A LEAF OF SEASONS

Raquel Angel-Nagler

The endless motion from one truth to the other,
Because truths are alive,
They learn, like a child, from living,
They learn, like a child, the path of the world to the world
***
Maybe birds have to learn by heart everything.
How to fly for love,
Hoe to fly from the autumn.
Maybe they sing all these things,
But we think it is a children song.
***
We are old fashioned. We dance the waltz,
And it is nice, because everything turns around us,
Because even space dances,
And it is not strange
Because space is alive,
And because space loves dancing.
***
At night, you undress,
Like the enigma of a tree that lets all its leaves fall at once,
When it is not autumn , and it remains naked.
Naked is beautiful, even when it is a tree,
When the branches are a dance.
***
I kiss you with so many lips.
With the lips in which I screamed,
The lips I bit in order not to cry, and I cried.
I kiss you with the lips that are a child of the body of love.
***
The rustle of the leaves is a poem that is alive,
And its meanings change with the seasons.
We don't know how to write such poems.
***
The play of the wind with the tree.
That's how the tree gives shape to the wind.
That's how the wind gives shape to the tree.
Because matter is everywhere, in the tree, in the wind,
And it loves playing.
***
The twilight is the enigma of the strange fog.
The fog that comes from houses, from the breath of people,
Of animals, of trees.
It is the enigma of all that breathes, and that breathes strangely,
Because the night comes.
***
The road that we leave follows us.
The road that we take, becomes us,
Maybe the cross-roads chooses for us,
Because fate loves the cross-roads.
***
Poets dream also when they are awake.
This is their weakness,
This is their power.
Maybe, that's why they are dream-eaters.
***
I love to water the flowers painted on the wall
Because they are alive,
Because time continues to move in their time,
Because matter rolls into the abyss of a flower.
***
Maybe in the after-life we'll be different,
And the ones who were late for everything, even for the lost dreams,
Will be on time. They'll find them.
But when we think of it, it will be again too late,
Because some dreams we need in this place, in this life.
Dreams may not feel the hunger, but they can feel the despair.
***
Maybe, in the after-life,
The poets of beautiful things
Will be left in a deep abyss,
And they'll write, if they can still do it
The beauty of a stone rolling down the abyss.
The beauty of pain.
***
We inhabit the autumn for so long
And we don't recognize yet the leaves that fall from our life,
And it is not strange,
Because as long as life is an enigma, also the death of a leaf is an enigma.
***
Often we walk bent,
Because we carry volumes of sadness.
It is easy to write about sadness, because we are sad people,
And we are so used to be sad
That we don't recognize happiness, even when we are happy.
***
The body of children often trembles in their sleep,
As if touched by a storm,
Or maybe it gathers storms for the future.
***
The sadness of the big cities.
Maybe they would have liked to be a nest, but they cannot,
Because the houses have doors and locks,
And because no one looks at the sky anymore.
***
The youth. The friendship with dark things,
Like the dark corners with the magazines of love,
That let our body discover us, that let it be absolved.
In some dark corners we were purified.
We begin dreaming long before we are born,
And we continue long after we die,
Because the dead dream in our dreams.
Maybe we dream in order to feel more alive,
Or maybe we live in order to dream,
Because some dreams are worth living for.
***
There are dreams that take us nowhere,
Not even to ourselves,
And yet, we are never here,
And it is sad,
Because everything happens here,
Life, the small hotel at night,
And even the crime of the century.
***
Each morning we brush our coat
From the dust of the past,
But we cannot brush our life from that dust,
And for sure, we cannot brush our tears.
***
Everything unbalances and balances
The space around us.
Our walk on a path, the rustle of a leaf,
A cloud somewhere high.
***
We walk alone,
Yet, the path, the landscape walk with us.
We change their future,
They change our future,
Because also time walks with us.
***
My poems say what I want to say,
And yet each one reads in them his own poem,
Which is nice,
Because it is as if I wrote many poems in a poem,
Or as if I wrote a poem for each person. An act of love.
***
We don't know what chases us from one age to the other.
Maybe we don't grow old gradually,
Maybe each day is a storm of time,
And all we feel is the cold and the loneliness,
Because loneliness is cold.
***
We are a child. We fall asleep on the lap of a carpet.
Maybe we feel it is the carpet of Aladdin,
Maybe we believe it will take us to the enigma of places.
We don't know it may take us to another enigma, the enigma of the future,
That we may wake up one night older, one dream older.
***
It is autumn everywhere, and it rains.
Our bodies drip loneliness
And there is no umbrella of mercy in the whole autumn.
***
At times, we don't notice that years have passed
Between a question and an answer.
Maybe sometimes answers come late,
Even though we feel that the question has happened yesterday.
***
We love, even before we know how to live,
And it is nice,
Because it is an adventure,
Because life is an adventure,
And because we are not yet afraid of both.
***
We are a child
And we read the pages of a dream,
Long before we know how to read.
We learn them by heart.
We don't know it,
But we keep them for the dreamless years.
***
Everything is alive,
Everything is born, it grows, it dies.
Maybe it leaves room, even though it doesn't know it,
And for sure, doesn't want it,
For a new crop, maybe a better one,
Because also wheat learns.
***
Everything new refuses the old,
And something newer will refuse the one before.
It is new, but it has no choice. It cannot refuse everything,
Because there is too much past in it.
***
Time moves in our time,
Long before we are born,
So we appear with death ready inside us.
Maybe, some evenings, when we are particularly calm,
We can hold the twilight in our hand. A candle.
***
Our most true stories are the ones we don't remember.
Maybe because they were too daily, too simple,
Maybe because they are the enigma we are made of,
And we love enigmas because they may surprise us
When we don't believe we can surprise ourselves anymore
***
Maybe the First Sin happens again and again
In the small hotel,
Because we are chased out of paradise each day,
And because our bodies of love enter each other's Paradise,
And they are absolved.
***
There is the pain that is a slaughter, there is the immense loneliness,
And we don't know how to save ourselves.
Even the rope in our room is useless
Because there is no one to push the stool.
So, we have no choice,
We have to find someone who'll love us enough to let us die,
Because love has many shapes.
***
It is easy to say: the years left us,
But we don't dare thinking of the things that left with them,
Because the things that left us are more precious than the years,
Because these things made us who we were, what we were,
And when they leave
We have to invent ourselves,
We have to invent the rest of our life.
***
When we are a child, we are always busy,
Because we gather the things that make us what we are,
Because we gather the past for our future.
***
The ones who left into the future,
We don't remember them,
Maybe because the future seems far.
We forget that the future is inside us up to the last moment,
And even much longer,
So we don't leave into the future, and the future doesn't leave us.
And maybe when we remember
We bring the past into the future, which makes it more familiar, more home.
***
Our memories take us further than what we lived,
Because they begin before we began,
And because we bequest them to the future.
They are our saga.
Poems and kings are made of it.
***
Suddenly, in the middle of the immense twilight,
We feel that in this place, in this time,
We lived all the lives we'll ever live,
And the rest of our life is not important.
***
Night. The whistle of the train disrupts the quiet of the moon,
Because the moon travels silently,
While our journey is a shout of life,
Even when it is the journey to a dream.
***
When they chase us from our home,
The small hotel ,at night, is an asylum,
Because we have to continue to live,
And because the bodies of love
Continue our life further than our life.
***
Some hopes make the world more uncertain,
Like a new-born dream, or even a new-born child.
***
The dead, wherever they are,
Are protected from the weather,
And from the long meals of long holidays.
Maybe they don't feel foreigners there,
Because they feel that everything belongs to everything,
And it is a pity we feel it too late.
***
Our hands shape on the wall strange shadows.
These shadows will grow old on the wall,
Because time moves also in the time of the shadows.
We'll find them, years later,
When they carved the wall with the shadows of the past.
***
Children whisper secrets in their sleep.
We don't understand it, and they don't know it,
Because the secret of a child should last for a life time.
***
It is strange
How some dreams are eternal,
And the dreamer may die tomorrow.
***
The dawn, the first light, is generous.
It brings hope to those who need it.
To those who drown in the paper-boat of their life,
To the children who made the paper-boat,
In order to save themselves from the dark flood. The night.
***
We grow old.
We keep ancient idols in our home,
We want to feel the enigma of the past,
Because we are afraid of the enigma of the future.
We forget that the past has enough future in it to become our future.
***
Maybe everything is matter, even the wind.
That's why the wind can be a wave,
It can be the shape of a tree,
It can be a cloud that floats sometime over our twilight.
***
Maybe everything is motion.
Maybe we last from one wave to another, not more.
And we too, we are a wave.
***
Everything is tied to something else,
As if we were in the small hotel, at night,
Where the body of love discovers another body.
Maybe there should be more such hotels
So we'll discover each other more, so we'll love more.
***
Some books become something of what we are,
Because they are friends,
Because friends become something of what we are.
***
There are many reasons for reading with our head bent.
Maybe our eyes are not so good.
Maybe the table is too low,
Or maybe we bow, the way we do when we discover our face in a river.
***
At times, books take us as far as the whistle of the train,
Because words are the whistle,
So they can take us further than imagination,
And we never return the same.
***
Our first childhood book
Is a carpet of words, a modern carpet of Aladdin,
So we learn how to float over ourselves, over imagination,
Long before we learn how to walk.
And we never forget it.
***
It is not easy to risk our life
If we haven't already died before, for a dream,
For a journey that was left in the middle, because also roads die.
***
The stranger on the side-walk of life seemed almost biblical,
And also his sadness was biblical,
Like a prophet whose prophesy was right,
Even though he didn't want it, even though he wanted to be a false prophet.
Maybe he was angry at the people because he loved them too much.
***
At times, in a quire of memory,
We find again the love for the others,
The way birds find the way to the flock,
And they sing it.
***
At times, in a quire of memory,
We find the poem we dreamt of, and it is beautiful.
All the other poems we wrote seem small.
Because poems are dreamers.
***
The small hotel, at night.
The quire of the bodies of love.
Only a sigh separates us from the quire of the angels.
And it is strange, because we believe in angels only when we love.
***
I loved a woman.
The years , wars , trains ran over us,
But we hid in the small cheap hotel, shelter for the vendors of love,
For the vendors of poetry.
The handles of the door consumed by the blind sweat of the hands,
The sheets consumed by blind finger-nails, and carved by the dreams of the bodies,
And the smell opaque from the passing nights, from the passing lives.
The bodies, like beggars of love, and they were sad and beautiful at the same time.
Some went there in order to regret and make the regret a reason to live.
Some, because life is short.
And some tried to surrender, but they couldn't. They continued the habit to conquer.
And at times there were embraces, unexpected, excruciating, infinite.
But the years passed, and people unite and separate,
And they don't know each other, because love doesn't let us know each other.
And still time passes, it's evening in our life. All the suns die over our roof.
So we find the exhausted hotel, the exhausted bodies of love,
We have the feeling of two sad actors in a theatre of love,
And yet, it was passion, the most excruciating, the most beautiful passion we have lived.
***
One night you came,
Your last clothes fell on the floor,
And you were beautiful, a leaf of spring.
But when you embraced me, you were a vine.
You wrapped yourself around my loneliness,
Around the wind that blew, and blew away time, memories,
And it was a storm of thighs.
Forgive my hands, they feel like heavy animals,
But animals are innocent, and they know how to love.
And maybe you'll forgive me for the life in which you didn't exist.
When I'll die , cover me with light earth,
As light as your body of love.
***
It is the age of advertizing and neon.
So we put neon signs everywhere.
In the entrance to the small hotel of love.
In the entrance to the cemeteries, so that people wouldn't forget.
To the dog rescues that couldn't rescue them from anything,
And above everything, the word' loneliness', lit in hard light.
***
Maybe poets are Fakir-helpers,
Because they don't know how to walk on fire,
They don't know how to sing to a snake.
They let the words do it.
***
Maybe we should let the wise men of the tribe
Show us
How to speak to people,
How to love listening to people,
How to let our hands pray,
And how to make this love, this prayer
A tradition.
***
Suddenly, in a corner of the street,
The sadness of a lamp-post, makes us sad.
It is easy for things to make us sad,
Because we are sad people,
And because some things move us,
Which is really nice.
***
When we return home, no one waits for us,
Because everybody is busy living,
And we are the only poets, we are busy dreaming,
And we are always somewhere else.
***
We write poems
Because we are dream-travelers, which is beautiful.
Sometime we return,
And we don't know why we returned,
Because there are dreams that are enough for many poems.
***
When we are children, we play with the girls,
With the first body,
Because we gather love for the future.
***
We cannot translate childhood,
Because words are only translations,
And childhood is not a word.
***
We leave things in the middle of the way, even our childhood,
Because they are too heavy. The night of a child is heavy,
His silences are heavy.
We have no choice, we believe that we continue childless,
And we don't understand why we still feel heavy.
We forget that we cannot leave the past in the middle of the way,
Because it continues with us, and it arrives far,
Further than what we imagine.
***
The salty things that make us what we are. The sea, the sweat.
Because the sea shows us
How to live between wave and wave,
And how to be a wave.
And the sweat knows how to love.
***
Each day something ends,
And yet, we cannot get used to the thought of the big end.
Because it is life, not God, that is our great addiction.
It is the opium of the people.
***
We keep the tradition of disease.
The black plague, T.B.C., covid.
We are contagious, and we have no choice.
We write letters from one room to the other,
Like a diary of loneliness and of love
To someone we never knew, and maybe we'll never know.
***
I love the rain, because the rain loves smells.
The smell of wet grass, the smell of a woman
And of her drenched dress that undresses her body,
The soft voice of an old woman that smells of all the rains of the past.
***
Somewhere, some time we admit our age,
Because our body admits it,
Of course, it doesn't know how to count,
But it remembers the small nocturnal hotel
With sadness, with soft sadness.
