planning
the day.


M) Instead, if sleep yawns,
don’t postpone it,
though it seems no point.


N) After all of this,
don’t only dream,
go be it.

ARTIFACTS

the fluorescent light
rubs against the Formica

standing stiff on a table
a saltshaker often lingers
with greasy fingers

many a shoe
has trampled on this rug
and so it wriggles
fade and parched
as a vase begging for water

when the doors shut up their trap
the couch will stretch out with deaf years
in front of a TV set,
chatterbox intent on
speaking by itself

in the meantime chairs
sit in clusters, staring at each other,
then turn their backs in a fit of temper,
concentrating on their own emptiness

the hunger provides
that the plates keep busy,
knives and forks scramble
whilst napkins take pains
to assemble the remains

a cigarette calls for a coffee that calls for a cigarette,
matches forget
their winglets in the air

in the looking glass the bathroom
skims its face,
puts itself together,
taps relieve their needs,
and vents scatter around the tracks
of those back in business

in the light which escapes
through a window pane
flocks of bills fly away
in their usual patterns:
money
money
money

A TOUCH OF NOTHING

anyone who strains to see nothing
and succeeds, has not seen any of it,
for nothingness isn’t anything
that in principle could be felt or unfelt,
and, if it did, I bet it would immediately
strike whoever did blind and deaf and dumb
for as long as he would sense it,
so that, in the end,
he would sense just nothing at all

and yet, how strange, it does affect us somehow,
and no sooner you think of it, you feel its grip
then and there, a kind of chilling drift of air,
climbing through your legs and ruffling
the leftovers of your hair,
but air, though thin (like your legs),
is also something as any other thing,
bound to be perceived or not,
but even when not, it is not simply nothing

stranger a thing than nothing is sheer beingness,
so trivial and inaccessible at once you can hardly define it,
though you hold it all the time,
of course nothing is simpler than simple being,
and say nothing about all those still stranger things
that lie between being and being nothing,
as you and me and all the things
that simply are without meaning
to be or not to be no thing

ON TORTURE

I don’t know
what you want me to say,
but I will say it
just in case

SAY A BLESSING

god bless my next-door neighboring artistes
who fixed me up with tickets to the Warhol's exhibit
god bless the rainy day
that swept visitors and traffic fines away
god bless private initiatives (entrepreneurship?)
and all I.R.S. incentives (chiefly for bluechips)
god bless those who cultivate the self-embellishing virtues
but above all of us the sky blue and the rules
god bless the outspreading smoking prohibition
and my new nicochewinggum addiction
god bless brothers guts, grits and wits
though a dose more spirits can also fit
god bless the repentant streetcar driver
who accidentally ran over Gaudí
god bless my dysfunctional parents
but also the Sacred Family
god bless (oh, don’t forget) brain damages
and, thanks to them, the neurosciences' advances
god bless those who pray and get
and those who needed but forgot to ask
god bless our world ruled by blind Chance
who debunked old venal Providence
god bless as well all that is deceased
and made room for what now exists
god bless God Himself
and all this mess He has amassed
and god bless who the hell blesses me
but my clammy handkerchief equally

A LITTLE SUN

When I was let in the hospital,
they informed me of a floor,
three flights of stairs,
two turnings left
and a room number.

In the dark loneliness
that commands a corridor
demanded by steps of stumbling strangers,
the ill, who are not allowed to depart,
find out that they are bound

to a body,
their deaths’ cage,
and watch their visitors from the inside,
with their heedless
eyes of glass.

I trod trudgingly through narrow passageways,
which clumped my steps with other walks of people
who pensively plod, and, as I opened the aimed door,
the wake of darkness from the confined shadows
still slurred my wobbling sight.

It was then that through the window
outpoured the morning,
nimble of light,
and, after recovering from the sun’s stroke,
I saw you, girded in gold, blithely asleep.

I gasped – happiness you only possess
in your unknowing,
and time is the hatchet man of the inert,
as we force our ways down a route
cramped and confused like a locked room.

And the little of sun we ever know only visits us
in discreet doses over a whole lifetime,
though it seems so dense
that we sense it as if it had always seized us
simply seamlessly.

