I lift syllables to plant
They will ripen in your mind
Like wheat of the ancient fields

Where our ancestors ate language
And leisure, like we have never known
We who labour like machines
As slaves might, while our lives
Is as a poem where the trees incandescent

Must watch themselves wither
As sheets of paper gone to waste
I lift houses of sound

To your legendary fracture of silence
These vacant lots of night-time
Where a pale puddle of your
Grip upon reality suddenly blazes
With figures of your once dreams

The summer has oxidized mornings, sunsets
A weightless winter awaits, as scattered
Pages are left to turn, each one

Words in the shape of a cloud of dust
As white as snow, as lingering
As the cold, and the murmur of a million
Leaves that once were, but are now only
The idea of color, the texture of earth.

Standing on the tiptoe
of my universe
I found I had

Nothing but love to offer
While the nature of
Anonymous cruel indifference
Can seem unnameably cold
I admired the ability of it

To make us feel free
Insolent as my fate had been
Greener than the word May

The mast of these afternoons
Only beggared for moderation
And that enraptured simplicity
From which I came
That was enough, and so were

The rest of the years that I was given
at the asylum of the eucalypti
I would rest, and it would be
Wondrous and christening
Like a white sunset.

To write poetry is
To create philosophical memory
To adjust the commentaries

Of all souls, to just one voice
To strip the inequalities
Of existence, of their mass
To write poetry is
To erase the written

Transforming what we have read
Making alphabets contemporary
Fluid, mystical

To write poetry is not just art
It’s neurological reprogramming
A quantum gesture to
The nature of beauty
And Meaning itself

To write poetry is
To return to an absence of meaning
The meddlesome mind forgets

The natural order of nature
To reduce layers of narrative
And return to a total peace
And a grand vision of the universe
As a talking thing, exchanging energy

In a physics of existence
To write poetry is to love the unwritten
Endings that all concur

To identify with the sudden
Rupture of beginnings
From which all thought originates
To write poetry is thus
The silence in between the words

And a solace beyond thought
To free oneself form the memory
That is an impression or a scar

On the mind, blankness is an ideal state
To observe time and space without attachment
To love existence independently
Of the personal conditions of one’s life
On the letters of your poems

I observe a black walking cat
A woman that must question her heart
To find the answers, without
Speaking we are a language
All we feel and do is a kind of vocabulary.

Today I am a tourist
In romance, her swaying hair
Across my lap
She showed me this long night
And I bit into it

Laughing loudly and aroused
Not for sensation, but for feeling
She showed me the stages of joy

We folded our lives
As we folded laundry together
Ate our meals in complete comfort
The interior of thirsty years
Of suffering, made worth it

In a few months of purest joy
Loving her was like a Jewish legacy
Of an expression of American hope

I could hope I belonged
But romance usually had a way of
Burning my letters at a bonfire
For a muse I couldn’t have
So much color, so much sadness

So many postcards from
The women I believed I loved
Thus I remember your face everywhere

Like a poet infatuated
With the idea of love
Who has some difficulty
Recognising her at “face level”

I will defy the movement of language
With syllables soft before the snow
For Autumn in the fewest chosen words
Along lines of simple alphabets

In the palm of my listening
I will observe you walk as a poem
Skips across ethereally this earth
With colors and bodies of Christmas

An instantaneous impression of beauty
I will sing a lullaby to the irreproachable sky
And kiss the poem-greeting letters
That dissolve as a soul among the trees

And the centre of music
That is a living expression of the times
Today the sun comes out in your poem
And I listen for the poem I will write in reply

I will be a hero of a recluse today, again
With an inner smile of jewel-pointed clarity
That the imagination is a universal thing
The night’s sheerness of black gardens

A voice from which religions spring
Spiritual movement completes itself
In an intuitive release of meaning
A letting go of the sadness of having come

And gone, like death, poetry takes me there
As a river of music, entering my blood
Chilling me with a serotonin symphony
The joy of being here, the glances and reflections

Of existence, mirroring poetry
Between silence and music
The snow and sun, men and women
The rain and drums stalk my fantasies.

I

The successive suns of summers
swim in me like a balcony of heat
I glow with the sol of sols

the pine cone of lava that
makes my cheeks full, white
the sun-drop of diamonds
have petrified in my heart
and I am creation rushing down

ii

On all that is below, these stars
know me and I among them
we are like water in water

ocean creatures of great adventure
vertigoes of light, layers of softness
suns of paradise, legends of golden noons
revolutions of princely sunspots
cliff of mortality, planets revolving

iii

Around a center, galaxies revolving
around a black-hole that was once
a great sun, time has pink candle-like veins

but she knows the sun, the sparkling rocks
the matter and energy of our destinies
caught up in a seabed of lights
the successive suns of summers
swim in me like an ode to sun-religions

iv

but I am here, drinking sun-wine
in the surreal view of full eyes
with a body of silver for the kaleidoscope

and a naked face dismantled by another eclipse
another wonder, another design of day.

November is the cruelest month, destroying
What once was for what will be
The snow will stalk our dreams, hoping
To fill the emptiness of another summer’s end
Earth will forget the dead
As I forget what it was to be a student

Labour fuels my hours, surviving
One year to the next, a broken man
Where is the Spring I once knew so well?
Where is my heart in this cruel world?
Where is time but in these broken images?
Memory is insufficient to be my food

The wind howls and I am the trees
Who have endured so much, again and again
The famous shadows on the ground mean nothing
They are what they were, darkness spreading
These unreal cities are all the same
With their cosmopolitan jargon and anonymity

Each trying to out duel the next, competition
In the workplace, in the dating market
One must be so careful these days
Friends depart without a trace, elders die
Families get divided, partners divorce
The winter dawn has its own beauty

A short and infrequent storm, the bloom
Of white to carpet our weary feet
On roads of fate, sometimes without shelters
Without kindred souls who know us deeply
The synthetic atmospheres of urban life
A society of white walkers, whose truth

Only mimics the fallen empires of liberty
The false figures of unemployment rates
Which do not count those who have given up
Indebted states, welfare states, police states
And the persistent rumour that democracy is dead.