***
After everything, the twilight comes
And the first star
The one where the Sabbath of the Jews begins and ends.
It is a witness that we loved and we were loved,
And we need the witness,
Because the Sabbath ends.
***
We walk bent because we carry too much on our back,
The days of iron where we lived, where we worked.
Bent is beautiful,
Because our back surrenders,
Because some surrenders make us beautiful.
***
Maybe angels become fallen angels
In order to die in a small hotel,
Of love.
There is no purer death.
***
At times, in the small hotel,
There is no time, only space.
It is the smell of love around us, inside us,
It is the storm of air that we breathe.
Then, time returns, because it is a moment before dawn,
A moment before eternity ends.
***
The saga of the past is the longest poem,
And it is beautiful, because everything is in there,
Even the jug in which we drank water.
A small-big world changer.
***
It would be nice to have a Hindu God,
The one that can be divided.
The head, the body of love, the heart.
It would be nice to feel his body of love in our bodies,
To know how the love of gods absolves them.
***
Rivers can be a religion,
Because water is life,
And because the only religion we need is life.
***
We sit in a small room, and it rains inside us and outside.
We are the counters of the hours.
The hours of struggle, of conquests, of hunger.
The hours of humbleness that fed us pain, and pain is not humble.
And the hours of defeat that somewhere, sometime, absolved us from the fear of defeat,
And we count the infinite, inexhaustible, unpredictable that we are.
And yet, we die.
***
The smile rolling over your body of love,
And your eyes, immense, like the eyes of the mute,
Because the only words were the arms, the breasts, the thighs,
And the night was an infinite road where we walked over time, over memories,
And yet, we were infinitely mortal.
***
We grow tired and the love grows tired.
Our gaze is closed
And it closes in it the consumed bodies of love, and the love,
And the children.
And the closed gaze cries.
***
The small things that become our life.
The pretexts, the compromises, the postponements.
And yet, these things are the pain of living, the infinite pain,
That makes us infinite.
***
We grow old.
At night, we lie side by side.
Our bed is a caravan of time
That will continue tomorrow without us,
Because the night is a killer,
And the beds of the old are killers.
***
Some time love grows exhausted.
The body of love is more memory than love.
We cover the cracks in the floor of our life, in our gazes.
We speak, we cry,
And we cry even more when we realize how lonely we were, always.
***
I believe in man who is a poet of heaven and earth,
Because poems can be infinite,
And man can be infinite, even though he dies.
I believe in those who can sooth the chaos and find in it a path or even a way to the big road.
I believe in those who forgive themselves, and go on.
I believe in the daylight when we can see the world, and in the night where we see our soul.
I believe in those who deserted the trenches because they were afraid, because I deserted
Too, because I don't want to die. And I believe in their tears because I cry too.
I believe in the staircase of the evening where people speak, because the night comes.
I believe in the eyes of a stranger on the side-walk of life, where he lives.
I am a stranger too, and my eyes came too from places where the world ended.
I believe in the infinite. Not only the infinite of the sky, but also in the infinite that hides in everything, because everything is the sum of the three times, the three infinites.
I believe in the unknown. A good place to take our life for an excursion.
I believe in those who have arrived.
Those who know that Ithaca is in the small days, and that they are infinite.
I believe in a person who cries, and he holds in his hand naked,, humble and mute
His odyssey to pain and to the silence.
I believe in earth because it soothes the naked feet of the living, the naked body of the dead,
And the naked roots.
***
We love to watch the fire.
Maybe because it is an ancient ritual,
We may be the first man who ever lit it.
We may feel , like the first man,
The whisper of mysterious spirits in the flams.
Of course, we are modern, and we don't believe in spirits,
But we still need them in order to feel the mystery that we are.
***
Maybe the train stations are the modern cathedrals.
For sure, the trains are the God and we are the believers, the ones who pray,
Because we have to travel each day up to the end of the world, in order to live.
***
After so many ages, we arrive to the age of being old,
And only a sigh divides us from the song of the angels.
And we remember how a sigh was the only thing
That divided our bodies of love from another song of the angels.
***
We walk on the street,
And suddenly someone opens his coat.
He is not naked beneath,
He only wants to show us the hungry clothes that cover his hunger,
Because hunger is contagious,
But after our lunch we are usually immune, so we are safe.
***
At times, when we mourn, and our eyes are wet,
We hide them behind a sad children book,
Because the tears of the old are frail and final. They hurt.
***
The creation didn't end with Adam and Eve, or even the snake.
There was also a blind prophet who painted their clothes in black,
And maybe he was not so blind,
Because we still use these ancient clothes,
And because death didn't become old fashioned.
***
We open our window for many reasons.
In order to air the room.
In order to look at the faces of humanity.
In order to see the helpless end of the day,
The twilight of sadness.
***
Maybe what matters is what we know
And what we want to know,
So also the unknown matters,
It also makes us what we are.
***
TO CHRALEA CHAPLIN
At times we walk on the street
And a man stops and looks at us
With a look from other times.
We are not sure if we know him, how we know him,
Maybe he is the man who was silent
Because his sadness was silent, and the movie was silent,
Who made us what we are.
***
At times, a man, a stranger, looks at us
With a gaze from other times,
And we feel that gazes like that made us what we are,
Because they have enough past in them,
Enough to shape us as it feels like.
***
The enigma of your hair
Covers the enigma of your body,
And the enigma of love covers everything
Because the world begins.
***
We know few things.
We don't know if the denture in the marble
Were made by birds that were hungry,
Or by ancient people that were hungry,
And they picked the wheat from the stone.
***
On the street, the blind man with the violin
Plays, and only the birds gather to hear.
The man is blind, but he can see because he feels,
So he sees in the darkness how blind we are,
Blinder than himself, blinder than his darkness,
And for sure, blinder than the birds.
***
When we go out we wear a hat and sun-glasses
In our to cover our childish face, the gaze of wonder.
And it is strange, because usually life makes us sad and serious,
And because we are not happy with the gaze of wonder that remained.
All we can do is write children stories
Because we believe in them too.
***
There is only one world and so many things,
Because matter moves in each thing in a different way,
That's why we are not a tree, not even a leaf,
Even though our autumns continue.
***
Like everything else, we are also a truth of the world,
That's why we see ourselves in it.
But for the rest we may need the wise men of the tribe.
They may say nothing,
Or they may hold in their hand the truth of something else,
A leaf, or maybe a puppy.
A truth that is easy to love.
***
There are truths that are always true
Because they are the truths of nature and of people.
So, there was never a stone that flew out of the abyss,
And there was never a man from the age of stone that flew out of it.
So, abysses are safe.
***
Everything grows and changes,
And everything is the mirror of something else,
Of how it grows, of how it changes.
So we can recognize our twilight
Because we hold in our hand a shadow and a splash of light.
***
We need a torch for many reasons.
In order to read the name of someone on the bell.
In order not to roll down the stairs when it's dark.
In order to follow an unknown path,
Which is a thriller, because we don't know if there was a killer on the path,
And we don't know whose is the skeleton, even though skeletons are not always silent.
***
In order to learn the world
We have to learn people and whatever people know,
Even the thriller of a skeleton that has been murdered ages ago,
Probably a slave, because killing slaves was holy,
And there are no traces of the killer.
***
In reality, words are pictures,
Because they can draw everything,
Even the picture of silence.
***
Some things are endless,
Like the hour when the sea becomes sky,
Like day-dreaming, because one life is not enough,
Like the body of a woman that was born of love and bears love.
***
We are slaves at night because we are slaves during the day,
And maybe we get used to it,
But in order to love we have to be kings,
Even if our kingdom is only a small hotel room and love.
***
Maybe there are also the cafes of the birds,
But they are nicer than ours,
Because they don't shout, they don't fight about who will rule the world.
They sing.
***
The way to the small hotel, the hotel of love,
Is lost in the infinite,
And we never know why we returned.
***
We return from the small hotel, from the lava of love.
Maybe we are defeated, or maybe not,
Because we bow to the daily things
That sing the opus for life.
***
We live in the ground floor of fate,
So we are close to everything.
Often we hear the old man in the corner
Who sings, in one voice, the duet
Of the rest of his life, of the rest of his death.
Fate may be blind, but the old man is not.
***
In the evenings
The strangers follow the birds that fly far.
In the morning,
The birds follow the strangers to the side walk of life
Where some old lady leaves some old bread.
So everybody is happy.
***
We don't really know where we go, why we go,
That's why we like to walk with a book in our hands,
Because books are path-finders,
Because they know the path to our life.
***
We love to fall asleep with a book in our hands,
Because books are faithful,
Because they wouldn't let us be lost alone.
***
The smell of the book grows old with us,
And what it says may be old fashioned,
But we are too.
So we love it because it is a tender mirror,
And we need tenderness. Always.
***
We love sad books
Because at times we need to cry.
In reality we write a better book
Because words don't have the hundred mouths of a tear.
***
The night is a lit city, but it is also dark,
Because there are the tough guys,
Because there are the poets.
Because there are the dreamers.
Because some need it,
Some write it,
And some dream it. The poetry of the dark.
***
Somewhere, sometime, we need our whole life
In order to cross one street,
And somewhere we need it to cross one dream,
Because it is a dream of many,
And yet, we cross it, each one alone in his soul.
***
Women don't admit their age because they want to die young,
And because they don't really know their age,
Because the dream of love is ageless,
And even the lost loves don't have an age.
***
Children ask much
Because they feel that everything has a reason, every life.
But somewhere they change.
They believe no longer in reason.
All that's left are the gods.
***
In autumn we gather the leaves from our yard
The way one gathers all his lost lives,
Or maybe in order to feel that we lived all the four seasons,
So it is an act of love.
***
The rain brings tears to the eyes of the statues,
Because statues are lonely, they know what sadness is.
That's why we carve the tombstones over the graves. To mourn .
***
The bird that knocked on the window,
What was it looking for.
Maybe it lost, like us, the flock of its life,
Or maybe it saw its face in the glass, and knew it is the last flight.
***
The days leave through the open window,
So we have to choose. To air our life and grow old,
Or to grow old behind closed windows,
Because the room, however modern it may be,
Has enough past to age us.
***
Each one of us has a secret fortune of forgotten things.
The things we saw, that almost blinded us.
The whispers that tore our ears.
The cries we should have cried, and we didn't.
One day we'll remember,
And the revenge of the things we forgot may be cruel.
***
Despair makes us sad and old,
And it is contagious.
Even the despair of autumn leaves.
They make the tree old. They make our eyes old,
And even our tears age, they become as fragile as a fallen leaf,
As final.
***
The small hotel, at night.
The line of the moon light
Is the only thing that separates our bodies of love.
So we purify each other, the way the bodies of love do,
And the line of moon light is purified with us.
***
There are some things that teach us patience
Like the cracked walls of the room,
Like the creases on the faces of the old that were carved slowly, silently,
Like the rustle of autumn leaves that are a patient sigh,
But we are not a wall, we are not a leaf, and we are not yet old,
So it doesn't matter.
***
At night we keep a candle by the bed of someone beloved who died,
Because we don't want to lose ourselves,
We don't want to lose our way to the living,
Because something died inside us too.
***
The huge sunset that leaves flames in our eyes,
That makes us feel sad and beautiful at the same time,
And all we can say is 'sunset'.
***
Maybe when the time comes
The ones who were far for so long, who were strangers where they were,
Will return, and will be strangers again.
And the ones who always saved their days
Will have to donate them to eternity.
***
We learn how to read our dreams
Long before we learn how to read,
Because they are pictures,
And because we draw them,
Even when we are afraid of the pictures we draw.
***
Poetry is a strange game.
We lose even when we win,
Because all we win is a written life, written loves,
And at times even the written ourselves.
***
Maybe we are only tourist in ourselves.
Maybe except the Plaka and the Psiri of cafes and bars,
We know nothing.
We don't know even why we wander in those neighborhoods of life,
And who wanders.
***
Maybe our body of love is a tree
Where another body writes its name
So that it will last longer,
Much longer than the four seasons of the night,
Even though the autumns continue.
***
At times, we write small childish verses,
Where we can hide, like a child, from the grown-ups,
Because the grown- ups don't read them,
And even when they read them, they don't believe them,
So we can go on sleeping quietly with the moon in our arms,
And no one will know it.
***
Maybe the gods stay where they stay
Because they wouldn't be able to resist reality,
And there are too few who can save them from it,
The poets, the mad-men, the dreamers.
***
We are young, very young,
Our hands don't know yet how to love.
The surprise
When the body of love discovers us,
And when we discover it.
The surprise of how a touch can have
So many fingers of pleasure.
***
Some dreams are a threat,
So we open the door of a moving train,
And we come out from the other door of the dream.
What a pity
We cannot come out so easily from the other door of reality
When the train moves
And stay where we are, because we want to go nowhere.
The 'here' is fine.
***
We learn how to be sad, how to cry,
Long before we learn how to live,
And we never forget it.
***
When we cry, we purify some things.
Our eyes,
At times, what our eyes saw,
And for sure the ones who have no tears left.
The old ones because they lived too much.
The strangers on the side-walk of life, because they lived too little.
***
The loneliness of a poet
Begins in the loneliness of a child.
But it is not a pure loneliness
Because they have both an imaginary friend.
Someone to sing to
What we cannot say.
***
We are young and we feel we conquered the sea, the yesterdays.
We walk on the tip-toes of the waves.
We forget that time walks on our own tip-toes, the whole past.
That it will be our past that will drown us, if we let it,
If we forget how much past we carry
When we walk over the tip-toes of the waves.
***
I love the sculptures of feeling,
Like an arm that falls from the shoulders,
The neck bent a little,
And the bald head with the veins that began in the childhood,
So they are full, and they are naked as pain.
***
TO MAYAKOVSKY
GOLD- THE INSATIABLE THIEF
Gold is a metal. Metals are not thieves.
