A GUEST OF TIME
(The accountant and his numbers)

Raquel Angel-Nagler

REMEMBERING PESOA
(The book of disquiet)

***
Time slows the sunrise.
I look at the street with my thoughts,
At time I use seeing, hearing,
But somewhere deep I don't think of the street,
I thought of my life without thinking.
I was not a screen of reality, passive,
I was thinking, and thinking was a denial.
If I would not have learned meanings: Greek, Latin, Church,
If I could see the way the world sees.

The habits of life break time to pieces,
As if life was another algebra, the limit of the unknown.
I think of life, the sperm of belonging,
I think of reality, the metal in its veins, pulsating, that belongs only to itself.
I don't know where I belong, if i belong,
Even life belongs to reality,
And I want to dream.

Night.
Suddenly the big wind coming from all directions, like life,
Then, the clarity of space is silent,
There is a secret fear that seems like quiet.
I am half asleep, half alive,
Pieces of consciousness float
Like semen of shadows, like a tear.
Maybe tears are layer beneath layer, like everything else,
In each tear there is another tear, a tear of the womb,
That becomes slowly the tear of the old:
Deeper, more final.

***

Some dreams are like feeling,
They defeat all the spaces that you are.
You look . the street is like a line of foreign syllables. Meaningless.
You walk but all you feel is the machine in your feet.
You don't walk to Ithaca.

You work too much.
The numbers are not an abstract disease.
The nostalgia for life, to be a convalescence from life,
The sense of sadness in a space between your eyes.
Your hope: a humble child of humble life.
The hours of the humble are smaller, they are low, as if something bends them.
The sea in the air, the salty time,
The low tide leaves naked the strip between what I am, what I didn't want to be.

We have, each one, his catalogue of anonymous monsters,
Semen of wasted love,
Eels from the corals, sunken beneath time,
Ghosts that haunt themselves,
The numbers in the books. They kill me each day from the beginning.
After all, numbers are additions, they add death to death.
The tallest questions, volatile and strong, because they are silent.
The big horizon belongs to a future we have already lived,
There are uncountable futures inside a future.
I lose myself when I find it.
I am awake and I am asleep,
After all, life is the big insomnia.
The day comes, like everything else,
Between the too early and the too late.

The sleepless hours are a beast,
They devour whatever makes me human.
I am less.
There is a civil war between myself and myself,
Diplomacy is mute.
It's not that I am silent,
I simply forgot how to speak to whoever I am.
I am always in another room,
I am the shipwreck of the other room.
I never dared to be superfluous.
I need the numbers, they are truce,
They are home, three meals a day, Sunday's suit.
When I don't sleep, I delude myself more,
I am more myself.

***

The endless hours of measuring numbers.
Numbers are only one number more, alone.
You are lonely.
Behind the trigonometry of your life: the walls.
You cannot believe that the others are real, that they have a soul,
After all, people kill because, like you, they don't believe.
But yesterday, someone in the office, suicided,
So he had soul enough to die.
I plunge my hand, trembling, silent, into my secret body,
I look for the soul, for the wound of the soul,
Maybe we all suicide from inside out,
I don't know if I have enough soul left.
Maybe the numbers are my soul, eternity exhausts itself in numbers.

Today, someone left the office.
He was part of the human colony here, so he was part of me.
Today I am less.
I tie myself to the numbers, I am a slave of myself.
Living is hard work, feeling is hard work.

***

I raise my eyes, my eyes full of numbers,
In order to see, to know that I exist.
Somewhere near, the human order, shelves, child of the ordinary.
There are people behind the glass, ordinary as the shelves, broken as human order.
I count numbers, so I count the lives that numbers contain.
I like to imagine that discoverers, poets, saints, they have no number.
I write the numbers; the only life available,
I dream of things at the borders of myself,
I write numbers over the dream.
I make the uncountable- countable.
Everything is a number, even nostalgia, dreams.

The mist weighs no more than the dawn,
The day that dawned, dawned again,
We have to survive the dawns.
I love the dawn in the city more than anywhere else.
The sun multiplies itself, square, precise, in the windows,
It multiplies your dreams,
Which, for a book keeper, also the ten fingers of numbers dream,
It is much better than just observing time, your life.

***
Today, there were clouds in the numbers, pieces of the world everywhere.
We had to catalogue the pieces.
In the country side the sky is always visible,
In the city you see fragments, you don't know if they stay, if they fall.
Clouds. I am the parenthesis between what I am, what I am not.
Clouds. Tattered like a defeated army,
Black, the shadows erase the illusion of space.
Clouds.
I used my unused time to write the poem of the nothing.
Clouds. Distant from the noise pulse of earth,
Distant from the silence of heights.
Clouds. Angels. Borrowed pieces of sky.

***

The life of the humble is an effort of being.
The numbers that repeat themselves in my books,
Are an effort of being.
It's morning in my life,
The light, all the verticals, all the horizontals, interweave,
Like truce.
The light is generous,
The city is a garden of roofs and walls, white over white,
But there is no truce inside me.
Tomorrow, hope, are poetry.
The only of this day is that it will end, the big demolition will be on time,
I'll be one day older, one day sadder.
I remember the eyes of a child, but these eyes are closed in, closed out,
I return from the first eyes, foreign, a nomad in the day, old.
The future pulses, blind, in my veins,
It is full of past, of things i saw too much or maybe too little.
I look at my life: an old newspaper to wrap fish and the effort of being,
And time, the big scavenger, will gather the newspaper and the effort of being,
The only riches available.

It's dark in the office, I am one evening older, one evening more alone.
I rise from my numbers,
And yet, I carry them with me, as if they were my destiny,
Adding number to number, numbers that were not mine,
Adding my nothing to the nothing, at the outer edge of time,
The biggest destination, the biggest nowhere.

It'e Sunday out and inside me.
The roofs of the city, oblivious to the existence of god,
But I remember the child, the first time in church,
The first time touching the gods.
I don't remember if he was surprised,
I don't know if his sadness was crucified here for the first time.

***

Evening. The numbers don't work.
I look at the cracks in the promenade, the sighs of solitary quays,
They comfort me with their sadness.
My chocking throat is the breath of the quays, the surf in the lungs.
In the piazza, the big noise of those who sell people, hands, fish.
The big silence after the sale, it gathers, finger by finger, the sadness of the tomorrow.
In day time, I am a product. Soled.
At night, I am passerby inside myself.
I feel the sea inside me, I feel the sea out. Foreign.
I didn't know that reality could be generous,
That there are not many seas, there is only one sea,
I wait at the outer limits of myself.

At the end of each day, the same thing is left,
The effort of being, exhaustion, time,
The insatiable hunger to change, to be more yourself,
Without changing.
Change is the unknowable. It is never really safe.

I wander through my autobiography, a history without story,
My confessions are empty,
I write the emptiness with emptiness,
I write what I feel in order to feel less.
Between sadness and sadness I make a Sabbath. I don't think.
My life is the story of old aunts:
Living is a room of patience,
Living is embroidering a pattern of someone else.
You embroider silently. You are free in your silence.

A thunder storm.
In the sky, time is immobile. The silence is black.
Sound sliced like the throat of a child. Sound is dead.
The metal in the veins of the tram pulsates, it is so human.
The rain is not simple.
It falls in the labyrinth of beasts and man: the market.
A drowned cry, and there is no umbrella of mercy.

In a corner of the street
A stranger sings, a man from dead races,
The song came from far,
The words were strange, a picture on a cave,
But the music translates everything.
There are too many thirsty places: people, pain.
The music was a hand that gave us water,
We drank it, the open veins in a syllable of music,
And it drank us.

***

The weather of my destiny.
In the office: the pleasure of darkness,
The numbers end always before the infinite.
We move smoothly from day to evening,
Time is like the memory of someone else.
We are all subjects of reality:
The light that opens our face,
The shadows we drag in a circle, the circle is closed,
Only the fingers can find us, silence after silence offers itself, denies itself.

I remember the lost past, the past that empties its images,
I write the numbers on the faces of the past, tipping wax fingers,
I lose myself in the numbers,
The past loses itself in me. It has nowhere to go.
But night comes, confused, turbulent,
The sperm of nostalgia, the sperm of the alone.

There are things that make me continuous,
The pieces align themselves, almost invisible, as absence,
Like a phrase, gentle because it is simple,
Strong, because it is simple.

I realize I like the waiters, the barmen, the fruit vendors.
I feel we are relatives, anonymous uncles, cousins.
Family is a strange creature.
Some pull the string in the puppet show of the world,
Some are the world, the uncles the cousins,
Without home there will be no world, no poetry, no Don Kichotes to save us.

Maybe a door keeper, a barber, a fish vendor,
Maybe they have the talent to be confused with small things,
Maybe monotony is necessary, to repeat ourselves, each day from the beginning.
Maybe they feel that the monotony makes them less monotonous.
Maybe a traveler may feel the boredom of the endless new,
The fatigue of choosing, wakening, mornings, having to choose the sky.
Maybe the small ones keep the talent to dream,
To see the non-existent, the blue mist dragging a day,
Yet, they leave the impossible to the impossible,
They don't realize that time exhausts itself in their dreams,
That life is a hand, tender, tumultuous,
Plunging in their secret body, into their deep groins,
That the hand will be a sperm, a life after so many deaths.
The hand will be small, endless repetitions of time,
A hand that moves through the era of fish towards them.

***

You know so little, you work too much, you don't have time to think,
You are confused, you feel nameless, so you don't exist.
You feel that you never existed before, before time became a cave,
A dead beast on the cave.
You are a dream of someone else, he made you unreal.
Your emotions fall from the height of numbness into the depth of time,
They cannot find themselves.
Man, each one is a stone, a rock, a blizzard of winged void whirling around it.
Whatever he saw, whatever he touched is not you,
It is the void. Time exhausts itself in the feeling.
You don't realize it is the end of the world, anachronistic, cruel, that is whirling.
You don't see the rain drop, a single drop, in the centeer,
Mother of earth sperm of the world,
The life of sperm after so many lives.

After the rain, the clarity of life in the window.
Each one a square sky of his own.
We are the scavengers of the hours, of the world,
The only riches available.
Each one is a coral of himself, a rose of living and time.
In the city of my being there are people, tapestries of the world,
A compact multitude in the same street of time.
The traffic light paints reality in exquisite colors,
It paints the direction of dreams.

***

Everything is a market: the selling, the buying.
They sell futures, happiness,
They sell men for paper : money.
They give them the perishables: the hours. The hours are hungry.
I have no choice: I sell myself,
But I sell it to someone tangible, real.
It is the horizon I deal with, I don't trust fixed vortex of the angels.

The window: a square of twilight.
I am what I see, I am the size of a square.
My gaze falls like time, from a rock,
Like a square river, into the depth of the sea.
My gaze falls into the turbulent pulse of water,
Where rivers lose their name, their shape.
My gaze: the square entangles with the deep intestine of water:
The circle, the chord,
They weave the belly of the sea,
The life of a seed after so many lives.
My gaze is white sea salt on the rock of time.

Your books: the accounts of others.
The desk: a mine field of numbers, of your life,
And yet, you love the books of small numbers,
Maybe everything is a number, even god,
The addition of number to number until time is exhausted.
The shadows melt in the walls. I accept the walls, the numbers in the books,
And they accept me.
I sell my ten fingers of time in order to sooth the ten fingers of hunger.
I use the parenthesis of life in order to dream,
I plunge my hand in my secret sea
I bring up the corals, the sperm of time, the sperm of dreams.

I am calm. I keep the numbers safe,
They keep my life safe,
The only life available.

***

I see you, tumultuous body.
Thoughts are unused time.
I don't think, I understand you, because I see you, gaze after gaze.
I love you, the secret semen in you, the life of a seed after so many lives,
And I cannot decipher what love says, the silences.

The thunder fell like time from a rock.
I was afraid,
I felt simpler than what I am.
Maybe the trees in the garden are more simple,
But they are not human, they don't think,
They don't know that simplicity is never really simple.

Let's be simple.
Let's be gazelles as gazelles, let's be rhinos as rhinos.
We'll have the seasons of love,
The season where rivers end in sands,
Which is never really simple.
And we should live simple till tears.
Simplicity is hard work.

In the village I can see the rocks of the night rolling,
The water fall of stars.
The cities blind us. They steal the horizon, they harden our eye lashes, stones.
After all, I am the sum of what I see,
I'll grow old missing so much of myself.

I think too much. Everything becomes a thought.
When I plunge a trembling hand in my secret life,
I find the thoughts, the big emptiness,
As if I was dying from inside out.

Yet, some days I lie on the grass,
The grass walking in my shoes,
My whole body leaning on reality.
The body doesn't think. It is simply living, feeling.
Living, feeling is not simple,
Their motions flake off, peeling, peeling.

Time comes and goes lightly,
As if my body was made of time, a breath,
And I don't know which part of my life is time,
Which part is timeless: the small deaths, dying, dying.

I think and write,
The way a river flows,
But my words don't have the simplicity of a water drop.
I want to write the way the rain falls in a puddle of a child, the first sea,
I don't know how to be complicated in a simple way, like a child.
One day,
I'll write water with water,
I'll write the puddle of a child, with a sea.
I'll write
Natural as magic,
Simple as magic.

***

The tavern, like half a syllable.
People like a parenthesis of life,
Faces, the indifference coming from too much life,
It is not easy to see your face in so many faces.
They'll die, like everything else, from inside out,
They drown in themselves.
I plunge my hand, turbulent, silent,
In their secret sea.
I bring back the coral, sunk under time.
The coral is beautiful. The coral is chocking.
The gaze of the people: the endless coral, the sunken time, the secret pain.
The pain of the humble is bigger than themselves.

***

The master of my life. He buys and sells me, a nameless product.
Maybe I think about him so much
Because he is real as witch craft,
He turns flesh into paper; money.
My life is paper.
Maybe I needed a symbol:
A statue: the milk of stone, the hard sperm of a hero
To believe in.
Maybe, when I'll grow old, I'll find other ways to avoid myself,
To meet my face, the bruised dried expression, rarely.
Maybe I'll continue not to understand simple things:
How was my hunger a failure, a defeat, and yet, it defeated me.
How was the paper money a triumph, and bankrupt.

I see the master. He is an illusion, he is real.
Monstrous, inevitable, unknowable, banal.
The carnivorous hands, they cut each day another finger,
The fingers fall out of light.

I wrote the numbers, I had no choice,
I had to find that meaning is number,
The mysteries in numbers,
After all, everything is a number, even god:
The art of adding number to number, until the end of time.
Maybe men are different numbers:
The numbers of those who sunk beneath human. : the line zero.
The numbers of those who climbed to the height of themselves,
Like birds: Smugglers of dreams.
Being human tires me.

I feel safe only in place I know,
But everywhere the anxiety of time that leaves,
The unknowable of life that stays.
Everything inside me is entangled
Like a knot of intestines that binds me to pain.
The faces that passed by me, through me, so they become my life,
And the big nostalgia i feel for myself,
I miss myself each day more, pieces of my life missing.
Each day I am less.

