Please do not answer me.
Time challenges us
ever since we have been speaking
this language we don't understand.
We, unborn,
like water evaporating
to prove our invisible lives,
flow away through our names
out of our range, beyond the edge,
a mistake that will never
turn into a resolution.
You'll find out
I never told you my real name,
and you'll pull the trigger.
Because I know that
all the shadows that
rise from you
will some day fade away.
Let us not speak of this anymore,
it will never come back.
All the time this echo
has trailed back to us,
has been expecting us to listen,
like two deaf eternities.
2. Under the Overcast Skies of Resurrection
2.1.
The cataclysm has smashed
our little huts of time,
and we stand on the thresholds,
hesitating to decipher
the wind that blows its way back
through this endless tinkling
and swinging of cobwebs.
2.2.
The giants of oblivion
carry us inside
an endless memory.
2.3.
We are lulled in the twin ceremony.
2.4.
Let us wait
where there is no beyond.
2.5.
Time blows through us
from birth to death
feeding darkness with light.
2.6.
We try to explain
until we realize
that nobody knows
if we really happened.
2.7.
And the sense of these things
we discuss today changes everyday;
but their sense never exceeds ours.
2.8.
Somnambulism and plot reversals:
we are crawling with darkness
along the trail of the quicksands.
2.9.
We drew our maps
for fear of getting lost.
Still we disappear,
and still we can't stop drawing
in finer and finer detail.
2.10.
Most of us have already died.
2.11.
We lose meaning
as we try to understand.
We burn till we die,
like all stars.
As we learn,
we know less and less.
2.12.
We trace back our fears to the sunset.
Then a desert flower whispers
the unspeakable.
And we understand
that the two halves of the sky
revolve around us;
that we are time.
2.13.
Only the clocks are alive.
The loneliness of their ticks
grows in each of us,
silent marchers of the caravan,
edge of the tide.
2.14.
Do we think
or are we thought ?
2.15.
We were told
to inhabit the ruins
and we took shelter
under these eyelids.
We touched this face
like a braille book
and soon discovered
the writing in the light.
3. Ghosts Oratorio
The loop broadens,
pain melts like snow.
We follow her eyes'
drifting towards death,
lingering in the lust of coma,
dangling a few minutes
until they relax
in a deepened
timeless
color.
A sand of fever stings my eyes,
the slaughter is over,
twisted bodies lie on the steps,
the light finally returns to them,
returns alone.
The sound of death
still tinkles in the mind.
The thunder flashes
over the next victim.
Her amused smile can be mistaken
for what we already know:
the restless amnesia of the ocean
trapped in the mounting noise
of the overcrowded beach.
Time will resume.
4. Because I Know the Answer
4.1.
"I am both the listener,
who listens to the loud cry
of the universe,
and the speaker,
who turns the tail
and undoes the past".
4.2.
"I nod to the question,
whispered behind the curtain
in a foreign language.
Each word echoes in the mist
and drops, each word
a stain on my life."
4.3.
"My two minds collapse
one against the other".
4.4.
"I threw the rod
with no bait
other than myself".
4.5.
"Nausea of memory receding
to the past.
Its dark lattice of monsters
is dripping a star
right into my eye."
4.6.
"I am a maze
of nameless decaying corpses."
4.7.
"Adrift in the cracks of memory,
I observe the endless fall
of the feather of an extinct bird,
spinning a route of faint screams."
4.8.
"The wind of silence
has wiped away the tears
from my cheeks
like dead leaves.
And I am what remains."
4.9.
"Drunk in the hurricane,
I breath the cobweb,
my life's dream,
each thread a reflex
bleeding soft from the mirror,
a silence forever sinking
into depths of eternity,
a shadow forever climbing
foams of woollen light".
4.10.
"The footsteps are not behind me,
but ahead. I am not eluding,
but following".
4.11.
"Through the shining gates of chaos
I enter the vast cemetery of the cosmos.
Walking in a spiral from the edge to the center,
I stop on each grave of a god, on each heaven."
4.12.
"The beam is traveling
towards the target,
leaving behind all that matters.
It is filling a void
I was supposed to inhabit."
4.13.
"I am sitting on the border
preparing to leap - all my life
I've been creeping nearer and nearer"
4.14.
If you never dream
you'll never die.
4.15.
"Unfastened, I fall back
into the waiting arms
of my empty grave."
4.16.
You feel like a clown
and they let you die.
4.17.
"I dive blind and breathless
down in the sand of twilight
struggling to recollect
the last words I had uttered
in the strum of the universe."