Only our hunger for gold is a thief,
And it is insatiable.
So we become thieves of gold,
And someone write a poem about gold- the thief,
Because it is the only way he could cry.
***
Maybe the wise men of the tribe are not dog whisperers,
But for sure, they are people whisperers.
So when we sit in the cafe and we decide how to divide the world,
We don't howl, we don't growl,
We just smell each other
Because peace has a smell of its own.
***
We lose our way
Even before we know how to walk,
So dying young doesn't save us from being lost,
And for sure, not from the past,
Because we have inside us always enough past to die.
***
The cafe of humble melancholies,
With the lonely lamp-post behind the glass.
That's where the strangers meet,
Because the their melancholies learned to be humble,
Because their sadness is not a stranger here.
***
We are poets
That's why we dust our old things,
Even the ancient crib, the aged drawers in our cellar.
We write the poetry of the past, because the past writes us,
Because the past can be a poet, when it wants.
***
People don't love poets
Because they take the picture
With their old house robes, the hair uncombed, the face uncombed.
And they prefer the photographs that make them beautiful
With their brushed suit, with their brushed life.
***
Maybe the poets give meaning to the twilight,
Maybe they make it our private twilight,
But there is only one twilight and many people.
So we write for each one a piece of twilight,
A shadow and a splash of light in our hand.
It may be a miniature, but when we hold it in our hand
We feel it more. We understand it more.
***
We spend more time missing our life
Than living,
And it is nice
Because missing our life, we love it more.
***
It is not easy to change our life
Because there is always something that delays it,
Like a bad weather, or a sudden memory.
And it is not strange
Because although time rolls always in our time,
It doesn't always roll the same,
And mostly memories confuse it,
Because they make it roll backwards.
***
Usually poets write in the dark
Because the lamp was exhausted ages ago
And we know nothing about lamps.
So it is not strange
That we don't know really what we write,
That we write dark things,
Or at most a line of moon-light in the poetry of the dark.
***
The autumn leaf in our hand.
We ask if it will return
But we don't hear the answer, maybe it was a whisper,
Or maybe it was too distant.
Maybe poetry, the whole poetry
Is the answer we didn't hear.
But the autumn continues.
***
Maybe poetry, the whole poetry,
Is the enigma of a leaf that fell.
And we soften the poem
By the sigh of the wind,
By a gentle rain.
***
The sound of the cicadas
That becomes summer.
The sound of the beaten carpets
That becomes the day.
Maybe some time
We'll remember this summer, this day, this place.
We'll cry, and we wouldn't know why we cry.
***
The forgotten people
Often go in the evening to the post office.
No one knows to whom they write,
And who write to them.
Maybe they wait for a letter from a medium.
Maybe it will be a card of a lonely king.
Because cards are not blind. We are.
***
The sliver of the moon
Seems like a hymen of a woman
And it is nice to see the body of love
In the middle of everything,
To let it purify the virgins.
***
Each one of us has a secret treasure.
One day we'll leave with a tied sack
And no one will know what we carry, not even ourselves,
And it is not strange,
Because some treasures: the old dreams, the old hopes,
May kill us. A knife of gold.
***
We are all deserters from old wars.
The wars with ourselves, the wars with the others.
Maybe the ones who are really alone,
Are the deserters from some dreams,
Because they desert themselves, they desert the others.
***
There are some things which are unexplainable: the God, the angels,
And there are many that are explainable,
So we try to explain them,
And we let the God, the angels, explain themselves.
***
One person is not enough to explain humanity,
Because the many change us and we change them,
Because a leaf cannot know why the tree cries.
***
In order to know who we are
We need to know who we were,
Because a child is born slowly, for years, for ages.
***
In order to know who we are, who we were
We need to know who the others are, who they were,
Because a child has many mother,
More than what we can imagine.
***
In order to know the enigma of a leaf
We have to use what other people know,
What other people knew.
Because the enigma of a leaf
Is the enigma of autumn,
Because everybody tried to explain the enigma of autumn,
While the autumns continued.
***
Thankfully, dreams don't have a calendar,
So they celebrate whenever they want,
They fast whenever they want.
So we sleep the way we live, the way we die,
Unprepared, unrehearsed, ready for nothing.
***
The sunny days of winter madden the birds,
They sing, they dance.
And it is a pity we are not sun-believers like the birds,
That we are not some Sufis who dance around the sun.
***
We go always with a bag of unfulfilled things,
And it is nice when we are a child
Because there is also the future and the hope in the bag,
But when we grow old
There is only one aged body, and so many unfulfilled things.
It is heavy and it hurts us.
***
The big fire of the sunset burns everything
Except time,
Because time is anyway a river of ashes,
Even when it is the time of a stone.
***
When we are old and we lose ourselves
It is forever,
Because we lose ourselves inside ourselves,
And because we forget, we take the key with us.
Yet, at times, a smile or a soft touch,
Find us in the darkness, and for a moment, we find ourselves.
***
Some people live so silent,
Like the stranger from the side-walk of life,
That even death cannot make them talk,
And after all, what could they say.
Dead cries don't talk.
***
We are illegal passengers on the wings of the birds.
We are not criminals,
But we are tired of climbing each day the mountains,
In order to live.
Because there is no daily mountain,
The hours, the days are a chain of mountains,
And the birds know it.
***
We may be sad
Because our parents didn't have dreams,
So our dreams are orphans.
Maybe there are other orphan dreams
And we don't know it,
And it is a pity,
Because there is too much world
And too few dreamers.
***
There are many reasons for standing up.
When we want to look far.
When we want to honor something or somebody.
When we want to go away because we honored our work for long hours,
And we don't have enough feet to honor anything else.
***
Songs sleep in the flute
Until someone wakes them up,
Like the silent stranger who brought it with him,
And he didn't know he'll continue to sing the sadness.
***
We travel. We cross whole seas
And then we drown in small days of small things.
Because the small days don't have a shore,
They continue one after the other,
So we drown forever in things that seemed really small.
***
We grow old, and time is a threat.
We break the old clocks,
Yet, the twilight continues.
***
We close the door
Because too much reality enters,
And reality has too many details that tire us,
That make us old.
Maybe that's why we dream so much,
Because details don't disturb the dreams.
Dreaming is safe.
***
A sad song we hear from somewhere at night
Is always about departures,
Like the body that discovers the child,
And it is the end of the childhood,
Like the bodies of love that discover each other,
And it is, up to the end of the night, the end of loneliness,
Like the body of a man that doesn't discover him anymore,
And it is a farewell to love.
***
Everybody around us dies,
And it is sad,
Because there is no one left to wish an easy journey,
No one to write a letter of consolation.
No one to tell how much we loved.
***
At the end of the street
There is too much autumn,
As if the world ended disciplined, tidy, at the end of the street.
Only a dead leaf fell on the side-walk. The last rebel.
***
Departures happen all the time, because everything leaves.
The trees leave, they walk towards the sun.
The moments leave, they walk towards old age.
But maybe we feel more that departure is eternal
When the train leaves
And it carries the loads of dreams that died.
***
There are too many departures.
The hours, the mornings, the afternoons.
They tire us, they make us old.
But even if we could begin again,
It will be the beginning of more departures.
So, it is useless.
***
We live, we love, we write poems,
So we consume feelings,
And we have to replenish them
In order to continue to feel.
Maybe that's why we sit often in a corner of silence, alone,
And we look at the people pass,
Because people are a storm of feelings that rains into our life.
And there is no umbrella.
***
Some dreams don't die.
They remain in a cross-road of life.
Because not all roads lead to Rome,
Some lead to dreams.
***
Of course we try to hide our eyes
That were blinded by what they saw.
That's why we cry,
Because tears can hide many things,
Maybe that's why even the angels use them.
***
We run, hour after hour, up to the end of ourselves, in order to live.
So the days are a slaughter, even though we call it life,
And then the night comes,
And we see again the slaughter of the day,
Even though we call it dream.
***
Poets stand, like a beggar,
At the door of the twilight, the immense enigma.
They don't beg for life.
They beg for a poem.
***
We travel.
We arrive so far that we can hear the sigh of the angels.
We remember it from the nights of the bodies of love.
We didn't know that also the old can hear it, when it is too late.
We didn't know that loving and dying hear the same thing.
***
At night,
Among the tough guys and the poets,
Also fate strolls.
It leaves silent traces,
Strangely, no one steps there,
Because fate may be blind,
But fear is not.
***
When we grow old, gravity is different, everything is heavy,
Even the nobility of the past is a weight.
So we drown with all the medals on our chest,
They let us sink more easily, more deeply, more eternaly.
The sea has no graves.
***
There are too many things we don't know,
And few things we really have to know.
Maybe we need the magician of the tribe.
He may say nothing.
He may let us touch the others
In order to know them more.
In order to love more.
***
At times we dream of tidying ourselves,
Of putting order in something, of finishing what was left unfinished.
We forget that we have to leave
At least one thing unfinished, in order to live,
Because life doesn't love finished things.
And anyway, life is not tidy.
***
When they humble us
We hear no longer the sigh of the angels,
Because even the humble, when the humbleness is too much,
Can leave the sky empty.
***
We have this strange feeling
That we forgot all our luggage:
The memories, the years,
On a train that has already left.
And it is not so bad
Because we had too many things
And only one life time.
Yet, even though we always dreamed of beginning again,
We realize that beginnings may be lonely,
They may hurt us.
***
Maybe there is no reality.
Maybe there are only the shadows of Plato.
Life is a shadow, and also death is a shadow.
Even feelings are raining shadows over an umbrella of shadows,
And we don't know why our life is wet.
***
Maybe the wisdom of the people is not really wise,
Because it believes too much in the past,
And it forgets that we have, each one, inside us,
His own sad prophet.
***
DARWIN
We have another childhood, and other children,
Even though we are all from the family of life.
After all we are not a leaf, or a root.
We even write poems.
***
When you laugh
Your eyes become smaller,
And your mouth is bigger than your face.
And also your body of love loves more,
Because it laughs too.
***
The small hotel, at night.
The bodies of love, the bodies of pleasure,
Invent an hour that no clock ever showed,
Because there is no clock of eternity.
***
Autumn is always a private affair,
Something between ourselves and ourselves,
Even though there is only one autumn
And so many leaves.
***
The spark of death inside us
Changes us. It makes us what we are.
But it doesn't change the many,
Because we die like a leaf,
And the many are a tree with more,
Much more than four seasons.
***
The cafe, round as a hug,
And the banana leaves, a gentle wall.
There are places where we write our poems,
And some places that write us.
***
We don't have to divide people into rich and poor,
Life does it.
Of course there is only one world,
And many people, many dreams,
So, we have to choose.
To make the world bigger,
Or make the dreams bigger,
Because life, our small big life,
Is hungry for big dreams.
***
Rome, the giant idol,
Fell many times.
But as long as Rome is inside us,
Rome exists.
***
Nothing comes from the nothing.
A dream may have enough reality in it to become reality,
The way a seed has enough wheat in it to become a mouthful of life.
***
Even in the holiest wars
We can know who fights, why he fights,
Because the gods have their own troubles.
They don't fight in the wars of people,
And the people- we can understand.
***
At times, we change some utopias into something that we can learn,
Because some utopias are alive,
And life loves to be understood,
So that we'll love it more.
***
There are many things we want
And only few things we need,
Yet, we don't know it, so we are sad,
But there are many kinds of sadness, or degrees of sadness,
So when we lose the things we need, our life cries ,
And this is another degree of sadness.
***
Real things have a shadow, an aura,
So we cannot write reality,
Because words are ghosts, at times even ghosts we love,
But they have no shadow,
And of course, no aura, except our own.
***
Strangely,
Some utopias give us life, and we give them life,
So we exchange realities.
The utopia of faces who are strangers in life, is even less real.
The utopia of a world of strangers, is even less real.
***
We explain the world by the world
Because it is the only thing we have,
Because we love to hold a leaf in our hand,
Because it tells us our seasons.
***
It is nice to think
That the world is made of fire, water, earth, air, and so do we,
Because they are things we can see, we can feel.
Maybe these are children stories,
But these stories made us what we are.
***
What we think, becomes what we do.
Thankfully, there are things we think and we don't do.
We don't murder the person who bores us for hours,
We don't kidnap the woman whose eyes we love.
And some time, in a quiet twilight, we'll feel,
That what we did, what we didn't do
Became what we are.
***
Everything unites and separates,
As if everything were a body of love,
And the world- a small hotel, at twilight
When also the shadows , the light
Embrace and un-brace.
***
Maybe there is not one freedom.
Maybe there is a staircase of freedom,
So some are more free and some less,
And maybe the tallest stair
Is the freedom to love each other.
***
We have to solve the questions of life,
Because they are many,
And because life is the only thing worth solving,
And worth loving,
And let the gods and the angels solve themselves.
***
Everything becomes its opposite,
Existing and not existing.
Even the bodies of love
Leave the small hotel and the night of love
Alone.
They leave the night and the body of love
In a place that doesn't exist.
***
The first question is always
The first beginning,
Because matter is a story teller,
And it has many stories,
So we want to know when it began
Telling us.
***
It is nice to believe in the Yin and the Yang.
To believe that light and shadow are opposites,
And then the twilight comes and they love.
***
We cannot imagine how strong we are
When we know.
Like knowing why the body of love loves,
Why a leaf of love loves,
And why they die even though they loved.
***
Everything begins in a struggle
Between the wind and the stillness,
Between the light and the shadows,
And then there is an hour of truce.
The twilight .
And the birds in the light breeze.
***
When we recognize beauty
We begin seeing what's ugly,
Because we have at least two eyes, or even more,
Because we divide what we see
Into what we like or not,
Into what steals our eyes.
***
In order to know what we are
We have to know what a leaf is, what a puppy is,
Because we share the same veranda of the same house,
And the same seasons rain over our life. They wet us.