***

The motions of being, as if time is exhausted in habits.
I am always the same.
I want to rest from being myself,
From boring the thoughts I don't think.
I want the impossible, it is much nicer than the possible.
Slavery is everywhere, because habits are everywhere:
The home, three meals.
Some are more slaves, some are less,
And the fear of freedom gives slavery its height, its depth.
Everything is us: the people, the slaves, the fear, and we are the everything
But the everything is a slave of nothing.
Night falls, like a stone in the abyss,
Carved on the stone: the parenthesis of life.

***

I reached the vertiginous heights of a book keeper,
I am a ruler, I count numbers so I count time life, the world.
The numbers were always important: the mathematics of life,
The addition of pain to pain, the addition of habit to habit.
The non existent time existed, it was banal.
Banality is a species of wisdom, the wisdom of everyday life,
And reality completes the gods, because it exists.

Maybe my life was a broken tin can, time dripping from it,
A tin can that is swept with other crumbs of reality, away.
I know that the sum of humans is not infinite,
But there will be a last question.

The call of a ship at night is human,
It has to hear itself in order to know it exists.

I couldn't rise above reality.
On the floors of reality I am a book keeper,
I have no choice, I count numbers in order to live, I count my life.
I reject my life, it is a life sentence,
I reject my dreams, the flight into myself,
And the flight that leaves me is the same flight.
The life of a book keeper: the sum of neglected things,
The laborious repetition of each day,
Actors behind a curtain of reality.
I look at the flaccid, aimless facts,
They are like me, a useless fact,
Nothingness is not better, nor worse, than the nothing,
And I am too tired to be something.

***

How often existence wounds me,
It strikes inside, some invisible sediment in a puddle.
I forget what I see, what I didn't see,
The high tide of light, the low ones, don't touch me,
The breeze that carries the colors, the air is indifferent,
My sadness is here and it is outside.
There is always what is:
The numbers in the office, the numb hours that hurt the same,
And not what should be.
Maybe, one day, what should be will exist,
We'll plunge a hand, aching, turbulent into our secret body,
We'll touch the deep wound that began before we began with the five fingers of our senses,
Maybe we'll recognize our dreams in a dry tear of flesh, our dreams starving, starving
Maybe existence will wound us in another way,
Maybe it wouldn't be inexplicable, it will be human.

The deserted house,
The clock's triple sound. It is three o'clock.
The clock is always in the center of everything,
Precise, unstoppable. There is no traffic light on the street of time.
A drop of time falls, inaudible clear.
Around me: the universe, abstract, negating everything,
Even the leaves fall without a sound, it mutes the leaves.
The details of my life: the numbers written on the back of what I think,
The balance sheet of what doesn't exist, and yet, I exist in it.
To cease, to flow, to replace intermittent things
With another kind of melancholy, to be external to what I feel
Memory is empty, a void. I never existed.
My suffering is empty, without thought, without feeling,
My suffering is a fatigued place.
Sleeping is just and insomnia,
They are for everybody,
Like time.

***

I look at the back of the man ahead of me, ordinary back,
I never knew that backs can sleep,
Maybe he bends too much, he is humble, humbleness tires us.
Maybe the work is too eternal, the sum of hours bigger than our hands.
I feel the tenderness one feels towards the ordinary,
Towards the innocence of someone asleep.
After all, sleep is the big equalizer.
The more i look, the more I see sleeping backs.
In the shop window I see my back asleep, the harsh lullaby of numbers
In the pauses between one reality and the other I sleep, I dream.
Maybe we all share the same age, the same third sex:
The passion castrated in the deepest body,
The secret sperm, the secret egg,
The passion castrated by the magicians of the market:
They sell sleeping backs, the best products,
They sell hands, mad heaps of fingers, the passion is paper.

The hours of endless numbers, the endless hours,
The arithmetic of everything detracts pieces from my silent equation.
I am less.
I sense a worm, a slippery tear, in the momentary gaze of the universe,
I feel the worm is I, my life.
I never knew how bruised I was, how bruised my life,
I never knew how sleepy can a worm be, the tired sperm of earth.

***

Dawn. It rains.
Life and its sad usefulness. I am visible, each word, through the void inside.
I don't know if truth exists, if it is necessary,
I feel the lack of consciousness which is the only consciousness I own.
I feel the whisper of the water fall in my eye lashes. I don't know what it says.
Each dawn I feel like someone summoned for trial, the eternal guilty.
To sleep, to be far from myself.
Outside: the rain drenches the voices, the old shoes of humanity,
And I crouch, deserted, human, alone.
I cry for the pain that waits in each crossroad,
I cry for the hand stretched towards me. It never arrived.
I cry for the numbers in the book, the insomnia, the sweating infinite.

It rains. The puddles of a child everywhere, the first sea.
What I know abandons itself to what I feel,
Everything is ordinary, everything is the possible, everything is like the imagination of a child,
The truth of the impossible.
People are paper boats, they pass by me slowly, time is a slow river
When you are a child.
Remembering lets me resist what I am.
Maybe remembering is a material paradox. It was. It is.
And the precision of time:
It leaves you always at the fraction of the moment between what you own, what you lost,
They become the same thing, the same sadness.

***

People are not symbols, no matter what the poets say,
And they are not a word on a page, biographies are great ignorants,
There is no one inside the word, nothing living.
Life is not a dictionary,
Yet, some phrases out of people, people out of phrases,
They don't know how bruised they are, how alone with the words,
They don't see the drop of dawn, a single drop,
Mother of light. The murmur that is life.
Light has no grammar.

You live a borrowed life,
After all you live the numbers, the miracle of ten hours in each hour,
The numbers are generous, they borrow you their life.
The numbers are harsh, you have to pay interest for the loan,
Some evenings you give back the loan, you are what you were,
Or what you think you were,
Strangely, you feel the old coal weary, entangled, remembering and forgetting are the same.
Amidst the big twilight, you are a giant mothball, trying to protect the long fibers of the past.
Of the future.
Amidst the twilight you seem a moment in time,
A few mothballs would be enough to protect you from your life.
You didn't know no one can store time in a mothball.
You didn't know no one can store life in a mothball.
You didn't know that the mothballs and the moth, the big weariness, anonymous,
The loans and the interests, the remembering and forgetting,
Are life.

The rain dragging the sea, the fish in the air.
In the street, an old man, slow, hurrying.
I look at him the way one looks at an enigma,
The enigma of someone who feels he belongs to nothing,
So maybe he is unreal.
Reality belongs to everybody.

***

Life is a big animal, each shiver is an avalanche of time,
And yet, each part of it:
The seasons, the people chopped from the animal, sooth me.
Even the numbers, austere, stubborn, are generous,
I count them with the fascination of a prisoner counting the lines on the wall.
I count the with the fascination of someone condemned to count
The remnants of the animal: a number.
One day, there will be only two eyes left: my eyes,
They will be bruised, groaning, too fatigued to count.

In the window: the country side. It is indefinite.
I thought I'll find peace in the borders of civilization,
But peace feels like boredom, a slow digestion of time.
I don't like the ground floor of life, but I enjoy the stars from its tenth floor.
Only the civilized, the ones dressed, are fascinated by a naked baby.
Only the exiled know what home means.
I see the natural weaving itself in whatever is artificial somewhere in my soul.
The only truce available.

The unknown is too unknown, a threat, a minefield in your eyes,
So, paint it with the colors of the known. It is safer, it doesn't ignite beneath your gaze.
The misunderstanding of reality seem tangible,
Civilization gives a name to something, simple as magic
It makes it known, it makes it real.
The factories of realities, we move through the era of names.
We don't recognize our feelings, so we give them a name.
The mist drags hours of blankness, it is sad in a monotonous way, like us.

The point at which we look at something
May be at the top of the ladder, or at the base,
So, in order to see we climb the ladder,
We see each one something else, we etch an inner window in our eyes.
We produce realities, rung by rung.
We don't know if reality is high or low
We don't know if high is also low,
We don't know if the ladder is a petrified shiver,
We don't know if reality is a safe place.

***

The solitary plaza, like the remnants of another layer of time:
The age of villages dripping into the city.
I like to see the plaza from one side,
To feel the nostalgia for the side I don't see.
The big forgetting, my whole existence: a vague photo,
And the tomorrow is an empty room, maybe I already lived it and left. I forgot.

After the rain,
The clean pile of houses, this domestic corner of the world: clean.
My impulse for joy, joins the impulse of the rain to dissolve, to dissolve.
I walk, my certainty in my pocket, the office is something I know, so it is a certainty.
Strangely, I feel free. The numbers are infinite, and yet they are a prison.
I never thought the infinite could be a prison.
I need so little to feel content, a leafy color over my sadness, and yet, even this little is too much,
This little is enough to feed a leaf or two, at most.
The motions of living consecrated by repetition.
I could consecrate this moment by repeating it, but I don't,
I leave it, moaning alone on the leafy color of the day.

I am not prepared for the open air of the world.
A sun ray burned my outer eye,
But my eye inside is open,
So, I gain little from this blindness.

***
To begin each day from the beginning, to feel each day from the beginning,
To sense the hymen of the emotion, virgin.
To feel today what you felt yesterday, is not feeling, it's remembering, a second hand life.
The city is a city of mountains, mother of stone, an avalanche of stone, of time, of people.
The city: child of the hours, mother of light, mother of shadows.
The city of bridges, it measures how close, how far is our alone.

Life, anonymous, attendant of names, walks in the shoes of passers by.
The buildings: a wingless condor, the semen of stone, the semen of what was: the yesterday.
The whole mystery of the world carved in monotony, in repetitions.
How new are everyday things, how monotonous,
How juvenile, how panting, like someone who came from very far,
From the cave, the beasts on the wall, the beasts in what they remember.

How the smallest things bruise my existence.
The alone in my room, the hours drag the hollows, I am not in the hours, I am not in the room, I am the big absence.
I look for sleep, a somewhere to search nothing,
To lose myself in the giant moths growing deep my clothes, they shrink me.

The square room, a square cage, a square horizon, infinite.
Men called thought Master,
But I have no master, no saint died for me,
No Moses showed me the way in the desert where sand is thoughts
Blowing, untouched, untouchable, dissolving, dissolving.

***

The books in which I keep the numbers of people,
Life is a number, my life has no number, so, I don't exist.
Life is the longing for a journey into the next mile, into the next hour,
Travelling to what you want to be,
But, you don't know how to want,
How to be, like me, the big beggars of life.
The open palm is still. No journey in the palm. It goes nowhere,
It doesn't know how to want to go.

You were not in the journey, you were somewhere else,
And returning, you were not here again,
You were too lost in the memoirs of existence,
But the absurd is real: existence remembers nothing, except itself.

I am not sad for the loss of my childhood.
I am sad because I lose it again and again,
With each note of the blind violinist in the corner, finding the chord with careful fingers,
Repeating them on the scaled of my ribs.
The repetition of the notes repeats the imagination, that repeats the nostalgia.
My eyes, closed out, open in. I cry.
I want to order my memory to halt, to come out of the picture.
I want a truce.
But I don't know how to halt what I feel.
My skin is glass, the nerves inside are glass,
Even an old tune can break them.

Dreams continue to dream. I am never really awake,
Or maybe, somewhere inside, dreaming and awakening are the same.
I walk through life, my rhythm is the rhythm of my astral friend, the only friend left.
I walk through the dynasty of the impossible the king of the possible,
Or I let myself float, like the kite of a child, in the four winds of the quadrant,
A bird in unknown spaces.
The dream is a painting of the absurd, the dream is more real than myself.
I go to the office, like everybody else,
I don't know if numbers dream,
Maybe they resist, like me, the line zero of life
Because of the kite of a child, in an island of air.
There is nothing monotonous in a kite,
Even the repetition of time in the kite
Stream into another era, the age of flying fish.

***

The inner map: the Americas to explore.
The weary map of the journey from day to day hurts my old shoes.
My tedium feels nothing, and there is nothing worth doing. It exhausts me.
My tedium: the big opacity in each motion I do, in motions I don't do.
I don't know if the numbers are guilty, or some cosmic law.
To have nothing to do. To feel a weariness I could enjoy.

You are alone in a house of someone you don't know,
Far from the big noise of numbers, from the big noise of stone
You feel peace, you are the king of the house, maybe for once, the king of yourself.
To watch the income of the world with no worries.
But the hard footsteps, like the invasion of the Barbarians,
Slaughters whatever you feel.
You returns to the numbers, no longer alone,
You return to the anonymous life. No kingdom left.
People tire me.

Sometimes, in a corner of silence,
I think of the on the shapes of the invisible,
Of feelings i don't know.
My true disease is the talent for suffering,
I miss something I don't want.
Even the unreal suffering is real.

***

The changes in my routine, I cannot contain them, I cannot contain my life.
I go on, you make walk through the era of the fish, you don't recognize it,
And the people walk in parallel ages, parallel life.
I hurry to the office, it feels familiar, unchangeable, home,
Here, habit is god.

The car light cut the water: lit snake of sea, dark snake, crawling towards you.
Who will guard the secret child, the first snake in his silence.

It rains.
The rain empties its sameness into me, into the world.
My thoughts grow liquid, watery.
There is nothing soft to lean on. The rain is steel.
The day is defeated, like so many humans, by the longing for light.
Maybe it will die a painless death, if such a death exists.

The morning is mud, or mist.
Where did it begin, where it goes, to the place where illusions go,
Or a wall, it will melt in the wall.
It was like the big forgetting, like a torpor of reality, nothing was visible, not even the invisible. There was no light, so shadows were impossible,
And the thoughts that shrink me, like sleep, were impossible. Thoughts have another reality
Where the indefinite and the definite are the same thing.
To have other thoughts that recognize me when the sky falls.
To forget the numbers, the mirrors that floats me.
The numbers that count what I feel, what I am,
The count of hours that become paper: money.

Dark sky.
I try to meditate, to keep in the blank lucidity,
Something bright: the sea gulls, wings of surf.
At times, the sky comes behind another sky, darker.
You are not ready for such a sky.
There is a small river, sad mud rotting between us. A tiny promontory for a boat that doesn't exist.
It's a good black to escape from one world to the other, one world is not enough for dreams,
One day is not enough for the sadness,
For all the numbers that count their own reality in my books.
One reality is not enough to live.

***

They say that the knowledge of understanding is different.
It is a deep eye, open, it has to take everything in: time, the world,
Our skins, peeling, peeling.
After all, everything exists somewhere inside us,
But the sense of freedom is not in, it is somewhere else, there is only the journey to freedom. There are no arrivals.
You cannot escape yourself, no matter how far you go, you can travel in the two hemispheres, but not the third one: yourself.
You sail in more seas that ever existed.
The only boat: your gaze, but your eyes leak through it.
My knowledge of numbers is too weary to understand. I cannot count the understanding.
Who will guard who I am, what I cannot feel, the far sea moving in my ears.