ORPHEUS

e non canto e non celebro che i topi
(Sergei Yessenin, trad. Angelo Branduardi)


the muddy day, brewing the weary clay,
clammed all eyelids with remorse
so none sees me anymore

if I shout, if I walk about in the nude,
if I wreak havoc on the civil truce,
it is useless, I’m my one and only witness

names, I ain’t got any (though none asks for it,
what feels the same) and to a fellow nobody
I cede my seat, unless he prefers my own feet

collecting beads from my dried song-spring
to scatter it into the wind is of little aid,
nobody listens or understands such things

following among the blind and the shadows
should secretly fill me up with all those things
I am as always the single one aware of

but such magnificent beauty misspent
in signs we cannot decipher
shut up for meaning just too much -

as the sea silences on the beach
or as bodies quiet down again
after love’s seeped through them

and all the offspring that springs from my tongue
grows up stronger,
steals my gasp and speech,

till they banquet
profusely
on my own leftovers

from now on I will sing only for the joy of rats and frogs,
I leave my words to those who won’t be saved from fire,
and reek and sweat like desire

I pick up my rests,
I’m both the dance of my shreds
and the dead dancer driven over the edge

the music which stood by me,
I looked back but could find but thin air,
yet still miss

another’s voice, another’s flair,
now can you believe this?
I have lately taken to talking to God

LIBRARY

these lined books
are the poor owners
of a sole anecdote
they can’t stop performing

they have hundreds of wings
but even if you tease them
they wouldn’t know how to get started
they are the desperate escape-artists
of a solo number
they can’t afford forgetting

the shelf doesn’t care
to have the eyes in the shadow
and not to manage to read their tales
it knows by hearsay
they don’t have that much to teach
but it likes to display them
as teeth in an arms race

it kind swallows them
every now and then
when a search
budges and rummages
to no result

trapped on their insides
the readers spell
random passwords
out of their shell

and silence is a voice in the head
hovering overhead
like an unremitting stream
leaking from the ceiling
to nobody else's annoyance

PONDERINGS ON A STATUE

deprived of an arm
the statue had its gesture
captured

without the legend in bronze
it had its speech
stolen

if they only could see us, its eyes would keep their quiet,
phantom in reverse that we all can see
but can’t see us in its turn

a second garment of moss
shelters it from the stone cold
which afflicts still nature

its heavy feet trot around time
time our eyes simply can't distinguish
for we can’t meet it from the outside

the statue must also suppose
nothing besides itself exists
and I’m afraid it has a point

one day they had organised
a loud inaugurating opening
but today you won't even hear about it

it seems bound to be less a memento
of the fortune of recollection than another
unwilling tribute to devouring oblivion

and when the night covers the world
and the dreams reweave the threads of the lived
the statue hides from our lights

and goes back to sleeping

SUMMERTIME

with its myriads needles the sun’s tattooed
summer onto city’s skin

clothes sweat on the line
and rotten before growing ripe

the afternoon drops shadows, by nightfall
there are going to be storms

in single rows, motors and mountains
march towards the ocean shine

above a stall of sounds, the day
zooms away

whereas on the stuck trains below hang
the drowned of the damp

and summer is one more passenger,
fat and cumbersome

that pushes and shoves to resurface,
dripping, stinking, gasping for air.

DRUNKARD'S WALK INTO THE BEDROOM

A day, a month, a year are not that far...
If you take one step each day you will near.
Oceans, mainlands ajar are not so far.
Above you, myriad stars disappear
per second (yet sofar so safely far)

throughout this misanthropic multiverse,
and who would give a holy shit? We did
manage to keep all this long way perverse-
-ly sober in a fool´s bliss (God forbid,
if only a She or a He there is),

blissfully innocent thanks to self-poisoning.
Though, as far as we see, all there’s to see
lies beyond understandability.
No use for proud or pseudoanonyms:
will will only get you so far as apathy.

A bed, though wet, could make for it. Just mind
your one big step into unhumankind.
None’s to blame, all things have been so planned by fe-
-rocity − ruler of each single life
or piece of unlife that ever existed.

One step each day, first drop, a pond, then sea,
never being indulged into self-treachery.
Step by step, a habit, as a law, locks us.
... Yes, maybe too far, as far as I see,
for lab rats (like us) skilled in Skinner boxes.

