FOOTNOTES OF AN AUTUMN

Raquel Angel-Nagler

THE SHRIEK
MUNK
The mouth is the whole face,
And the shriek is the whole life,
Because the silence destroyed the words
And it is destroying itself
In this face. In this mouth.
***
AN ANCIENT GREEK STATUE OF AN OLD WOMAN
The sadness of the old woman is different,
Because everything in her is patient.
The wrinkles, and the cheeks that sunk,
And the neck that held the face for years,
And because everything, the sadness, and the patience,
And the wrinkles, and the cheeks, and the neck, and the head,
Remember how to forgive.
***
EMINE
A STATUE BY ATHANASIA TERTIPI
The cry of the humble is different.
They cover their eyes and their face with their hands,
In order to protect their pain from the world,
Or, maybe, to protect the world from their pain.
And only the hands, the faceless, nameless hands that serve us,
The infinite hands
Cry.
***
A VASE
By ATHASIA TERTIPI
The vase is no humble.
It shines in all the colors of the white,
And it holds its neck high,
As if it knew that it were exquisite.
***
Maybe the ones who hate themselves,
Hate everybody,
And maybe they need to destroy everything
In order to find what they hate,
And all they see among the bodies
Is the face of The One who knows all the names,
And the terrible fear that hates them.
***
We have to go far, in order not to hear that we were refused,
Because we have a petition for work, for mercy, and other small things,
And because we were refused in many places,
And in some, they didn't hear us at all.
The truth is that we are humble,
So, they refuse us and we refuse nothing,
And we mop the stains of blood from the floor.
***
At times we inherit inexplicable things:
The old watch with a time that doesn't exist anymore,
And an hour that may exist tomorrow, or even later.
And to think that with these things we have to build a life.
***
We ask what day it is
And they tell us 'today'.
And to think that with such answers
We have to build a life.
***
The perfect crime
Wouldn't happen again,
Because we die only once,
And we leave The Great Killer helpless.
***
We close our eyes for many reasons:
In order to protect ourselves from the world,
And in order to protect the world from us, if we are merciful,
In order to forgive,
And in order to remember the gaze of our mother
That forgave everything.
***
Each morning
Our sleep is filled up with noise and cries, and wooden legs,
And the fog that seems like smoke,
As if the upraising-s and the wars didn't finish yet.
And only the blind violinist and his violin
Remind us that eternity may be somewhere else.
***
We leave behind us
A story written in a hurry and off-hand.
And it is sad, because it is our only testament. A hurried story.
This, and the dreams.
***
They don't let the humble ones in the office,
So, they stand out,
A man on a staircase,
And maybe this is the only destiny left empty
Which they can use:
The humbleness, and the waiting, and the man on the stair case.
***
The humble have little to leave in their testament.
Maybe a wooden hand, from all the trays they carried,
Which is in good shape.
And the evenings when they were home
And they leafed through the hair of a child
With incredible tenderness.
***
The room in the old-people house.
The number on the door, the bars on the bed,
And the naked sad legs, because the night-gowns are too short.
This is all that's left of our mother and all the happy meals,
And only the smell of her hands kneading, her infinite hands,
Remembers.
***
We grow old.
We love people,
Because we realize that hatred hurts us more,
And because we can no longer bend
To mop the blood from the floor.
***
Beneath our life
There is always a prehistoric village,
But when we use the underground train
We don't even notice it,
And only few feel a strange nostalgia, inexplicable and sudden,
And this nostalgia goes far, much further than the train
***
The underground train,
Like the memory of an old disaster,
The caves, the terrible noise, the earth trembling,
And the people silent,
Waiting for the new rock that will fall over their life.
And no one remains the same.
***
Maybe lamps are prophets of darker times,
The way the candles by our beds
Are prophets of the eternal night.
And maybe the opposites exist in each other
And they forgive each other.
And it is beautiful. And it is sad.
***
The poor scarecrow
Didn't foresee the epidemic that killed the birds.
And the loneliness it feels, and maybe, most of all,
How much it needs the birds to justify its life.
***
They send us out of our home,
And we become again a child,
Like the first exile,
And they send us out of many places,
And each time, it is the first exile,
And we are a child, and again alone.
***
We look in the small advertisements for everything.
For a murderer to kill someone we dislike.
For a childhood we can get in an offer, because we lost it.
And for a second hand destiny,
Because we cannot afford a new one.
***
We are jealous people. Jealous and sad.
So, the luck of someone else hurts us,
As if he stole our luck.
And when we think of it,
No one proved yet that the quantity of luck in the world
Is infinite.
***
We avoid ourselves
Because we suspect that it is we who betrayed ourselves,
Or at least, will betray us.
Because no one knows better where we hurt,
And because we have a talent for suffering.
So, we should be cautious when we come near ourselves.
We are dangerous.
***
Our homes were never our own.
They belonged to our old mother, to our woman, to our child,
And our homes belonged to the one we worked for, and they made him what he was.
And he didn't know that the hands that worked had a name, a face.
And he didn't know that these hands, these infinite hands, were holy.
***
Quiet is important,
Because all the revolts and the uprising-s
And the barricades of people,
Began when the quiet was too deep.
***
Maybe we are humble people
And if they wouldn't have taken us to the wars,
And other deaths at all the walls of the world,
We wouldn't know that we are important
And that someone needed us, or at least, our death.
***
We choose our victims.
We find a humble man in the street
And we throw him a piece of bread,
So, he dies out of shame.
And there are many killers like us,
Because humiliating the humble is safe, and it kills.
And maybe it is an eternal bullet.
***
Humiliations don't come from the nowhere,
They return from somewhere,
Because the humble were humble for centuries,
And humiliating became a holy tradition.
So, the humble mop the blood from the floor,
But, the blood continues.
***
Some poems, anonymous and exquisite,
Remind us of old houses,
Because no one knows who lived there
And why they left.
***
Strangely,
We grow the way we should grow,
As if we have rehearsed everything,
As if we existed before
And our life remembers.
***
Maybe, the cicadas
Are the true troubadours of summer,
And they sing about love and death and murders,
And all we feel is the heat.
***
At times, we sing with the cicadas
As if we were one of them,
As if the summer were the last one.
So, we have no choice.
We all sing the summer.
***
People die, and they leave an empty name.
And to think about the humble, the servants, the waiters
Who never had a name,
So, they leave the nothing.
This and the incredible tenderness in the gaze,
If we could see.
***
We ask questions that don't have answers,
Or we leave our knees dirty,
We do a million strange things
In order to keep the child that we were alive,
And we don't know that the child dies
When he is an orphan.
***
We are murderers by passion,
But somewhere, we realize it is more difficult to kill a word
Than anything else,
Because some words find us where we hurt most,
So, we remain vulnerable, helpless.
Like the old lonely woman we murdered yesterday, or the day before.
***
We are strangers. We had a quiet life,
And we were afraid of journeys,
So, we don't understand how we traveled so far,
From the place where the world ended,
To a place where the world ends.
So, maybe journeys are useless,
Or maybe we carried the end of the world inside us.
***
Some things make fate furious,
Maybe, it is the childhood toy that we almost lost.
So, we stand with the toy in our hands
For hours, for years.
We are tired, but at least fate forgives us.
And it is sad, because we die with the toy in our hand,
And we don't know who didn't forgive .
***
Maybe, fate likes tidy things,
Like a vase that is always in the middle of the table,
Or a woman of love in the same corner of the street,
So all the lonely, and the sex maniacs and the murderers
Can find her.
And what happens is not tidy at all,
Because life is different. It is not a tidy place, and for sure, not death.
***
In all the stories
There are hotels of love with big names,
The name of a goddess, or an angel of love.
And maybe, when we love the hour of love,
The name loves us.
***
We try to be nice,
We smile to people in the street,
And we ask their forgiveness,
Even for a slight touch.
But, it is useless.
Because people are suspicious.
They don't trust our smiles.
And they don't forgive the touch,
Because they don't have a free moment to forgive.
***
The best hour is when we are absent minded,
As if there were no door, and strange things get in.
A medicine for the dead, the perfect murder,
And even a poem.
***
We love quiet as much as we love habit.
And then, one night, suddenly,
We draw a door on the wall,
And the murderer who passed there by chance,
Entered.
So, we lie by the door,
And all our habits bleed.
***
Usually, our mercy is not a marathon.
It may be a walk here and there,
A beggar here and there,
And we don't want it to become a habit.
Anyway, there are too many poor and sufferers,
And we have only one mercy or even less.
So, we have no choice, we run away.
Maybe, when we die, we wouldn't have to run anymore,
Because we are old and tired, and because we need mercy.
***`
We don't feel mercy for the mad,
Because they became rich in another way.
So, they don't need our money,
And for sure, not our tears.
***
We are happy for a whole afternoon,
As if we owned something big,
But, later, we don't remember what we owned,
Maybe our destiny, or scenes from the crime of the century.
So, we don't know how to repeat it.
We have to wait for another occasion to own something big,
Maybe, to own our life for an hour or two.
***
It is known that death works in the dark,
Until one day we find words like light,
Life, or a ray alone among the clouds.
Because some words postpone death,
And maybe that's why we have to forget them
In order to die.
***
We are humble people,
So, when we go to the office for some petition,
They never have, among all the chairs,
A chair humble enough for us to sit.
So, we stands for a hundred years,
Like a tree of pain.
***
The humble
Eat their soup clean,
Purified from meat or even chicken,
And also the hunger they eat is pure,
So, they purify their life.
And they are not pioneers, they didn't invent something new.
This tradition is centuries old,
So, it is holy.