There are those who have the longing for a big love which they cannot love.
There are those who have no longing for a love they cannot love, mother to themselves,
They feel love draining in their pillow, like the years.

The daily tedium, as if the gestures are weary of the hands.
The monotony of journeys, the indifferent eyelashes
And the books in which try to fill me with the emotions of others,
Then, the big atrophy.
I return to what I am certain;
The insomnia of my dreams, the interruption of who I am, why I am,
And the numbers, they are the only journey, the only book, the only life available.

We are strange creatures.
We gather inside us the inexplicable weight: a dawn, a hope, mother of stone, mother of light.
Maybe we are a climate: storms in the horizon. The horizon doesn't exist.
They go somewhere else,
And the great forgetting: a rain that washes away what we remember.
The forgetting is clear. It soothes us.

Days are anxious creatures.
Suddenly the veins of silence stop pulsating. We fall out of light.
The infinite is broken, glass shards taciturn, separate.
I crouch under my fear, fingers shape a bowl for shadows.
The only thing immobile is the book with the numbers,
But the numbers walk towards me, unstoppable, stubborn,
Snake shaped like sin.

***

My dreams were great poets.
At my desk of numbers, in my unused time, I write perfect phrases,
In each phrase, the journey of a great poem,
The phrases: blue mists dragging a sea.
But when time is exhausted in the numbers, I get up.
Only a trace of the great phrase is left,
As if it was the solar plexus of a deserted city.
As if my phrases ran with the big runner: time, and won, just before the finishing line.

I am, like everything else, layer beneath layer,
I enter my layers one, and I become many.
The smallest thing: the white rain of a word, a quarry of silence, the monuments of someone else, they tie my thoughts at the borders of nostalgia,
In each of these things I repeat myself, in each i am someone different.
In the moment that are mine, I live my life, an old jewel smoldering, a stone of ash.

Any place: a city, a beach, a poem, are a dynasty of memory,
And maybe the dynasty of memory is a city, a poem, a beach.
But, the dynasty of words means little.
Wordless, the wind sounds just as it sounded to Moses, the air was the same black,
The same sun burnt air.
The great metaphysics of words doesn't change even the grass in the shoes of reality,
It doesn't change the big truths: the world, time,
And yet, words sooth me, they know how bruised my existence may be.
They know I can love.

***

The sky, satin blue, the clouds float. The will of the wind is kind.
If I could feel without thinking, I could be happy.
I would sit in a tavern, I would have the power to drink,
To let the wine laugh inside me, natural as a landscape.
But I am I. I live in a peopled imagination.
A lunch in a room, a banded body, a banded silence,
And then, back to the numbers.
They don't drink, they don't laugh, and I don't know if they are a landscape.

Insomnia is hard work.
All the thoughts you didn't think, think themselves now.
The exhaustion takes the shape of my body, my glass bones,
The shape of an experienced somnambulist.
I don't know if the dark lake that envelopes me, is dying.
Not knowing tires me. I am as weary as the hours: defining, muzzled.
There are hours like a new philosophy of life: profound. Futile.
Maybe the numbers in the book are foot notes. Maybe they know.

After the rain. The day: like an illegal holiday. I don't know if imagining is legal.
I was preparing myself for existence for so long. My words mutilated me, my satin tongues.
The room: the absurd nakedness, the magnifying lens of something private.
I could be happy if the stars didn't drop so silent.
It takes time to get used to be alive.
It takes time to getting used to the thought that life is a number.

Some moments are a razor blade, the slice suddenly something ancient,
The clay still damp in the eyes.
You are condemned to seeing, to knowing.
You realize that in the biggest theatre of the world: life,
You were the actor and not the play writer.
In the play, your motions: blind, deaf, ready for nothing,
You go on,, between what you feel and the little vision left.
I knew how to forget myself but not how to remember.
Forgetting soothed me.
I lost the pass word to who I am.
To know nothing about yourself is to exist.
To know something about yourself is to live, the skin slowly peeling off like paper, like pain.

***

Some moments are a surgeon, they slice an ancient membrane of blinding.
You pass from the anonymous life to knowledge.
Suddenly you are sentenced to knowledge.
You see how you don't act the part of being yourself, it acts you.
You were the gesture, not the actor, your fingers falling, falling.
You make the somnolent journey between what you felt and what was seen.
You were human, amnesiac, you were someone else,
And suddenly you find yourself in the middle of a bridge,
You remember the pass word to who you are.
To know nothing about oneself is to exist.
To know little about oneself is to live, to remember that bridges count the distances between our alone.

***

There are too many bibles,
So betrayal is inevitable,
We came here to lift heavy weights, but no one can lift the tear of a fish.
No one can walk in the mine field beneath the wide feet of a question.
The face of the man : a dark repose., he betrays himself long before someone else betrayed him,
And the thirteen men at the table don't know that everything has happened already inside him: the trial, the verdict, death.

We eat at the table. We don't look at the clock.
We don't know what time it is in the world.
We don't know what time it is in the plate.
We don't realize we are time eaters, stars grinding, crumb by crumb.
We don't think how without time we'll die,
Thirsty, hungry, a moment before eternity.

The blind violinist in the street corner.
His face: a warm note.
Someone assaults him.
He doesn't rescue the sound, but he feels it goes towards him like something inevitable.
The twilight paints his eyes, quiet shadows.
He holds the violin, like a child, under his coat. The child is safe.
If they shoot, they'll have to shoot first him and then, the child.

Landscapes are too big. They tire you.
Everything moves far: faces, what you remember, what you forget.
You are not sure if it is the thing that move or your gaze.
The only thing that moves towards you, pure metal, is death,
It is closer than a breath, closer than pain.
And yet, you resist.
You continue the rituals of daily life,
The rituals that can slow time, like afternoon tea sips, the hours that don't exist,
The garden that doesn't exist is exquisite.

We are not alone in our body: the big unknown inside us has faces, shapes.
We eat our lunch, we feed the unknown with a careful spoon, slow.,
Like someone who feeds a child.

Life is not simple, but nothing is really simple, not even simplicity.
Life feeds what exist: the body.
It feeds what doesn't exist: what we forgot, the dreams.
It can give a spoon of dust to both, the big poison.

***

The seasons I live are square, the seasons of a window.
When you live the numbers, when the numbers live you,
Everything has to be precise: three meals a day,, the square sun over your table.
It's autumn, the absence changes hues,
Nothing is dying, and yet, everything looks over its shoulder:
The big nostalgia for itself.
Leaves grow old, long before they begin.
Words grow old long before they were said.
A leaf, its skin peeling, peeling, in my thoughts.
Winter.
The rain washes away the colors that have lost the color and even the memory of sadness.
I know with the knowledge of the body, ages beating like rain somewhere deep,
That the season I have is the season I lost.

Barricaded in the room. I count numbers and they count me, each day from the beginning,
Yet, autumn enters,, an antiquary shop of sadness, an odor of absence in the air.
The obscure pores of sadness, all obscurity begins in fear . The obscurity in the humble is huge, bigger than themselves. Autumn grow old inside them, long before it begins.
The energy left is weary, the hand falling from a gesture. The antiquary shop tires me.
Each autumn brings us to our last autumn, like each spring.
The wind: dust of lives and stars. It peels off our ears, it draws trenched lines in our eyes.
We are deaf, blind, ready for nothing, even though we are dressed, ties, goats' skin, as if ready for the journey.
Everything is an atrium of the unthinkable that become a thought,
Everything is the sandcastle of a child.
Some day, all knowledge will be a book half read left on our bed, un-teachable, untaught
But there will be one last question. It will be human. It will be lonely.

The slow night. I close with my eyes lashes the nothing, the insomnia.
The room of numbers move towards the absence.
The absurd of counting, of being counted tires me.
The lambs I counted in my childhood are dead.
The wind makes the shadows shiver, they may be flags of something,
But shadows know nothing about flags, they float, smugglers of borders.
The room is too small for the moon. I try to imagine its color: a white metal melting on the roofs.
Letters walks on the walls, like the walls of Daniel: something that should have been said, that was said. Walls are the big deaf of the world.
Down below: the river of the street, people flow there, the shapes of time,
The shapes flow like time in the paper boats of a child,
They shipwreck in the first sea : the puddle of the child.

Also today the world doesn't turn. It stagnated in the void.
I postpone my will, my thoughts, I postpone my life.
All I can do is write numbers; my three meals a day,
Even the thought of death is audible.
All words are a translation: I speak to others, and through them, I speak to myself.
Life is numbers. I cannot count all the numbers I have postponed.
There are too many colorless weathers. Glass. They exhaust me.
Life is a promise that grew too tired, too glassy, to promise anything.

In spring time I grow suddenly old: the living light and the corpse of my feelings,
The hours of numbers subtract each, years from the account,
There are too many numbers, too few year.
The tyrant of spring, the nostalgia for an impossible exile,
My sleep doesn't sleep, my eyes open inside, It is the insomnia of what I think, of what I forgot.
I get up from a sleep I didn't sleep, the square sky in the window: empty, but a sliver of a moon left after the wreckage of the temples.
My eyes: a pilgrim. That's enough.

***

The unknown crouches somewhere in the known,
Among the tress of time, the trees of Eden.
The face of Eve is the shape of the known, but it doesn't know itself.
The misunderstanding of reality become us.
The journey to human is a journey to a name. Without a name, things don't exist.
Arrival, nameless, the skin peeling like time, doesn't exist.
We don't know where the thoughts come from, who thinks our thoughts, which fountain leaps and sinks back to itself.
We don't recognize our feelings, so, we give them a name.
The mist is sad in a monotonous way, like us.
And the numbers, the years of tired desks count me.
I am always less.

Dreams are banal, because everybody dreams.
Evening, slow as the world, as patient. I return from the desk that twists my back,
That bends what I feel, that makes me paper: an account book, the money of someone else.
I dream numbers, they come row after row, the terrible army, the mechanical echoes
Empty into me,
I am a number, like life, like god.

***

Sunset.
I return home, the numbers in my motions, like eternity, the accountant of the sky.
Prayers are numbers.
A sense of peace in the air, it is not mine, scattered haphazardly like an abstract painting.
The painting, child and mother to itself,
I don't understand families, maybe I don't know how to feel.
There are too many unfinished things in the air, gestures, the beginning of a smile,
The illusion of a sky, erasing itself in the nothing.
My emotions, like any emotion: layer beneath layer of emotions.
Emotions have roots, they exhale the earth, the years of silence, like scent, like rot.
In a well inside me, somewhere deeper than myself,
I feel the confused magic, the sadness of feeling something.
Who will guard me from my feelings, who will guard my face in the well,
Who will guard me from the numbers, counting, counting.
The infinite universe is too tight. No one can escape the infinite.

I need someone, a rope walker, the tight rope of numbers,
To fall down from the height of what he remembers, what he dreams,
To be my substitute in the world.
I am too weary to be myself.

What you feel is who you are, if you know how to feel,
To see someone alone, and to be alone with him,
To see someone lost in thoughts and to think him.
I am hungry by hungers I didn't taste.
My feet are consumed, the grass glued to the shoes, by journeys I didn't do.
But I am imprisoned in a unique jail: the numbers,
An electrified fence I have to touch, number after number. I am convulsed.
Each one has his oown prison, the hand cuffs on all his motions:
The motions of living, of thinking, of words.

You exist, so you travel always, from one hour to the hour, from one pain to the other,
And maybe all the pains are the same. The repetitions of the journey, you repeat yourself, so you are always different.
Any road will take you to a place like all others: the end of the world.
My journey is from number to number, they repeat themselves, and yet, they make me always the same. They bring me always to the same place: the sadness, tearless, that consumes my eyes, that counts me.
Maybe I am the journey, the only landscape is the landscape of who I am.
I don't know who I am, I don't know if I am a landscape, what landscape knows how to count.

***

THE PICTURE IN THE WINDOW
I stare at the picture. I don't see it. I imagine.
A woman, the smile painted red, the eyes of a child, bigger than her face, bigger than he eyes. The eyes were sad, the sadness of a tear, barren as a belly.
Eyes are numbers, they add digit to digit, the proof of the infinite is the sadness.
Her eyes looked at me as though I knew if god exist, if the soul exist.
I was still, a museum without statues.
I didn't know which window of the human soul did I approach, which sadness.

***

All I write is the quality of the ordinary, all I write is what I don't know.
Days made of numbers, they move, they whisper, but no sea moves in my ears.
Every gesture is the multiplication of the monotonous,
Every gesture approaches too much the borders of my sadness, of my paper skin.
At times, I see myself in someone else,
People are mirrors, like numbers.
The same banality, the monotonous,
As if I touched with all the fingers I own: the senses, the thoughts, the dreams,
The absolute laws of life,
And I don't know if thinking of the laws makes me banal.

***

I don't understand the monotony, the topography of numbness named: my life.
Like a number that repeats itself, defeated, unstoppable.
I don't know who chose whom.
Among us: a layer of bugs, the bugs of necessity, a womb dulled by so much effort
Bearing the bugs of monotony.
We need more water tending us, washing our hands, washing the way things touch us,
Like a small ritual of love.
We need small monotonies, the bugs of monotony : the narrow pupils of fear.
We need small fear.
Maybe some have a secret door, the rust climbs over it, yet, it opens:
Poetry, love, a garden in the back yard of their life,
Maybe, others have nothing to save them from a destiny that chose them,
Because they didn't dare choosing.
Those who live like me will die like me:
They'll stop, like a clock where time broke in a digit.
The space of the hours, the years which was theirs, continues alone.
Maybe when time ends, everything ends, even the numbers that counts it,
Maybe the chaos that began before time began, becomes visible:
A dark mother nursing it secrets.
The bugs among us are famished, they devour us each day more.
Even death is monotonous.
We are child of monotony.
We are step child of time.
We are grandchild of chaos.

***

Slowly, the numbers floating calm as a moon, made me invisible:
A number repeating itself.
I wanted to be visible, I wanted a clear space, light melting in the whiteness of the walls.
I felt all the dimensions of a zero.
I never knew how a zero can crucify me, an empty cross. Zeroes can bleed.
I never knew the martyrdom of the invisible:
A glass snake, from a modern Eden, wrapped around what I think, who I am,
What I love.

***

I pretended I am the tree of knowledge: I am the counter of numbers.
I didn't see the boa of Eden, I am choking, I am a number, a small one
Among all the numbers possible.
And yet, I am the size of whatever I feel, whatever I think, whatever I count,
Maybe that is the size of a human.
The light melts in the glass, from the window I see more world,
Somewhere, the tower of the city, a vacant cliff.
It's soothing, the certainty of something to lean on whatever I see, whatever i feel.
The cliff is vacant. The city melts in the warm glass.
I am happy, nobody can tell what I lack.
The stars spill in, like a waterfall of light, they enter my eyes,
They enter the cosmic void inside me.
I feel the pulse of the most distant star in my pulse.

