stay in bed,
the apocalypse
can't bother us here.

a fascist walks into a bar
that you're swinging into his face
like you're knocking it out of the park
with all of your might
because it is the only
appropriate course of action.

and so what have i to offer you beyond
a collection of cheap and naive sentiments
matted in the dust of ineloquence?
i miss you, is all, but not even you:
an image of you, but not even an image:

the ghost of a fantasy. yes, i am
haunted, haunted by your absence
your senseless existence your
orbit without mass or distance
and all the rest, in its restless fabrication.

all that remains are your artefacts
with i among them, not quite intact.

we are propelled into a world
from nothing,
a vast world, a glorious and terrible world,
a world full of mystery, tragedy and laughter,
dancing, responsibility, horror and struggle,
ending in sickness and death;
a world stretching far back before us,
bloated with debt and expectations,
devoid of our consent, deaf to our cries.
at first a light blinding—hiding shadows—,
the horizon so open and terrain so broad,
but with every step, a piece of the world crumbles away,
another path, a mountain, an ocean, a face crumbles away
into nothingness—
with every step, a space gained and a place lost forever,
guilt, questions, freedom, new fitting chains,
a narrowed horizon—
with every step,
a fate refined—
with every choice: destiny,
to which we remain blind.

how good it is, then, that we might find travelling companions
that make all this worth our time,
and tools like language, memory and connectivity
to re-make all this into our own time,
and together, step over the horizon of history.

stumbling through the endless
snaking valley of twisted letters,
lost, looking for you;
the shadows do not always inscribe fear—
what i fear is that you are
where i cannot go.

who could you be
if not metonymy
under another name?

opening up,
driving
them away.
opening up again,
the only way.

i am ashamed of my body!
how it must be ashamed of me,
whatever i am.

i must come to learn
what is essential, that is
to say to learn to
listen
much harder.

a leaf falls,
it all comes too soon—
be ready, prepare,
if you would have it.

i'm undone,
thank god and all the ******* angels
in heaven, and fallen ones too:
i'm undone
before your endless, ecstasy-emitting body.
these ruins of the future
are a paradise
in this riveting flux; consecrated and desecrated,
made seraphic and savage
in the undulating ebb and flow of our flesh.

the body i live with
does not appreciate
the thoughts that keep it restless
in the early hours,
the ones i won't part with.

the body i live with
is not comfortable with me,
expressed in a voice
without sound
that is an occasional harmony.

the candle
flickering
—everywhere, nothing at all.

the eternal truth
of your departing beauty
supervenes all that i am.
beyond the fierce horizon,
a path with you, or fatigue?

a madman shouting on a street corner:
"the apocalypse already happened!
it happened in your sleep!
and this is but a nightmarish dreamscape
on the brink of fiery daybreak!
the apocalypse already happened!"
i briefly ponder my life choices and move on.

the gentle swell
of your bountiful life
merging
with the pallid horizon
that touches a place where i
cannot accompany you.

the impoverished
night-time, flashing blue, black,
is full of sirens,
but there is no one
coming to save us.

i reach into the treasure box of language:
what was once shining and vital, far off,
now rots in my hand.

the moon has changed its face
but i cannot.
were i strong enough
to push back the sorrowful tide,
this love could reach you once more.

the path between us
is made of words
and with every step i take,
i step on something jagged,
and i have so far to go.
(i go on, there's nowhere else
worth going.)

i love the sound of my own shuddering, bellowed
voice
because i so seldom get to hear it.

the red of the tulip
contained in my gaze
—shouting

a toast,
a toast to every moment of clarity forgotten,
to every splendid line i put off writing down
until i could conjure it no longer,
to every sentence i should have spoken
and every silence i should have kept,
a toast to every deception i miscalculated,
to every promise broken, every bond neglected,
to every question i failed in formulating,
to every time when i should have wept
and every time when i should have refrained from weeping;
a toast, a toast to every embarrassment, every disgrace,
every regret,
to every time my hand should have been extended
and to every hand i stubbornly refused to accept,
and the rest, too, a toast to all the rest.

what else is there to do on nights like these
if not to get drunk
on memories,
the stronger the better? every spectacle
of microcosmic tragicomedy,
that makes up the vortex of my life,
is sublime before these disordered senses,
before it's revealed to be
pathetic and melancholy in the morning's lucid, lurid light.
a toast, then, that the night last the longest
and the next day pass by quickly enough.
a toast to every moment of clarity forgotten,
to every splendid line i put off writing down
until i could conjure it no longer,
to every sentence i should have spoken
and every silence i should have kept.

there's no satisfying you people.
****.