***
We are humble people,
So, we know we have to be nice and quiet,
Because one day, when we'll die,
They'll make us rich.
They'll give us the whole humbleness
With the interest of years,
And they'll make it eternal.
And we don't know when they'll allow us to cry.
***
We brush our clothes carefully,
Because they were the clothes
Of our grandfather and of our father,
So, they deserve respect.
And because they are the only proper clothes we have,
And we use them for special occasions,
When we take the wife for a walk,
And we don't want the slander of the eyes,
Or when we go to court,
And we don't want them to condemn us,
Because, often they condemn the clothes.
So, they are guilty.
***
We dream of someone who gives us,
For an inexplicable reason, a hat.
And when we wake up the hat is near our bed.
And the hat smells of our father, and of family gatherings.
So, we understand why we dreamed it,
But not how it made the journey from the past to our room.
So, when we find an unknown hat with a familiar smell
On our night table,
We should show respect,
Because it may be the proof that the past is here.
***
It is not the disasters.
It is the waiting for disasters that kills us.
Because waiting is a killer, and fear is a killer.
And we are only people,
And all we need is a little quiet, at least inside us,
In order to die less.
***
We don't know each other,
So, we are suspicious, and we misunderstand each other.
And this is the real disaster, the biggest,
Because one day it will kill us all.
***
We are humble people, and we have a humble name
The 'nothing'.
So, we never write our name on the door,
Because such a name that seems like a cureless depression,
Longs for trouble.
And yet, we keep it,
Because having a name, even such a name,
Is important,
And because we know the humble are usually nameless.
Maybe it is a friend, a patient friend,
Someone who'll cry for us on the tombstone.
***
Dreams never sleep,
That's why they are so important.
Because the see 24-7,
So, they can foresee everything.
The stars, and the sun, and the perfect crime:
The last world war.
And we think we just dreamed.
***
We wait at the fence of the shooting wall
For hours, for years.
And we realize that only the ones who shot
Walk out, on two living feet.
So, we solve one by one, the questions of humanity.
***
There are too many things to which we cannot say good-bye.
So, it is useless to wave our hand to the past, to our dead,
Or even to the lost years.
It will consume our hands,
And these things will still stay here,
Even in our waving hand
***
They arrest us,
And they put us in front of the truth machine.
We are old fashioned
And we didn't know there is a machine for truth.
So, the dreams that dreamed the truth are useless.
But, they may make a dream machine,
And maybe it will also create them.
***
Only those who went each day out of the door, and took the same way
In order to arrive somewhere,
Know that there is no door where everything begins, and there is no way.
And also life knows it. And poets.
***
Maybe poets leave their poems on our table:
A leaf of autumn, a wooden leg from the street, a lost dream.
So, we are never left without something to sing,
Because the singing consoles us, and it makes things our own.
And we sing the leaf, and the wooden leg, and we sing the lost dream.
***
Some people return from the wars,
Or from the cemetery of dreams,
And they continue to live because they forget,
Or they continue to live on order to remember.
***
Stone axes are popular with murderers
And even in war.
A praise for our century.
***
We go to the small hotel, to the woman of love,
And the love last little, like all eternities,
And only the smell of her belly last longer, much longer,
Because it is the belly of eternity.
***
We have the talent for suffering and we use it.
We play the child in the circus,
Because the children in the circus grow immediately old.
And we know how many porters are in hell,
Because we know all the doors to hell,
So we can use each night another door of pain.
***
The hours, the day, the years,
Are the great looters.
Maybe, one day, they'll leave us
With an empty destiny, or an empty name.
And maybe only the nameless are protected,
Because there is nothing left to loot.
***
There are some whose sadness is so immense,
That the whole autumn follows them,
And an endless procession of people and centuries.
Because the treasure sadness began long ago,
And we simply add, each day, a coin or even more.
***
We had to save something bigger than ourselves:
A dream that was lost, or even the last leaf of the world.
Maybe, when we save something bigger than ourselves,
We save ourselves.
So, we saved nothing , and there is nothing left to forgive us.
We are guilty.
***
We are small negotiators of the impossible.
And to think that with this we have to build a life.
***
We embrace each other,
And our embrace goes far, much further than what we imagine,
Because we embrace for all the days that will pass ,
For all the dreams that will be lost.
And our arms smell of eternity,
Like the arms of those who embraced, just yesterday, their dead.
***
The dead are stronger than what we imagine,
So, their cry can raise cars and whole streets,
Like an old uprising that we thought it has ended.
Because the dead die, and they leave their cry here.
***
We lie, we kill, we torture,
And behind all these
Is the terrible hatred of ourselves.
And we don't know what we forgot ,
And what we shouldn't have remembered.
***
We have uncountable ways to kill eternity,
And maybe only our pain protects it,
Because pain is eternal, and it kills us.
***
We love winter
Because the days are smaller,
So, we get lost less.
And maybe also the shutters and the curtains
Make the houses are smaller,
So, we are closer to ourselves.
***
We dress up as a hero, like a child,
In order to avoid the real dangers, like a child.
***
Dreams become true through other dreams,
Because one dreamer is not enough,
And because dreamers need each other
In order to dream more.
***
There are those killers who raise their gun
Like an old woman of love who raises her hand of love
That betrayed her.
***
We need always an alibi
For the crime of the century and other small things,
At least in order to absolve ourselves .
And it is not simple,
Because we were here,
But we didn't see, we don't remember.
So, we are guilty.
***
There are things that happen after years, or not at all,
And others that happen like an attack of panic.
So, we were always careful,
But the clock stopped, suddenly.
***
Time is a patient punishment.
It makes us lose, little by little, our age.
And we cannot believe that we are still punished for the First Sin,
After all, we were not even there.
And we cannot believe that the sentence is death.
***
For sure, they didn't share the world fairly.
They gave each one a cross-road,
And they gave the humble, and the beggars,
And the old woman of love,
A corner of the street that goes nowhere,
An empty destiny, nothing more.
***
Usually, we consume our years, our infinite years,
In small things:
An hour that didn't come on time,
Or a mornings and the garden that were too short.
So, we gather the treasure of small things
And we add each day a coin ,
Maybe, one day we'll die with a coin in our hand
And we'll be infinite, and the coin.
***
The grass in the park
Touches so many bodies,
That it smells different.
Because the smell of love is contagious,
And even when it rains,
The water drops carry this exquisite smell everywhere.
And the smell purifies everything.
***
When we were a child,
There was always a love that didn't exist,
And things that didn't happen.
And to think that this is what we used in order to grow.
***
It rains over the sad poems
Because they bring the autumn sooner,
And because sadness is contagious
And often cureless.
We are sad people, and everything proves it:
The poems, and the long autumn that rains into our life,
And the hospitals for sadness.
***
It is easier to write sad poems,
Because we are sad people,
So, we feel them better,
And they let us cry like a child,
With all the tears we have, with all the eyes.
***
Women prefer to return
From the infinite of the bodies of love, and of love,
To a tiny mouth of milk.
***
Children don't know how to save themselves from reality,
So, they stay in their closed pushcarts,
And it saves them.
And they don't know it will shatter their nights,
For years, for a life time,
Because the loneliness began, in this child, in this cart.
***
We don't know how to save ourselves from reality,
Because we are drowning
Before we've learned how to swim.
***
We change all the time the roads
Because we don't know what went wrong,
And which turn of the street
Was responsible for everything ,
For the alley without a name, for the house without a number,
That we became.
***
We are wounded
In one uprising or another,
And when we lie on the stretcher,
All we see are the stars, the infinite stars,
And we feel the infinite inside us.
And we never forget it.
***
It is not a good season to travel,
For the dreamers,
Because it is autumn everywhere,
And maybe, the only umbrella possible,
When it rains in the world and in their life,
Is their dream.
***
We are negotiators of mysterious transactions,
Like those who have nothing better to do,
Mostly, the poets.
***
We could pull down the whole sky,
Like a shipwreck,
Because we are drowning,
And many drown with us,
And because we are, like everybody else, artists of the impossible.
So, we pull together the sky ,and we walk on it.
***
We climb on the table
In order to see what we lost forever:
The tiny child
Who hides easily in the furniture
And even in the rug.
And it is sad
Because we cannot reach the ceiling
To find his tall dreams.
***
We torture our life
So that it will seem more real.
As if the autumn in the world
And the leaf on our bed
Were not real enough.
***
We may remember, in one moment, our whole life.
And we cannot live a whole life without a moment to remember,
At least the hands of our mother, the infinite hands,
When they touched our head like a blessing, like love.
***
In the evening
We send our dreams by wind-mail.
Maybe they'll find the road of the lost dreamers,
Because we are lost too,
And because each dream needs the dreamer.
***
There are so many postponements;
The next day, the next year.
So, also our childhood is postponed, and our age.
And it is sad,
Because we don't know how to postpone reality.
***
We lived in ruined houses
Together with the wind and the rain,
Because we wanted to touch the oblivion of the world,
And we touched it inside us.
***
There is too much oblivion
In the empty post box, and in the guest room,
And inside us.
So, we give up, which is much less pain and less tiring
Than trying to remember.
Maybe some twilights, a smell or a distant music
Will bring back everything,
And we'll be able to cry.
***
We are too restless to have only one life,
So, in the evening, when we are tired,
We don't remember who we were that day,
Whom we loved, who loved us.
Maybe, we die as many deaths as our lives,
And it is sad,
Because they'll dig only one hole in earth,
Like the common cemetery we dug in the war,
Or after massacres,
When we didn't know all those who died.
***
The wet shoes
Are the only proof
That we have survived the biblical flood.