The sense of smell is like the ten fingers of a touch.
Some days, when the numbers in the book halt the race to the infinite,
I go out to the street, I feel, so I touch the visible, the invisible,
And suddenly the smell of burned wood melting in the air, a round sky like a blue ball.
I see, I touch, the tiny ten fingers of a childhood are a long delicate thread,
I return, against time, to the child.
The only truth that is home, that is poetry.

***

To belong to something.
It is easy to belong to routine. Routine is hope.
I don't know how to belong to the tall mountains, deep as wilderness,
The thin silence of the peak is dangerous, I don't know what it says.
Maybe the world was meant to be flat,
And the mountains were an error of the gods.
I am a low land person, no fireworks of echoes at my walls.
Yet, here, dreams are deeper than reality, taller than reality.
A circus of meanings playing in the plazas of my head.
But the numbers are routine. They follow each other, pale, precise as a snow flake.
They feel safe, tireless as the moon-stone.

I prefer a flower, a simple flower,
To the god who created it.

My dreams dream me. They leave me awake to non existence.
I see them leaving, their vanquished backs. I never knew backs know how to cry.
Life may be generous, it gives us the whole landscape, absolute as an antique world:
Dreaming.
It lets us be victorious against the non existence:
The battle field on a kitchen table, empty cartridges,, crumbs.

Those who dream are poet of silence.
For those who dream, the future came too late.
But I, in my dream peopled city, I know my dream is no longer a child.
I am alone in the big circus of sadness.
I don't know if numbers are sad, if the infinite seizes their senses, howling in their endless eyes.

***

Whatever I dream becomes real as pain.
Whatever I dream: victory. I feel the defeat inside victory.
Love: I feel the separations, the departures in love.
My dreams are not a smile,
But without dreams, all that's left is days made of numbers:
The three meals a day, the starving soul, the mind which peoples a blank room,
Colorless breaths.
I know that dreams are not reality, and yet, they come together, as if they need each other
In order to exist, and I don't know whose is the cry.

There were places that were a refuge: a sand castle, the sea.
The scene stands stubborn: I went towards the sea, I had to leave myself
In order to dissolve in the foam,
And maybe dissolving is uniting.
I had to come and go, each time from the beginning, like the nostalgia of the waves,
To lie on the sand, the ruins of a twilight in my breath, the sand castle of a child in my breath. The sand castle was alive, it breathed me.

Some things tire me. They are too banal, too monotonous to be easy.
Even rest is not for free, we pay for it, the black coins of time.
Rest tires me.
Living seems a mistake of nature, of a mad scientist.
The room lays siege, the shadows shatter the walls. I write the numbers and I don't know what time it is in my life. Time is a number.
Around be: the bibles of numbers, the fourth wall of loneliness, the dead sweat of dreams,
And I don't know the art of escaping, how to leave behind whatever I have, whatever I am, even the dreams,
To leave behind the hope of finding myself.

***

We are a child who lays siege on heroes, all the shapes of adventure.
We are a child who learned how to speak long before we learned how to hear.
The big deaf of the world.
We don't know what the words didn't say, the dictionary in a comma of silence.
We don't know that knights can speak with the throats of the ten fingers:
The duel of two hours, two heroes of time. A voice that doesn't split castles
With the echo of a spark, it climbs them, like a dream that began
Before we began, that continues, patient, stubborn, careful,
There were it is safe, at the edge of fear.

The sadness. To become famous when you don't believe in the after-life.
I count the numbers each day, and they counts me, and I don't know what the numbers know. How they don't peel off, like paper, like my skin.
In the hours that are mine, I walk on the street, I see things, faces, shop windows, silk shawls
Streaming like time.
Suddenly I am on the silk road: the trees, the farmers of worms, the caravans, the deserts, the dangers, the price of blood, the factory, the machines, the offices, the directors, the small people who weaved their hunger in the shawl. The shawl is exquisite.
I return home exhausted. I lived a hundred lives in one twilight.
I forgot how to cry.

***

I stand, a third rate actor, behind the curtain leaking unclarities:
Trapped like a shield, nameless years draining in my bed, what I forgot because I couldn't remember.
No one is ready for what he forgot.
I return to my third rate room,
I lost the play, I lost the key, I lost the years.
No one is ready for what he has lost.
When the tide is low, when the clarities peel off like skin, like water,
No one is ready for love.

The hours made of numbers defeat me in the battle field of a clock,
They plunder my moments, something precious leaking from my fingers.
I don't have time to think, so I don't exist .
I feel that imagining life, is much better than living. Who I could be:
A far sea moving in my ear in a map that doesn't exist.
I look, but my eyes posses nothing.
Eyes have no roots, I am ready to posses the nothing.

LITANY
We are like two chasms
Standing by the sky-river.
Maybe love is a child climbing a ladder that doesn't exist
To wash its delicate toes.

***

We don't believe that happiness exists, that there is a deep mine, the old jewel smoldering
And we are too vacant to dig.
We don't believe that something will make the clouds lighter,
The clouds disperse, like torn pieces of foam, like stray animals,
But inside us it's cloudy,
Inside us, years leak in our sleep obstinate, obsessive, sad.

The sunrise, the red tear of dawn.
Again, the big orphans of the world produce mothers, metal, useful, useless,
And the numbers produce themselves, as if they didn't fear the infinite.
Everything I searched for, I gave up, because I had to search, because uncertainty is pain,
An embryo sipping blood in a womb that doesn't exist.
The five fingers of touch, touched, but they posses nothing.
My hands stretch high: the sky is empty, the sky doesn't exist.
Even the sunrise is not a smile, it is too old to believe in something,
Too old to save our masks of fury.

***

Time slows down, there are a hundred hours in each hours,
The arena is invisible, yet everything defeats you: time, the numbers, the fatigue
You think without thinking, you feel without feeling, yet, you feel the tiredness, you feel the suffering. The pain: a sea pulsing under your skin, salt, salt under your skin.
You cannot describe fatigue, describing will give it color, and fatigue is colorless,
Like absence, like the void in the middle of who you are.
You are fatigued when they sell whatever you own: hands, mind, even your shadow,
Only the fatigue is yours.
You are fatigued when your soul can no longer delude itself:
The sky is empty, and there is no ladder.

The song of what doesn't exist
I live days of numbers, and I don't know who really exist: the number, I.
I long to carry towards what should exist, the glory that doesn't exist,
My feathered helmet.
The helmet defeats me, it is defeated in a deep arena that defeated itself long ago.
I plunge into a sea that doesn't exist,
The water, a salty sheet, over all that exist in my life, all that doesn't exist.
They are inseparable, as if they belonged to each other,
the same sea pulses its salt crystals under the skin.
I drown in a sea that doesn't exist, only the feathers are visible.
Maybe victory and defeat belong to each other,
Like the visible inside the invisible.
I won, and I am defeated.

The big anguish comes like a cosmic avalanche,
But I am not a star, I have no orbit under my roots.
Even sleep, a leaf undoing its yellow caves, betrays me,
The cave cracks, it is awake, like me.
Whatever I am: the numbers, the memories, the forgetting, the dreams,
Are awake in my sleep: a lake thick with fish and clarities.
There is pleasure in clarity.
Their is suffering in clarity.
My face in the lake is a cry.
One life time is not enough for the cry.

***

We are alone in our body, and we are together.
We touch each other, two houses shoulder to shoulder,
Each touch takes something from the other, a dissolving wall, a window,
And gives something from itself, a drop of dawn, raining, raining.
We learn how to be more ourselves, more others, everything is tangled,
We untangle nothing.
Truth is tangled: the shadow inside the light, the silent balcony that is a procession of the big noise of the sky, walking words. It gives us more truth.
We look, we see, yet we posses nothing, we create memories, they posses us.

I write so that I'll lose myself.
The tedium of numbers, of existence, the fourth wall of loneliness.
Writing is a narcotic, a scar. The pain alive beneath it is muzzled.
It lets my hallucination forget all that I don't resist remembering.
I hallucinate sea gardens, imperishable green in an antique book,
A safety exit from myself.
I write in order to lose myself, like a river falling, a blizzard of water,
Into the sea, where they lose their name.
I write our sadness.

I was a modern Diogenes, a torch in my hand.
But the torch burned all the horizons, it peeled off their skin like paper.
Maybe it was too early, or too late for truth.
Each number became hours, the big struggle.
Also the dreams were not a smile.
Maybe it was too early or too late for dreams.

The past was a step mother, fingers keeping the shadows,
And the future came always too late.
Time was not love.
You are alone,
The knife in the middle of your cry, like a battle that began when you began.
You are a refugee from time,
And the closed eyes of the doors are an endless corridor of silence.
You cry,
But who will hear your cry.
There are no men out of time, no angels.

***

The numbers defeat me always more,
I don't know if they are real, if they exist, if the non-existent can defeat a human.
I think what exists, what doesn't exist, in the same thought.
Today my thoughts are pages of my private bible: torn, blown away,
Years withered, the size of a leaf.
I feel that truth is my personal Sodom.
It is behind me, it is mine, as long as I don't turn around to look.
I am foot-cuffed in a truth I don't know,
And there is no other bible to escape to.
I am frail as ancient clay, one cry may shiver it to pieces.

On one can understand a feeling he never felt.
I cannot explain fatigue to someone cold, restful as a photo.
Fatigue has no grammar,
Yet, it exists, no matter the grammar.
My fatigue empties everything: the yesterday, the tomorrow,
The lines of hope in the palm.
How can I explain emptiness.
When I'll say that the number I count and that count me, are empty,
Not even the numbers will know what I mean.
I don't think that numbers need meaning in order to exist, to be an actor, a stage, to be deep.
Who would believe I feel something too simple to be said.
Who would believe the unsaid can be a prison:
A cell without walls, without definition of what walls are.

The numbers in my book count me, they count the world,
But how can they count the infinite in each thing, in each number.
Maybe the numbers feel they are real, maybe they don't know they are a dream of reality,
My dreams feel they are real, a blizzard of wings in a pale winter, they don't know that reality dreams, a tapestry on the wall of a day, a rainbow in a sky that doesn't exist.
Which number can count reality?
Which suspense story of a crime that exists, yet doesn't exist, can discover the ambush of reality.
How can a children story find the infinite in each thing: in red painted laughter of a clown,
In the tear of a fish.
How can I find the infinite in a silence.

***

We live such anonymous lives. We don't know our name.
We live on a stage in a play we don't recognize, in the mother tongue of an orphan,
Knowing that words are only translation makes us even more foreign.
And the person in our head, the one who thinks, who dreams, who speaks with his thoughts, with his dreams, there are no translations.
This person is invisible.
The person that is us is an absence, stalled in paint, an exquisite picture.
We look and our eyes posses nothing.

Living and dreaming, we bear them and they bear us,
We are a mother and a child.
Under the corrosive sun everything dissolves, and maybe dissolving is uniting.
Living and dreaming, a tangle, a spider web, the long slim fingers of sunset inside a sunrise,
Beautiful as pain.
We dream ourselves and the dreams dream us.
There is no poetry without dream,
There is no dream without poetry.
Beneath nights blue with cold, dreams are the biggest poets.

Around me, the fog is solid, there is no clarity,
I don't want the others to know who I am.
How in such mild air the fog is so obsessive. I look, my eyes laced with foam.
I don't know who I am, where I come from, where I go.
I am alone, the fog ferrying the smells of absence.

***

There is the lucidity of dreams,
The logic of the impossible.
I don't know if lucidity is really lucid, it could be the logic of the impossible.
I don't know who dreams whom.

My poem, a wall tapestry with flowers,
I take it into the rain, without umbrella,
We want to be real.
In the rain, the water gossips, it brings the poem closer,
Words of water in our ears.

I don't know where the desert inside me began,
In which thirst, in which indifference.
I wrote paper tears,
But rarely my tears were water.
I was orphan.
An analphabet in emotions,
An analphabet in memories,
And nothing, not the forgetting, not the illegible feeling,
Were mothers.

No one knew who I was.
No one knew the time table, the last train.
No one knew I was on the train, and waiting in the station.
It was too late for waiting.
No one knew if the late comers had a name.
It was too late for names.

***

There are feelings that crucify me,
And I don't know who crucifies whom,
Who can be utterly innocent, utterly guilty.
The crucifying is bewitched,
The crucifying is the exorcist:
I write on the cross the feelings that crucify me, the feelings I crucify.
I write and the pain of the cross, the pain of the bleeding nails, is soothed.
But life anchors itself to pain, port by port, like footstep multiplied in the water,
And I don't know when, where will the next crucifying be,
In which fear, in which longing, in which love.

People like me, the ones whose days are made of numbers,
The numbers count the roof of rain, three meals swallowed in the silence,
Swallowing the silence.
People like me, time : slow like a planet, the future comes too late.
Whatever I wanted was lost: shadowy chambers,, a moment before the shadows,
Everything drowned, like a slow shipwreck of the possible.
In the mad theatre of life, living is acting, it eases, it doesn't release.
Everywhere, the endless repetitions that make us different, that make us the same.
I don't know if I am different enough to be different,
If I am the same enough to be the same.
I am poet of lost battles, the glorious retreats.
My poems write me in parenthesis, in commas of silence.
I feel only what I write.
I don't know in which deep jewel smothering, in which purgatory, feelings begin,
I never knew paper cries.

I want the impossible. To be someone else. To etch another window in my tears.
Being myself is hard work, the disbelief in bridges is lonely .
And dreaming of being other is, like all dreams, a slow shipwreck of the impossible,
And you don't know who survived, if there were survivors.

Each morning I pretend to be myself:
The lost battles that I continue to lose,
The slave traders imposing on the shadows the noise, the ships:
The numbers and the men that make me count,
Subjugating me to a life that was lost each day from the beginning.
And I don't know why I don't cry.

***

I was born old, older than myself,
Stars, water sunk, like double eyes, blinked and died,
And i continue to be born, each day older, I continue to die.
Life is not generous with the old.
I don't know why it doesn't open the sea when I drown,
Why It exiles me, like a refugee from time,
Why does it leave me, like a refugee, like a cry,
At the closed silence of doors.
Life is old too,
And I don't know what it hides beneath its wrinkles:
A feather, a knife.

It rains.
I am sad because I feel too much,
Because I remember too much,
The memory that becomes effort, purposeless, a little Sisyphus.
The memory that is the proof that I exist.

***

We are all refugees from time,
We run, the fever trickles in our hair.
We leave behind the sound of our foot steps, echoes spark on the stones,
In our hands: tiny shoes.
And we don't know who will guard the shoes,
Who will guard the tiny shoes from growing old before they were a child,
Who will guard the first refugee from time,
Who will guard the cry that holed the paper skin of a day.

Life was always pain., the hours that were drugged,
The numbers that raped the hours.
But, there is no wall melting into a door, there is no escape from life.
Whatever route I took, was a short cut to where I am, more raped than ever.
Thinking too much killed whatever was spontaneous,
I killed the sand castle of a child.
I thought too much, I killed, neither indifferent, nor cruel, I only knew too little, the longing, I killed the courage to cry, to tear the water inside me.

My dreams, my sand castles crumble, a mild hill shrinking,
But I don't care,
I wasn't there, I was in the dream of somewhere else,
I am not guilty.
My only truth is the sand.