the sun
is always setting somewhere.
we stay put,
we're not going anywhere.
please let me keep saying it.

the time we spent, the smile
and the look
still haunting me.
accursed be the humid heat
that awoke me from the dream.

the tree rustling
the wind:
speaking and not.

i've lost what i didn't see coming
—i saw it go all too clearly.
i can only wait and hope to find
what i won't see coming again,
and again,
joy.

you wanted with such fury to be
to be kind
to be loving
to be generous
you wanted with such ardour to be
to be there
to be all to one
to be understanding and to be understood
you wanted with such frenzy to be
to be wild
to be tamed
to be seen and heard and touched

what happened?

you spent too long wanting
and never learnt how to get

but take heart, my joy,
there is time yet!

tiny raindrops fall,
dancing,
helpless in the wind.
i think of politics:
inevitable struggle.

today is a miraculous disaster, like the same before but repeated: something new and undialectical. now i hear footsteps in the corridor of the sanatorium skull sanctuary. thoughts of the proto-symbolic muse have crept in like winter mists over the empty fields as the sun sets again. turning over in bed. deferred, all around me, the dead ones, the days, the exiles. teach me to speak
a language to-come
for the waves of love have long been forbidden from this one. aftermath of machine makers: beautiful, too feeble a word. the notions of self and hatred have become too antiquated and too childish for self-hatred to be of effect. wastelands too have their day. the way is non-lineal, wrapped in complex points. seeking to saturate the atoms of a life: immanence. seeking to witness the vistas of a soul’s minimum of two multiplicities. it’s too easy to spend too long counting your obsessions. the sovereign says nothing again, it’s nothing new, it’s not nothing either; it’s not something to stay silent about. the day is gone; but stay a painting with me a while longer. the day is gone; how many of us are forgotten? i don’t remember
when i stopped counting.

to go somewhere, you must
leave something behind.

time again, as if for the first—        not yet
does the earth have a meaning or a sense
and they neglected to tell the children
the limits of the possible are not set.

beneath the crust of daily indignities
courses the plane of unceasing life;
eruptions across history, one strife
if unsurrendered: serendipities.

go my soul, "love what you will never believe twice"
in the end, all there is is the throw of the dice.

and i bet they spoke to you
of you as you refused to know
yourself
and before you knew
it, you were open, sunlight.

and i bet they looked at you and you
saw that they could see what you had been
keeping secret just enough to make
beautiful,
and you smiled and couldn't stop.

and we were looking out forever in
opposite directions but there
was nothing behind what we
could see when we turned around.

and what else could tenderness be if not
revealing what you've kept
hidden even
from yourself?

so afraid was i
                                    to put pen to paper

for fear nothing would come, nothing
                                                         ­      would reveal

                                                         ­                    and lo, behold—

                              what chance
                                            to have stumbled
                                    upon this place.


          and but what if all my love turned to dust?
                    it would matte the silence like an untouched skin

                                                           ­  electric

           it came unseen, anterior to knowledge

                                                      ­       exceeding it


desire was the flame, the heat, the function, the burning bright, the sun, the roar and the dance, the play of frivolous gods, the bite, the consuming, the unrest of molten core, spark, flicker

desire was the sea, the waves coming to claim what was only ever borrowed from them, the bounty and breast and beacon of life, that vast graveyard, the unending gift, now peace, now storm

and desire was void and lacked nothing and produced
the real


                                                          ­            and what, for all that,
                                                           ­                       remains?


a quiet collection of dimming experiences
the tender redolence of human encounters
a song and music in the heart, if you are capable of listening carefully
a whole body blessed with the texture of gratitude
laughter—its promise


                                                       ­               an eternal joy, given
                                                           ­           in the senses
                                                          ­            and senselessly          


go now among the strange things of this world
and may your existence be a dance across time


to have dared will always have been
the essential,


                                                    ­       come desert, or mutilation,
                                                                ­                         or even flight

                                                        i­f yet flight.


we do not yet tread among the ashes of the sun.
there is something vaguely familiar to hope in that
at the very least. on.

a voice is solitude,
impenetrable,
somewhere else, among
others.

the shadows slowly encroach down the hall;
so suddenly the day is gone,
wasted, men and women somewhere struggled through it,
others buckled under it, sunken mid flight crossing oceans
and man made borders fleeing wars and geographical destitution,
children starved through it, profits were made,
and the room is steeped in darkness.
through the window i see
the white orb moon, distant, glowing, painted
onto an ice blue sky, dashed with ghostly clouds:
i look away for a moment,
i look back:
the sky turned to deep cobalt
and the moon, still distant, radiant, not departed,
is the face unchanged?
the sky so deep now,
this could be the depth of the ocean,
but the moon
still just beyond my fingertips.

