ALARM CLOCK

what is hell other than repetition?
as a scenery, a room
plunged into its own depths:
a cat would stretch further
and display more darkness
behind the stingy eyes

trapped inside a single day,
I hear an alarm clock
that keeps on ticking,
no point in snoozing:
it would go off, if it could

and however
if there would never
be a morning after,
or if there never
could ever be
such a thing as ever

there would be elsewhere the haste in the cities
lifting the dust and the noise in the streets,
there would be at least a streak of light,
which would only slowly abandon my eyes,
as a nonchalant summer sunset,
or as only gradually vanishes
a word, a god, a habit

an incomplete body
would follow without the shadow
on the same ways I used
to trail us along

or else we may all be alive already
and only roam in the underworld
out of practice or for reminescence,
as a dog we had scared away
but sneaked back from the clearing of a dream
(though dreams usually don’t go around sniffing,
and the gate had been left properly locked)

but time, this strange variety of disregard
that scatters dirt among the corners,
deprives the books of their stiffness
and yellows the brown in the furniture,
erupts all of a sudden into the window and leaks
onto the sheet, and goes on to flooding
the sleeping room

soaked in sweat,
I hear the same old snore
from the alarm clock
and wake it up
instead