I like to be undefined, unpredictable,
Like the play of chaos with order, I don't know if there are loosers.
I don't know who I am, but my dreams see me,
Maybe they know my name, my address.
I remember little: a childhood.
The tiny shoes in my hand, two butterflies, don't know me.

***

I am too tired to count numbers,
The numbers become my hours. They tire me.
I feel in order to think, I think in order to feel.
I am in a cosmic orbit, unmiraculous, unwinged.
It is not easy to live at the center of who you are,
It is not easy to know what is the center, if there is a center,
It is not easy to sense the closeness of faces in the orbit.
I feel that closeness is not safe, not even to myself, the throats of my wrists scream.
The only protection is the silence, silence is strong in building borders, motes of a castle.
I live distant, inexplicable, I am my own riddle. Maybe there are no answers, maybe the Answers area man with a white smile, a dam of tiny teeth, utterly childish,
They know the taste of something real.
And I don't know what is the center of who I am,
If there is closeness.

Inside me, the forgetful surf, the surf, too forgetful for metaphysics.
I know some simple things,
And I know that nothing is really simple, not even simplicity.
Favors, a sun ray striking like damnation, they invade me,
And sincerity is a favor I don't need.
I feel tenderness to whatever lets me be where I am, the alone.
I sit in the cafes, and I am a passer by in the streets of my life, in the streets of the Numbers.
I don't know if I am good or evil, If I am a beach of goodness, the sea of evil- the sea is not a smile.
I never knew who is guilty, who is innocent. I don't know if the numbers are an alibi.
I don't know if innocence exists.

***

My eyes see. They posses nothing.
The visible is bruised by seeing.
The invisible is what the visible senses.
I think one can cry when he sees too much or too little.
I cry and I don't know how much can a bruise, the eye peeling like paper, see.

People like me whose hours count them, whose number count them,
People who drag their shadows in the big circus: life,
The only magic possible is seeing,
But the magic bruises them, it has too few dimensions to enter:
The simple pain which is never simple, the muzzled thoughts: the silece.
I see 'I', I see 'others', there is no 'we'.
So rarely we remember that the others have a soul too, that they exist.
I envy the bees. Their 'we' is magic.
I don't know how the others see me, in which moon the color of metal,
Which phantom, flattened to a picture in the eye.
And I cannot step out of myself, dimension by dimension, to see how I am.
The geology of what we think, what we know, is layer beneath layer.
The thoughts are too many, the scribble on each other, utterly illegible:
The architecture of tears, the feelings that were orphans even before they began.
I don't know if there is a layer 'we', if it is one too many dimension to enter.
I don't know if one life time, one soul are enough for the 'we'.

People like me, the habits are solitude, not 'we'.
People like me,
The solitude, creates us, like a god, in its own shape, the clay in its hands is still wet .
The palms open like a cry.
When I am alone, I have, like a child, an imaginary friends,
We answer questions before they were asked,
And we play, the old jewel that reason, loveless, untouchable as tomorrow, didn't plunder.
Speaking to people tires me, I feel anxious as if I was guilty of something I don't remember, at time I think their gaze was studied as a crime.
And I don't know who is guilty, who is innocent, I don't know if one hour, a glazed spark before the last sun, there will be judgment.
I don't know if god exists.

***

People like me, whose past came too soon,
Nothing left to change,
Not even the numbers that become the date of something that doesn't exist,
That become a hand, creased, scarred, time leaking from the crack between the fingers.
People like me, nothing is possible,
In the big windows of the world: all the impossible, its skin glass, its skin paper.
Beneath our eye lashes the visible peels, peels.
At time we gather in the throat of our fist the impossible, a cry.
At times we hold the impossible, like a hand, alone in our pocket.
The possible tries to break the glass, the fist,
Maybe the shards are a manual of living, incomplete, imperfect.
Maybe truth is a broken glass.
And I don't know if a broken truth is still truth.
I don't remember the manual of living, the throat of the impossible .

***

People like me never feel safe, the smell of salt in our feet, like pain,
The deserted village, humble, humbling.
I protect myself,
The entrenched the space of being, the numbers: my paper castle,
All around: the silence of doors.
I am silent, I am free in my silence, silence after silence offers itself to me, a mute mote.
I would like to say I am a slave to no one,
But I am slave to the numbers: the roof of rain, the three meals in the kitchen,
And I don't know in which absence, in which day, selling its images, freedom exists.

***

Again and again,
You confuse Eros with love.
You don't know that the halo of love is big, bigger than dimension of fantasies, than who you are,
That the longing for love posses you.
You are possessed.
You'll never be virgin again,
And you don't know if first love exists.

***

The blue mist dragging the sea.
I see.
To be able to see into my eyes, and into the eyes of others, the eyes that see me.
To be able to see this truth,
To be able to cry, the cry cracked, whole as truth.
My life: a second hand stage,
A second hand tragedy, the only hero is defeat,
And the numbers that defeat me, hero bby hero.
My life: a cell, the shadows melt in the walls. A sentence to life,
A sentence to silent. There are no words left.
I didn't know that the unexpected, a blizzard of wings in the roof,
Is the expected. Betrayal has one dimension too much.
There is no paradise for those whose life is maimed, no crutches,
And the solitude has no feet.
I didn't know how to accept life, my life, I couldn't accept that suffering
Igniting a dead flame is holy,
And all I want is to accept myself, or at least to like it,
To have someone to help me weep.

***

I was alone with my numbers,
Mute, practical boats in a sea that doesn't exist.
I was a guest, everywhere, a tourist in the empty benches of memory.
Maybe my halo is cold with blue veins, as if I didn't know how to feel,
I don't know if i suffer, I don't know if indifference is suffering.
I follow the future that left, the things I wanted died a quiet death in the future.
I don't know if the future will find me,
If the numbers, my practical boats, will find a beach that exist.
I don't know if numbers are happy, if beaches are happy.
I don't know how to be happy, maybe I love myself too little, I am a step child of myself.
Maybe content will be a mother, warm worlds shake from the oars, from the white motions.

***

They say that if you give love, you lose love,
But love is a tapestry on a wall that doesn't exist, so how can you give it?
People like me, too lonely to love,
They learn how to dream love.
Among the sirens of time, dreams are always dreams. They are safe, they are a practical door.
Maybe the numbers I count dream me,
Maybe they dream the love of numbers, from zero to the infinite.
When inside me, the shapes repeat themselves, like thoughts, like absence,
I know that love is too close to the walls of my city. It peels off my skin, like dust.
And I don't know why the distances leak from the cracks of my fingers, the gutters are dry.

Woman, you are in my poem,
But I cannot write you, only a gaze, quick, white, butterflies in your breath.
And I cannot write love, only a shape dreaming inside me, a color replenishing itself.
Woman, you are in my poem, you are not mine.
I posses only the moment you appeared,
A green wind in the huge tree of the night, a leaf crackling.
This moment is mine.

I would like to be a face in a train's window,
A train that goes nowhere. The frozen smoke.
I would like to be in a vacant station, the station of the impossible.
To feel at peace with the train, with the station, with who I am.
But people like me, too exhausted to feel,
Peace is as tasteless as a shadow, it dissolves, dissolves.

***

Numbers don't know how to forget,
But, at times, I forget the numbers, the gods of my hours,
I see the world. It is like the world of a child, pictures of the impossible, I fold my hand on a mountain, I love with my eyes.
But the eyes open inside are indifferent, like the eyes of fate, they don't feel, you are not safe in your feelings, feelings break apart like the world. Fate doesn't know how to cry 'help'.
I love what is external, what is not invasive like a shriek. The facade of a woman is safe.
When I want to look deep, the bottom of the sea, the blue coral, sunken time,
I look in myself.
I sit in the small room, silent, handcuffed to the laws of big numbers,
My eyes, a window of hurt. I travel in this window, I observe, I love with my eyes,
With what my eyes remember. The only love available.

I don't know the address of the soul,
But I see it. I see how quiet, how fragile it leaks in the dreams, in the gestures,
How it repeats itself.
We all have a soul, we all dream it,
And yet, the dreams are an impressionist canvass: the yellow minute before the wind walks, faces like broken clocks, everything is similar, nothing is the same.
Maybe the dream are the best thing a soul may have.

***

It is strange, we live where it is dangerous, where certainty doesn't exist.
In the room where I count the numbers, all our infinites lose life after life.
People come, drunk on reason, they don't know they have a soul, they don't know that my numbers have a soul.
Religion became myths.
Debates brought questions. There were no answers.
All that's left was a doubt, doubt is pain,
And a freedom for which no one was prepared. It was too lonely, the white clouds dragging all our dimensions.
We didn't inherit the doubt, the anarchy of living.
Alone in the room with my numbers.
They give me a direction, the colors of remembering, the quiet sense of what walks towards the infinite.
Each number is a written soul,
The letters walking carefully, precariously, like something rare.

***

Time was younger. People kept the altars, the God, without knowing why.
Today, we lost God, as if we knew the 'why'.
People chose another God: Nature, the ritual of liberty, of the equal.
In my room, the light melting in the walls, there are only numbers,
Everything is a number, even God.
There is equality in the numbers, each 'one' is simply 'one',
And the laws of Nature are numbers, they are God,
They know that beyond the laws of nature there are only the laws of nature,
They don't rebel. They choose the only possible: they accept.
They dream, like me, so as to smell the whiteness,
To touch a number more perfect, ten white fingers deepening the infinite.
My numbers: an avalanche of white stone in what I think, in what I am.
I knew that everything is imperfect, a number could always be bigger,
And yet, perfection exists: each number is perfect in what it is.
Night falls, slow as the world, sudden.
The day empties its images in the window.
People are numbers, they add themselves to each other, they subtract.
Night falls.
The eyes, the dreams walk by me to a sense I know and I I forgot:
I smell the whiteness, I smell the depth.

***

I don't know where the dreaming began.
Maybe it is the genes, the Samurai death mask that make us dream or die,
Maybe the numbers that cross our lives, endless, real-unreal.
I don't know if numbers dream, if the infinite dreams,
Maybe it is the anonymous living, mute mannequins behind glass,
Molding us from the delicate distances, streaming, walking bare toes in our veins.
I dream, but I didn't flee life, I simply changed lives, I chose the lives and they chose me..
Dreaming is an art, a sculpture of a reality, my stone head.
To see myself from outside, to see from within,
How quiet pain walks in my skin.
To know myself, one day maybe to know also the others

We live where we fear.
I feel how reality bruises me, and the thought that others feel, dream too leave me face to Face with a bold sun, scorched, squandering my summers.
I know the mask of gestures,
I know how the stranger somewhere deep, deceives me, again and again.
I see only what my dreams can use, the rest is trash.
I dream myself, invent myself, I am each time different. I don't know what time it is in my dream, and i don't know in which dream to find myself,
In which palm of secrets, in which number that counted my life, in which stone head,, in which time, in which Death mask, in which eternity.

***

Bending shortens you. You are invisible, your life, the numbers, the ones who sit on tall chairs, make you always more invisible.
You are too invisible to love, too lonely.
They say we came here to lift heavy weights, but love is a Sisyphus, and being loved is a second stone.
Why do we know ourselves so little.

You want to be free in the anonymous, in your silence,
To be alone, to lie by yourself quietly thinking thoughtless,
But feelings are a moon, the moons is not a door,. The best ring finger cuffs you.
There is no freedom in love.

Why everything is change, private impermanence in a lidless room,
Why even the numbers that count me, count always someone else.
Why what is becomes what is not, maybe what is not, yet is, is the only truth.
Why everything is a memory that didn't happen yet.
Why the solitude is a bridge between myself and myself, why bridges measure the distances between everything,
Why the cities beneath my feet are a bridge between what was, what is not,
Why do my feet mumble silence after silence.
The only thing I own is this moment where i am who I am, where I'll be other.

Why do we know ourselves so little.

In the big circus, the ten hours a day rope climbing, the hours count you, the rope, the numbers.
Night falls slow and sudden, in the infinitesimal light of the stars, you walk along the sea,
The stars are double eyes, the waves are no longer water, they are an echo of something that never existed.
At times, thoughts are not a noun, they are a verb, they travel, they work, they jostle each other for space, for the unthinkable.
At times emotions are a verb, they lie down, the grass is too full for words. It is pure feeling. I want to know why emotions are real only when they become memories.
And time, another verb, walks by me, hoods me. I don't know what time it is in my life.
Time counts how many I am, how many of myself-es I loved,
How many of myself-es loved others. And who will count my absence.

How can one die utterly,
When he thinks the unthinkable, when emotions find him on the grass too full for words,
When he moulds the dead echoes into a story, the myth of beginnings, like a god.
Why do we die, a half read book on our bed.
How can one die utterly.

***

The mute tears, only the numbers counting me, a whisper,
Time flickers into extinction in the whisper.
Only the dreams float beneath time.
They count nothing, they measure nothing, they let you be someone else
Even when you are yourself,
They let you dream the poem long before it was thought.
Maybe the first human dream was paradise, you entered the bible, Adam and Eve were beautiful, they walked like children, but a little different, because the bible was no longer a child, because there was the nostalgia for love, the way a child loves.
They were always close, always further than hope, there was a sentence to unhappiness,
And the eternal sound of the rain: the sound was dry. They were thirsty.

Children books should be clear, the hero should never die,
Obscurity starts with danger,
Dead heroes are alive, pirates, they plunder the childhood from a child,
He grows suddenly old.

I write because whatever to be said was said, but is forgotten a moment before the voice.
I write because I dream in verses,
Because the dreams can paint the infinite indifference close as a photo, a smile frail as paper.
I live with my hands in my pockets, each hand alone.
I believe that the nothingness is an answer to a question I don't know,
And I believe in sleep: the slow rebellion against a reality that is bankrupt,
The money is paper, dry leaves, the mathematic of love: the parallel lines,
The shaman of what doesn't exist.

***

The space between one number and the other, a blank smaller than the breath of a child.
Numbers are hard work,
And yet they let my thoughts, nomad in a space that doesn't exist, think.
The potion of our feelings in alchemy, a mad scientist.
Maybe the future will split the fire more precise, igniting glassed flames,
We'll use like time, years in our dimensions,
But there are too many dimensions in our dimension:
God, dreams, the 'I', what we remember, the height of our eyes,
The dimension where the real and the unreal continue each other,
Where the era of fish and the 'now' are entangled.
I believe in dreamers, the seers, finding the moon-metal in all dimensions, precise as light.

Nothing is simple,
not even the numbers that count me, that see me like a gift of a difficult morning.
Even saying 'halo' means meeting. Meeting is never simple.
My feelings are opaque, not easy to find, they are nomad in my time,
Nomads in what I am.
I envy the artists who painted what they felt, that touched it.
Pain is different, I feel it and it feels me, against the cracking wall, I feel compassion for Something, for everything.
At night, my eyes closed in, closed out, they unload their feelings onto the dark,
All they feel is the big absence,
The huge bed, the black sheets, where my feelings, opaque, nomads, can rest at long last.