We are ancient people, ancient and sad,
And we don't realize it
Until we see our wet shoes.
***
We have too many debts to life.
The wars, the tortures, the harshness,
And the people from whom we stole their name,
And we left them nameless.
And we don't know if we'll ever remember
How to be tender,
If we could die like our mother,
Her daily hands, her infinite hands
That forgave everything.
***
Some people cannot tell a story,
Because they don't have a story,
Only a booklet of repetitions,
Where they repeat the hours, the days,
And they repeat themselves.
And only some twilights, when they are alone,
They see a moon that will never happen again.
And they try not to cry.
***
We become a child too soon,
Before we know how to use our childhood,
Before we realize we've gathered
Too many inexplicable things,
Too many to become our past.
So, we grow old, before we have a past.
***
We return each day home, defeated by everything.
And yet, we were strong, we were the soldiers of life,
And only sometimes, when the twilight was immense,
The infinite used to conquer us. This, and the dreams.
***
We grow old.
At times we open our drawer:
Old yellow postcards,
And other souvenirs which prove
That we lived, we loved, we were loved.
And it is sad,
Because it is a common grave of everything.
***
We dream, when the world is not enough,
When we need more world,
Room for everybody.
And it is sad that we die
Because the world is not enough,
And there is no more world ready.
***
We don't know who we are,
Maybe our name is' nobody'.
And if the little murders and other small things
Wouldn't have betrayed us
And brought us here, to this cell,
The tombstone of the living,
We wouldn't know we have a name.
***
The blind violinist plays
And he makes the street sink
Into another place, deeper, sad, tender and infinite,
As if it were the cemetery of mothers.
***
They absolve the children,
They call them pure.
And it is sad
Because children are pure in a different way.
They love the body that discovers them,
And this love purifies everything, even the absolution.
***
They absolve the child,
So he loses his small sins
And the love of his body.
And they absolve his dreams,
So, he loses them too.
***
The blind violinist plays,
And his violin plays and his face plays,
Because faces are another kind of violin.
And the music and the face are so sad,
That we feel the world should begin again,
And we should begin again. Each one.
***
The blind violinist walks and plays,
And the street follows him,
As if he were the magic pipe player,
And people would follow his magic,
Until they became a crowd.
And it is important,
Because at times, the crowd can go far, much further than magic.
But meanwhile, only the street follows him,
Because it is the street of time, so it does what it should do.
***
It is Sunday
And the humble conquer without a blood shed
All the benches of the city,
And they eat their bread and olives in the restaurant of God.
Maybe, one day, they'll feel it is not enough,
And they will conquer the restaurants of the world.
And this will be enough
***
Small objects that we use and that use us.
And one day, we don't need them,
Or they don't need us anymore,
So, we throw each other into a corner of time.
And maybe, this is the only proof that we never live without an age.
***
There are mornings in which we wake up
Utterly in the past.
We walk through a corridor that doesn't exist
And a door that is not there,
And we hold the hand of our mother so that we wouldn't be lost.
And maybe, the corridor, and the door, and the hand of our mother
Exist all the time,
Because the past is everywhere and also inside us
And it doesn't forget,
And for sure, not the hands of our mother,
The infinite hands.
***
So many things can kill us,
And most often words,
Because they can be harsh bullets,
And there is no bullet-proof vest around our life.
And even the deaf read lips,
So, they are shot too.
***
So many sins.
Even the body of love doesn't purify us anymore.
And yet, we were once innocent.
Our poems can prove it,
They were a pure hands, pure skin, ungloved.
And all the poets who suicide-d.
***
In the hospital of the poor
Wives sit by their sick.
They are silent,
After all, there is nothing to say.
And only their face has a spasm
Because they try not to cry,
And because they try not to cry for too long.
***
The birds carry inside them the clear sky,
Without angels and without gods,
And they carry the leaves that fell,
Because everything carries inside it
Its own autumn.
***
Maybe our life, our small life
Is the art of the impossible,
Or at least, the nostalgia for the impossible.
And maybe we write poems about smaller things.
We write the nostalgia for ourselves.
***
The telephone booths are a lonely place,
Room for only one person,
So, they remind us how lonely we are,
And how we need to hear someone, in order to survive,
Even when there is nobody here.
***
Maybe the innocence never left completely,
Because whenever we see a bucket full of earth,
We feel the child that we were,
Ready for the sand and the shells.
And we feel the skin of the girl whose body discovered us,
Soft as a pure sin.
***
We are a tiny child,
And in the house, terrible animals covered with cloth
Become a table, a sofa,
And the bed where we were alone from the start.
So, our fear goes far,
And we don't know yet how many animals wait for us
***
Twilight, and we are tired and alone.
We invent the melancholies of tomorrow,
And they invent us.
So, we have no choice. We are sad people.
***
We have a talent for sadness.
So, we sit in the evening.
We gather all the bullets that shot us: the words, the gazes,
And we use, each one, for the wounds of tomorrow.
***
Maybe the feeling of failure began when we began,
And it is not all bad,
Because our small lives could be
A story of Kafka or another big name,
And because poets gather their failures to write poems.
***
There were good reasons for failing:
The days were always too small,
And the evenings were too late.
Yet, maybe we failed because of the feeling of failure,
Because this feeling goes far, much further than life.
***
It is twilight,
And somewhere, the laughter of love of a woman,
Remove the useless hours, the useless day.
Because the laughter is exquisite,
And because it lets us travel far,
Much further than the hours and the day.
***
It is night
And the humble walk carefully,
Like someone who stole something big.
And it is the truth.
They stole some quiet from the world,
Because they are going home.
So, they are guilty.
***
The directors summon us,
Daniel in the lion pit,
Only, we cannot hypnotize the lions,
They hypnotize us.
So, we'll inhabit the same chair, in the same office,
For a hundred hours a day,
For a hundred years.
***
Everything betrays us.
Our gestures, our words, and even our silence.
So, we are suspicious.
Maybe we are the ones in the news who drowned the children,
Or even the brothers of Josef who tried to drown him.
We are the guilty of all the centuries.
And we don't know who betrayed us,
And who will absolve us, some day.
***
At night
The park grows further
Leaving behind only the gentle smell of old things,
And your hand, your pure hand
That found my first body, or maybe created it , softly.
***
Each day, the danger of small habits.
Because habits betray us,
And all the killers: the gazes, the words, the knives,
Know who we are, where we are.
And because they let us feel safe,
So, they leave us deaf, blind, ready for nothing.
***
In the evening
The flame of the fire-place
Bends always towards the irreversible,
As if it were the dance of the twilight,
Or even of our life.
***
At night, home,
People feel safe, because they are invisible,
So we can hear the smallest things,
Like the tremor from the unknown life of our father,
Or the soft cry from the mute who lived with us for years.
The small things that make us tremble.
***
We are a child
And we play with little Maria husband and wife,
In a dark corner of the house.
And the next day her mother comes with tears in her mouth,
But she says little.
After all, she is poor, and the poor understand,
And they forgot, long ago, how to shout.
***
We grow old
And we cry whenever we say:
The next day, the next week,
Because the next day, the next week
Are no longer a safe place,
And maybe, they never were.
***
TO MEMA CHARALAMBOUS
Life hurts us, and most of al people,
And maybe, when we understand
We don't need to forgive,
Because we understood.
***
TO MEMA CHARALAMBOUS
There are the dreams of a child
That we dreamed and we loved,
And then there are the dreams of youth,
And of man.
And it is nice
That we let the dreams grow with us,
So, we understand each other.
***
TO ATHANASIA TERTIPI
One day
We'll stand in front of ourselves,
Owners of ourselves,
Lords of our share of reality.
And it will be the first Ithaca.
The first one.
***
We are a child
And we bury a dead bird in the park.
Maybe it is the first death in our life.
So, death is something that doesn't fly anymore,
And we don't know
It was the first funeral of our wings.
***
The squeaking of the door that didn't open for years,
And it opens to a deep meaning.
Someone who sells clocks
Which we don't want.
So, maybe we lose the deep meaning of time;
The Great Mover that moves us to a somewhere else,
Even when we are here, behind the door.
And at times, it leaves parts of us on the other side of the door.
***
We are as innocent
As a path with no foot prints written on it.
We are as helpless
As a path where the foot prints carved themselves.
We are men.
***
We don't need calendars and other prophets,
Because one life,
Is one prophet too much.
***
And always, the loneliness of the things on the street.
A parasol that was left,
And it rains out and inside it.
A watch that was lost
And it shows a time that doesn't matter anymore.
And the desert smoking from a cigarette butt.
***
There are more forgotten poets than what we imagine,
And yet, at times, some of the verses enter a song,
And people sing it, and they don't mind whose verse it is,
Because they made it their own.
***
The poetry of leaving a train,
Of being in the past and in the future in the same moment,
As if it were the poetry of living and dying at the same time.
The poetry of everything.
***
Maybe we are a companion
That we know from the old good times.
The times may be now less good,
But we continue to be our companion,
For old time's sake.
***
Flies love the old animals
They write on their faces pastoral poems.
But, then the evening comes and the bulbs,
And it is sad,
Because they write on the light small epitaphs.
***
TO ATHANASIA TERTIPI
The humble own one thing:
Their hands and what the hands know,
So, they sell them in all the crossroads of the world,
And they don't know that their hands are a treasure,
And that they are holy.
***
TO ATHANASIA TERTIPI
We are what we create:
The food, the home,
And even a poem.
And we create a treasure of sadness .Always.
***
We grow old.
We didn't climb on the roof
From the time Paradise was there.
Maybe, Paradise is still there,
But, we can't reach it.