4.18.
"I question myself
while staring down,
aware of vertigo,
aware of catastrophe,
in the shadow of time:
Am I God ?"
4.19.
"And I almost turn in silence
to listen to myself speaking
as if these meaningless words
were being uttered by others".
5. Blood Tide
5.1.
We, twice mirror images, bridges
between our tiny islands of silence.
5.2.
The long serpent of our words rattles to the moon
but life is faster than any thought.
5.3.
We are two ?
Who are you ?
You who steal half of
my everything ?
are you afraid
of my living;
or of my dying ?
5.4.
Words come less and less often to the lips.
5.5.
His hands lazily waving goodbye
in a moon current of vertigos
to the crowd of phantasms
hanging from the skies
over the stinking ruins of the sun.
5.6.
Your eternity, twenty billion years ago,
was what it is now. Mine is what yours
never was.
5.7.
His smile rushing feverishly away
into waves of sunshine haze,
like an extinguished lantern
in the nightless mirror maze
of the underwater ghost city,
wavering from dream to dream
beyond the edge of the maelstrom.
6. The Blossoming of the Leeches
6.1.
Like footprints of time
the roman numerals on the wall sun-dial.
And the arrow melts in the target.
6.2.
A sapphire tattoo is cruising the eclipse.
6.3.
Swallows carve their spirals
over the glittering of the dome,
as they turn towards the open sea
in a tide of crystals and fire.
6.4.
Dancing octopuses on a midnight zeppelin bleed to death.
6.5.
Dreams happen on the carved surface
of an ancient coin.
6.6.
The kite plunges down into the rainbow.
6.7.
The iceberg recedes
like a scar
that is healing.
6.8.
Maimed gladiators in the empty arena.
6.9.
In spite of this,
life, the jail with no walls, but a noise
in the silence of eternity,
still radiates.
7. Avalanche
I sink into the stale dephts
of the inscrutable world of a snail;
into the innumerable flea-images
that stain the mirror blood-purple;
into the multitude of dark syllables
flowered thousands of years ago
and still haunting like bats
the caverns of my mind;
into the burnt fall of this age,
more and more the beginning
of undeceived forgetfulness;
into the sparkling diaphanes of twilight;
into the watery whispers of sea-moons;
into waves of faint memories;
into my own shadow,
again and again into the tempest
of my minuscule selves;
into the luminous amphitheater of tidal skies
(rattling cadaverous smiles
scrawl fates with midnight squills);
into the opulence of sudden gusts
silently flitting from bell to bell;
into the gigantic whimpers
of chilled faggots in the boreal fire.
8. Astral Swoon
The subject of this poem
is itself.
Like the convulsed clutch
of a drowning man.
Darkness surrounds me.
I am a blind man
reading the Braille book
of the universe;
a clown, perhaps,
babbling his jokes
in a deserted circus;
a grinning skeleton clung
to the helm of a ghost vessel
adrift in the hurricane.
I perceive the transparence of the world
changing to the light in which I perceive it.
I perceive myself
at the end of the trail,
folded in fire,
my mind decomposed
into primitive thoughts,
my time receding
to infinite childhood.
I am silent again, dumb.
Where did the echoes
of all my words fall ?
I no longer exist.
Or, maybe, I didn't exist
in the first place,
and that's why this poem
was left unfinished.
9. Banquet
The ceiling mirror is dripping guests on the table
that was set for dinner several centuries ago.
Dimmer and dimmer they fade out
before reaching the memory of this nightmare.
Reality
slowly coalesces
in a bright unfocused
image of this glass of wine,
each little bubble
of the foreground, boundless,
blossoming in a universe of its own.
And still
shapes and shades
of living bodies
surround my glass,
swim through my
demented drowsiness
like revolving gears
and pulsing lights
of a disintegration gadget.
10. Night Dust
Sculptures of foam
stand still over the cliffs,
like obscene graffiti littered
over the plaster of this vast
expanding shell of moonlight.
Tomorrow
wet wreckage will surface
as the sand dunes
will be swept by the wind.
11. Missa Laica
There is no future in the spider's web.
But that is where the ants plant their kiss,
in the glue, in the grip, of time.
Ideas intersect meaning
and bear worlds; in which
men are born; men bear
new ideas, and the cycle
resumes, endlessly weaving
multitudes of worlds together
in the depths of the mind.
12. Dialogue of the Mirror Images
(There are too many stories to tell,
too many in the joined palms
that talk for us night and day).