At time I love the slight fever:
The endless race of numbers, passing the torch to each other.
I am exhausted, my paper skin peels off,
The numbers write me.
And my eyes are paper, the numbers are merciful: a paper tear in what I see, in what I don't see.
I have nothing to bequest.
The real and the unreal continue each other, a train to somewhere I don't know.
The race of the numbers, the fever that ignites me.
My paper eyes sooth me, like a written lullaby.
The half read book on my bed read half of me.

***

The long hours of numbers walk in my old shoes.
There is nothing new, nothing uncountable so that I feel I exist.
In those hours, everything is the beginning of a birth, the impatience,
The feelings one inherits from the first moment of the first hour.
Maybe what I feel lasts too little to bear something.

I am at least two men, or even more.
I am here, and I am always under a bold sun, somewhere else.
My words shipwreck, like a gold fish, in liquid thoughts, a beautiful aquarium,
The thoughts that didn't know how to become words,
Maybe they thought a manual for small murders,
But I was somewhere else. I am innocent.

The numbers hurt me. They are the possible.
I long for the impossible, because the impossible exists.
The nostalgia for who I wasn't, because the who I wasn't exists.
And pain exists: in the possible, in who I wasn't, even in dreams.
The impossible dreams in my dreams.
And who we are is flattened in a picture, we lose at least one dimension:
To know who we are, to believe we are real.
We come here imperfect, broken, and we become always less complete.
The visible, what happens around us, vanishes, easy as a breath
We long for the dimensions we lost.
There is an old sad jewel smoldering beneath us.

The fine fiber of thoughts weave the feelings in their fabric.
The knot of thoughts is pain.
Thoughts don't know how to weep.

***

Some evenings, when thinking is too old to be virgin,
I read my ancient papers and they read me.
Everything is the color of a slow rain,
I shipwreck in the puddle of a child that doesn't exist,
I don't know how to say my name, my address,
There was no ground floor of life free,
A basement, the petrified light, is enough.

Wedded without love to the numbers,
There are the thought, I am free in my thoughts,
There is the imagination, I am free in my imagination,
But I forgot to imagine what is real.
I am too tired to feel, I am not free in my fatigue.
I am not free in my numb groans.
I am not free in the nostalgia for what I wasn't.
I stand by a door shut by silence. I am too alone to enter.
I am not free in the silence, I am not free in the alone.
I don't know how to cry.

The numbers count my life,
Feelings are a number, an equation,
When something is missing, something is added,
I don't know who adds, who subtracts,
How hate can become love,
I don't know who is guilty, who is innocent,
I don't know if numbers are a true confession.

Bent always over numbers,
Life feels like a back ache,
And the soul- an unfinished number, peeling off like paper, like skin.
At night, the numbers come towards me, like a tide without a moon,
Seas beyond vision, I spill vision, sea after sea,
I drift blind, deaf, ready for nothing.

***

Some, die in order to live.
Some, like me, live in order to die.
Each day is a day of life lost, each number is a moment of life lost.
There are too many numbers and only one life.
Dreaming is the confession that life is not enough,
And art is dead nature: a statue, the stone flickers towards extinction, the hard fire.
A vase of flower that died a moment before painted.
Even the big longing is baptized inside us, alone,
A bridge of vapors to a god that doesn't know we exist.
We are never one with god, all obscurity starts with danger, the fear of height, the fear of debth.
We are never one with ourselves, as if a piece of us was lost, and we don't know in which
Kingdom's border we'll find it, in which truth.

It's morning.
The numbers tire me even before they begin.
I walk down a street, as if still asleep, time beats like rain,
But it is not enough for waking.
The inertia of the will: I cannot think, I cannot speak, I cannot feel, I cannot love,
And I am saved, I am numb, I cannot hurt
The vacant heaps the silence over words.
I sense the danger of sleep walking. It inebriates me.
My motion don't betray the sleeping will,
But maybe one night, the moon will bring the tide too close,
I'll drown in my sleep, in my drowsy will, in the street, in my life.

***
Maybe my face was trenched line after line like a disease, when the first thought began.
The chaos was inside me, at the edge of danger.
Inside me order is hedonism,
Even the urge to bring order the endless numbers, the endless hours the urge used,
Was pleasure.
But what is disease, what is health, which is more natural, even the leaves fall sick in autumn.
I use the chaos in tangled streets, in the confused noise of stone, I use it for the hedonism of order. I tidy even my dreams.
I need so little: the chaos, the toy of life is enough.
I sense my body flickering towards extinction like a silent twilight, at night I fold my longing for love in a tidy drawer.
Is the longing for love a disease, is age a disease. Even the light doesn't blossom at twilight.

There are deserted village peopled with faces.
The deserted village is my life, only the numbers remained, and I don't know if they have enough free will, if they can be alive.
I feel the others, but I have to explain to myself what the feeling feels, how does it feel.
The fatigue of choice is suffering. Each hour is across road, each number is a cross road.
I am too tired even to want, to be someone else.
I feel life drowns inside me, as if the deserted village was a dead lake floating towards me,
Troubling the face of the silence.

***
Nothing is easy in the suburbs of life.
I have to find in second hand markets
My first hand dreams, my first hand longings.
I don't know if numbers dream in the pause between digit and digit, between reality and reality.
There may be first hand stars also here, in the suburbs of living, the first hand blizzard of wings, of a poem that didn't happen yet, the first hand dream in a room with the fourth wall of reality.
There may be, like an anticipated memory, a first hand tear.

***

Numbers are never violent, they don't rebel, they try to change notheing.
Young man, revolt? Change?
The civil war somewhere deep defeated you, you are a deserter,
You come from the era of the fish.
You try to change the fish.
Young man,
You don't know how to change yourself, how to weep over the corpse of your childhood,
The corpse of the poem that you were, the corpse of your truth.
You cannot resuscitate the dead, there is no Messiah available.
Young man, changing the world?
Let your eyes lean, like a moon, over the sea.
Watch the blue truth of the waters in a pause of quiet, in the pause in the eyes.
The blue truth inherits nothing, no sea no fish. It is true.
Young man,
You can sense the truth, like a tear of the blind,
Like a child.

***

The ones who inherited world are numbers too,
But, numbers are bankrupt, they are paper, like money, they are obscure.
Each obscurity begins with danger,
They tell you real fairy tales,
They say you can buy light in the market,
That money is the womb of suns.
Thinkers are the big skeptic. They see.
But when you see, how can you survive,
How can you sell suns, light,
How can you sell futures, happiness.
Truth is bankrupt.

***

Dreams are pure abstract,
They have their own reality, the poetry of reality.
I don't know if numbers are an imperishable garden, a tapestry on the wall, a dream,
Or if they send roots from the wall somewhere in reality.
I walk through a life rootless.
Words don't have roots, the root of my touch is cut. Abstract.
Being a spectator of life soothes me,
Being a spectator of myself is pleasure.
They say that life is a huge museum, they hallucinate, life is motion,
Even true statues are the motion of time in the stone,
And the numbers that I count and that count me, go somewhere.
Life is an avalanche of feet, time beating like rain, leaking into another time.
Life is not a tidy place.

***

The day grows still, the numbers immobile as if the infinite didn't exist,
The whole world is still, as if nothing happened, nothing will happen,
And I am still, no leftovers of pain in the plate.
The calm floats, visible as the useless,
Whatever I etched, slowly, in the window of my inner eye: the remembering, the forgetting, the effort to choose, the effort to live: a foggy lens, small, like something distant.
It isn't the weather, the anonymous color of the day. It isn't.
It is strange.
I see without seeing.
I see life streaming beneath ancient stones, light like a cry that doesn't know itself,
I see the mist flowing inside and out, the mist that doesn't know what it is, what it is not,, Opaque water in the chaos that began before god began.
I see the leaves unfolding their yellow caves, moving without moving, moving without knowing why.
I see the smoke of an old war, the smoke is still, it doesn't know why it chokes.
And I don't know who will guard life flowing lightly, like a cry that doesn't know itself,
Who will guard the mist, the opaque water from an ancient chaos,
Who will guard the leaves in their yellow cave, the leaves that don't know why the yellow,
I don't know who will guard the smoke in the eyes of a child.

***

The old imperfections are tolerable:
I have imaginary friends, long used they became well loves.
The numbers, at night, when they don't work, they dream,
The thousand and one nights, a Scherezade that loves me,
A reality that loves me.
Somewhere inside, everything is tangled,
The fragile distances from others,
The indifferent longing for love,
And the dreams: imaginary friends. Also dreams die,
Something in myself is lost.
But life is the art of loosing.
Each day I am less,
Each day the impossible is more.
A hot rain melting the shapes of the possible.

***

The numbers that I count and that count me: a manual for survival,
And life is a manual for small eternities, a tool for dreaming:
A curtain falling over an ancient drama, deep inside.
I play myself:
A man belonging to what is distant, to what could be, to the unimaginable
To a love that paints itself in blurred water colors, lost in a delicate distance.
I play the poetry of the impossible.
Inside me: a whole society, I need no longer the chess board, the pawns, the bishops,
Everybody is inside me, they are a chess mate to loneliness.

There is the longing for the impossible:
I weep over the corpse of my childhood. I weep for what never was, a sea leaking in the cracks of the past, I weep for the true past.
No past is the same. There are more pasts than people.
All night long the dreaming, all night long the longing for who I never was.
Dreams are ancient earth, layer beneath layer.
In some vertical time I can find all the pasts that I was, that I wasn't.
The sickness of life peels my paper skin, like loneliness.
Why are there not islands for the sick, for the lonely, to dream, to heal themselves from reality.
Life bruises me. Why living is a motion, why there is so much reality.
I sit in the room with my numbers, another sickness.
Why do I have to count instead of dreaming:
A music flowing through me, me flowing through the music, a long, slow river.
I am in the river and I am at the banks,
The possible is the theatre of the impossible.
I come like a dream, I leave like water.

***

Each day I count new numbers, and they count me, new years, the moment they grow old.
The new is unknown, known as pain, and choosing between the new and the old is a relic of tough weathers, holy, unholy.
I had no choice. I made the fragile distance, far from myself, and dreams don't know the art of living, of closeness.
My life is a Cartago, it must fall, a city in seige, the wind ferrying the smell of dead.
I live, the sea drowns under my skin, like life, like what we call real.
Only at night, alone, reality collapses like a sea-wall into salty marshes.
The night is a refuge.
The fourth wall of loneliness, the tired air in my breath. I speak solitude, I sing solitude,
I cry solitude, I seek solitude.
Nothing remained of the sand castle, not the child, nor the soft imperfections of the sand that loved me.
There is too much autumn inside me, the yellow caves of the leaves fall like old fingers in a
Touch. So light. So heavy.
We die from inside out, pain feels like slow rot. Look how gentle it walks, how invisible,
How inexplicable. So real. It fills my entrails with the grey stench of the impossible
mingled with the possible.
All around: the gravity of the void. Emptiness rolls towards emptiness, like a water fall of dead stars.
I'll die in the last city, the last deserter from myself.
Nothing ever belonged to me,
There was only a picture of the world somewhere inside,
The sea in the sky, the tear of a fish.
All I can take is the picture, the tear.
I want no more from life than the night, the lullaby to pain,
Maybe the numbers know if this is much, if it is little.

***
Time grew old inside me.
Reality and dream: a blizzard of wings in the sky,
I don't know if there are two skies, if only two skies are enough.
I don't know if numbers age, if reality confuses them too,
If they dream even when they work,
If numbers play, if the sums are a hazardous game, who wins, who loses.

Maybe I am a bridge between reality and the dream of reality,
The delicate dimensions between my eye open out, and the eye open in.
Maybe I am a bridge, I measure the distances between the solitudes, the two wings of a butterfly.

Maybe somewhere else life bathes in the sunlight,
But here, in the room, there is a window of twilight,
Life trapped in the window, no motion. Life is still.
In the twilight,
I don't know who I am, who I want to be.
I don't know who writes when I write.
In the window of twilight,
Everything is a distant cry of itself.
What I want back is what I was before the cry.
The weariness of feelings chasing feelings,
The longing to long.
The sadness, like a door closed by a silence.
I don't know if loneliness is a disease or a healer.

I don't know if the numbers by me
See the same twilight, if they feel the same melting light.
I don't know if they can measure the distance between one number and the other,
The mathematic of loneliness.
I don't know if numbers cry.

***

The numbers wrote the poetry of a number, a digit, a child, alone, in the infinite of a day.
At night,
I write the poetry of dreams. Poetry is big, bigger than reality,
I can paint with star colors, my odyssey in space, like an anticipated memory,
I draw the memories that didn't happen yet. I change reality.
Dreams are earth, layer beneath layer,
My dream can be a home: a castle, or the sand castle of a child.
They are may be an old jewel smoldering, priceless.
No one can put a price tag on the priceless.
My poems are paper, like money, but they don't feel bankrupt.
The poetry of a dream is the big alchemist, the golden rain, world under sheer water, the ancient flood of the impossible.
I don't need raining gold. The waters of the impossible are enough.

***

To think that my greatest suffering, the sea under my skin, peeling, peeling, is not really great, is the beginning of knowing the waves, relics of tough weather,
Like the law of big numbers, the infinite, there is always a number that is bigger.
There are many kinds of suffering, more than people.
At times, my suffering is territorial, I need larger space than what I am,
At times it is a moon, the beautiful moon, stealing the sea, wave by wave.
Maybe suffering is as great as what we make it.
We are artists of suffering.
When I suffer, I stand by the river of time, the Jordan my backyard,
I see myself, I leak through the cracked water, I am other.
Time is the mad alchemist of change, even my suffering no longer recognize me.
In the river: the tear of a fish, a forgotten fragment of suffering.

I grew from inside out,
The numbers were tools and hands, they shaped me.
My will: the master of indifference, indifferent like the sky to the will of a cloud, indifferent to who I am, who I am not.
My inertia was a moon, the moon is no door.
The smallest motion could rupture time, the world, the pieces hanging in the air like clouds, pieces of shattered sky.
My inertia was deeper than longing for life, for a touch, for tangible fingers.
It was deeper than the longing for love.

I use numbers so I can measure what's real,
My motions: the motions of reality, the dance of waves, water blossoming in my dreams
My indifference: the indifference of a number to what It counts.
I am a master of indifference, I pass by the ebony air on wings, by the sun sinking under my feet, as if they don't exist.
We are never alone, we are witness to ourselves, we are the judge, encased in glassy eyes,
And there is inside us: a whole society, so we have to put up a good show,
I've learned the role of longing, pale, cracked as an unused smell.
Maybe that's where tears begin.