Maybe, Paradise has an age, and a height,
And our Paradise
Could be on the ground floor of life.
***
The hands of the blind often tremble
When they read our palms,
Because they don't read our fate,
They read the creases of reality on our hands.
Maybe, these creases are the only reality we own,
So, the hands of the blind are a sad place.
***
The women gather the clothes from yesterday's party,
And they tidy them
The way one tidies a secret.
Carefully. Softly. Silently.
Because under our clothes we are naked, utterly naked.
***
Under the city, the sewage
Where all the big pamphlets go,
And other things that fed us for years.
Maybe, they'll become a leaf or wild grass,
So, they wouldn't be utterly useless.
***
The dreams that didn't happen are lost,
One way or another.
Some die when they are young,
And some grow old with us, tired with us,
And they die with us.
And poets love the dreams that didn't happen,
Because they are a ready poem,
So, they are not utterly lost.
***
It is strange,
The certainty of people
That the moon will appear also tonight,
Or at least part of it,
And maybe, the habit of living,
Protects us from the doubts: the killers.
***
The certainty that tomorrow exists
Is so beautiful
That everybody shares it,
As if it were the religion of everything that exists.
***
The sea flows into the depth of time,
Like the shipwrecks, like the drown ones,
Because the sea has no graves,
So, also death flows deep
Into the blue eternity.
***
Some statues are strange,
Because their immobility is mobile.
The lines of the clothes that flow,
The eyes that grow immense,
As if they gathered magic, and pain, and time.
And the tears
When it rains outside and inside them,
Melt the stone, and it flows.
***
Everything exquisite was consumed, utterly consumed.
The immense twilight, and the violin, and the music
That sang there.
And the poet gathers all these things,
Because they are consumed and eternal,
And because they are a poem.
***
Children have nothing to protect them
Except telling imaginary stories,
And believing them.
And also the poets.
***
And always, the hazyr feeling of loss.
Because we are never sure
If the years, the pain, and the autumns of the world
Were a gain or a loss.
***
And always
The long road, from the ones we take alone,
Because there are many such roads
And we discover them one by one, pain by pain.
***
And always,
The nostalgia for the infinite.
As if the infinite of pain, of the humbling and of the humbleness,
And the infinite walls of the world where they shoot us,
Were not enough.
***
Some dreams
Are the strange feeling of an eternity
That wasn't born yet,
Because some dreams
Are mothers.
***
Maybe, only the unfinished
Gives some meaning to our life,
Because it leaves us somewhere to go.
***
Children run for many reasons.
Because they love it.
Because they hide from something: The mother. The fear.
And because they have an enigma to catch.
***
Poet are insane for many reasons.
Because true poetry is a kind of madness.
And because the million versions of one word maddens them.
And they have no choice,
Because writing is an irreversible habit,
Or even an addiction.
***
The evenings become a journey.
To sadness or to nostalgia which are usually the same thing.
We use the trains that don't exist anymore,
And we travel to all the lost things.
When we return, we return tired,
Because losing is a tired place.
***
We sit in the cafe
In the company of a story that we don't know how it ends.
Because people tell their story
And they never know how it will end.
So, we learn how to live among half stories.
***
We sit in the cafe
In the company of a story
That we don't know how it ends.
And we remember the child who fell always asleep
Before the story ended.
So, we return home, more beautiful than ever,
And with a sleeping child in our hands.
***
Maybe,
True answers exist as long as we don't know them,
Because then, they become again a question.
So, we have no choice.
We continue to ask.
***
Maybe we are the true travelers
Because we have nowhere to go,
But we forget we travel from age to age,
So, we always go somewhere,
And we are never here.
***
At times, simple things can be cruel.
A word from our father, in the age the father is god,
Or the silence of the other children,
When the other children are god.
And it is not simple,
Because these things are a lesson in pain
And they teach us how to be hurt and how to hurt,
For long, much longer than all the lessons.
***
Some evenings, we gather
And we say young words and young madness.
And when we return
We realize we don't have the strength to be mad or maybe honest:
To feel whatever we feel
And to shout it in the middle of the street.
And we don't have the strength to be young.
***
At night
They change the traffic lights, the cross-roads
And even the names of the streets.
So, maybe it is the true journey,
Because we are in our small town,
In a night like all others,
And no one knows where to go, and why.
***
True poets escape through a word,
The way a child escapes through a dream,
And this escape is exquisite. A poem.
***
Somewhere, sometime, we have to die.
Maybe that's why the twilight has a mystery
That we didn't feel from the time we were a child.
Because children are a little animal.
They feel death even though they don't know what it is,
And so, they feel the mystery.
***
At times, when we were young, we thought of suicide.
Maybe we were desperate,
Or maybe we needed to impress the world
With the depth of our despair.
But we postponed it, until it was too late,
Until we realized that despair walks
In day light in the street, utterly unnoticed,
Except by the mad ones, and the children.
So, it is useless.
***
We begin dreaming
From the first moment of the first hour,
And we never forget it,
Because we inhabit it for the rest of our life.
Maybe death will be a dream too,
And all the stories of the awakening of the dead are useless.
***
The humble may be dangerous
When they stop kneeling or even bowing to fate.
So, we cross them in the cross-roads of the world
And they bow again to fate,
And they don't know that the only holy thing is their death.
***
Behind each insomnia
There is an old, bitter, terrible and bitter word
That we ate one supper up to the last bite.
So, we have no choice.
We continue to chew it each night,
And we don't know how to kill the poison.
***
Smells keep their childhood.
So, they are the only biography left
Of a child.
***
We are all sun-believers
Or at least, addicted to light.
So, in summer we sleep less,
And we work for longer hours,
Because also the hours sleep less.
So, we have no choice.
We work and we dream our addiction:
The light.
***
No one really knows us,
As if we were a symbol of something
That no one understands.
And it is sad,
Because symbols are a lonely place,
Too lonely, and too distant to inhabit,
Like Heaven or even God.
***
Maybe one day,
We'll give justice with justice,
The way the rain gives rain,
Infinitely natural, infinitely true.
***
We are forgotten people,
So, we are vulnerable, because oblivion consumes us.
And maybe the only way to protect ourselves
Is to remember who we are.
***
It is strange,
But around the street lamp
The dark seems deeper.
So, we have no choice. We hold the street lamp
The way a child holds the mother,
Or the way the dispossessed, the humble, the stranger
Hold a dream.
***
We create things:
Food, a home, love, a child,
And we don't know that these small things
Postpone death.
***
We don't know with how little eternity
A poet lives and writes,
And we don't know with how much eternity
He dies.
***
No one knows with how much desertion
The gaze of the stranger was made of,
The gaze that understands the hundred names of suffering,
So he doesn't need to forgive.
***
The crime happened somewhere far,
Maybe in our youth.
A word or a silence that murdered someone.
And we don't understand
Why our dreams punish us now,
And the crime happens again and again.
And there is no one left to forgive us,
And we don't know how to forgive ourselves.
***
We have to lose eternity
Because they force us to grow.
So, we have no choice.
We learn how to die little by little.
***
The soldiers have their own sadness,
The infinite sadness,
Because it speaks to the dead,
And because the dead were young, almost a child,
And the infinite of a child is life.
And they feel that death goes further than justice.
So it is the infinite killer.
**8
The blind walk better in the shadows
Because they feel that they are less alone,
And that everybody walks in the shadows.
And maybe our life is a path-finder in the shadows.
***
Maybe life is the art of loss.
We lose everything:
The child, the years, the dreams.
And it is strange,
Because the same life
Lets us keep them somewhere,
In a corner of our silence..
***
The humble know that time is priceless,
Because they have to run the marathon of hundred hours
Each day, in order to live,
So, the sleep standing,
Like the ones on the cross.
***
It is not easy to cross the bridge over oblivion,
Because we have the fear of height,
And the fear to remember.
And only some evenings
We see the birds high on the bridge, utterly quiet,
And we feel that it is too late to forget.
So, we cross the bridge.
***
At times, we feel so innocent,
That we think we are a child again.
But nostalgia forgets many things,
It forgets the mine-field of childhood.
The loneliness, the fear, alone at night,
And how the lies protected us.
***
It is strange,
But when we cry,
We feel that everything exists,
Because everything cries,
And the eyes of everything cry the pain of seeing,
And the immense joy of seeing.
And also the blind cry, because their tears see.
***
The birds, the infinite wings, cannot cross the facts,
Because also bullets fly,
So, they die in places where wars are a fact,
And in the places where the world ends,
Which is a fact too.
***
In the small hotel of the night
The man and the woman climb on the consumed stairs,
To another kind of Paradise:
To bodies of love, and of love.
And then, the long silences in which all the words cry,
Because the bodies of love have their own hell.
***
The greatest adventures are often lost
In endless articles, in too many words,
As if they were endless graves,
Because words can be graves of everything.
***
It is morning in all the stations of the world
And the engines breathe heavily,
Like tired lovers,
Or like those who have to run, also today, for a hundred hours,
In order to live.
***
Sometimes, the feeling we have won time
In a word like' tomorrow', like 'next week'.
And beneath a feeling there are always other feelings.
So, somewhere deep, we sense
That the last Ithaca may be today.
***
We dream a lot, and we are never here,
So, we feel that someone else lives our life,
And one day, too close to death,
We don't know who will die.
***
Whether we want it or not,
We travel in our dreams,
In buses, in children trains and even on flying carpets,
And in the morning we return
Tired from all the departures,
And from all the faces we lost,
Because losing tires us.
***
There is always something to play with,
If we don't forget how to play.
There are the toys and the games of a child, and his fantasies.