GREENER PASTURES

I also grew up here, among these fogs,
where colors, as rules, dodge and wear away,
although redder than red is still the rage,
and the souls glow much bluer than the blue,
and so the rain falls greyer than the grey.

My father left us, my mother and me,
in one of those veiled chaste mornings,
dreaming of pastures greener than this green.
It was long ago, he must, I suppose
have already built a life of his own,

thinking he’d better not try to come over
and see us back in these valleys, so he
would not disturb the lives we’ve so far lived
in a place we still happen to call home.
True as it is, he couldn’t be more wrong.

Now it is my time to leave for a journey
in which I will fear nor hunger nor pain,
but dread all those blank nights, wishing that sleep
would come instead of a silence repeating
these barren solitudes inside my head.

And I will fear no strangers up my way,
but dread the fierce impression that no matter
how far you get, the journey will outlast you,
that you have come such a long way and yet
no sign of the greener pastures, and yet

no sign of greener pastures.


(october 2006, in a dream)

THE QUADRIPLEGIC

1.

As he traversed the threshold he perceived,
resisting being blinded by fear’s cold grip,
he was not the same person who had leaved,
after having slept and waken up dreamingly.

Sure that the bus from downtown had dropped him
at the same stop he’d been caught that same morning,
and, walking down the street, he was let in
a house whose dog barked in familiar tones.

He hushed to himself, because he could not
talk of all the things that no longer talked:
for there were no more flower, jug or couch

anywhere around. Though there was plain light,
the single thing that he still could make out
was the broad soaring emptiness of daylight.


2.

he moves about himself and sees
the other surface of things,
the one mirrors do not disclose,
the one we can’t see with eyes wide open

he goes past them listening to their chatter,
he still doesn’t know he is there no longer,
or that he simply is where they are already,
where they were quietly waiting on his comeback

he tries and realises he cannot recall his name,
smiling, he thinks he probably will not miss it,
maybe the name gave away but he persisted
picking his path into a nameless domain

there he watches again his joys and pains
but either with equal serenity, or then with eyes
stirred with both oblivion and understanding:
so walks the man safe from life again

vainly the roads vary from one to the other,
vainly the roads vary from one to the next day,
so walks the man in his death,
not one dead man in particular

but the one who finally made it to be no one,
and understands he is the same as each and every man,
because every dead man is the same man,
and each way he treads, his one single way


3.

as Janus’ neighbouring heads
do not communicate,
the future flows from the past
but won’t tell where it aims

we are like a third head,
blinded with both hope and regret,
but which a day shall watch over time
with that other form of non-seeing

we call forgiveness

SO WALKS THE MAN IN HIS DEATH

1.

As he traversed the threshold he perceived,
resisting being blinded by fear’s cold grip,
he was not the same person who had leaved,
after having slept and waken up dreamingly.

Sure that the bus from downtown had dropped him
at the same stop he’d been caught that same morning,
and, walking down the street, he was let in
a house whose dog barked in familiar tones.

He hushed to himself, because he could not
talk of all the things that no longer talked:
for there were no more flower, jug or couch

anywhere around. Though there was plain light,
the single thing that he still could make out
was the broad soaring emptiness of daylight.


2.

he moves about himself and sees
the other surface of things,
the one mirrors do not disclose,
the one we can’t see with eyes wide open

he goes past them listening to their chatter,
he still doesn’t know he is there no longer,
or that he simply is where they are already,
where they were quietly waiting on his comeback

he tries and realises he cannot recall his name,
smiling, he thinks he probably will not miss it,
maybe the name gave away but he persisted
picking his path into a nameless domain

there he watches again his joys and pains
but either with equal serenity, or then with eyes
stirred with both oblivion and understanding:
so walks the man safe from life again

vainly the roads vary from one to the other,
vainly the roads vary from one to the next day,
so walks the man in his death,
not one dead man in particular

but the one who finally made it to be no one,
and understands he is the same as each and every man,
because every dead man is the same man,
and each way he treads, his one single way


3.

as Janus’ neighbouring heads
do not communicate,
the future flows from the past
but won’t tell where it aims

we are like a third head,
blinded with both hope and regret,
but which a day shall watch over time
with that other form of non-seeing

we call forgiveness

DE LA LOI DE L'ASCENSEUR OU COMMENT LES DERNIERS SERONT LES PREMIERS OU VICE-VERSA PAS NECESSAIREMENT DANS CET ORDRE

Le roi pécheur et le roi pêcheur ont parié sur une course.
Le premier est arrivé gagnant par la tricherie de changer les noms des routes.
Le dernier a consenti qu’il faut savoir perdre et l’autre lui a remporté la coupe.
Celle que personne a vue sans disputes et d’où Jésus aurait ôté nos dernières gouttes.