***

Saturday.
I am a convalescent from a weak of numbers, the six days' disease.
I don't know if the numbers continue to count without me, if they need me,
If the numbers are a gift for difficult mornings: meanings, a direction in the void.
There is a beginning of twilight in what I feel, in what I think. The quiet sadness of light.
The balcony colors my hours, it colors my drowsiness.
The longing for the impossible, the possible that never happened.
I see my voice, falling leafy, yellow.
The balcony is a train station, my face in the train's window, my face in the station,
I see my life, peeling like paper from my face, leaving, leaving.
My eyes closed out, open in, I see.
I see myself a flatten, two dimensional picture,
I feel the big nostalgia for the dimension that was lost, I don't find my shape in the mirrors. The eyes of mirrors are flat.
I feel the longing to be whole, and I don't if whole exists. I don't know if the light includes these things.
The numbers that walk by me, faithful as a shadow, a sere of numbers, half a number or even less, are they whole.
In the balcony, the hours walk cracked, the moments leak, alone as a raindrop. Are they whole.

In the minute pauses between number and number, I read thoughts, I think the thinkable.
But the window by me, full of world, full of the unthinkable. I feel that unthinkable is not enough, but I don't know how to read the window, the infinite details of colors that cannot replenish themselves, of cut paper people, of leaves that have to rash,
Of the wind bending all the hours in the same direction, of the big silence of a child, bigger than his life.
Now, let's meditate upon normality.

***

The years of numbers made me a scavenger of time, of old things.
The past is not ancient enough, everything existed once in the present, even the past.
And I gather details, tiny numbers, like the infinite, the law of big numbers, that is made of small ones, a round belly, like the belly of a fruit.
When I count tiny numbers, whole, half, or even less, their motion smaller than stillness,
Their minute motion translucent like the tear of a child,
The mystery of the infinite seems visible in small things.
The big things, the big numbers, a whole army of numbers, absurd as war, absurd as the cut legs walking, walking. Their absurd is too visible, too obvious to be a mystery.
In the office, I contemplate the parade of tiny numbers. Numbers, almost invisible,
Walking in a raw, so daring, so inexplicable.
I am a scavenger, I remember.

Saturday slows time.
Warm worlds shake from the clock.
I read my poetry of dreams, I didn't know time flows in the words, in the dreams,
I didn't know that everything the leaves in my words, the long fingers: the branches of my dreams, will bow to some big thing. There is courage in this, there is dignity.
I feel that my words were only translation, that translation is hollow, it is cut paper people
Cut paper feelings, it is bankrupt, like money, the cruel paper.
Time rips the paper, an ancient stone knife tearing the syllables, a moment before the begin.
And I feel that translations are a flattened voice, a two dimensional whisper of who I am.
I am left with the longing for wholeness, a raindrop in my palm, the whole world in the rain drop.
I want back the dimension I lost. I am drenched.

***

Life may be a vale of tears,
But people don't have the courage to cry.
We came here to lift big weights, the big noise of stone.
We don't think of death, like a city where time doesn't exist.
We think the thinkable, until the unthinkable begins.
We speak, we touch with shut fingers, slowly the fingers fall from the touch,
We survive the while, arranging the emptiness, and nothing protects us from defeating ourselves, from going on defeated, the shadow starting from our feet.
We know the abstract, we don't know how absurd are meanings in an absurd world,
And we don't know how to cry.
I know where I am, where I go, simply because of the impulse for life.
This impulse knew always the way home.
The big Ithaca.

***

My friend,
You must make more maps.
Life persists beyond reason, beyond the umbilicus, the breasts that love us.
Look: my numbers count me, the count the visible, the infinite feeds them the berries of the dark, of the invisible.
My friend, beneath your paper skin: the mask, you don't know who speaks when you speak, whose lips shiver, you don't know who you are when no one sees.
They say: seize the day, as if the day was thighs from the market of flesh,
To seize towards whom,
Towards time galloping like a mad equation.
Maybe memory could tame time, but there is time also in memory,
All that's left is to weep over its corpse, well used, well loved.
My friend, we are jugs, we came from another map, we give shape to water,
We give shape to thirst, the thirst for simple water.
My friend, nothing is really simple, and water is never simple.

In the room, the numbers work in a quiet corner,
And suddenly time invades us, trading its poisons: war, rebellions.
And I don't understand why the rage, why the fury for an old cloth: a flag, for the lines on a map. Against a cracking climate, my thought, my feelings melt in the hot rain.
No empire is worth the ruined sandcastle of a child.
No empire is worth the shattered series of numbers, the beauty of clear dimensions.

Time, the shaman of change,
We don't know how to find ourselves, each day from the beginning, we don't know how to find the possible inside the impossible.
We go on, lost, losing, and the sacrificial lamb bleeds like the cut neck of a child.
All I want is to sit in the balcony of twilight: the shadows entangled with light.
A truce.
A tiny pause to remember: I was so small. The sun rose under the pillars of my tongue, enormous.

***

History is the biggest market, the slave trader of the ages, handcuffed in time.
It sells you wars that unload their pain, like earth, on your shoes.
It sells you gods: winged, un-winged, beasts painted on a wall.
It sells you rows of illusions, like a pilgrimage, like a parade to a sky that is always falling, which is the same thing.
It sells you future: the peaceful lines on a map. The invisible fury for each line.
It sells you truth, it has so many cellars, the map is not for sale.
And it sells you dreams, it empties them from the last drop of truth. They are thirsty.

I sit in the room with my numbers. I watch; they sell nothing, not even themselves,
I see how quiet they go on counting, measuring, what's real.
Reality is not safe. The little invisible are an ambush. You don't have a manual for the invisible.

The real and the mask sleep in my bed,
Beneath, above the sheets.
I watch: the mask, a borrowed skin, sowed coarse, a cracked touch,
I know it is the soldier of my life,
It guards the real in the depth.
It is strange, it is the unreal that protects who I am.
Numbers are different.
They are real and unreal at the same time, they caress, like a soft page from children's book, all the truths.
Touch is not mask, only skin.

Everything is an adventure,
Even my numbers : the adventures of the zero,
The adventure of negative numbers, fearless of death.
My adventure is to dream, to make from a quiet corner, brush by brush, syllable by syllable, beauty.
Watching reality, how it writes its own story, weighs on my eyelids like boredom, like sleep. Watching reality I see how ideas drown in a summer rain, and there is no umbrella of dreams.

To belong to something: creed, wife, the world, is banal.
My numbers come, each one alone, and yet, they belong to the idea of the infinite.
And I don't know if the infinite is banal.
To belong to nothing, not even to myself, is freedom,
But I belong to a deserted house, to the face of a child left in the window,
To the wind sifting, layer after layer, my life.
And I don't know in which life, in which layer, I'll find freedom,
In which window will wait for me, in which face.

***

In the room: me and the numbers.
Empty space where I can find myself.
I am a tool, a cracking stage, a deserted street,
But I am not changing the address of my life.
Home is something abstract and something real, a sail that drinks your breath, a flattened sea in a picture.
The life I have is home, the light melting in the whiteness of the walls, feels like home.
I don't have the manual for pure happiness,
But good enough is good.
I don't know if the numbers mind changing equation,
I don't know if there is an equation that is home.
I don't know if number have an equation for floating in a day of blue satin: happiness.

***

The years of numbers, the numbers that count my life,
Made me timid, like falling eye lids, stalled in paint.
And yet, my blood beating like rain: I am, I am, I am.
I am not afraid to dream, to play with numbers, even with the laws of big numbers,
Alone in a corner of silence. I am not afraid of the alone, of the silence.
The numbers are not timid, they are bold, and they are vain,
They feel precious, an old jewel smoldering in their body,
And yet, they know what fear is:
They hide in long series of numbers, invisible, shrinking, growing, a deserted surf in a beach of equations.
They are a wave tangled in the sea, there is no private journey,
To travel, each wave alone in its motion, alone in the wave that it is.
To travel, each number alone in its turn, alone in the number it is, where it goes.

***

I don't know what time is,
I don't know if it is abstract, a shadow flattened in a picture, or real.
I don't know if it can measure a soul, if it can make it timeless,
I don't know if the rain beating in the skin of grasses, can bend it,
If it curls in a motion of love.
I don't know how it goes foreword and backward,
I am an ancient drama and new tears at the same time.
And all the unfinished: the cigarette butt, a book half read on your bed,
A perfect master piece,
Do they arrive, do they end at the same time.
Maybe, numbers understand time better,
They add, they subtract, everything is an equation,
Maybe they sense time flowing in each addition, in each subtraction,
Towards something eternal, like Jacob's ladder, rang by rang, one foot on the ladder, one in fire.
I don't know how eternal can number be, the loneliness of the crowd stalled in paint, a Beautiful picture.
I don't know if eternity is finished or unfinished.

***

I don't know if numbers know how to love,
Everything is a number, even god,
So maybe love is a secret equation.
Can numbers count love, can they add love to love, sense the skin of an addition,
Can they measure the delicate distances inside each addition.
Do numbers love themselves?

To be happy is to know you are happy,
And to know that knowing, the landscape of imperfections,
Brings unhappiness.
We are ancient nomads, we are tourists in happiness.
I don't know if numbers know how to be happy,
If they know that happiness is not an infinite number,
I don't know the momentary, the forgetful surf leaving, leaving, saddens them.
The splendor of an hour, a roof of blue satin, happiness stalled in paint. It is not happy.
Night falls. No one can cross the night and remain the same,
I don't know where I'll find myself tomorrow, in which surf, in which roof,
And I don't know where happiness will wait,
In which edge of the surf,
In which beach beyond happy and unhappy.

I thought the world was an illusion,
Shadows melting into walls that don't exist.
But pain exists, it remembers the garden your body was, it unsettled the rooted green,
It un-roots roots.
I don't know if the numbers that count me can count my suffering, if they know what pain is, if they believe that pain is real, if the infinite exists, if the infinite is the infinite pain.
I go on with pain, the killer of illusions.
The whiteness that I remember was not an illusion, a sheet that wrapped my birth, my death tomorrow.

Knowing, the landscape of imperfections, is pain,
And not knowing, worlds under sheer water-you don't exist.
You choose.

***

My tooth hurts me, and the whole universe.
Maybe the meaning of pain is abstract, silence after silence that go nowhere,
But, it is real.
Maybe the universe that hurts is abstract:
The universe I shrank in a name, to contain it inside me.
Maybe the meaning soul is abstract,, a light striking the air, the invisible,
But I believe in the abstract, it is real, the invisible is real, like a corner of silence.
Maybe the brain is real,
But it is matter. How can matter create the abstract: thoughts, dreams,
How can a day empty its images.
It is strange, to feel how quiet the tooth walks in my pain, how huge,
How each steps bruises a name: the universe inside.

I don't know if numbers are abstract or real, if numbers dream themselves,
If they use soul or matter in order to add number to number,
The long slow river to the infinite.
I don't know if the infinite has tooth aches.

***

Everything melts, a world of water under sheer water.
I flow through myself, I am a river inside a river,
Whatever I knew, the way I felt, the way I dreamed dissolves,
I am fluid.
I am in the river and I am on a bank,
On the opposite bank: the other.
The other bruises me.
He stole who I am, he stole my name, he stole my dreams,
He is a firework of echoes from a liquid wall.
He watches me, I am shipwrecked between his eyelids.
I want back my name, I want back my life.
The other is silent. The thin silence, thinner than a river in a mirror.

***

The fatigue of living, the fatigue of words, the fatigue of
Imagining, the fatigue of the repetitions that repeat thee boredom,
The fatigue: a slow fire moving on its root, it scalds me, I am smoke, I am invisible.
Life is earth, layer beneath layer,
But life is a messy place, the layers lose themselves, they find themselves, they lose themselves again,
And I don't know how many I am, The one I was, the one I am, may find themselves in the same layer, the same time in their time.
I advanced so as to be the same.
I read days emptying their images into words,
As if the poet knew what he knew before he was there.
I don't know if numbers grow tired, if the fatigue makes them
Fade, if it makes them invisible.
I don't know if they go backwards, if they advance in order to
Be the same, I don't know how they can arrive to the infinite,
If the infinite, the endless waters, accepts them among its reflection, the same.

I don't know if the infinite has to repeat itself, like the numbers,
In order to be the same.
I don't know if the infinite is bored.

Poets should trade their belonging,
Say much in little,
Spare their words, after all, they own only the words and the silence,
They should remember that pain, beauty, the blossom of time in a comma,
Have no grammar.
There are too many words, and too few truths.

***

When I look outside- I dream.
When I look inside- I am awake.
I etched a window on my outer eye, I looked. There were centuries in each day, there was a deserted village in each day. I looked: a thousand and one monotonies in each night.
I looked: a man using a grimace that was not his own, in order to be himself.
I etched a window on my inner eye, I looked: I didn't recognize myself.
In the inner eye: a child, no fairy tales, the same deserted village trading its poison in two lives.
In the window out I see the numbers, always different in their sameness.
I don't know if numbers are awake, if they look inside, if they remember the infinite in which they began.
I don't know if the infinite is awake, if it knows that the zero was indispensable in order to become itself.

***

OMAR KHAYYAM
Omar was an orbit of love, no time blossomed in the air,
The orbit was timeless the way orbits are,
But I don't know how to love, which is the right orbit,
And I don't know how to be eternal,
Whatever I am, whatever I am not, lasts at most for a moment.
When you love, you love the way you live, from inside out,
But I live the way one dies, from inside out.
For Omar, the sky's dome was sane and clear,
But my sky is ill, the clouds confuse it, they hurt,
But I have to accept the clouds. They are me.

I write. Words are images, like the hieroglyph of a pharaoh,
Like a written landscape. Words are a home where I live with my hours vanishing,
, vanishing.
I make my words work, polish the old jewel smoldering,
Flow like wave chasing wave, a sky of blue rain,
And I can cry when I read an old jewel polished,
Because there will not be another first time.

***

Flocks of burnt paper graze the sky.
I see the sky, but I don't know if I can see the distances of the fire before they evaporate. I don't know if I can see the distances in the eyes of others, where is the accuser, where the judge, where are the verdicts. Flocks of burnt paper graze my eyes.
Inside me: worlds under sheer water. I am at the bottom of the sea, a coral where time shipwrecked. I don't know if I can open the eyes of depth, to remember who I was, who I was not. A herd of blue hard flowers grazes my eyes.
Shores of twilight streets, the land's end, tall moon mountains, so indifferent to what's real.
You sooth me.
Distances of the night, winds painted black bending everything in one direction: beyond knowledge, beyond judging, beyond memory. You sooth me.
I want so little. To let my pupils take me in, softly hold me alone in my body, alone in the matter of my body.
To know matter has no soul.

In the room, I let the numbers see me, count me, but numbers are innocent, they don't accuse, they don't judge, there is no verdict.
I don't know if number can love like a mother, simply because I exist,
I don't know if they feel how awkward I am, how weird, how tired, what a small number I am,
I don't know if they can love like a friend.

The biggest theatre in the world: nature. It plays all the roles: the luxurious stars, the light melting in the walls, the excitable red of flowers. It plays also us, and we don't understand why we are not more beautiful.

