How sweet, to have no purposes in sight:
Those wandering can never lose their way,
Captured by the unmaking of the day,
Swirling towards the center of the night.

Mad men parade in endless roundabout
Across the clover tables and red glows,
And the ghost thread of time just barely flows
Till the last broken gambler cashes out

But sticks around, still looking for a chance
To tango to another kind of dance
And they smell so good, the midnight flowers.

Come look for them, beyond the neon haze,
Sink into their unquestioning embrace,
They will love you forever for an hour.

When ivy strangles the bust of
generals
And the watches of secretaries are stricking ten,
I'll crawl back to you, my moonlight meadow,
Silent like a subterraneous Nile.
I want back the unrest,
The musics that you robbed me of,
And the fata morgana
We would chase through the alleys of that endless midnight
Just for the pleasure of watching it recede before us.
My life is a sequence of conditionals:
Ever since you left
I'm guarded no more
By the magic of your everyday chores.
There are days I'll forget to look up the sky,
And many, many times
My lefthand side is crushed
by the almost unbearable certitude
Of knowing you'll be waking up somewhere,
Warmer than a dove,
And I can't be there to witness the miracle.


When ivy strangles the bust of  secretaries,
And the watches of generals have struck ten,
I'll be gone already.
Look for me by the other side of the window:
I'll be a raft in the open night,
Drifting across frosty constellations.
Someone that's me has been writing this; still,
there is so much I will never understand.
Let us love each other:
I see your trail in the flight of birds,
Your face in the lines of I Ching.

The second light of sunrise filters
through the blinds of a broken transom window, gliding the kitchen.
There’s an instant
in which bottomless jars, worn out dishes
and a headless Mickey magnet that has fallen off the fridge
Seem to levitate in a sea of dusty honey.

I haven’t witnessed the scene.

I think about all the other ordinary prodigies
That must be happening somewhere.
A trembling chrysanthemum blossoms in the frosty gardens of Nagoya.
Six grey wolves fail to hunt down a white deerling.
A middle aged man whispers into a hollowed stonebrick, then covers his secret with mud.
Two  giraffes disappear in the middle of a starlit Colosseum, to the astonishment of a roman dilettante.
Twenty years of boredom; then an ex con feels the tact of dewy grass under his feet again.
In a balcony over the Seine, two lovers prepare a padlock.
Some skinny kid from La Matanza scores a last minute free kick to win the neighborhood derby.
A pretentious teenager watches The purple rose of Cairo for the first time, and  discovers his true calling.
Days before dying, an old man stops by a bakery and inhales the same caramel fragrance he would inhale in the afternoons of his childhood summers.
An older brother decides to throw a game of Mario Kart to his sibling.
On a deserted reed bed, a blackbird sings the most beautiful tune in the world. There is no one there to listen.
A single mother finishes cooking breakfast for his son, and decides to let him sleep for another five minutes.
A physics grad student solves the meaningless quantum noise model that’s been torturing him for weeks, and stops wondering why he didn't choose to be a lawyer
Two old friends share the same espresso in a hidden Manhattan coffeehouse, perhaps for the last time.  

None of this everyday miracles are
happening to me.

Every droplet the distant drizzle brings,
Every perfect chrysalis, every glow,
Like seasons, they will blossom, wither, go,
And linger in the living heart of things.

A single moment holds eternity.
And yours is  lurking somewhere, out of sight,
Drowned by the silver waters of the night,
Buried beneath a hollow lilac tree.

I see  the reed bed where we said goodbye.
We watched how slowly darkness filled the sky.
Deigos floated astray across the pool.

The chirping of the crickets left the glade.
Besides the rim, perhaps a willow swayed.
Perhaps the harvest moon was beautiful.

-"Old nail, why linger yet so straight for,
All rust, but spirit still unshaken,
When everything around has been forsaken,
And all your brothers wither on the floor?

You last, and there's no point in lasting:
No petty beam, no structure to support,
For once a great design has fallen short.
Yours is just a sad and aimless waiting."

-"It's true, I have long outlived my purpose,
It's true I've been forsaken, I suppose.
Green woodbine is now crawling through this wall,

I know I'll soon be garbage to the tinker.
And yet there's a reason why I linger:
I linger 'cause I'm choosing not to fall."

The sky, the sun, her footsteps in the snow,
cradle of old, forsaken beatitudes,
are coming back to fill your interludes
with all the broken brights you'd wish to know.

And then what's left of life is rushing through:
the waiting, the quiet sense of duty,
the lost strength, the feeble bolts of beauty,
the ageless sand that's piercing through the blue.

You will not get out: the woodbine's cracking
Bastiani's walls; all the tartars smacking
the gates, there's nowhere else to go.

You'll soon know what's the price of solitude,
but now, to fill the final interlude:
the sky, the sun, her footsteps in the snow.

Through the silky lattice of what, why, when;
Through the ever-forking tunnels of time;
Through the maze of causes, iron and wine;
By the burning bridges, we met again.

“Though the stream flows, nothing really changes”
I thought, as she walked again by my side.
The night's musk pervaded and conjured the sight
of a blossom that flourished for ages.

Yet all moons must set, and that is a crime:
By the neon gardens of splendor untouched
I kissed her goodbye. Right then, as I watched
how she walked away, she turned one last time.

She said: “Closure can be the beginning.”
I wished it had not; the world kept spinning.