DE LA LOI DE L’ASCENSEUR OU COMMENT LES DERNIERS SERONT LES PREMIERS OU VICE-VERSA, PAS NECESSAIREMENT DANS CET ORDRE

THE PROMISE

I promise you though
that from the day on
I will be gone
no one will get to hear from
me for ever after.

As you have already heard me swear
after the day I will have I left her
no trace of my ways
may be found in spare
when or wherever.

From the distances I will have got
I pledge not to come back again,
be it in your remembrance,
be it in my own presence, beyond
any of my canniest second thoughts.

By then possibly no one could
have ever been warned for good
about what I did or should
before the day and after
I had gone and walked on her.

The day I will go, I must be gone
as I had never gone before,
for that day on I will have sworn
for once and all that I shall no more
pack and swear and beg her.

HOW THE STORY GOES

I lift them all up
with my bare hands,
just to take a closer look,
these late ones on a yellowing picture.

They grin a bit falsely, as they should,
but I get this uncanny impression
they also gaze at me
curiously,
as if they were watching a film or a TV show,
just wondering
what would happen next,
how the story would go.

I know how it ends, for sure.
I will be over their mantelpieces
just doing the same,
watching a nephew’s, a niece’s
act from a photo frame.

BRAND NEW IDEAS FOR A BACK ISSUE

To my lung's disgrace I never took on smoking for my own lungs' sake.
To the astonishment of my hands, I never committed a single lame poem without putting them to blame.
Yes, I've always drunk just over-much but won't raise a toast once to the dizziness of my stomach.
I never offered my busy seat to the comfort of my tired hips, nor settled my lap to nestle upon my lap.
Nope, never really got used to having my sleep induced with the help of self-hypnotherapy.
Nor did I bother to take my hat off when saw me coming, but always came past me with hat on and hair needing combing.
I never pulled my bootlaces to raise myself above the ground, instead highly recommend lifts, angels, opiates, lunar parks.
It takes the whole of your soul to get anything as you got started.
So keep the way, and keep quiet.

BRAND NEW IDEAS FOR A BACK ISSUE

To my lung's disgrace I never took on smoking for my own lungs' sake.
To the astonishment of my hands, I never committed a single lame poem without putting them to blame.
Yes, I've always drunk just over-much but won't raise a toast once to the dizziness of my stomach.
I never offered my busy seat to the comfort of my tired hips, nor settled my lap to nestle upon my lap.
Nope, never really got used to having my sleep induced with the help of self-hypnotherapy.
Nor did I bother to take my hat off when saw me coming, but always came past me with hat on and hair needing combing.
I never pulled my bootlaces to raise myself above the ground, instead highly recommend lifts, angels, opiates, lunar parks.
It takes the whole of your soul to get anything as you got started.
So keep the way, and keep quiet.

THERE MUST BE A MOMENT

there must be a moment
before the age of restlessness
when you can still say I don’t want to

time to choose
to keep one’s own master
or to decide not to decide thereafter

the last turning area
to pick up the footprints and endure
before the mark when the road crumbles apart

a single moment: that of the suicide’s signature,
the concentration of the trapeze artist,
the dance in front of a penalty shot

every predicament can take on a remedy
before inertia ties from the outside
and the impossible gesture freezes in

a moment to collect the look and recall of you
forgetful already of that elusive moment
which has long gone ahead of you

as if it was only meant to remind
those who are strangely still alive
that love is eagerness not to be

GAME THEORY

1.

heads I win
tails you lose


2.

P.S.: Well, I know this is not
exactly good verse.
I think I could suppress more than a half.
I could in fact suppress
all of it, but, you see
the perfect poem is
the blank minimalist page,
so my point reads:
you can’t intend to contest
without keeping mistake
somewhere in.