***
We don't know how strong our hands are.
They are the builders. They are the destroyers.
They are the curers. They are the killers.
So, we should be careful when we use them,
Because they are also a child of the body of love.
***
It is not for nothing that we rose on our feet.
We need our hands,
And two hands are enough for living,
And for you, your hands full of summer.
Give me your hand.
***
Maybe matter is the soul we speak about so much,
Because it is eternal,
And because it changes its home, the way the soul changes addresses,
As if it were the architect of eternity.
***
Whatever we do, we feel inside us what wasn't done,
What will never be done,
So we mourn what never existed. We mourn the irreversible things.
We are sad people, and the sadness makes us deep, infinite.
***
Your hair full of silences. Your hair that was a child and now is a woman.
Often you loosen it, you loosen the woman and the child,
And you become infinite. And you make the withered small hotel infinite.
***
Street cleaners sweep the pages of old books, they sweep the past.
The past is wet because it rains,
And its stories are consumed because the ants are hungry and the rats are hungry,
And they eat the past,
Because the past is not only the past of people, and it seeps everywhere.
***
The unknown is a promise, it is a promise of the infinite,
But it could be the infinite of pain, the infinite of the dead that didn't die yet inside us.
So we go to astrologers
And even to exorcists who move between the beyond and the small opaque room,
Between the infinite sadness and the happiness they promise.
But we cannot be happy. We didn't tell them that we killed.
***
We need someone to cure us,
Even a whisperer who enchants animals,
Because animals have a soul too and they cry when their life bleeds.
Because who, if we would have told him beforehand
Would have endured the pain that became his life
And his hand that killed.
And we endured it, because it happened slowly,
And because the war kills first all our eyes,
So we don't see ourselves when we shoot,
We don't see the eyes of the one who shot us.
***
Women of the wide fields. Withered women.
They are hungry for someone, because they are hungry to live.
So they find someone, and they love without love,
They love no longer even their dreams,
And the hunger for life is not hungry anymore.
***
Come to the festival of people.
The colors buzz, and the sky buzzes,
The music leaves behind a river of light, of faces.
There are only life and the miracles, and they are the same.
Someone tries to remember if there was ever happiness in the world.
Someone laughs from his chest, like a clown for all seasons.
The balls play with the curiosity of a child,
And the children come and go between laughter and dream. They'll wake up
A moment before they grow old. They'll cry and no one will know why.
The top turns under the hands of a child, and it may be the last top, the last childhood.
Only eternity doesn't grow old.
Someone without legs walks again and again on his head, like the monotonous play of sadness, then he collects the pity of people.
In a corner ambulatory singers sell their sad voice.
In the shadows, some female clothes, like a tender army of surrender.
A couple, silent, spit peals, as if they spat the loneliness on each other.
Youngsters pass by. They don't see, they don't hear. They are closed in their youth.
The magician makes someone disappear in his laughter, and maybe he'll stay there.
A mad man passes, silent and torn. He walks over the laughter, over the night,
Between the fireworks and hell.
Strange mirrors deform us, and we don't know who we are. We are lost in a mirror.
Someone dances, his body twists like a lonely flame, and slowly, the ash gathers.
The women's heals pray to the sky.
Someone without lips will never kiss the whole madness, the whole beauty.
When dawn comes, the festival will be over, like a life that surrendered to love,
And was not absolved.
The huge tent folded on earth, like a cemetery of miracles.
Maybe we'll remember that sometime life was miraculous.
The moon light-rays, like a bench of a bar, and the lit dice win the treasure.
In the bar
The dancers step over the rhythm, over time.
Some quiet people sit bent under the madness of joy.
And the old guitar players, opaque, ruined, jump, so that the others will laugh, so they can sooth their infinite hunger, and the laughter that kills them.
Under the tables the legs mingle like a huge octopus of love.
Ambulant magician that dazzled the night and life, cannot charm the sad soup to be magic. So they eat the sad soup.
And a lonely woman sweeps the remnants of the night. She is silent, and she doesn't say who she is. Maybe it is too late in her life for answers
***
A city like all the other cities of the world
People who run after food, and the ones who run after a poem.
The ones who are silent, opaque, because they don't want to cry.
The ones who leave in the middle of a dream.
There is a man who decided to be a beggar, the way we decide things for no reason,
And for all the reasons. He wore torn clothes and torn sighs, and he gathers the offers
Of humanity to a man, because he knows people love to feel pity.
There are the ones who become mad. They say that wars are insane, so people become
Insane. The madness after the war is quiet, strange, without shrieks,
Like a silent, cruel sinking in ourselves. But there are many ways of being insane,
And we keep them secret inside us in order to protect our madness.
The cold winds bring thin earth, and we remember the big earth of death.
***
The bar in the city.
It is night and the world is deeper.
Outside, the long road. No one waits for us, and we wait for no one.
Someone sings suddenly, as if someone pushed him to sing. Maybe the dead,
The songs comfort them. His voice, like the night, like the deep autumn,
He sings as if he sung only to himself, because these are the only songs worth singing.
The smoke, the drunk air make the faces imaginary, opaque, distant,
As if their eyes began somewhere else, where the world died,
And they arrive here slowly,sad, panting.
It is strange how true are, at times, the things that we imagine.
People laugh for small things. Maybe life wouldn't be as dangerous if not for the small things, They keep us, panting, on a tight rope. The mortal balance.
People speak only about things which are distant, not their own.
The others, each one lives alone, in his infinite silence. That's why the dead are silent.
They live only what was their own.
For a moment, no one speaks, but we have to speak, and to speak a lot,
Because the night comes, and yet, all the words are less than a sigh.
***
The woman and the small hotel of the night.
The hotel small, immense, a corner of shadows and paradise.
The exhausted beds, the withered towels, things consumed by thousand others,
Maybe they died, but things keep a memory of the passage of people, a passage without a Face. Because in each life there is something deeper than that life-
The life of others, and things are alive, and they die.
No one comes alone, because the loneliness here is immense, they come two by two in order to survive, because inside sin and the stolen pleasure there may be something that hurts us more, that we cannot resist alone.
And the woman who longs to escape, to walk over the daily things, over the years, over the possible. That's why she is so exotic, so distant, as if distant fates made her what she is.
The woman is cold, and the man is cold, because whatever we lose makes us cold,
Even the lost dreams.
And inside each embrace, the end waits, final, unchangeable like the sum of numbers.
The woman stands, small, eternal, her gaze lost above the roofs, above life, above the years.
She seems like a lonely tree, a deep quiet tree, carrying on its trunk the whole weight of the infinite, and the wounds of the cut branches, are the eyes that knew what hell is.
After wandering in eternity she returns to the room, because eternity is too cold.
She returns to the bed, ready to risk again all her dreams in the uncertainty of love, in the loneliness of love.
The small hotel of the night. The man at the desk
The eyes of the man are opaque, like ancient wood-cuts that conquered time.
And he knows how the seed falls in the fields, in the wombs, because each thing has inside it its own god.
The doors of the rooms have no keys, because the man is afraid of keys, and because he knows each person keeps his own key of his cell, but he forgets it, and this is his prison.
He sees people come so together, so alone, and he feels the eternal innocence of the lonely.
He knows we are all guilty for each human act, the sin, the virtue, because everybody lives in the life of the others, so we are guilty and innocent.
He knows the terrible beauty of people who want to love because they don't know how to live.
He knows that inside us nothing is lost, not the lovers, the sins we saw, the loneliness we touched. We are full of so many fates.
Suddenly, the man feels quiet. A joy that touches the other side of the infinite- the pain, and he realizes that this joy, this pain, is because this immense life
Has to lean, patient, excruciating, on our shoulders.
***
Women
The waitresses in the cafes, the maids in the small hotel, the ones who clean offices and sweep the dusty justice.
Women simple, inexplicable, lonely, small, infinite.
They speak about the rain, about regret about tomatoes and other eternal things.
Maybe they speak in order to exist, they don't know that the world exists because of the Small talk of women.
On their faces, the rivers of time flow silently into eternity,
And their swollen hands are absolved, forever.
Their words have the color of fate, which is the color of earth, and their patience, is the Patience of earth.
Their words weave the lost years, thoughts, suns, and the inexplicable hours into an Exquisite cloth. But again and again, the cloth is torn, and everything is lost in the infinite of the silence, and all that is left is the mortal hunger to weave the tender threads, the words,
But they know how difficult it is to finish something, even the weaving, because whatever We do ends in the middle.
They are not young anymore, their children grew. They know how children grow, consuming their childhood.
They know, like an animal, how to smell danger, because they had to protect their children,
And because women have a secret tie to blood.
The blood to bear a child. The blood to die.
***
The night, the dream of human love and the lonely body of love,
Are reasons enough for murder,
So we kill the dreams and the dreamers , we kill the poems and the poets,
We kill the sleep-walkers and their lonely ghosts,
And we don't realize that with each killing, we kill something in ourselves,
So it is a double murder.
We are guilty.
***
Maybe the sadness of the drunkards, their ancient pain
Began with Noah.
Maybe all the drunkards drink the Biblical flood each night,
In order to survive, in order to float over the memories, over time, over the dreams,
In order not to drown in themselves.
***
We die twenty four hours a day
By a dream, a gaze, a gesture. We die twenty four graves a day,
And all these deaths don't forgive us.
So when we die once more, maybe it will be the last death, the last grave,
And maybe this death will forgive us. This and the quiet earth.
***
It is autumn everywhere, in all the provinces of life.
It rains coins, gold , hunger and pain,
And the rain kills us.
We need urgently an immense umbrella of an immense dream
To save us.
And we needed all the jewels of sadness
In order to write this rain.
***
We grow old and all that's left is to remember.
We remember those who drowned in their life,
Those who stepped over dreams,
And the infinite gaze of the dying,
And we realize we left in each other something of ourselves,
Something we gave, something we didn't give.
So, we are different. There are many inside us.
And when someone closes the door on us,
He leaves outside the sum of pain. The infinite.
***
It rained in our age, it rained endlessly.
And inside us, a past we don't know,
And maybe enough future to learn what pain is,
And no one can help our pain, except our pain.
So, we are lost.
And even poetry, the big dream, is too late,
Too late to use it.
***
The profession of poets
Is the impossible,
Because they dream too much
And live too little.
***
Motherhood is infinite, too infinite for only one grave.
It needs a whole cemetery, and the cemetery inside us,
And it is not the eyes, it is the infinite hands.
The hands that knew how to forgive.
The hands that cried, because mothers cry with their hands:
The imperceptible touch when we are lonely, when they are lonely.
And when the hands laugh they smell like fresh bread.
And all these infinites cannot be contained in one death.
***
Through the open door the big night enters noiselessly,
And all the cemeteries where we buried our mother are not enough
Because they dream in our dreams.
They are silent, and the forgive us, and we remember it,
Because we always remember the dreams that forgive us.
***
When someone close dies
At times we cannot cry,
Because he is so different, so unreal, and the loneliness is immense.
And only our body of love and the body of love of a woman
May forgive us that we are alive, and that we cannot cry.
***
Inside us there are more, much more than one person.
At times, they accept each other, at times they are killers,
But when we have to walk on the daily tight rope,
To walk above danger, above dreams, above hunger, in order to live,
We are one sad person.
***
There are strange heroes.
The old woman in the corner of the street who hides under her skirt a ruined paradise,
And she has the courage to love.
And Judas who betrayed and loved,
And the killer who killed for love.
They are heroes in a different way. They never forgot how to love,
And how to hide in a corner of silence in order to cry.
***
Lovers see, like the blind, with their hands.
The fingers that are the first clay,
And the clay of the body of love.
Maybe that's why love is always a new virginity,
Maybe that's why it cracks, why it breaks.
***
Maybe, when the time comes, they'll judge us,
And we don't know how they judge.
We don't know if they judge what we did or what we felt,
Maybe they judge the hatred, the woman who didn't love, the fear, the envy.
So, we are all guilty.
***
The play ended.
The hero leaves with the poison that killed him, in his mind.
And it is strange how people can live with imaginary poison for years,
And how it can kill them.
***
We return each day
From gazes that didn't see us,
From hours that stepped over our life.
But, we revenge.
We sit in the veranda and we look at the immense twilight,
And the lights turning on their tremble,
And it makes us infinite. It makes our life infinite.
***
We are hungry for life,
But we shouldn't forget that life is hungry for us.
So we should eat each other's hunger,
In whatever we eat, in whatever we see, in whatever we live,
In whatever we love.
***
Maybe Paradise never existed.
Maybe the first chaos left a shattered world,
And a sky that was empty,
And the first man and the first woman bore children and war.
These, and love.
***
Poets return from the night in the small hotel,
From the body of love,
One night more exhausted, one night more pure,
And they write a poem like a new virginity,
Because each poem is a new hymen.
***
Hats are never simple.
Some have eternal flowers, because we need something eternal in our life.
Some are low and they cover our eyes, because we want to cry alone,
And some are tall, like a tombstone, that closes, heavy, irreversible,
Our whole life.
***
Strangely, it is the little days that teach us what is big and what isn't.
Like the repetition of the hours, of the gestures, of the silences,
That make time endless, irreversible.
Like the daily despair that makes the horizon infinite.
Like the love that grew tired, and the bed is too small,
Too small for two solitudes.
***
We don't know the face, or maybe, the faces, beneath our face,
And the gangs of faces beneath our face that kill each other.
But, there are mirrors, and they see us ceaselessly, endlessly,
They see what we do, so they know us,
Because what we do is what we are.
And the mirrors don't forgive us, so we have no choice,
We have to forgive ourselves, and go on.
***
We don't know where our face comes from,
From which murderer, from which rape, from which cry of a woman-girl.
We don't know all the faces in our face.