Every footstep can be taken
at any point in any direction
without changing the destination
of our trip. A vision
of shrills at night
piercing the depths of rooms
that no guest will ever leave,
while we draw from the thorny
strips of angst pinned
to the wall a smell of obscene
love, and our beings
shiver, twist into the very
fibre of being, of what
we will shortly be reduced
to be, such nonsense, that I
cannot quite catch the meaning,
the purpose, only the words
you uttered, here and there,
in the dark, the sinister jargon
that rattles itself off
every so often, rehearsing
the longest speech of life.
(The wreckage has hit our shadows:
debris, weeds, pebbles, bright
and wet, gritty with sand to the hand
that swims through the heap,
tiny whirls of dead things
that crawl along the hurricane's
shell, jewels of time
that grow and spin forever
behind the curtain of twilight).
The enigma of our bodies in the mir-
ror.
Talking backwards into the past.
A fistful of light rowing
shorewards in the dusk.
All leaves must fall.
Each firefly a wake
that will not dissolve.
We are unable to stop
the dripping of the moon.
We are unable to bury the dead.
Still clinging to the irrefutable
ideogram of the foetus, we are
autumn leaves that last.
I stand in front of your eyes,
which have stormed so wildly,
days and nights for many a century,
still trying to decipher
the word that you uttered.
I have been watching our shadows
hanging from the sky,
fingerprints of our lives
next to nothingness,
sleepwalkers that balance themselves
on the night's thin blood line.
You bend your head over me
like a budding flower
before the bee. Honey drops
from the corners of my eyes.
The wavering filigree of your smile disappears
in the motionless emptiness of the bubble
whose final transparence surrounds us.
The wind bent the tall stalks
and carved paths among them.
We walk along those furrows,
sown with hues of rainbows.
I am falling through a mirror
into someone else's life.
Realizing that, if there was
a moon, I missed it.
You exist, like nothing else
does. Am I writing this poem;
or merely copying it, like
a monk whose life's meaning
is but the series of signs
he carefully duplicates
over and over again?
Agony is the abracadabra
of a magic flute. The crack
will grow until it fills the world;
the jagged blade of the lightning,
the scar that will never heal,
flaming needle of the compass,
the thread of fear spun around
the orbits of us all.
The thrill of drifting
from bud to bud
through clouds of light
and showers of pearls
in a hiss of wind,
wrapped in colorful scents,
a fossil receding to its past,
unfocused lense of time.
A can rattles alone
in a moonlight fire,
the never ending echo
of a dance of dying stars.
Thinly dotted feathers falling
from the towers of silence,
buried in the future
of all things, of all people.
Sun rust whirling
in a lattice of dew.
Births and deaths
scattered all around our breathes.
You survived the wreckage,
not the salvage.
I shall draw dragons
on the canvas of your eyes.
13. Ghost Towns
13.1.
Specks of dust floating
in the dense mist of rays
that envelopes the ruined temple,
the gigantic fossil mouth
that was drained of words
but is now filled with thoughts,
thoughts that have been waiting for us
to lend them our minds:
whether lies or truths, they have been
wiping our eyes and pushing towards us
through the crowd of terrifying figures.
13.2.
Blind figures with no names have no memories
but the one collective memory which engulfes
every gesture and every word. Naked,
with glowing eyes, they spin along the bottom.
They are breathed by nostrils that, in time,
will swallow them all into the original pit.
14.
... they will trample me underfoot,
distortions in the mirror of time,
they who went at dawn with baskets
on their heads, carrying far away
into the river's womb the million
pieces of the golden sundial,
while the winking armors of the raiders
pierced through the thick vegetation
of the valley and sliced the tinfoil
globe of the universe
they walked and walked and walked
until the haze wrapped together
both the runners and the hunters
and still they walk, and walk, and walk,
the multitudes of fugitives, the armies
they will trample me underfoot,
distortions in the mirror of time,
they who went at dawn...
Horizons shrinking to a point.
The quest is over.
Chimes flooding the square, submerging
the flashing crisscross of lifted swords.
Wizards, jugglers and acrobats.
Then pounding music, and dances,
until limbs and minds collapse
to sleep, and the giant turquoise
is left alone again to guard the town.
Moonlight: the sand shines.
Desert wind.
The dust rises.
14. Finale
And I wonder if Piero,
the venereal undertaker
poking about for virgin corpses
in the quivering mist
of a profaned tomb,
if Piero,
the rattling bowels
of my shadow,
if Piero,
the dangling bat,
the bat upon the beam,
if Piero,
the noise behind this thought,
I wonder if Piero will ever die.