the air is filled with the scent of spring flowers
whose names i do not know,
whose deaths i will not notice.

messiahs and heroes
pass by each day and night
in nameless droves.

in my travels i kept meeting philosophers:
the first philosopher taught me that i need
to grow up,
her medium, a picture of regret;
the second philosopher's advice was
to stay away from philosophy for my own good,
she told me straight faced and direct;
the third philosopher told me i need to
get to grips with just how much i will never know,
and i learnt just how attractive i find wisdom
and how out of reach she really is.

in a kiss
is kept a fragment
of eternity
and a torturous memory
when your lips drip poison.

within ten minutes of getting home
i'm already ******
and reminded that the highs
are always followed by the most atrocious lows
already moaning in my poetry
and loneliness has been keeping me company
since the moment i left rooms full of laughter
and my silent room full of unread books and forgotten pages
hasn't yielded an answer
already moaning in my poetry
always moaning in my lonely poetry
and i remember a precious friend told me
he had been jealous of me for achieving scenes
that coloured his angst riddled dreams
in times that i don't like to remember
that were anchored by secrets under sleeves
and crude masks, and childish fantasies,
and fake pleasantries, and keys to an empty home,
and a nauseating shape and face, and a lack of talents,
and an absence of stable or intimate relationships
—pft, what's changed?—
and he couldn't believe that i was jealous of him
this whole time
and i will keep being so for time to come.
but it still pleases me to see him succeed
even from my unseen observatory of squalor,
and i do adore hearing his lover speak of
how her love for him was born in fire,
awkwardness and innocent symmetry.
in all my travels, i have never found anything
more beautiful than friends
and why should i need to?

our curses make up the rumbling grey
that blots out the sun and spits
spears of fire into our retinas;
our blessings make up the very
earth we stand on
and seldom take account of.

i remember reading somewhere
that when some of the first poems were being written,
they were made with rhythm and rhyme in mind
because it was believed that would
carry their messages further, all the way to the gods!
i'm not yet sure what i'm praying for
nor even if it's gods i want to be heard by.

no one seems to understand me but i
understand why that is the case:
they can't read minds; and mine a mind
i haven't even deciphered yet,
a territory of oppressors and elusive solace.

what can i say of my pain other than
it hurts?
why do i insist
on sweating out confessions of demons
and performances of buffoonery
when my belly is full of *****?
and why does the sight of the ceiling
at 4AM so often act as a catalyst for tears?
perhaps a life of depression
is the most agonising way to die
(if only for how much time it takes),
though certainly i am still ignorant
of the true horrors that lie behind
the veil of privilege undeserved.
the conquerors' half of my blood
feeds a fountain of guilt
while the conquered half whispers
of sorrow, revolt and broken chains.
oh endless body, give strength
to my transient spirit fading
that i might share it with our flesh.

your soul is a fragment of a puzzle piece.
my soul is a fragment of a puzzle piece.
the souls we love, hate, don't care about,
don't know, grieve for or have forgotten
are fragments of puzzle pieces too
and each a world unto itself.
i implore you,
explore.

the books in my room gather dust.
time turns to satin—on the shore
of ideas, an old boat coats with rust.
in the wind echoes its engine's ancient roar.

children play their games in the street.
ashes of the sun flushed down the toilet.
all things seen and unseen begin their retreat
as fun comes to an end, the adults spoilt it.

not a day goes by—that's all, that's it.
no one wants even to ask if
                                                                 we're going to make it.

twenty years gone by
like a dream.
still not woken.

twisted fire
sinks into my blood;
how easy it is,
now, to forget the world.

take any society:
the most productive element
is women.
the most rewarded
is man.
(and the most annoying
is the one lamenting the state of affairs
who disrespects his mother.)

plenty of the future
will not be consumed
by the ensuing seconds,
probably
(depends on geography).

take your time if you can, come what may.
you've lots of history to wrestle with
before you can truly reach a new day.

we became so accustomed
with dying
that living
no longer came naturally.

if you look into the essence of things
for long enough, the truth will manifest
that despite what the universe is telling you,
you don't really need that Big Mac, at best

a deep desire's unsatisfaction
is its only real redeeming feature
for its completion is its death, and worse,
your loan will not cover your expenses.

but the sacred only enters when life
is lived beyond need, and all of future
is a faded dream, with life completely

emptied of engineering, and the eye
in excess consumes the sun to suture
itself to night, so to see things frivolously.

and we had but
yesterday as if it
was always
going to be
enough, but no
tense that we could scrounge up
between us
quite captured
the moment.
perhaps tomorrow.

"****
the romanticisation
of despair"