what I’ve been taught by the wind of my youth,
lying tenderly on the soft ground,
holding meaningful words for each day of the sun,
for each night of the moon.

all words flew through my body,
as if I were the vortex,
for each the meaning of each word.

and then the red wave of the sea came to my feet,
fate’s black leathered glove covering my eyes,
saying:
sleep in this forever muteness,
be enfolded in soft silken fabrics,
dive in my love.

all the bright flags of my youth,
all the mysterious gazes of my youth,
all the dangerous flights of my youth,
all the rains.

My cold Earth, in fear
—
mother of all gods.

And we pray, we beg,
and then we fall

onto the emaciated asphalt.

No work of flouting hands,

Nothing to save, or to be saved

In these circumstances.

My dreams, fragile

As an early March bloom,

Frozen in the escalation of the doomed return

Of far worse times.

And then we reverse the cloak,

in surreptitious fashion eat the leftover air.

There is no more home
—
only the eternal return:

chimney’s smoke,

family’s lovely oak.

Hot-blooded, not frantic
And when you say,
“You are intense, all gas, no brakes,”
I feel safe to be hot-blooded.
For the second moon is discoverable,
And the path to the other side of the Styx is discernible.
If the natural speed of my being made me a traveler,
I would hope that one day
I would look—with sizzling, doomed eyes—at the face of my homeland,
Crying in gaiety for falling asleep
On the lap of the world: “settlement.”

Never was I happy being everywhere,
Nor was I while being somewhere.
All paradoxical,
Ironical—
Story.

you’ve been in this room before.
i know you sat and counted hours
of eternal, overwhelming regret,
and walls by which you were covered—
in fear
of leaving this room,
whose windowpane doesn’t function;
even the window itself
was pierced by a bullet—
wretched, as your spirit
for willingly withholding the power
to open the door,
which you don’t even need to devour
with the glance of perpetual pain,
and the heart you cannot admire.

My thoughts of gentle kindness,
birds in metamorphosis—
fly always above the sea,
as if the sea were the mind.
An individual storage of memories and missions,
to which
mortal challenges
do comply.

Going further,
they would become canaries
in the coal mines.
For each artistic sensuality,
danger is the loftier flight.
Thought, without aiming heavens
rests on the earthly side—
ambitious yet bashful,
pious to its soul’s plan.

Nights are liminal;
mirrors of the darkest quality,
walking through which brings
—landscapes subliminal.

Not on your warm palm lies,
neither widens your irises.
Silently, it crawls in the feverish, mysterious mind,
in which memories start to expire,
leaving you at the mute dusk,
making your body transparent,
immobile.

In a room lit by a sizzling bulb,
guarded by innumerable church icons,
no one is there in you
to believe
in higher powers.

The reality, finite,
is and is not in the sizzling bulb.
That, too,
will be finite,
terribly soon.

The sun prolonged the overture,

two red carnations facing his face,

his body lying on white satin.
Waxy and cold,

My face tilts toward the corpse,
no longer here, yet definitely present.

What is this feeling?

And is there a being,

or is this the swan song for his soul?

If there ever was a soul,

If there ever was an everlasting spirit,

that drives this car,
then crashes into stone,

stays alive,
but not its vehicle—

by far, it’s him alone

who continues the journey

by prudent legwork.
And as he lies there straight,

i see his pale face,

knowing that this is the farewell,

yet he’s not there to listen to goodbye—

Or is he?

Accept the two carnations, Dad,

and rest on that white satin.