Maybe we are a modern Atlas sentenced to carry on his back infinite fates, forever.
And we don't know if somewhere in the depth, the innocent eyes of a hairy creature,
Look at us.
***
We don't know that when we pass by the stranger from the side-walk of life,
When it rains,
And we don't see him,
We don't see how the rain melts his face, the innards of his body, the innards of his life,
We are the first Cain.
And there are too many CAINS and too many HABELS.
***
Old people carry with them, inside them, papers. So, they are paper people, delicate.
They carry ancient love letters, the drawing of God by a child, letters they wrote at night
To death or other murderers.
And because they are old, they forget the umbrella,
And it always rains over the old, so they melt little by little.
Maybe that's how everything will end one day, and all that will remain
Will be the world, the molten paper, and the quiet rain that will forgive us.
***
The old man and the old woman at the table.
The gaze without purpose, for sure not the purpose of seeing,
And they spit the peels of seed, as if they spat the loneliness at each other.
At night, their bodies make the bed cold.
And they don't remember, they don't remember why they are with each other,
In the same house, in the same life.
***
We fed our lives with strange things.
With deaths, with pain, with women who didn't love us,
With dreams consumed by too much use.
But there was always the hunger for life. This, and the poems.
***
In the corner of the street, the blind man with the violin.
His fingers consumed by the tears and by the love of the chords ,
And the music goes far, much further than the chords,
And he gives the people who pass,
Something infinite. This, and the love.
***
Maybe our little-big life is an acrobat,
And we all walk on a tight rope.
The rope has many names: the fear of death, and more than this,
The fear of life, the dreams, time, God, and the nothing.
And we keep our little-big existence by the infinite, unthinkable balance.
***
Today again, the same compromises,
The same consumed shoes from the street of time,
The same hope we hide for something big, and the suspicion that we hide nothing.,
The sins we forgot, and the innocence we don't recognize,
And in the evening there is no possible left,
And the unthinkable becomes a thought.
***
Your heals are a root, where everything begins,
The tree, the leaves,
And the sun in the leaves,
And the love in the leaves,
And you give me your body of leaves.
***
People die,
And the fears, the vanities, the memories, the dreams, die too.
And there is so little left to bury.
***
The cellar and what happens there are always secret.
Some nights we find there the dust of bones, of passion, of time,
And we think we know who we are, our past.
And some nights we find the angel of the drunkards,
Because the drunkards are a pure, and a killer with a sad knife,
And we realize that we have more, much more than one past.
***
Children don't like mirrors,
Because they don't want to grow,
Because they know something we forgot,
How to live playing, how to learn playing.
***
Poets know the secret subterranean entrance to heaven,
Because they dream, and because dreams are always subterranean.
Of course , also the entrance to hell is there,
In the same place, in the same night.
***
There are many cross-roads. There are also many crosses,
And we hear them coming,
They bite the edges of our fingers, they bite the edges of our mind.
So we have always a cross that crucifies us,
And the guilt, because guilt is a feeling that purifies us,
Like a confession to ourselves.
***
We grow old.
Our innards become streets of pain.
Maybe we give mercy because we need mercy.
We give a feather of our childhood to an old woman with a dead bird.
We give a dream to a child, because the children that came from the places
Where the world ended, have left their dreams there,
So we give the child a childhood.
And we sooth the old woman and the bird, we sooth the child,
We sooth our life, and we sooth the mercy.
***
On the dusty street
People bent from the dust and from the infinite hunger.
People who run each day the Marathon to the end of the world in order to live,
And in the evening they empty their shoes from the roads.
And women who sell love, and whose sadness is more heavenly than heaven.
And when we see them, we know we are not alone,
And we know have a treasure of suffering in our hands.
***
The twilight is strange and familiar.
Somewhere there are trains that lost their whistle, and therefore, the journey.
And in a deserted building, at the edge of everything,
Stretchers with the cries of old wars,
And hope is far, much further than death.
***
The days where we run up to the end of ourselves in order to live,
And we drown in our shoes.
At night we count the treasure of our sighs,
And the only witness to our sadness is a dead god.
We try to cover our traces, so that no one will follow our private Via Dolorosa,
But the past is everywhere, so it is useless.
***
We kneel with our face on the ground
Like someone whose life conquered him,
Like someone who prays to a god that died the day he was born,
And when we get us, there is a shadow on our neck,
And our face remains on the ground.
And only now we notice how many people in the street are faceless.
***
There are many ways to kill.
We can point a finger at someone,
And we draw an imaginary circle around him, which is not imaginary at all,
And the circle is always smaller, always tighter,
Until there is no room for loneliness or for life.
Circles can be killers, and fingers too.
***
The deep night.
We are caught, like a big insect, in the infinite spider web of the moon,
And we have no choice,
We love the way the ones who are dying love.
Maybe, it is the only love that exists.
***
We looked too much at what we want, at what we feel.
We used a telescope that gave the infinite to our existence,
And we know nothing of others, of the their infinite pain,
Of their infinite life,
Because we look from the other side of the telescope.
We are alone.
***
The love of poets is strange.
They make love with dreams,
And they fill the small room with the smell of sperm and of poems that could have been,
That wouldn't be,
And we don't know why they continue,
Because each night the love hurts more, and the dead sperm hurts them more.
Maybe one day, the infinite pain will be a poem.
***
We don't realize that our faces are a mask.
At times the mask is honest. It smiles with true lips, it is afraid with all the eyes.
And at times, it silences our life.
***
We use masks for many reasons, and we know them all,
But we don't know that masks can consume our face,
That one day, when we take them off, there will be no face left.
The deep nothing.
***
There are ghosts everywhere, because there is death everywhere.
When we hear the ghosts' steps we tremble,
We are afraid of the dead, maybe because they are strangers in life,
And maybe because they see, from the other side of life, better than what we wish,
Who we are , what we are.
We forget that one day we'll be a ghost too,
Our steps at night will be lonely, and we'll need love, more than ever.
***
We all have a corridor in our life, and steps that bleed.
Maybe the steps of a love we were too small to love,
Maybe of a dream we were too small to dream,
And maybe the wooden leg of someone who died,
And we were too small to love the missing leg.
***
Killing for love ends nothing,
Because the killer becomes, more than ever, a slave of this love,
Because of the regret that is a slave-trader.
***
It is easier to be a saint when we die young,
Because we don't know we are all sad people,
And before we die, we don't realize that we'll die too,
So we bless the sad and the dying,
And we feel even more how eternal we are.
***
As long as they put people on the cross,
They put on the cross also life,
And it is all of us who made the crosses possible,
So, we are guilty.
***
Some hats are humble
When we raise them for someone important, someone rich
And humbleness may be heavy, as heavy as the grave of a human,
So we carry our grave on our head.
***
On the stage; the war, the screams,
And the terrible silence of a man without a face who was betrayed by someone,
Maybe a friend.
He gets up and leaves, and he carries with him this betrayal, somewhere deep,
Where he keeps other betrayals,
Because betrayal has stages everywhere.
***
People look in mirrors in order to be certain that they exist
And that mirrors exist,
Because some people are mirrors, and they are not safe,
Because mirrors know how to see.
***
Maybe everything is a theatre.
We don't know who gave us these incomprehensible roles, who gave us our face.
We don't know who silences us, who left a cemetery of cries in our mouth.
We don't know why the plays are always tragic, and we have to die at the end,
And why we carry this death inside us for years, for ages.
***
We choose the roles ourselves, from the first hour.
Whatever we accepted: the bullying, the murder of dreams, became our role.
So we learned how to be humble ,the kind of humbleness that kills us, because there are many kinds of humbleness.
And we learned how to live with a cemetery of dreams out of our door.
***
She loved me in her own way,
But sometimes, at twilight, I saw in her face,
Something indefinite and terrible,
As if she wanted to destroy the need to own me,
In order to own herself.
***
We die little by little and so dies the love.
We remain, two strangers who don't recognize each other,
And between us the big exile. Time.
***
Maybe men are, somewhere deep, sadder than us,
And women marry, because the loneliness is unavoidable.
At day time life is easier, because we make things and they make us,
But night falls heavy,
It brings back the sadness of the man, and the loneliness of the woman,
And the pleasure, the lonely prisoner of a moment.
***
There is something strange
That makes us do things we don't want to do,
And the things we don't want to do make us,
And when we try to escape there is always the abyss where all the escapes die.
We don't know for sure if we exist, if there is something under our clothes,
And if one day there will be someone to bury, someone we murdered.
Maybe we dreamed too much and did too little,
So, we are guilty.
***
I write each day, even on the holy Sabbath,
Maybe because I am old, and old people speak endlessly,
As if they believed that the moment they'll be silent,
They'll die.
***
Our mother died, and so, our friends.
Our dreams left us, or maybe, we left them.
And we learned what pain is, what loneliness is.
So, nothing is left to worry about. Everything happened.
***
There are nights of the bodies of love, of love,
That are not simple.
The woman scrapes us with all the finger-nails she has
And we bleed the passion in our blood,
And there is nowhere to escape, because the passion, the blood blind us.
So, we are the helpless god, and we love them
Because they are immensely strong, immensely sad.
***
Our years are a calendar of lost battles
And we don't know why.
It could be the big words, too big, that we shouted.
It could be the small truths we killed inside us.
It could be the endless departures within us, small, silent, unstoppable,
And all these things don't forgive us,
And we don't know how to forgive ourselves.
***
We believed in the people of the big roads,
And yet, we lost ourselves.
Maybe we have to know people by the first gesture, by the first thing they do,
Or it will be too late,
And maybe, it was always too late,
Because we don't know how to forgive ourselves
For the belief in the big roads, for losing ourselves in the big roads.
***
We need people,
But we need their true faces,
Because truth has faces,
And it has roots in the faces,
Infinitely deep. Infinitely alive.
***
Maybe matter is the soul we speak about so much,
Because it is eternal,
And because it changes all the time,
As if it were the architect of eternity.
***
We sit in the immense twilight
And we draw a woman in the air,
But the woman seems unreal,
So we draw the eternal pain,
And the woman bears love and children, and a cemetery of cries.
***
A night where only the blind can see,
And in the dark the stray animals hear further,
And the love
That is blind and is a stray animal,
Sees, hears, and loves.
***
The immense sadness everywhere,
So one day, we decide to jump from a bridge,
And there, purified by the water,
Our true life looks at us, like a stranger, a beautiful stranger,
And it is a pity that we are not patient,
Because the bridge and the jump can wait,
And also our life can wait further, much further than what we think.
***
The immense suffering and the small mad-house.
Someone is there because he has only one eye, the innocent one.
And someone is a child killer, because children shouldn't grow,
They should remain eternal.
And there are the cries of the children who have to grow.
There is an old woman who swept the whole earth,
And she gives everybody the cries from her sack.
Maybe one day the mad-house will burn,
And everybody will go to hell,
Because there is not room enough in Paradise for so much sadness.
***
It is early in the world.
A woman nursed a lamb, and we loved everybody,
And we felt the immense sadness of everything.
But it didn't last, we had to leave the Paradise of the living,
Because we had to learn how to hate, how to kill,
In order to repent. In order to enter the Paradise of God.
***
The Barbarians came and left nothing.
All that remained was a small hotel of love
Where men left their sperm,
And a woman who buried the sperm in her innards,
Because she remembered how to love and how to mourn love.
***
I inherited from my mother a flower,
The one that grew in her deep gaze,
And on her hat.
And from my father I inherited the planks in his hands,
The ones where the drowning try to hold when it is too late.
And that is how I live.
Drowning with the planks and with the flower in my hand.
So hell wouldn't be a surprise.
I'll continue to drown with the planks and with the flower in my hands.
***
We remember our mother, and more than that her lips.
The consumed lips that whistled the daily tunes,
And the kettle whistled too, and the pots and the kitchen.
We remember her hurried, silent death.
But life was not a mother, the life after her.
It didn't whistle love,
And it left too little love to hide our lips, our empty lips.
***
We don't know how to be a friend of a woman.
There is too much body of love in our body.
We can talk in the immense twilight for long,
But our hands hold each other
Infinitely close, infinitely tight.
So, we have no choice. We follow our hands.
***
Whatever we did is not ours anymore,
All that's left are the things we didn't do,
Or maybe we'll never do. They are our own.
No one can change them, no one can conquer them,
Because they don't exist.
So, as long as we live, we are the kings of what doesn't exist.
And it is sad, because also death will steal from us all that exists.
***
Endless childhood days, they enlarge the infinite.
Small dates that no one celebrates.
And the fallen leaves of the calendars
Are a private autumn.
Because the autumn continues, even in the infinite.
***
We are a child, and we love the whistle of the train.
It enlarges the horizon.
But we grow old. We wanted much and we did little,
And the whistle of the train becomes the voice of an animal in pain,
The cry of someone who lived little,
And his death forgives nothing.
***
The infinite suffering.
But we don't go to the places of miracles
Together with the hopes of the mad, with the crutches of the saints.
We adopt our body of pain, our body naked as pain,
And we know that the body of pain is our child, and that pain is our child.
Which is another kind of miracle.
***
The tragic plays have logic.
The crime, the punishment, the judges-gods,
And the need of each one to walk to the depth of the big road,
In order to exist.
But life has no logic
And there are murderers even in the hotels of love,
So the heroes cannot understand us,
Unless they were killed too, without reason, without hope,
Infinitely alone.
***
Maybe life is a child
That draws a window on the wall,
And the child flies with all the birds that exist.
And there is always a wall near us and a pencil.
***
Each house has a secret window that can take us far.
But usually we find it when the house is no longer there.
Maybe drawing a window on a brick or a stone is enough,
Because a window is a hole in the sky, an infinite for the eyes and the birds.
***
They don't chase us from Paradise only once, they chase us again and again,
And we arrive to the city where everybody was exiled from Paradise,
The people drink, they kill themselves and the others in order to survive,
And only the women make love with closed eyes, in order not to sin.