Then, the bodies of love,
And then there are the memories,
Because memories may be playful,
And because, often, they recycle the fantasies of a child.
***
We left our games
Behind the walls of a mythical forbidden city,
Where only a child can enter, and the mad ones,
And the dreams.
And the poets look for a child, or at least a dream,
Because poets need myths in order to survive.
***
We have to be careful,
At least to put order in all these leaves,
Because autumn is insidious,
And because it will come, step by step,
Into all our seasons,
And the unthinkable becomes a thought
Slowly, carefully,
In order to protect us from ourselves.
***
The mysterious train whistle that passed through our childhood
And was lost in the infinite.
And it is sad, and it is beautiful,
Because it is the only thing that remembered we've travelled,
And it feeds our truths.
***
Maybe the mad know something we don't,
Or at least they feel better,
Because their eyes look always in one direction,
Towards the One who knows all the names,
Even the name of the nameless, and the mad sense it,
As if they were a barometer of fear.
And it is not simple, because fear is contagious,
So, we look where the mad look .
***
Maybe, everything begins with a child
In the window of the evening,
Where we went far, maybe too far to find our way back,
And little by little, we get the irreversible habit
Of losing ourselves.
And there is no hope,
Because habit and the irreversible
Are gods, or at least kings.
***
We are a child, and we meet in the corridor
People who died, or who will die soon,
Because children know little, so, they sense more,
And they feel the shadow that each person carries
As a picture, nothing more.
And only later, when they know more,
They are too afraid to feel.
***
Evening,, and man from the burial service, still in the corner,
Like a road sign that tells us we are late,
Or maybe, that it is late in our journey.
And the bridges pass through us,
As if there was nowhere else to go.
***
There are many promises, but promises are insidious.
We have to come down in the right station, in the right time,
And it is sad, because even then,
We cannot stop thinking of all the promises we've lost
In other stations, in other hours.
So, happiness is a doubtful affair.
We are sad people.
***
We gather mementos
So that they wouldn't drag themselves
In the shadows of the past.
And maybe that's how destinies are made,
Because they are compulsive collectors too,
And because whatever we do is another memento,
A souvenir of ourselves.
***
We are not a lion or even a gazelle,
Even though they are beautiful.
We are different
Because we write poems about them,
And the blind violinist plays their beauty .
***
In the street, forgotten faces,
Yet, they refuse to die.
But, it is useless,
Because oblivion is not merciful,
And it may bury them alive
Together with whatever they owned:
The past, the dream
And even the memory of themselves.
***
We sleep, and in our hands, they key of a kingdom,
And we wake up with the feeling
Of something beautiful that was lost.
Of course, we had many key in our life,
And we lost them,
So, we lost also the doors that they opened,
And they could be exquisite.
So, we learn, little by little, all the names of loss.
***
We remember the bees and the raised skirt of a girl,
And then, one night is enough to open a curtain,
And to know.
And maybe, that is what happens always.
We open suddenly a curtain that was always there,
As if ready.
***
We are a child, and we love secrets,
So, we make friends with the unknown in our closet,
And he gives our lonely afternoons
A secret paradise.
And anyway, true Paradises are always secret.
***
At times, the feeling of the strange quiet,
When everything is crumbling everywhere.
And we never forget it.
And maybe it was a lesson in death.
***
Memories are not always merciful,
And it is sad,
Because we cannot choose what to remember, and when.
So, at times they kill us,
And our only crime was that we remembered.
And we should be careful
Because remembering may be suicidal.
***
Maybe, there is no free place, utterly free,
To say what we want to say.
Even at the family table,
Or in the cafe with people we know.
So, silence may be the only freedom we have.
***
We are always in a hurry,
As if we were rushing for something that was promised
And we have to be in the right place, in the right time,
Because that's where promises happen, before they are lost.
And maybe, everything happens that way.
In its right place, in its right time.
Even though we don't notice.
***
We are all guilty of something or even more,
And we think we have forgotten,
But our sleep is afraid.
***
The youth that we were dies everywhere,
In our body, in the shop-windows where we look for our face,
And in our dreams.
And we don't know that dreams are a mother
And they bear the dreams of a man.
***
It is winter
Somewhere where the world is ending, and the dreams,
And we are cold,
Because there is only one world,
So, it is winter also here, and inside us.
***
TO ATHANASIA TERTIPI
One day
We'll stand in front of ourselves,
Owners of our duties,
Owned by what our life needs.
***
When the birds leave at fall
We remain alone with the autumn,
And all our wings, even the ones of a child or of dreams
Have left with the birds.
So, we have no choice.
We escape the autumn, pedestrian and fatigued.
And it is sad,
Because we all feel the leaves inside us,
The birds, and the dreams, and the feet that are tired.
***
Sometimes, at night, our dead dig through oblivion,
And they give us their infinite sadness,
Because they need someone to cry for them,
And because there are never enough tears to sooth death.
***
It is a quiet evening.
Somewhere, the cry of a child,
Or the steps of someone who passes.
And it is strange,
Because one day we may feel
The faraway evening and the distant things,
As close as pain.
***
We cross the night,
The way we cross our life.
Unprepared, unprotected, painful
And so beautiful.
***
We don't know who we are,
Even though we meet ourselves all the time.
And we don't know it is time to meet,
And that one life time may not be enough
For all we want to tell ourselves.
***
The arrest the dreamers because they are dangerous,
And they torture their body and their dreams,
And they try to confuse history.
They write in their book another name and another confession.
Maybe, they need history to absolve them,
But, history is not God, it is the story of people,
So, it absolves nothing.
***
Dreamers are dangerous, so, they arrest them
And they make them confess.
So, the confess their childhood,
And the mercy in the hands of their mother,
And the soup of hunger in the hands of their mother.
And they hang them
Because they confessed the truth.
***
The cell is not safe.
The people inside grow mad,
And the others cry still,
But soon they'll be mad in a silent way.
So, we sit in the window,
We wait for the birds to fly in the public sky,
And for our dreams, to walk in the public park,
For a life time, or maybe more.
***
We died long ago, heroes or the inconveniences of war,
But, we hide it,
Because all around, among the living
We see the traitors,
And even worse, the ones who continue to dream lost dreams.
And maybe hell is honest. It fulfills what it promises.
***
They renew the mad house.
The painters give us cigarettes
And we give them dreams.
Because they keep in the mad house
The dreamers from all the centuries.
It is safe,
Because people are afraid of madness,
And because, often, the mad house maddens the dreamers.
After all, madness is easier than sadness,
The infinite sadness
***
At times,
The purple silences of the twilight
Scatter gentle kingdoms
Among the humble, the poor, and the children.
***
The heavenly rights of the humble
Are in heaven.
So, only the birds can reach them, the infinite wings,
And the bullets, because they take the humble to all the wars,
And they fly like a burning angel,
And they donate them another kind of infinite .
***
Maybe we hear better our life at night:
The lonely steps of someone unknown who passes,
And, for a moment we know he is here.
***
The ones who grew old sit in the cafe.
They got tired of wandering in the infinite,
But the bequeathed this wandering, this infinite,
To others,
Because it was their only masterpiece.
***
Summer is cicadas and love,
Because it is easier to love in summer,
And because the cicadas sing the salty smell of summer
And of the open flower of the body of love.
***
Maybe our life is a mystery,
And mysteries are something that cannot be shared.
And we don't understand even ourselves,
Which is the true loneliness.
***
Some evenings
The sadness has the smell of old books,
Or of an old room in an old house,
Because nostalgia is another kind of sadness,
And because both of them are delicate dust.
***
The dreams dream about the future,
And the biographies- about the past,
And the poets dream all the three times, and more,
Because they want eternity or nothing.
***
One day, we may kill ourselves.
We'll use the words or even the whispers
That would have changed the world,
Because despair is a killer.
This, and the people who want to change nothing.
And we know that 'everything flows'
But this river may be too late for us.
***
Maybe life is a hand shake with the infinite.
And it is sad,
Because we lose the trust
Long before we lose our life and all the infinites.
***
In the depth of the twilight, the waving shadows,
The blind violinist plays and he drowns in the music.
Because each one has his own sea, his own way to drown.
The musicians- in the music,
The poets- in a poem.
And the humble- in a cry that never left their mouth.
***
Children sense
That the impossible is a good solution.
And maybe, only a child can feel
That life is the art of the impossible,
Because children believe in magicians,
And after all, life is another kind of magic.
***
The humble wake up at dawn,
The hour in which the ones who will climb to the guillotine today
Wake up.
And maybe, the hundred hours a day in the factory
Are another kind of guillotine.
It is efficient, and it kills them.
***
In the evening
We walk over the ruins of two wars or more
In order to arrive to our room.
And the wars walk in our sleep,
And they leave inside us more ruins.
***
We look at the whistle of the train leaving,
And for a moment
Our eyes, our dreams leave too,
Because the whistle of the train was the mystery of the first journey,
The journey of a child.
And we inherit the child so we inherit
Also the whistle, and the mystery, and the journey.
***
We see the train leave,
And it is not the rain,
It is our life that salutes all the departures,
That cries.
And everything is a departure, everything is a train leaving,
And yet, our life never gets used to it.
***
We read history books, calendars, old diaries,
In order to save something from the past,
And for sure, that the past will save us.
***
At times, the smell of love is dangerous,
And it leaves the streets deserted,
Because love is a promise and a threat,
And even the tough guys know it.
The kings of the street.
***
Love can be a promise, but also a threat,
And maybe only the children don't know it,
So, they love unprotected, utterly fearless.
***
The blind violinist and the exquisite music.
