I keep on dying again.
Veins collapse, opening like the
Small fists of sleeping
Children.
Memory of old tombs,
Rotting flesh and worms do
Not convince me against
The challenge. The years
And cold defeat live deep in
Lines along my face.
They dull my eyes, yet
I keep on dying,
Because I love to live.

You pass through light searching for me.
From the way you don't see me
not even when I take the shape of a cry,
I understand that your supreme triumph will be death.
Despair is an empty space
in which no one meets no one.
Despair is an autumn in which
the highest peaks are strangling each other.
Where can you be?
It's as though my days have slipped away
in a shrill season
of no one,
and no one can recall
what light flashed across their faces.

Carmelia Leonte from *City of Dreams and Whispers

Too many days come seek their past within me
I reach out my hand towards your face and it draws back.
I reach out my hand towards your heart and it stops.
I mustn't speak.
Who knows what secret code
what signals meant for death
I might disclose.

And your face.
And the vision of this hand.
And the way you're removing yourself.
And the image -
vertical as a scream.

Carmelia Leonte from *City of Dreams and Whispers

We are watching the clouds
bandage an incarnadine sky,

we are practicing our best knots,
weaving an army of tourniquets,

we are slow-dancing
barefoot on the edge
of a razor.

We are watching
a demolition derby
in the driving rain,

the smell of motor oil
mixing with gasoline,

the hard melancholy
of dying machines.

We are waltzing from room to room,
smearing our names on the floor,

we are keeping time to slow music,
bleeding out behind closed doors.