And everywhere, the autumn continues.
***
At night
You bring me to the depth of your eyes,
To the depth of your body,
And we love silent, blind,
Because we are too deep in our eyes, too deep in our bodies,
And we don't know if we'll ever come out.
***
Maybe we have always a foreigner inside us,
And only when we love, when the night of love loves,
The foreigner that we were disappears,
Because all the faces, all the bodies inside us love.
Maybe death learns from love,
Because there are no foreigners in death.
***
The small hotel, at night.
We dress the woman with our mother's clothes, consumed by the years and by pain,
A woman with big hands, as big as the breasts,
In order to kneel and to ask forgiveness,
Because maybe it is never too late,
And we may forgive ourselves.
***
We are blind and our gaze hangs somewhere in the sky,
So the birds pass through us,
Because the birds recognize the immense sadness of the void,
And the darkness raining in the open eyes.
***
The dead lie with their hands crossed,
As if the crucifying never ends,
And nothing is enough, the years of pain, of hunger, of the terrible humbleness,
Not enough to absolve us.
Maybe one day we'll absolve ourselves.
***
Some nights we are Jacob fighting with the angel.
The infinite silence, and we fight with nails and teeth,
We scrape the flesh, and then there is a cry,
And we realize that the angel is a sad woman of love.
And that we raped the angel, the woman and love.
***
We die in a moment more infinite than time,
Beyond anything daily. Absolute like instinct.
And maybe, this is the way we love.
***
We grow old and sad and we do sad things.
We cry for sacrifices we couldn't do.
We feel regret for crimes we dreamed of.
We ask forgiveness from the dead that cannot forgive anymore.
We are guilty, and it soothes us.
***
We age
And we are still afraid of the dark.
We keep always the lamp in the corridor on.
But we don't know
If it is the fear of a child or of an old man,
And maybe, it is the same fear.
***
Children's dreams. Bigger than dream and more terrible,
And they spread everywhere,
To the window of suns, to the delicate air of the day.
And the poets remember. They write the dreams that wrote them.
***
You didn't turn off the light as you always do.
You undressed and you showed me the breasts that suddenly blossomed,
And you gave me all the motherhood,
All the children that never happened in all our nights, and all your bodies of love.
And it was the deepest night. A cry.
***
Years of immense void.
We feel we have nothing that is our own except regret. This, and death.
We don't know how to forgive ourselves for what we did, for what we didn't do.
And we don't know if death knows how to forgive.
So, we are guilty.
***
The flies drowned in the remnants of light,
They were dead shadows in the immense twilight,
And you waited for me.
You covered my naked gaze with your eye-lashes,
Because, at times, seeing hurts us,
And you soothed my gaze, you soothed the dead flies in my gaze,
And you soothed my body, the body of love.
***
We don't know why we were left unfinished,
Why we have only one face,
And of course, we need many faces in order to live.
But, we learn.
We grow faces, the immense hands, the immense sadness in the eyes,
Like a Hindu God,
Or like someone who throws seeds of himself in earth,
Like the body of love.
***
The immense sadness,
So much that all the shadows of twilight could pass through us.
We are hungry, but we have nothing to sell,
So we sell our souls,
Because the saints need the souls of the poor,
In order to be accepted in Paradise.
***
We stay in a deserted station, because we have nowhere to go,
And because we are a stranger from a place where the world ended.
We eat the smoke of the trains that don't go anymore,
Because we are hungry,
And because there are no trains to the places where the world ended,
And hope is further, much further than death.
***
Above, the heavenly music,
But in the nocturnal bar no one looks up.
Maybe they don't hear it, or they don't want to hear,
Or maybe they believe that the true God, the God of mercy,
Cries in their glass.
***
The immense loneliness.
Maybe, one day,
Only the dogs that barked at us in the street
Will notice that we miss.
Dogs are pure. They wouldn't cry.
***
So long after the flood
And we still wait for an umbrella of mercy, or at least, for a rain-coat.
But the wheels of justice somewhere high are as slow as eternity
Because they are eternal, and they forget we are not.
And anyway, there is a shortage of raincoats,
And more than that, of umbrellas of mercy,
So, it is useless.
***
Maybe, to be crucified,
Or to crucify ourselves
Is the same thing.
The same immense loneliness, the same immense sadness,
The same incomprehensible life that didn't forgive us.
The same terrible urge to ask the cross for forgiveness.
***
We try to escape the stampede of the crowd,
And our hands our wings, or an exquisite music, or an incomparable poem,
And they take us above everything,
Above the crowd, above time, above ourselves,
And we learn how to fly, like a bird, like a poet, in the immense sadness.
***
In the nocturnal bar
Among the drunk killers and the drunk saints
Who drink in order to resist the saintliness,
An old woman burns incense and climbs on the scent.
She doesn't know that the door to heaven is the next door to hell,
The way it was in her life,
And maybe in all eternities.
***
A man passes, a man like all others,
And his gaze hangs from his face,
Because he is mortally tired, too tired to look high,
Maybe only the earth can forgive all that pain.
***
We hold hands
In order to walk better on the street of time,
And we forget that these hands used to be fins, a flock of wings,
And that they can fly through our twilight, through the immense sadness,
And that they fly together, even when they fly alone.
***
We stretch our hand in order to touch another hand,
And to touch a dream,
Because hands dream, and some dreams are contagious,
So when our hands touch the hands of others,
We dream together, even when we dream alone.
***
It is the last meal of the condemned.
We keep our breath far from the table,
Because some things are poisonous,
The smell of saints that are always at the table,
The smell of another cross,
The smell of human departure, the infinite departure.
***
They crucify us,
And then the un-hang the sunset from us,
And the wounds leave shadows in the air.
We are pure. We don't use miracles or magic,
So, we die forever.
***
We grow old and poor.
We eat the leaves of the calendar,
And we eat the autumn in the leaves,
Because we are hungry,
And because time is the only poison we can afford.
***
The blind violinist from the corner of the street.
So little of him was left after the stampede.
There is the shape of a hand that became a violin,
And it played his soul when he was killed.
There is the child in his open eyes, the eyes whose innocence began to hurt him,
And there is the quiet of those who gave up the suffering of the gods,
In order to suffer their own suffering,
So we recognize him, and we bury the hand, the violin, the soul, the child,
The innocence, the open eyes, the suffering, and the gods.
***
Some evenings there is a stranger under our window, and it rains.
He has an imaginary violin, the one he always dreamed of,
And it remained a dream.
And inside him, the music.
So he plays and the tunes are drenched by the rain and by the infinite sadness,
And the only umbrella of mercy is the music.
***
At night, only the dead visit us.
They don't know that they are dead, so, they laugh.
And death is also here, he tells us about the killings of the centuries
That made us what we are,
And he remembers a fly we killed in our childhood, and we cannot save it anymore
Because time never goes back,
Sometimes the birds fall over us and they die, as if death had a different gravity,
And he makes life too heavy to live.
So, we have always something to bury inside us,
The dead that visit us, the killings of the centuries, the fly, and the birds.
***
In the corner of the street, the evening, and the blind violinist.
His soul without a rain-coat, and it rains,
And on his shoulders a consumed colored jacket that the blind cannot see.
Maybe it is the jacket they give the blind in hell.
And the music played the evening, the rain, the soul without the rain-coat,
And the colored jacket that the violinist couldn't see, and the hell of the blind.
And it played heavenly. It played the heaven of man.
***
When they want to crucify people,
They always find someone in the corner of the street to help them,
Because he believes in the heaven of crosses,
And in helping those who suffer
To purify their suffering by suffering.
***
The women who were ugly, and who no one wanted their body of love,
Don't die unloved,
Because the unknown has to pass his hand over each one who dies,
And he does it infinitely tender with these lonely bodies, these lonely lives,
Because death is the last justice.
***
The unknown man is always here, in the house, silent and incomprehensible.
At times he looks at the destiny of the dead that remained empty, useless.
At times he looks at the sad old men who sell wreathes for the dead,
Even though they conquered nothing, and death conquered them.
At times he touches the dead hand of a woman of love, as if he gives her what no one gave her, and he purifies her death.
The story cannot end, because the unknown man is here and time is here,
And they both wander together, further, much further than what we imagine.
***
Your hand, so transparent,
I can see through it far,
And the birds can fly through it, because the hand has a sky and the infinite sadness.
You whisper: I have nothing to hide except my hand,
And then the hand, this incredible hand,
Showed me the leaves of twilight that followed it
***
Somewhere some time, we ask the stranger inside us who he is,
And he answers: I was always somewhere else.
And this is enough. We know who he is,
And we know why we were away for so long.
But it strange, because on the old sofa in this house, in this room,
There is a stain of the ice cream of a child.
***
Some nights we draw a window on the wall,
And we travel through it, like a modern Aladdin,
And the birds pass, the dreams, the pain of living and the terrible humbleness,
Because an open window is a hole in the sky.
***
At times, the days feel like lice that eat our body, our life.
When the time comes, there will be nothing to bury,
Only the dead days, the dead bones, and the lice that are eternal,
And nothing forgives us, not the days we let die, the life we let die,
And the lice.
So, we are guilty.
***
Someone leaves, someone beloved, and we keep his hand,
The hand that held us often at the edge of the abyss.
So, we are alone, but the hand and the edge of the abyss are always near.
One day, the hand wouldn't be enough,
And we'll be alone with the edge of the abyss.
***
The immense loneliness.
At night we hear the vanes that change the wind,
And we touch, like the blind, the shadows on the wall,
Because who ever passed hear left a shadow,
And our fingers see the infinite sadness of the shadows.
***
The small hotel, in the distant suburb.
A woman dances, and she keeps in her breasts the pure milk.
She'll give it to the poor men, to those born of love,
And to the children that could have happened.
***
We close a door because there is no longer trust.
On the street, the street lamps look at us with big pure eyes,
Like those who wait for God,
So we wait too, because we have to wait for something,
And because we want to be absolved,
Because each one is guilty of something.
***
Maybe the justice up is like the justice down here.
It gathers lots of beggars.
Some beggars crawl under the floor of the churches. They beg for mercy.
The paralyzed roll, so they wouldn't be stampeded. They beg for life.
And a fly fights desperately with the invisible. It begs for nothing.
The dreamers are, as usual, somewhere else, so they beg somewhere else.
And the words of the deaf are incomprehensible, so they don't hear what they beg for.
And somewhere inside them they know death will be just.
***
In the small bar by the cemetery
The grave diggers return silent, opaque,
As if they buried a man,
And the mystery that followed him always, stood there,
Absolute, unmovable,
And they know, the way one knows pain,
That a mystery is following them too, incomprehensible, silent,
And it carries with it the whole sadness of man.
***
At times, the unknown visits us. In his hands, a sack with empty, second-hand destinies
Which were left by the dead. It is a pity to waste them,
So he gives them to the poor who cannot afford a new destiny.
On the wall, the insects move, because the unknown enlivens them,
And because they smell our flesh and death.
And only the music from the street soothes us.
A one-handed violinist plays heavenly,
And he brings the true heaven to this room, to this life.
***
There is too much death in the yard.
Someone wraps himself in shrouds, because there is no other way to escape.
Someone dies inside his words, because words can betray us.
And someone who died long ago comes wandering,
Because he was too poor to go to heaven, and even to hell.
But there are also the living.
There is one who has his hand empty, so empty that whole flocks of birds
And the whole sadness of twilight could nest there.
And the stranger who hides his journey under his clothes, like a sad treasure.
And everybody lives for something,
And maybe the dead died for everything, for the empty hand, for the poor, for heaven, for hell, for the stranger, and for the words that betray us.
***
There is too much fate in the house.
A mad man with a mad, huge hand in which he buried a bird and the repent.
The dead on the roof cry, and people think it is the rain.
We see the street acrobats pass, but they do nothing.
Their SALTI MORTALI are too far, together with the all unfinished things.
We keep our letter to god we wrote in our childhood, as if it were the ticket to heaven..
And the unknown among us says: I am innocent.
I killed the violinist because I loved his music and I want him to be eternal.
So everything is innocent. The repent and the dead bird, and the cry of the dead, and
And all the things we left unfinished, and the letter to god, and heaven, and the music that killed the violinist.
***
At day time it was a hotel like all others.
But at night, the ancient regret returned, and people licked the poison in their hands.
From far: the shooting of dead wars.
An old woman used the fire of old sins to cook the soup of the killers.
And the unknown, alone in a corner, kneeled and covered with his arms
The immense cold inside him.
***
We lose our way again and again,
Even when we don't walk,
Even when our legs are cut,
Because the way passes, like time, like the Great Road, through us,
And we lose ourselves often.
***
Maybe, nothing happens only once.
We are exiled from Paradise again and again.
We are accepted in hell each night,
And even the Messiah comes each day,
He sees the children of love that no one loves, the dead lamb,
And the sadness of the strangers. But he doesn't find the saints.
So he leaves , and he leaves the children of love, and the lamb, and the strangers,
And the immense sadness.
***
We bury the poor with old, consumed clothes,
So, it is difficult that they'll enter heaven,
Because they are too poor, and their clothes are even poorer.
But, they are not afraid of hell,
Because that's where they came from,
They know it the way pain knows us.
***
There is much dead in the house,
But at times we have living guests.
So, we have no choice.
We wake up the dead, like a modern Messiah,
And they wait in the cellar,
Until they can come back and continue their death.
And we should be careful,
Because we all weak up the dead,
When we remember, when we dream.
***
We bend, just like that, in order to catch something,
And we see the legs of God.
It is a miracle,
Because the bible doesn't write about God's legs,
And for sure not about His arthritis.
But we need other miracles.
We need the cut legs to return to the bodies,
And the bodies ,to the guardians of the Great Roads,
And of the immense human sadness.