And people kneel there
And thank their dead parents for the songs they sang,
For the love of the songs, and for the talent to feel beauty,.
Because we inherit many things,
Maybe even the talent for happiness.
***
They exile us.
We are on the train, and the moment before we cross the borders,
We throw out our old coat, the one from the war and the deaths.
So something of us will remain in our mother-land, except our mother.
Because the coat remembers everything.
***
In winter, the days are shorter,
And we may have less time to worry.
But, we have a talent for worrying,
So, we use it even when we sleep.
***
Children have a talent to be lost,
In a dream, in a secret path,
And even when we find them,
They may be still lost,
Because the dream and the path continue.
So, they have no choice.
They become a scavenger of lost things, or a poet,
Which may be the same thing.
***
Poets are lost in the thousand meanings of a word,
And lovers- in the thousand meaning of a gaze,
And the poor- in the immense meaning
Of the plate with the soup of hunger.
***
Dreamers are saved from their dreams by a bullet.
So, the mop the blood from the wall,
But the dream continues because the blood continues.
And the people sing the dream and the dreamer,
Which is another kind of saving.
***
The rainbow inside a rain-drop.
Like the play ground of two giants.
And all we see is a water drop and the dust of light.
***
We stay with our parents when we are a child,
And often, when we die, in the family grave.
These are two different eternities ,
And the same root:
We need love in all the worlds that exist.
***
We are dying,
And we think that someone, someone from up there will come,
He'll kneel and ask forgiveness for the years of our sadness,
And maybe also for the centuries of sadness.
But, nothing happens.
So, we have no choice.
We kneel and ask forgiveness ,
And we don't know if sadness is a sin.
***
The endless rain and the floods.
We need help, so we open the bible,
But the flood is also there.
So, we have no choice.
We learn how to breathe water.
And to think about it, maybe our body remembered it,
Maybe it remembers the water it came from ,a beautiful jelly-fish,
Ancestor of the bible.
***
The sad ones don't love big words,
Because they make the sadness, the infinite sadness,
Tiny, without depth, without secrets, without whispers.
Maybe the small words have more silence inside them,
So, they feel more.
***
We lived big loves, big dreams,
And yet, it was the small things that killed us,
That killed the loves and the dreams.
We don't know how strong are the small things ,true Piranhas,
And they devour us, flesh, dreams, loves, bones.
***
The clock never stop,
Even when it is late, they continue to the too late,
And even to an hour that doesn't exist anymore.
And yet, we look at the clocks all the time.
Maybe we want to know what time is it in our sadness.
***
The clocks cannot stop,
Because it is always too late for something or someone,
And the clocks were made to show the too late. Always.
***
The dreams of a child take him far,
So far, that he loses the way.
At times, he returns, alone,
As if he's lost the dreams and his age.
And he has no choice.
He learns the art of losing: life.
***
We don't know what, or who, keeps us in our age,
Because we have all the talents to be a child,
To dream big dreams, to believe in heroes and legends.
And when we think of it, it makes us good citizens, good soldiers,
And when they shoot us, we die with all the talents of a child.
***
An old woman sits by the table.
And she disentangles a ball of wool.
For whom?
Who should return from the labyrinth of the past,
Who should remember?
And the woman continues,
Maybe she'll go into the past,
The way we remember, the way we disentangle the wool,
Alone.
***
The refractions of the twilight
Spread gold over the humble.
Maybe, it is the only treasure they'll ever own.
This, and the treasure of their sadness.
***
It is war everywhere.
The women are naked, looted from everything,
And the army of the maimed flees,
Maybe, from the cruelty of the hands that shoot,
Because the bullets are not cruel.
So, they are not defeated.
***
We have exhausted all the heroes and the legends
In our childhood.
So, now we live the small days,
And if we are lucky, we feel the courage needed to do it.
***
They call us a 'black sheep',
And they avoid us, as if the black color were contagious,
And they don't know that we see them.
They are grey.
Maybe we are guilty,
But our only crime was that our dreams were not grey.
***
Poets find the infinite in everything,
Even in small words, like' why', 'where',
Even though they don't feel it.
And it is sad,
Because a moment before death or even a moment after,
They feel the infinite in the small words
For the first and the last time.
So, it is too late for their masterpiece.
***
Children find strange things in the street,
Like the door bell of the infinite,
So, at night, when they are alone, they ring,
And they don't know there are many infinites.
So, they may find the infinite of terror,
Or the infinite of dream.
But, it is too late. They rang.
And they learn, so soon, the too late.
***
We feel lost,
Because each time we look for ourselves
We find someone else under our clothes or under our hat.
And it is sad,
Because we have no choice.
We have to change in order to be us.
***
We don't realize
How little we live in our life,
And how easily, a life that doesn't exist
Can break.
***
We don't notice how life leaves us
Because we are always worried about something,
And maybe, we have no choice,
Because this something is life too.
***
One day, we may travel to the past
On the tracks that walked in our childhood.
And maybe, it will be the only witness
That the train of a child existed, and the childhood.
***
We are always tired
Because of the sadness, and of the endless departures,
And of too many autumns,
And of the things we didn't do.
And all these things: the sadness,
The departures, the autumns, the things we didn't do,
Tire us.
***
Often we feel defeated,
And we know we are not weak.
Maybe it is the passion for something in the depth,
In the past, or in the future,
And for sure, the passion for the impossible.
***
Too many things close the door and leave us outside:
The people who don't want us,
The people we don't want,
And the winds of autumn, the sad killer,
That slams all the doors in the world.
Strangely, part of us remained on the other side of the door,
So, we die on both its sides.
***
We are always at the border of a feeling,
And we cross each moment, each hour,
Illegally, without a passport,
And without knowing really why,
From one feeling to another
***
We go to bed.
The night is black, the insomnia is black and the dreams are black,
And in the morning we cough up the blackness. Carbon.
And it is not enough,
Because also hundred hours a day in the factory
Are carbon miners, and they dig in our black fatigue,
The infinite black fatigue.
***
In the plaza
A chair, a table, paper and ink.
All that's left of the dreamers and the confession.
And all around, stains of blood,
Because the confessing and the confessions bleed,
And time never goes back, so it cannot mop the blood.
And it has no choice. It makes it infinite.
***
We leave the dripping umbrella in the corridor,
So, we bring the rain home, and also the autumn.
And we realize that even our home is not an umbrella of mercy,
And it lets the autumn rain into our life.
This, and the raining reality, and the raining pain.
***
We lean our ear on the tracks
In order to hear the train,
And we are not sure what we feel and what we'll do.
It may be the last train,
And we may be the last man, the last passenger,
And we don't know if we are ready
For so many infinites.
We feel that one infinite, the infinite sadness inside us,
Is more than enough .
***
Some nights, we go to the stone garden,
To hear the cry of time.
Because time cries in all of us,
But the garden of stone is silent,
So, we hear it better,
And we hear the most ancient cry, so close to eternity.
***
Maybe, everything is an infinite grave,
So, we shouldn't forget the earth,
And we crawl, like a root,
Because the earth can be life.
And like a root, there is earth in our cry.
And in the distance, a stone garden,
As if it wanted to say something.
***
The wars, the uprisings, and we write
On the empty edges of the pages
Our life.
And these little foot-notes
Maybe all the history worth knowing.
***
The wars, the disasters,
These inexplicable times,
When we understand each other,
As long as they last.
***
Poets don't know how to leave
The ambition for eternity,
In order to write an eternal poem.
***
Of course, everything comes from near-by,
Or even from inside us, like danger, like a gang of killers in our garden.
But, we have to save ourselves in the only way we know.
We swear that it comes from far, that we couldn't know it.
So, we are not guilty.
***
We begin in the womb and the sperm,
And the dream of the womb, and the dream of the sperm,
So we have at least four parents, or even more.
And from dream to dream we arrive to our life.
And it is strange,
Because we continue doing it long after we're born.
***
So many things lost.
So many things we didn't notice,
So, they are lost too.
So, we have no choice.
We become a scavenger of lost things.
And we're not sure if we'll find only our lost years, our lost past,
Unmingled with lost things that are not our own.
But, anyway, the past of others was always in our past.
So, it doesn't matter.
***
Feelings don't sing solo.
They are a strange quire,
Each one with an utterly different libretto,
With different octaves in his voice.
And they think they sing the same song.
***
Maybe our dreams understand the meaning of feelings,
Happiness, love.
But, when we wake up we forget it.
And maybe, the meaning of a feeling is too intimate,
Too embarrassing.
So, we have to forget it, and continue our life.
***
We grew old,
Yet, we remember the time we had the power to cry.
And we remember the power we had to tell ourselves
Soft words,
When we were the only friend left.
***
In the street,
People that exist and don't exist.
Maybe existing needs power and it tires us,
So, we take a break.
And maybe, when we don't exist,
We exist somewhere else:
In a dream, in the last day of everything,
Or in the first one.
***
We love the streets at night.
The deserted remorse-s walking alone,
The light of the street lamps humid from the raining distances,
And the dead who know the hour of death
Wander far, in order not to die again.
And when we think of it,
We don't know how many deaths are in our death.
The organ that die one by one, the feelings that die one by one,
And maybe the dead memory of ourselves is the last death.
***
We don't know how the humble one
Feels when the infinite walks over his shoulders,
When it is night, and he is too tired to live.
As if he were the last man,
And it was the last infinite, firm on his shoulders.
So, he wasn't defeated.
***
The mad stumble under the weight of the infinite.
Maybe, because madness is infinite,
So, it finds the infinite everywhere,
And most of all, in a child,
Because he stumbles too under all the infinites.