***

Words keep us apart. After all, words are only translations.
It is the silence that speaks in the pauses between one life and another, between ourselves and ourselves a no language with no grammar, a language we forgot yet, we remember,
But we learn first how to speak, and only later, much later, the no language of silence.
We live in a translated reality, we don't know the others because we don't know ourselves.
There are too many translations and too little first hand realities of who we are, of what we are not. There are too many words and too little silence.
It's touching the way we ignore who are the others, we can love them better, or even be happy.
Maybe we translate even ourselves to ourselves, the 'we' un-translated is pain, it peels off the skin from the mask. Maybe we never met ourselves un-translated, plumb in the water of an eye, the inexplicable tear of a fish in the depth.
Maybe we dance, masked up to the soul, translated up to the soul, to the music of the moon in the water, our shadows, guests in the feast.

***

We gave the mystery a name: death. Names are the best shroud.
We know only the shroud, we know only the sadness of a body that seizes, seizes.
We see the slow pain of ending: the tears of the old, small, final
Only imagination the mirror, the double eye can look into the labyrinth, the beast in the depth.
In this world there are no arrivals, no departures, and yet, death is an arrival and a departure into time, into the world, into whatever is alive.
I don't know if I'll part like a Pharaoh, I don't know if I can carry whatever I own: the memories, the forgetting, my fingers lucent as glass in a poem.
I don't know if death is the end of love.

I don't know if time grows old in the numbers, a locked drop in a zero, if the numbers read the number of death on their palm.
I don't know if numbers die, I don't know if the infinite is eternal,
I don't know if love has the number of death on its palm.

The urge to confess, to empty, like a day, its shadows.
I don't know if the day fears, like me, to be vulnerable, utterly visible.
We live, we confess, we empty the low dark clouds where it is dangerous.
The danger of feeling more, of sensing more, the danger of knowing more who we are.
It is comfortable to mean so little.

I don't know if my numbers confess, if they know secret equations,
I don't know what is the vulnerability of numbers, is it bigger than themselves, smaller,
Or, is it the same, like humans: the size of a hand, yellow, naked, the fingers falling, falling.

***

Life is always uphill, even when you descend. I went, uphill, downhill, to all my nowhere-s.
Yet, there were gifts for a difficult day: the gift of life, the gift of dreaming words,
And the gift of the numbers, they count me, the count the roof of rains, three meals, they know what plates, forks are for, which is enough.

My eyes cannot see themselves, and my face cannot see its face.
For long slow ages, men could see themselves only in the blue satin of a lake, in the well of someone's eye,
Bowing.
Maybe that's where bowing began,
That's where tears began.
I don't know if numbers could ever see themselves, in the round raindrop of zero, in the shining waters of the infinite, I don't know if numbers bow, I don't know to whom they bow,
To which simplicities, to which equation of chaos.

***

Art is the story of illusion:
The ghost of the huge night tree,
The ghost of a rustle,
But it feels more real than reality:
The yellow cave of a leaf opening, opening.
A rain drop, an old jewel, on a leaf.
As if it etched a window in our inner eye,
We sense, we see.
It is a nomad in the flesh of what we feel, what we remember,
We don't own it, we cannot lose what is not our own. We keep it.
I don't know if numbers sense art, if pure mathematics is a masterpiece,
If the purity moves them.
Painting,
Stalling the sea waves in mid air,
Stalling the feeling in mid air,
Painting imagination : mist dragging a lake, the naked water.
Painting ourselves: the thousand dimension of who we were, who we are, who we are not.

I don't know if someone will read me in the tomorrow: a book half read, half lived on a kitchen table.
We are all story tellers.
We use pieces of what was, of what we felt, of what we remember.
Feelings are never simple. Memory is never simple.
Our stories: the mystery of small simplicities.

I don't know if the numbers mind the tomorrow will remember, if it will drink the green in a number. Maybe they feel that the only story teller, the only story, is the infinite,
The unforgettable, the un-forgetting infinite.

***

Even the smallest gesture is a confession, than the gesture leaves you vulnerable alone.
Motion begins in the small pause of silence between thought and thought, it has a thousand dimensions to enter, to leave.
Dreams are true if we let them use fragments of reality: dawn, the color of metal,
The shade of eyelashes in a gaze, if they travel towards life always more.
Life loves enigmas.

I inhabit the suburbs of life, far from echoes bursting from walls.
The breast of a lake, the blue milk dripping, a sky of white rain, the simplicity of being.
They are all that I don't own.
I let life pass like a distant sound of a sea. It doesn't drench me.

Numbers are gestures, they confess, always.
They work. They have to count whatever exists: a landscape more frank, the indifference of a family of objects, and I don't know if they count also what doesn't exist.
I don't know if numbers dream, I don't know how they can be real and unreal at the same time. I don't know if numbers are a simple phrase. I don't know how simple can a phrase be: a knot of equations, how simple is the infinite.

You dance.
You let your gesture tremble: planets pulsing in a lake, the gesture drip, like the sound of a distant rain. They drench you.
You nurse the dance. You give it the motion of pain that doesn't make everything stone,
A white blizzard of wings in your fingers.
I don't know if numbers understand art, if the real beauty is a smooth, shining equation.
I don't know if all they dream is the infinite: the whole world in a raindrop. The infinite is always thirsty.

We use analphabet hands, we use gestures, fingers falling from our hands.

To know how to speak, words opening, opening, to be visible, to be vulnerable.
To speak precise like a simple old hand 'I feel like pain', to speak when teeth bite the ancient mouth, to know it is the picture of cry.
Numbers are always precise, exact. They say what should be said, no more.
I don't know how do they describe a cool wind inhabiting an hour, a day, silent masks of fury.
I don't know if 'pain', 'happiness' are numbers.

***

I am simply an account. I tidy my books, numbers, the estate of lives, and even the anarchy of souls.
I divide the souls into types, I tidy eternity.
There were those who wandered the whole forty years in the desert, they crossed every feeling, they crossed every echo of thirst in walls of sand, the syllables of pain, dune by dune.
They entered the promised land.
There were those who longed for the goal. The goal defeated them.
The longing was bigger than their life, bigger than the light melting in the whiteness, it didn't let the world, the world of sand, blossom in their feet, it didn't let the fire blossom in their skin, sun by sun .The longing defeated them.
They didn't enter the promised land. They only saw it, like another Moses. Their eyes were sand, the longing was a tear of sand. It was thirsty.
I don't know if numbers long, if they need the other numbers to be complete. I don't know if it is the journey that matters or the goal, I don't if the infinite is the promised land,
I don't know if arrivals exist.

***

I am only a small accountant,
But I see, my eyes- a quarry of silence.
I see the mask parade in the city where men are mended:
The preachers and the preaches, the empires, the eternal beliefs.
I don't think the Buddha had his awakening under a tree,
I think he woke in a window of an office, store room eyes,
He saw the mask parade of faces, mended men,
All he said was 'it is empty'.

I count numbers, I forget that not everything is countable:
The delicate dimensions of love, the height of pain that begins in the depth, the roots of shadow, so maybe my counting is empty too, but I don't sense I fell into the light,
I feel the simple sadness of a simple man,
And I know nothing is really simple.

***

Strong men of strong will,
Their motions: a quarry of stone, their motions fall out of the light like the throat of a fist,
They hunt the stones, taciturn as a stone, they leave a ruined city inside us.
And I don't know if stones feel, how they feel,
I don't know how could the world be
If the throat of a fist would inhabit its silence.
And I don't know who inhabits our silence now:
Which map of a touch, which manual of stone.
I don't know where the humble will survive,
In which longing, in which sadness, in which fragile light, the sky falling, falling.
Numbers have a strong will, they are path finders,
And yet, they are different:
Long delicate fingers entangled in each addition, in each subtraction, like feeling, layer after layer,
The zero in the infinite, the infinite in the zero. There is a round moon in the zero, there is an infinite sea in the infinite.
The moon in the infinite sea is generous, a ripple of light, it opens and shuts, accepting everything among its reflections, like a gift for a difficult hour, like tender water.
We are thirsty.

***

We think rational, we use logic, we measure ladders to somewhere, we feel superior
In the big arena of living, we kill the beasts with a cry in the knife.
In a corner of the arena I learn how to weep. I know that I don't know what a beast knows,
How to let the distant sound of a rain drench you, how to let love be naked as a body.
The logic ones doubt feelings, doubt reason, they doubt their doubts.
Maybe in the corner of the arena we know little, maybe we understand more:
How to live inside the small men that we are, how to live, shoulder to shoulder, like homes, with others, the minute gestures that make us big.
We don't know how much reason, how much feeling truth needs in order to be truth.
It's night, the wind bends us, like the grasses, in one direction:
We love like a man, like a beast, each in his own way.
Maybe there are more ways to love than ways to live.

Numbers are exceptional.
They know what they know, trading the delicate dimensions of the flesh of what exists. They don't doubt themselves. They know how to be alone in a digit, how to be close: additions can arrive deep, much deeper than what we think, as if they knew the equation of love.
I don't know if love is a number.

***

Against a cracking climate, truth is invisible, the big unknown.
I am just a man counting number,
But I don't accept the inexplicable.
The more I live, the more I gather 'why's,
They say that if you know the 'why' you can endure anything.
I love poems; the rhythm of words, the sudden surprise of an emotion,
But when the poet doesn't know the 'why', the 'how' he changes the universe,
He creates a God or even gods.

I don't know how much numbers understand, what 'why', what 'how's,
But numbers believe in the truth of an equation, in the beauty of its logic.
Equations need no God to exist, no God to explain their beauty.
I don't know if God is a number.

***

Who we are, the dreams that we are,
We make them impenetrable, opaque.
But time, the long, slow river,
Leaks through the cracks in our eyes.
The 'who we are',
Is not water resistant. Even the cracks in our eyes, the tears, are not water resistant.
The "who we are',
Is not time resistant. Even eternity is not time resistant.
We live visible, vulnerable to the raining river, to the cracks in our eyes.

Numbers are different.
They are naked even beneath the layer of an equation,
They have to be visible in order to know where to go,
To which infinite, to which zero.
I don't know how the thread back and forth, filament by filament,
To the purest number.

***

I don't know for whom I write,
For myself, for you, now, for the tomorrow,
Or even for the past. The dead hear, the blanket of silence is consumed always more,
And I don't know if the tomorrow will breath, deep, the vapor of my words,
If it can translate the vapor of the 'now', fleeting, fleeting.

The evening is blue, the light falls gently.
I don't know if men can fall as lightly, as softly as the light.
I don't know if this marine evening,
My face in the blue aquarium of the sky,
Will let me drown slow, sad, quiet.

I don't know if numbers think for whom they are written:
For the today, for the tomorrow.
Maybe an hour, a day, digest only what centuries alone digest:
The first octopus, the mammoth, the sadness of a human,
Maybe the numbers don't know what time it is in their time,
I don't know if they feel the light falling, so soft, if it saddens them,
If they know how the zero rolls, like a moon, out of light.

Night.
In a distant window light blossoms.
The houses: vague, abstract.
How can all the human agony exist in something so abstract.
The house, me, the window : a mirror that turns all the vagueness into something real:
The face of a child in the glass, the shadows melting in the walls,
As if everything exists because something else exists,
And yet, I am alone.
An invisible bridge in the night, in the silence, measures the distances between me and me.

Maybe numbers know there are no virgins, they exist each in the round belly of another,
Like the round belly of a fruit.
Maybe they are nor nomads in loneliness,
There are the magic equations that keep them close.
Maybe something in the night measures how close the number are, how lightly they walk towards each other,
As if they knew the equation of love.

***

Alone in the sad office, the walls of accumulated groan, the window that grew old, they see nothing,
Yet, I don't know how to rebel.
The rules,, the laws make everything stone. My eyes of stone cracked from being sold, bought
In all the markets of the world. I don't rebel, it is not fear, it is inertia, the habit to be what I am, I am too tired to change.
I don't know how to take back my life,
And I don't know how to cry through the cracks of stone.

I don't think numbers are rebels, I think they obey the equation that owns them.
They walk in blood soaked papers, row after row of numbers. A common grave.
I don't know if numbers cry.

Everything begins from without:
The universe that digs our depth with stone tools, the atmosphere of ancient goans.
Everything begins from within:
The universe that rains through the cracks of our fingers, in each gestures, in each hand shake.
The death that grows from inside out.
I don't know how much in, how much out I am, I don't have feet enough to step out and see.
And I don't know what mirrors people are, how shattered, why I cannot find my face. I am faceless.
I don't know how visible I am, how visible I want to be, how invisible I can be .

The only atmosphere I need are the numbers:
They are external, they work inside me, like the equation of breath.
They don't mind how cracked are my eyes, how visible I am.
They feel like peace, or at least, a truce.

***

To think or not to think, that is a question.
You have to choose, each time from the beginning.
To feel or not to feel, that is not a question.
Your feeling plunges, like ten long fingers, tumultuous, vibrant,
Into your secret body, to find the ancient wound.
You have no choice. You feel.
To own or to lose is the same thing.
Whatever you lose you store in the past, the old jewel simmering somewhere deep,
The coal that doesn't burn the pain.
I don't know if numbers think, feel,
But I am certain they own, they lose.
Whatever they lose they keep in the infinite: the coal that burns beneath the motion.
There are no thieves of the infinite, everything is stored intact, even the coal beneath a zero.

We live where it is fluid, a mote between knowing and not knowing who we are, who are the others.
Knowing is too deep, a quarry of pain, hunter of stones. It bruises us.
Not knowing goes easier on the soul, it comforts the sages, it soothes us.

I think that numbers are conscious,
Knowing lets them play, it lets them invent the games of the infinite.
When the numbers don't know they grow furious. In an hour of dead leaves,
They climb on an equation of fire.
Numbers have a temper.

Safety is a god.
We don't know how to live where we fear, we stand with our back to ourselves.
We are deaf, blind, ready for nothing.

I don't know if numbers long for the habit of safety
If they fear, if they can live where it is dangerous.
I don't know if the zero, the round habit, the unchangeable orbit,
Creator of infinites,
I don't know if zero is God.

***

The evening, the existence of people, of old routes that continue in new ones,
Matter leaks in the cracks of everything, the tiniest gesture, the abstract that you think, you feel, the sobs, it is the gift, the pain, that makes you real, ten long fingers that touch the invisible inside the visible.
You feel the universe, a moment before it was born in your depth. The only miracle worth something. The sky enlarges its blanks, the planets are no nearer, but you sense the impossible inside the possible.

I don't know if numbers feel they are matter, if they feel they are abstract, if they feel they are real.
Maybe they are the poetry of dimensions, of the immeasurable, measured, and therefore, they are the big poetry of matter. The song of the stars.

Maybe love is the power to be close, to feel the sky falling, falling, too close, yet too far,
To let the closeness melt in your hand, and still be your hand, five fingers, five finger prints,
Life printed in each finger. The sky falling, falling, your fingers float in the marine blue,
Your fingers sob, the small melancholies of love.

I don't know if numbers love, but I know they don't fear the closeness.
They lie in a tight bed, small suns in their armpits, there is no more than a zero between them.
Maybe the zero is the distance of love.

***