***
We are old and confused, but there is love.
We go for a journey, for a honey-moon,
Because we forget we are married for a hundred years.
But, it ends before it begins,
Because the man falls and dies in mid-air,
And the bride holds the life in his dead hand.
And, it was the deepest journey.
***
We are in hell, but there is a mistake.
We tell them we are not the killer,
Here is the earth in our mouth, and the shade of the cypress tree on our face.
We are dead,
And the dead don't kill the dead,
Because the dead are pure,
And they don't know whom to ask for forgiveness,
Because they cannot forgive themselves.
***
Even statues move.
The dust of time leaves them,
And the dust of the hands that made them leaves too.
So, statues are a storm of dust,
If we can see it.
***
Matter rolls, flies, flutters.
Maybe it is an eternal butterfly,
Even though it carries stars on its wings.
***
In the arena, the wrestlers wrestle.
They leave prints of their hands on each other,
And the prints go far, further than death,
And they never leave the arena the same.
***
We are only a child,
And one day we see our mother cry.
She is infinite and pale, like all the people who saw too much.
We don't know why she cried,
But from then on, we accept, without asking, the crying of people,
And anyway, crying kills the words,
The ones we understand, and the ones that understand us.
***
We don't know why we write.
We don't know if we can sooth the immense shadow each one has on his wall,
If we can sooth anyone when the festival ends, and the taste of wine is lonely,
And it doesn't end.
If we can sooth the immense sadness, that each one lives in his own way,
And if we can sooth ourselves, our shadows, our festival, our lonely wine,
And the sadness.
***
The strangers in the city come from ancient tribes,
But the barbarians killed their world, so they come from a dead world.
In the evening they sit on the side-walk of life where they sleep,
And their words are warm, because their life is too cold.
So, when they part, they leave behind a warm dust,
And the poor, the humble gather it, because also their life is cold.
And when we think about it, we all need the warn dust.
***
There can be nothing bigger than the debt of existing,
Yet, we don't realize it, and we don't use our life.
We don't know it is the only way to pay what we owe.
We don't pay the treasure of life and of sadness , the big debt.
***
There can be nothing bigger than the debt of existing.
To feel the earth when we lie down, like the shadows of the evening.
To feel the first earth i our hands and in the hands of others,
And to feel the immense sadness in the bliss, and in the earth, and in the hands.
***
We are the ancient conquered, because the earth conquered us,
The queen mother and the queen killer.
We are a quiet tribe, maybe because the years of earth quiet us.
The clean hands are enough to feed us. These and the clean silence.
***
The strangers in the city are ancient exiles, exiled from everything.
They became so simple that no one can see them,
And the flout they brought is a bliss, and it is pain,
It tortures the mouth and the ears and all they remember.
And at twilight, on the side-walk of life where they sleep,
They hear, each one alone in his body, the crack in the last light.
***
We are the scavengers of the city.
At times we find strange things,
Like an old paper, maybe it is a law that could save us,
But it is too ancient, too creased, too smelly,
And anyway, our profession taught us to believe little and to doubt a lot,
And we are not sure if we found a treasure, or the history of human pain,
Which is another kind of treasure.
***
The strangers
And the fire on the side-walk of life.
The boiled potatoes pass from hand to hand
And the vapor of the quiet food
Spreads like a prayer of a man to man,
The deepest prayer.
***
There are many reasons to speak in a deserted street, where ther is no one.
In order to scare the silence.
In order to feel that we exist. Speaking is always a proof,
And maybe that's why people speak endlessly.
And because there may be someone in the depth of the street,
Someone who waits for a voice.
***
We don't know our house until we go to the cellar
And we realize how dangerously it leans on the darkness.
So, we avoid the cellar.
But at night we see how also the upper floors lean on the dark,
And we realize that our houses become human ,
So they know too the immense sadness.
***
Often, the dead return,
Because no one can finish his destiny on earth
And die forever,
If he didn't cry all the tears left.
***
Children may not know many things,
But they feel them.
Maybe they feel, like a little animal, the smell.
The smell of secret joy, of secret pain,
And the smell of death, although they don't know what death is,
But they feel the sadness in the smell.
So when children cry, there is always a reason,
Even when they don't know it.
And maybe we too, we cry for the joy and the pain, and the death, and the smell of sadness,
And we don't know why we cry.
***
By the window, people pass and their salute continues in some infinite.
But, it is evening and our hands fall from our arms,
Because no one passes, there is no one left to salute,
To wave the human bond, and the immense sadness.
***
At times, at twilight, we go to the bridges,
Because in this hour they end in the depth of the invisible,
And because bridges measure the distance between us, the loneliness,
And in the evening, the loneliness goes far,
Further than the invisible.
***
On the street, all the dead continue to walk,
Because the grave is a sad place, and it is narrow, so they are restless.
And because they are curious and they want to know the news of the world.
But only the humble ones can see them,
Because death humbles us
And it doesn't forgive the dreams of greatness.
***
In the house, the misleading silence of the dead and the shadows
That make the night and the days the same,
And we can do nothing about is, so we leave.
We follow the road that is lost somewhere far,
Like the destinies we didn't use and were lost in the invisible,
So even the poor cannot use them,
Because the poor often use second-hand destinies.
***
There are many reasons for becoming invisible.
When we know that somewhere we'll betray ourselves.
When we fear that others will betray us,
And when we are a stranger and our name, our face betray us.
So, we live in the shadows, little by little we become obscure,
And then come, in one package, the paradise and the hell of the invisible.
***
Everybody dies, but all the deaths remain in the house,
The death of the old, the death of a child.
Sometimes when death is too crowded, we go out of the house,
We sit in the yard, we see the ball of the child,
And we cry for things that end in the middle,
Because everything ends in the middle
The play of a child, the childhood, the dreams,
And all we can do is cover our face with our arms,
In order to cry alone.
***
There is nowhere to go.
We are people, the temporary address of hope and fear,
And the other people, the ones we never knew, the ones we'll never know,
Don't let us go back or forward,
So, we are sentenced for life to stay in the temporary address, we hope, we fear.
But anyway, everything is a temporary address, even the sad body of the dead.
***
At times, when people speak,
I feel I never grew up,
Because I don't know what they say,
I see only their lips that become long and dark,
And I don't understand why they don't cry.
***
We are sad people,
But at times, everything is calm, so calm that when we open a window
We are already on the other side,
Together with the birds and the music of the blind violinist.
And the world does what it should do. It continues.
And maybe the calm, and the window, and the birds, and the music and the world,
Will let us forgive ourselves.
***
In each house where someone dies,
There is a child that suddenly grows old,
And there is always a corner that is a shadow
Where everything happens, and will happen again and again.
It rains, and the windows have to resist it. This, and the shadow.
***
Death enters the houses the moment they are built,
But the dead are somewhere else,
Except when they dream in our dreams.
And the children take into their sleep
The dead they don't remember,
And the first death they remember,
And they talk to each other , tenderly,
Because the dead and the children need all the love they can get.
***
There are people who stand, from the beginning, while the others proceed,
In the impassable,
So, they are always distant, and they grow old in the same place,
Because time passes also in the impassable, and sadness too.
***
Some nights, when they end, leave us with heavy eyes,, heavy gestures,
As if we have walked, without knowing it,
In a street with a different gravity,
A street we forgot, in order to survive,
The fear of a child. The street where the steps are too heavy to run far. And too lonely.
***
We are dying
And we realize that all the eternities are not enough.
Someone calls our name. He calls looking for us, and even though we don't hear it,
We realize suddenly that this call was always here, inside us, around us,
And that we'll lose what was truly our own. The call. This, and our life.
***
The years abandon us,
And usually, we abandon ourselves,
So that very little of us is left,
Maybe the imperceptible child in our gaze that knows us, and a dream that knows us,
Are that which doesn't abandon us, that fill the voids,
The way only a child can. This, and a dream.
***
There was in the house the divine humbleness,
The one that makes the animals look down, that let our gaze fall.
But there was no god in this humbleness,
There was something imperceptible and terrible,
Like the smoke of a past that was burned, of people that were burned,
And we knew that the three of us were the only family of the centuries.
The holy trinity.
***
Maybe we use our childhood in order to grow,
But, we use too much childhood,
So that there is too little left
To understand
The imperceptible things that make us what we are, and the tears of a bird.
***
Some people are sad.
They look for days, for years, at the same place.
Maybe they find in it the immense sadness that soothes them,
Because the sadness can sooth the sad,
And because the immense sadness can be everywhere,
Even in the first cry of a new born.
***
Some nights, fear is everywhere and inside us.
We walk in the silent corridor
And the candle walks in front of us, like a path finder,
Because candles know the fear of the dark, they know the way in the dark,
And they show us the sad face of our fear.
So it becomes our sadness.
***
Maybe, the years that didn't see us, and the people that didn't see us,
As if we didn't exist,
Let us see the others, the disinherited, the exiled, the invisible.
So, we know we are not alone.
Maybe, one day people will see, before it is too late,
Before they kill the strangers, the lonely, the hungry, the maimed, the gays
Because they don't exist.
***
We dream a lot. We put the night on the drawer near our bed,
And the dreams come.
So we create life outside life, and then we feel exiled,
Because the exiles are everywhere. The exiled from their childhood,
The mothers exiled from a child, the ones exiled in a dream.
And like all exiles, the loneliness feeds us.
It gives us the silence, it gives us the transparence.
But, some evenings, we open the door, as if we hoped that someone will see us,
And we still stand there,
As visible, as invisible as the sadness of man.
***
We grow old
And we remember the big dreams that deserted us,
That have built no road to continue.
Maybe they'll have to begin again,
Humbly, like a deserted god , in a forgotten village,
And to know that they are mortal,
And that eternity is far, much further than what they imagine.
***
At times, we see someone, someone we knew,
And we hardly recognize him.
Maybe the second hand clothes and the shadow in his voice
Remind us something,
But we don't remember the loneliness that became his face,
And the tired feet that couldn't carry the dreams.
And they torture the road. This, and the rest of his life.
***
The days need us hurried and alone in our dream,
Alone in our autumn, like a tree in a deserted village.
So, we are hungry.
And the nights come, slow and nameless,
And therefore, maybe more true.
They are slow, so we can satiate our life and our hunger for life,
And they are nameless, so they have all our names.
They let us dream in the dream of others,
They let us be lonely in the loneliness of everything.
***
We don't realize, when we speak at the table,
That each word can close a door or a window,
And all that can enter is the dust of time,
So, we sit and we grow old at the table
Because the dust of time ages us,
And we forget that there are words, small, humble,
That can open things.
And anyway, it is too late, too late at the table, and in our life.
***
Someone was in our night, maybe the unknown one,
But in the morning, there is nothing,
Only the imperceptible smell of the dust of time and of the irreversible.
From then on, we wait at night for the one who waits for us,
And the others, asleep, follow silently the one who follows them.
So, we wait and we follow, and we die humbly, quietly,
Because we don't want to cry.
***
We don't know how it happened,
Maybe destiny, consumed and creased,
Changed our face.
It gave us the face, like a Hindu cast, of the untouchables.
Even the disinherited, the exiles, don't come close.
We are alone.
Anyway, everybody has something untouchable
Inside him, around him, and it goes further, much further than confession.
And he is lonely, in a different way.
Because there are many kinds of loneliness, of the untouchable.
***
We try to sweep our home
From the illusions, the dust of autumn, and from the destinies we didn't use,
But it is useless.
Even the dead return in order to purify the life that they lost,
And they lose it again.
So, we have no choice, we continue to live with the illusions, with the dust of autumn,
And with the unused destinies.
Maybe, one day we'll return with the dead,
But, the things to purify our too many, and there are only two deaths.
***
The sadness in the house is too lonely.
So, we have no choice, we go out in order to cry with the others.
Because the others have the same sadness,
And the things that make them sad are usually the same:
The daily marathon in order to live, the terrible fatigue,
And the loneliness, because fatigue closes us in itself.
And we cry together, like the first tribe of men,
The hunters who hunt the same hunger,
And the fruit gatherers who gather the same life, the same love.
***
There are evenings where we hear the great dreamer
And he gives us dreams,
Because dreams pass from the dreamer to the ones who need them.
There are people whose life kills them, and they want their life back,
In this life, in this world.
Because pain, hunger have no paradise.
Dreams are not paradise either,
But some dreams can be a fire that goes further, much further than hell,
And they kill what kills us.
***
Maybe the true mother-land is the past,
Because dreams come from there,
And who we are, what we are come from there.
We walk, already tearful, in front of a time in which we don't exist,
And we die, always in the first moment of the past, or even a moment later.
***
We have to hid, always,
Maybe because there are debts of life which we couldn't pay,
Or maybe because there were too many big things:
The loneliness, the fear,
And it is easy to hide big things behind small ones:
A deserted small life,
And we are safe, because you, you, and you hide too,
Maybe for the same reasons.
***
Life is small,
So, at times, when we open a door,
We are already on the other side.
Maybe that's how we die, on the other side of the door.
So we should be careful when we use doors, and windows too.
***
We grew old and all that's left is remembering,
Maybe it is the after life,
Because remembering is reward and punishment.
We remember the big dreams that went nowhere
Because we didn't build a road.
We remember the humbleness of the past,
When the wandering vendors closed their voice and the shouts,
Because the money was enough for that day.
And most of all we remember death
Because we knew all the names of death in the war,
So we recognize it now, in our life.
***
The immense banana leaves are gentle.
And gentleness is contagious,
So, everything is the cafe is gentle,
The chairs, the cushions, the tables, and the people.
Only the dog that entered from the street ,
Infinitely mortal and opaque, is different,
Because it is hungry.
But, no one sees it. Maybe hunger makes the hungry invisible,
Or maybe our eyes make hunger invisible.
So, hunger doesn't exist.
***
The night in the street.