***
They throw out of the old people house
The long stories, that were too long,
And the stories that grew silent.
And it is sad,
Because they were the only witness left for everything.
***
In the orphanage
The fairytales are silent,
Because the children grow old too soon,
Before they are a child.
So, they are useless.
***
Some people shape our face
In order to use it in their theatre of shadows.
So, we have no choice. We play the shadow.
And only at night, when we are alone,
We cry, and the silence of shadows cries too.
***
We are unknown, even to ourselves,
And only at times, in a horror movie,
We find something that is us.
So, we have no choice,
We go on living unknown,
Because we are scared.
***
Everything begins somewhere, but we don't know where.
And our hands are caressed with lifeless gestures .Endlessly dead.
And we remember the hands of our mother,
The infinite hands, utterly alive.
So, we hurt even more.
***
There was a tremor that crossed the old house.
Maybe it was made by forgotten words that still kill us,
By a child whose gaze was tortured and it bleeds,
And by the day light where all the crimes were visible.
***
The deserted childhood.
The open door could throw us out any moment,
And the letter we wrote to God
Was still in a crack of the wall.
So, we became friends with the silence,
Because it was loyal, and we could hide there, always.
***
Maybe, we have to protect ourselves less,
Because there are gestures of soft motion, hidden,
Almost eternal,
That lead us to the others, and to what the others feel,
The way the hands of our mother, the infinite hands,
Lead us softly, silently, to life.
***
The blind violinist plays,
And he senses the gestures around him,
Because they lead him to a piazza of people,
And the people sit with him,
And their words draw colors in his darkness.
This, and love.
***
There is something hidden and eternal in our stories,
And mostly, about our bodies of love.
So, it is not safe to write about ourselves,
Because there will be always someone who'll take us to court,
He'll swear it wasn't him. He'll plead not guilty.
***
Children die inside the man
And they take with them,
Like a Pharaoh, all their toys,
In order to remember,
Or to play, when they are alone.
***
The blind violinist plays,
And the music plants a garden in the darkness,
And people sit there, and sing the garden.
***
Dreams are a cureless disease,
And even death is not a solution,
and the garden of stone over their head.
Because the dead carry the stones the whole way,
In order to dream in our dreams.
***
A hair pin falls from our head,
So, we kneel in order to find it,
And strangely we find other lost things:
The gazes of men, the young thighs and the young nights,
But, not the pin.
And when we find it next morning,
It is not the same one.
It is one night older, one night more alone,
And we cry, because we realize suddenly,
That there is no return.
***
The shriek of a motor-bike passing,
Is enough to shatter the garden, and the colors,
And the birds, and the man and the woman on the grass.
It is a fragile world.
***
We live in an inexplicable reality,
From which we'll come one day,
To embrace, as the only explanation,
People.
***
We dream too much, so, we don't have time to live,
And we are without history,
Like the sadness we felt suddenly, for everything,
For the first time,
When it was too late.
***
The twilight is a just hour.
It lets the shadows and the light inhabit it,
Close and quiet,
And maybe, also the shadows and light inside us.
***
The burning reflections of the twilight,
Like an old, lost revolt,
But we ask no questions.
We remember how lost revolts
Leave no one to ask,
Because the dead don't speak,
And nor the bullets.
***
It is a funeral, but we don't know whose.
And they tie the hands of the dead,
Because they refuse to be buried,
And when we come out,
We feel that everything has already happened,
And we touch silent, infinitely silent,
The scars on our hands.
***
Time has imagination, so, it can be cruel in endless ways,
And consume us in even more.
So we change, each in his own way,
And no one recognizes us, and we don't recognize the others,
And we don't recognize even ourselves.
So, we grow old in a world of strangers.
***
Dreamers send letters to the future,
Because it is lonely to dream alone,
Because we all need someone to believe us,
Because the world changes all the time,
So, they want to change it in their own way.
And because dreamers are mothers.
***
We grew old. We sit in the balcony
And we look at destinies and what people use to fill them:
The simplest things, and the most improbable,
And they don't realize they use also the destiny of others:
The things they saw, the things they touched.
So, maybe destiny is not such a private affair.
***
Maybe, when someone in the street sees us,
And feels our pain,
He may not save humanity,
But for sure, he saves himself.
***
In the temples
Statues fall and break, like old gods,
And that's how religions change, by themselves,
And because the statues were too old to know
The gods we need more.
***
The songs of people
Don't need resuscitation,
Because they don't die, even when we think they did.
Somewhere in a corner of the world,
Or even in a corner of a cry,
They sing
***
There are people of Sundays,
And we hardly recognize them on Monday.
It is not only the clothes,
But also the immense sadness and the fatigue
Of something beautiful that is lost,
Because losing tires us.
***
We grow up. We are young, and we are busy loving.
We love the corners of the night, and the big roads,
And all the women .
And all we know is the love of a mother,
And maybe, this prepared us for all the loves.
***
At night, people are lost in the dark,
Because the take it also inside them.
And the poets gather all this darkness,
Because the darker the poem,
The deeper it is.
***
We part, each moment, with a big dream,
And we return tired, because departures tire us,
And also the giant journey.
Maybe, we should travel to one dream at a time,
And save ourselves one dream at a time.
***
We return from the body of love and from love,
Our gaze immovable and we look at the void,
Like someone who has lost himself and he doesn't care,
Or maybe he wants to remain lost.
And maybe love is the art of the impossible.
***
Words as hurting as hatred,
Words as comforting as the hand of a mother.
And to think that some words
Make us what we are.
***
The dark is a great confessor,
Because, strangely, we see ourselves better.
And it is also a confession,
Because it saw all the small murders, and the sadness,
And the boy and the girl by the street lamp,
Which is another kind of confession.
***
Children run,
As if they knew more than we imagine,
As if it were the only revenge possible
Against the stillness of death.
And maybe children are
The revenge of life against everything.
***
Maybe the inexplicable
Explains at least a few things,
Enough to prove that we exist,
Even though we don't know why and how.
***
We are humble people,
And usually we see the floors and the walls of the world.
But, one might climb on a table
And look through the open window,
And what he saw kills him.
And no one knows what he saw
And who was the killer.
And maybe the humble are vulnerable,
And they feel the world as close as pain.
***
Each twilight
We hear the laughter of a woman flying to some infinite,
And the music of the blind violinist that is another kind of infinite.
So, we sit in the veranda
And the infinite of the twilight is everywhere, and it is exquisite.
And we realize that one infinite is not enough for one life time.
***
All we have is the inexplicable:
The world, us, and everything else.
And to think
That with this we have to build a life.
***
The restaurant with the ancient waiter
And the ancient clients,
So, they serve ghosts,
And we cry, because we remember
How they used to serve dreams.
***
The revolts. We shot fate,
And fate shot us- the dreamers.
But, no fate can shoot the dream,
Because dreams go far, much further than death.
***
We are dreamers,
So, we know that reality is not important,
And that we dream, when reality is not enough.
***
It is night
And we don't know when we'll arrive home,
And if we want to arrive.
And the hands of our mother, the consumed hands,
The infinite hands,
Absolve us of everything.
***
We come out of a door,
And we don't know how to find the again,
In order to return.
And it is important.
Inside they may put our life in sale.
But, we don't find it.
And we cry, because suddenly we realize
There is no return.
***
We think, and we don't remember what we thought,
And usually we forget our most bright thoughts.
Maybe, that's why poets write such dark poems.
***
We think too much, so we don't remember what we thought,
And usually we forget the most beautiful thoughts.
It could have been our masterpiece.
And maybe each one has a masterpiece in his forgetting.
***
Someone, somewhat mysterious, comes near,
And he tells us we are followed,
And even though we are followed,
We have to follow him.
And we don't know where to send
The parcel with all our belongings,
And who will remember.
***
The ancient woman in the window,
And the stranger in the street.
They look at each other for long,
Until they realize the uselessness of all the languages,
Maybe, because each one comes from a world
That ended in a different way.
And maybe, because the pain learns
How to be silent, even in the gaze.
***
The stray cat looks at us and leaves,
As if it felt the uselessness of all languages,
And we cannot even caress it,
So that we'll feel it, and it will feel us.
And maybe there are many stray cats among us,
And it is not easy to caress a stray life,
A life deserted for too long.
***
We move here and there, small motions,
Like a child in the rustle of the womb,
So, we are born little by little.
Yet, we grow old suddenly,
Like the rain, and the leaves, and the autumn,
That come from all directions, at once.
***
The humble live quietly, too quietly,
So, it raises suspicions.
Maybe they hide something,
Or maybe they hide themselves.
And we don't know that they try not to cry.
***
We sleep endless hours,
Because we are delicate, and life hurts us.
One day, we may die in our sleep,
And it is not simple,
Because death may be the eternal insomnia,
And it will teach us how to live.
***
They say that the more we sleep, the more we live,
And it seems inexplicable.
Maybe the dreams are the replay of life,
And this explains everything.
We live more.
***
Some things are too beautiful to understand.
So, we have no choice.
We feel and we say nothing,
In order to feel more.
Like the mute who grows a garden in his silence.
***
It is strange,
But often we find in the dark,
Whatever we lost at day light.
And in the morning we wake up,
More guilty, more pure than ever.
***
Things that only the inexplicable purifies.
Because life, and the bodies of love, and love, and the idea of sin,
Are inexplicable,
And this inexplicable lets them purify themselves.
They are pure.
***
It is useless to change our life,
Because also the other
Will have our talent for sadness,
And the genes of our silence.
***
The rain doesn't know the mystery of a rain drop,
That makes the rain, rain.