The magician sells second-hand destinies to the poor,
And an old woman, consumed and immensely sad,
Sells her second hand love.
And no one knows that the dawn will come,
But the autumns will continue.
***
We don't love our loneliness and it doesn't love us,
But, we are lonely.
The people in the street don't see what we see,
The imperceptible sadness of everything,
So, they laugh.
Maybe we'll be lucky, and we'll die before the world dies,
And there will be someone, maybe someone unknown,
Who'll know that a man died.
***
We don't know how deep are our houses,
We don't know that even their consumed walls
Go deep, deeper than death,
So, we should be careful, especially when we age,
We should go down to the cellar
When we are ready to feel the immense cold outside and inside us,
And the infinite sadness of things that stay.
***
We use the house and it uses us,
And it is perfect when there is love,
When we draw a window on the wall and open it,
When they draw a window on our gaze and open it,
So, the birds, and the dreams and the clear rain,
And the human sadness
Can pass through.
***
When we die with an empty hand and a bullet in our mouth
We leave a letter,
And no one knows that this letter, these few words,
Are the mystery of why we were, who we were,
Because mysteries are secret,
And the words are the code of our soul.
***
Often, we sit in the veranda
And the night consumes us little by little,
And what's left is this something, imperceptible and infinite,
That we need in order to feel.
Our substance is concentrated, there is nothing superfluous,
And the night goes deep, deeper than death.
***
We grow old. Often we sit in the veranda,
We hardly speak, because night comes.
Outside, the distant shooting , the killings of the centuries,
And the misleading silence of the dead,
Because the pain is eternal,
And we feel that everything has happened already,
And that we are only observers, like the dead.
***
There are strange hours where we want to tell strange things,
Like the woman in the corner of the street,
And it rains in her life and in her bag,
So she has no longer a passport and a name,
And no one had an umbrella of mercy,
Or a night of mercy to give her.
And us, we sit in the depth of the corridor,
But we don't open the door,
Because we are on the other side.
***
Names are a strange thing.
At times they are a home-land.
At times, an exile, like the names of the strangers
That make them more foreign, more alone.
And there are the people who fear to lose their title,
Because they don't have behind it a real name, or maybe even a real life,
So they will lose everything.
***
We sit in a corner of the evening
And we look at the mystery that we consume by living,
And that we'll leave empty.
And we hear the blind violinist
Who plays the infinite sadness of everything,
Of the living who live and who are dying,
And we realize that some mysteries,
Like the mystery of the human sadness,
cannot be consumed.
They go far, much further than death.
***
Pain is an epidemic. An epidemic of suffering,
And it goes far, maybe even further than death.
At times we pass by the mosque and we count the shoes,
But for sure, those who suffer barefoot,
Are more, much more than the shoes.
***
We sit at the table and we bring up the glasses of wine,
And we see only the hands that hold the glasses,
Faceless and nameless,
Because we use these hands each day,
So, they become invisible and mute.
***
At the table, people speak endlessly.
Maybe they don't confess it anymore, even to themselves,
The terrible need to silence whatever is out of the door,
Opaque and immense,
Where we wait for ourselves.
***
The hand that we saw
Was the hand that served the meals.
There was only the hand, bodiless, faceless, nameless.
And the serving girl stole whatever she could
From the remnants of the hands,
Because hunger is always pure.
***
In the nocturnal bar, nothing was innocent.
Death was spread everywhere,
Among those who were drunk,
And those who wanted to get drunk,
And among the serving girls,
Because they were too sober and too tired.
Maybe, they'll all go to hell,
But anyway, they have it inside them for long.
So, everything is fine.
***
There are many reasons to be silent.
When we are secretive.
When we are captives and we don't confess.
When we are mute.
When it is twilight and it is too infinite to speak.
And the saddest thing is that we've learned to speak a lot and to say little,
So, maybe we are all silent.
***
People are lost everywhere,
Because they have to arrive to many places at the same time,
So, they arrive nowhere.
But the blind use their calm stick and the calm of their darkness .
And they go far, much further than the panic of the days.
Maybe we all need a calm stick in order to know where we are, where we go,
And, if possible, why we go.
***
We forget too much and at times it is not safe.
We forget that whatever we fear, has happened already.
It was always inside us.
And we forget that each gesture betrays us.
So, whatever we fear, the loneliness, pain, death,
They are inside us, they know us,
They recognize the gestures of those who are lost,
And they are ready.
***
Little by little we forget the dead and the aura of the dead,
And like this, we bring them closer to us.
They become ours in a different way,
Like a house where we don't need doors.
We can enter from the yard,
And the dog smells our tenderness.
***
The epidemic of suffering is everywhere.
We were exiled from our childhood before we knew how to be old.
And the girls, they don't know how to love, they fear love,
And their body of love is fearless.
Maybe somewhere, someone shapes in clay, once more,
The treasure of our sadness.
***
There are things that stand behind us like old pain.
Behind whatever we didn't say, there is something that feels like fear:
What we should have said.
And behind all those who are conquered by life,
Maybe all of us, when one body is not enough for all the sadness,
There is a second body, imperceptible and infinitely real.
And behind the horizon, there is another bigger horizon,
Because we need to believe in something.
***
It's morning in the city.
The blind violinist, wedded to a corner of the street,
Plays, and he makes love to the corner, to the street,
To the people , and to the birds,
And he gives them the whole treasure of sadness,
So he makes love also with the souls.
***
Maybe we lose from the first day
What our life needs most,
To be here,
And we are very little here,
Like a stranger, the body conquered by life,
Who returns at night to what is his own:
The side-walk of life, the dreams, and the shadows, the deaths.
So, we live somewhere else,
And we return to die here.
***
Our steps betray us, always.
There are the steps of the lonely that hardly touch the street of people,
Because they don't know how to love it, or maybe, how to love.
And there are the steps of the poor, infinitely fearful, infinitely careful.
They seem like the steps of a humble saint,
But there is no paradise for the humble or for the poor,
So, the steps take their treasure of humbleness
To another address .
***
Maybe the humble ones are blessed.
They are so simple, that almost no one sees them.
Often, they stand in the corners of the night,
Where also fate stands, utterly invisible.
And when they open a door and stay in front of it,
They don't obscure the infinite streets of man.
***
We all have a home,
But we live in the street, in the yard,
And then, we remain forever in a grave.
So maybe our true homeland is the outside,
Even though we don't know how to love the earth,
And there is the sky we hardly feel,
After all, we are not birds.
***
Maybe we were always ready.
The only roof we needed was the rain,
And we slept out of the fences of the world, infinitely invisible.
We walked, more silent than the earth,
And many walked with us to the end of the road,
To something in the depth.
And we are alone.
***
We thought we've conquered life, but it conquered us,
And we never learned.
We lived with the little, and the too little fed us.
And the autumns continued.
Maybe one day everything will forgive us.
Life, and the little we lived, and the too little, and the autumn.
***
Maybe we are, each one, responsible for everything,
Otherwise, why do we live with people, with the world.
And we don't understand people:
The strangers with the strange names and strange faces,
The ones who are humble, too humble to speak.
And the people that were not here, that were missing always and forever.
So, we are guilty.
Maybe we'll be forgiven, because the evening comes,
And we follow, always more foreign, our shadows.
***
Each day is more foreign, and we are more foreign,
The unexplainable sits in the depth of the corridor,
And little by little, we understand,
Because the corridor passes in our depth.
***
The barbarian come
And they slaughter the innocence of animals, of the children, and of truth.
All that's left are the black fortune tellers and the black fortunes they tell.
They are not innocent,
And they slaughter again the innocence of truth.
***
We'll never recognize God,
Because, like a modern Maria, we carry Him inside us,
And we carry also the earth that will cover us, forever,
And the earth that will cover the gods,
Because some gods are the height of man,
And they learn how to die.
***
Maybe the last day of those who die lasts forever.
And maybe when they speak of the treasures
That the dead beggars have gathered,
They don't know how the immense hands
Under the consumed sleeves,
And the immense humbleness,
Were a treasure of pain.
So, their last day is even more infinite.
***
Sometime, we understand what is really ours.
What we gathered somewhere else, maybe in a journey to pain.
Like a stranger who brings the treasure of sadness
From a place where the world ended.
It is his own.
***
They came, those who know how to wait,
And they were many.
Maybe they were waiting for death, so they brought death to the town,
Because waiting for death kills us.
So they stayed and waited and then they left,
And their shouts made them always further.
All that remained was the smell of the dead that grew infinite by waiting,
And the smell of a newborn that couldn't wait.
It had to be born.
***
A day of something higher than death.
The mourning.
But the dead don't let us mourn properly,
They follow the thread of our sleep and they tear it,
So, in the morning we are too tired to be sad.
All that's left is the death inside us, because it was there from the first hour,
And the birds that die flying, and they are higher than death,
Because they know how to mourn.
***
Maybe we don't belong here.
We only rent our life.
And our days whisper the same irreversible-s,
Like a word that was said and cannot be unsaid.
In the depth of the road, tired and infinite,
The old irreversible sits on a bench . He is tired.
***
We write.
We put in the clay of the words the silence,
Like the first silence from where we began,
So that the words will explain us.
***
Children don't consume the dreams by dreaming,
Because the dreams of a child are infinite,
But, at times, they are consumed by the dreams.
And the humble, with the humble life and humble dreams
Keep the treasure of life, and the treasure of dreams,
Unconsumed, because they are too humble to consume them.
And they are consoled.
***
We are scavengers by passion.
At times, we try to organize our smelly treasures,
We forget that the meeting with the great organizer
Was set from the first hour,
So, we may die with a treasure of pain
That even the great organizer can tidy.
***
The eternal migration, dark and infinite.
People who come from places where the world ended
To places where the world ends
Dreams and birds and people who wander
Between the never and the nowhere.
Maybe the stones always knew the senselessness of wandering.
***
Maybe poetry is a card game
Where we lose everything
When you say too much.
***
Poets write poems in the sand,
And what they write is already separate from them,
And we don't know if we are the poem ,the poet,
Or the sand, the eternal sand.
***
The unexplainable is everywhere,
Not only in the shadows, but also in our home, inside us,
And also in the old woman of love,
The nights have sold her body, but no one wants to buy her soul,
And when she dies, her shrouds are light, infinitely light,
And it is unexplainable,
Because pain, and hunger and loneliness have weight.
***
Suddenly, inexplicably, we turn and look at someone,
Closely, deeply,
As if we were born for this moment, for this gaze.
It lasts little, as long as it takes two people to cross by each other,
And yet, it is immense.
Maybe there are many moments like that, and many gazes like that,
And the unexplainable explains why we are here.
***
Mothers are tired
Because they carry heavy treasures.
The treasure of love,
And the treasure of infinite insomnia.
***
Maybe homes are made little by little, and they make us little by little,
But for sure homes are built the moment people visit them,
Because they become a gathering of people, and they give and receive life.
Like a dream that many visit
And it become a home , a gathering of people, and it gives and receives life.
***
In the corner of the street
The blind violinist, and the song his fingers, his inexplicable fingers, touched,
And the song sings the immense sadness.
So, the fingers of the blind can cry,
Because they see.
***
We don't know where we live,
Because when we return, we don't know from where we returned,
And our loneliness is lonely somewhere else.
They send us letters: the shade of a cypress and the picture of our mother.
So , no one is left to forgive death.
***
Cats throw a wild shadow
And they cannot control the leopard in their gaze,
But they are not leopards.
And they are a gift,
A hairy path to the true wilderness that we have lost
Somewhere far, much further than death,
When we were domesticated.
***
It grows dark, so that the blind can walk,
The stick is silent in a soft way,
And maybe this softness guides them,
The blind and the stick,
And the dark knows what mercy is,
Even though the light doubts it, always.
***
We have to learn how to forget, in order to live,
Like the body of love that keeps the seed inside it, silent,
Until the harvest comes.
And when we die,
We have to carry our whole treasure of sadness
To leave it somewhere else, and to forget it,
Because we cannot die until we didn't cry all our tears.
And maybe we'll remember that living is a sob, and we wouldn't forget it.
***
Maybe our dead dreams save our soul,
They let us die more pure,
Because there is no hope to kill.
***
The flickers of death are everywhere inside us,
And maybe they give us our life, our whole life.
And maybe our life is the sum of things we do in order to forget it.
But somewhere, sometime, we remember, as if ready.
***
The unknown is everywhere, inside us, around us,
And the irreversible.
In our room, the curtain seems like a shroud,
And it inhabited our childhood, it inhabits us now,
Together with all the irreversible-s that grow always more immense,
More final.
***
The immense twilight,
The shadows, the distant lights that turn on and tremble,
And everything is a mystery.
That's why the twilight is so beautiful,
Because it is a witness of mystery,
Of the shadows, of the lights, and of our gaze that saw it.
And when we think of it,
Everything is a witness of mystery,
Even the blind violinist who sees the music.
***
Maybe, our address is the outside.
We exile ourselves. We hide. We camouflage our life with silence,
So that the unknown, the great killer, wouldn't notice us.
And we don't realize that the fear of the unknown is the true killer,
And that the unknown was inside us from the first hour of the first day.
So, it is useless.
***
There are many kinds of forgiving.
There are the mothers who can forgive even death,
And the lonely go far, further than the night,
Like a pilgrimage to forgiveness,
Because they don't know how to forgive themselves.
And the old woman of love
Who lies under the twilight of the window,
And she finds her soul, which is priceless, because her body is cheap,
And she forgives herself.
And the beggar who returns home
And hides the terrible humbleness of his hands,
Because they are witnesses, and he cannot forgive them.
***
The grave digger returns home from the grave
And he carries still the dead in his touch, in his gaze
Far, further than the night,
As if one loneliness was not enough.
And maybe everybody has more than one loneliness,
And we dig each night graves inside us.
***