Like the humble
Who know the mystery of being small.
***
The immense sadness, and the rain drops rain over everything,
Like the humble who knows the mystery
Of being everywhere,
In all the piazzas of pain,
Without an umbrella of mercy.
***
One day,
We'll feel the prolongation of our fingers in everything,
In the poems we write,
In the pot we make in the factory, and in the factory,
And in love.
***
The hundred hours of work a day,
And the soup of hunger, and the dreams,
And the laws of change,
Shape us.
There are many mothers.
***
Everything changes, the river flows all the time,
So we flow too,
And we arrive to another place in reality.
Maybe, in this place we'll own our hands,
And we'll own the power to be tender,
To caress with the infinite palms of a mother.
***
They say that justice is the shortest way,
So, it should be the right one.
It should be as close as pain.
***
Maybe Spartacus was a hero,
But in the wrong place and in the wrong time,
Because heroes, like everything else,
Need the right time, in eternity,
And the right place of reality,
In order to make the possible- possible.
***
The ancient tribes, the shared life, the shared fruit,
Were the beginning of everything.
And maybe one day, we'll stand in another eternity,
In another place of reality,
And we'll feel in our hand,
The hands, the infinite hands of our mothers.
***
Music grows with us.
There is the music of a child, of youth, of a man, of the old.
And also dreams do it, and stories, and poems.
And it is comforting,
Because there are friends for all seasons.
***
In the evening
Someone cries out of our door,
And we don't know who, and we don't know why.
It could be someone we know, even ourselves,
Because part of us is always on the other side of the door.
And we cry, because we miss ourselves.,
And because we die on both sides of the door,
And we never knew how many deaths could be in one death.
***
Everything is an enigma: the past, the future,
So,, we go from one enigma to another,
And we don't know who we are, even in the 'now'.
***
A moment is something inexplicable,
Because it has all the enigmas
The enigma off the past, the enigma of the future
In its minute body,
Too minute to know where we are, why we are.
***
The thighs of love, and the breasts of love, and the pleasure.
And they purify us even when we are too old to remember,
Because the body remembers,
And because the body is always oure.
***
Some travelers were lost in the poetry of a moment,
And some- in the poetry of the journey,
And others- in a poem.
So, there are no survivors.
Maybe, poetry is the art of losing ourselves.
***
So many inexplicable-s.
The sob of the door in the evening.
The birds that come each twilight to die on our roof.
Maybe everything will be explained
When we are too old and too hurting,
And we'll know why we die.
***
We grow old
And everything is an answer.
The consumed body, the pain, and even the silence.
So, there is nothing left to ask,
And the answers become always more near.
***
They bury us, the way they bury the humble,
When it rains over the world and over our rotten rags.
So, they have no choice.
They dress us with the clothes of someone else,
And it feels like a body of someone else.
And it is sad,
Because we never owned our life,
And owning our death would be the first justice .
***
The dead don't give us presents, even for big events,
And it is sad,
Because a small gift, how much could can it have.
Maybe,, we consume the soul, as long as we live,
Each day, each night,
So, there is too little soul left for eternity, and for small gifts.
***
We begin a revolt
.So, someone prepares the signals and the battle cry,
And others revolt until the bullets find them.
And it is strange
That history remembers only the heroes who gave the battle cry.
Maybe the battle cry is forever, and also the silence of the dead.
***
The demon shouts:
It is too late to ask for favors,
And after all, it was always too late,
Because we were sentenced the moment we were born,
Or even a moment before it.
And while we wait for the rope
We forgive no one, because we don't have the strength
To forgive, or to love. We are tired.
Because we wait for the rope for too long,
And the waiting, and the thoughts of the rope, and the rope,
Don't forgive us.
***
The blind violinist plays,
And the gypsies and the bears pass.
He doesn't see them, but he feels.
So, the music stops,
And for a tiny eternity the bears sit and they don't dance,
Because music is not only love.
It is justice.
***
The blind violinist is old,
So, his music tries to gather all the time left
In the treasure of his sadness.
The shining coins.
***
How infinite can one life time be,
When the twilight is immense, and the distant lights are on,
And the shadows are silk.
And how infinite can one life time be, when the infinite is pain.
So, we never know if one life time is enough,
If the infinite is enough.
***
The moon write itself on the window, like a ghost,
With white chalk,
Because the moon loves ghosts, and they love it.
And the poets takes the delicate chalk, and the love,
And write a horror poem.
***
In the morning we go down stairs,
With all our dreams still alive in our gestures,
And we get into our life.
And maybe we enter countless lives : the roles,
And the past, and the future, and the day dreams.
And we don't know where we'll die, who will die,
And how many times we'll die.
***
Poets die, and their infinite follows them,
And only some poems are rebels,
And they don't follow the poets, and the dead infinites.
***
The funeral of a poet is melancholic.
The infinite of people that should have been there
Doesn't exist,
And only the infinite of his poems follow him.
And it is sad,
Because this loyalty poisons his dreams and his death.
***
We leave in our testament one phrase:
We found the treasure.
So that the others will continue to look for it,
Because there are many kinds of treasures.
And maybe we leave them an empty destiny to fill.
***
We ask the dervish
How he walks on the coal,
And he says: I found my road.
***
We grow up,
And we are the age of insomnia.
Maybe the wings of a child can't enter our sleep,
And folding them is pain.
***
Dreamers try to be calm, to look like the others,
And, at times, they succeed.
We could say it in a banal way:
The calm before the storm,
Or in another way:
The storm is already here.
And all we see is the quiet.
***
We cannot tell a story that never began,
Because everything continues something
That continues something else,
And even our silence continues another silence.
So, it is useless.
***
The door was closed for too long to open,
And the moon hangs in the window.
So, we have no choice. We escape to the moon.
We sit on the rocks, and we don't understand
How can they become light,
Or how a word can become light,
And even a touch on our face.
***
In summer nights
We lie in the garden ,but we cannot sleep.
Maybe the star-light, the dead light,
Reminds us the soldiers, almost children,
That died in the war,
And they are another kind of light.
***
Children cry, and then they fall asleep,
But, it is useless, because their sleep cries too.
And it is strange,
Because also when we grow up,
We cry even when we don't know it.
***
Someone sits on a bench.
He has nowhere to go.
And then he gets up and walks with slow steps, opaque,
Towards the past,
Because the past may tell him where to go.
After all, the past is a mother.
***
We are a child,
And the grown-ups speak in a foreign language,
So that we wouldn't understand.
But, from then on, being a grown-up
Feels like a foreign language we cannot master.
And maybe, all of us miss a mother tongue
That will be a mother
And that will tell us tenderly, infinitely tender,
How to become less eternal.
***
There are many versions of a poem,
And maybe, the best, is the one that makes us cry.
Because when we cry for a poem,
We can cry for another million things.
We are sad people.
***
Maybe poems are a confession to the dead,
Or even to some deaths inside us.
We think it is easy to confess when it is too late,
And we don't realize that the only one left to absolve
Is ourselves,
And the dead rarely absolve us, and the poems.
***
We don't know how to be silent,
But, beneath our words there is always something heavy:
Whom shall we betray the next moment, the next night.
And maybe, no matter whom we betray,
We betray ourselves. Always.
***
We grow old and tired.
We learn how to be as silent as god,
To let death and all the other gifts of fate
Kill,
And to say nothing.
***
When the blind violinist,
His consumed clothes and his consumed life,
Plays,
We feel that music is not love, or even destiny.
It is pure justice.
***
We are humble people,
So, there was nothing that ever moved on earth:
The feet, the horses and the chariots, and the trains,
That didn't pass over us, that didn't make us bleed.
And the blood continues.
***
There was the small hotel named Paradise,
Because the tears of love
Are another kind of heaven,
And we cried there often.
***
We learn, little by little,
Like the ancient man from the tribe
Who came from a common marriage,
How to love one woman,
And how to find in her all the women we desire.
***
We believe in free will,
And in fate.
We know it doesn't make sense,
But it explains everything.
And we feel safe,
Because all the fronts are covered.
***
We are poor,
And the ladies of mercy visit us each day
To bring us something old: trousers, sock.
Because pity needs the pitiful.
***
We are poor,
And yet, we don't accept the gifts of pity,
Because there is a price:
We have to be grateful for months, forever.
And we cannot afford it.
***
We sit in the empty plaza,
Old, consumed, deserted,
Practically ready for death,
And strangely, He comes,
Because usually He doesn't mind how ready we are.
And we have tears in our eyes, and pity.
Because it is a sad profession,
And because we feel how life fooled both of us.
***
From the first moment of the first hour,
There was in the clock an inexplicable minute,
And we look frequently at the clock,
And we don't understand.
Maybe, a moment before death,
When we'll be half blind or even more,
We'll see the minute and we'll understand it,
And it will understand itself.
***
We spend our time in the street,
Or in the big plazas,
And maybe it is a satanic plan,
Because it lets us love people.
***
We love humanity,
And maybe, that's why we spend our time
In empty streets, in deserted plazas.
And this explains everything,
Because the humans scare us.
***
Mothers cannot stay dead for too long,
Because they have to put us to bed
And to tell us stories.
It is in their genes, and genes go far, much further than death.
And maybe, death understands,
Because He has many mothers: the hunger, the wars , the pain.
***
We have to read less,
Even books about the philosophy of life, the Zen,
And other manuals for tiny eternities,
In order to live more.
***
We have to do more things,
The struggle, the work, the creating,
So that we'll feel the meaning of life in our life,
And why some tears are beautiful.
***
Mothers wear large dresses
In order to hide the child from life,
And to hide life from the child,
Maybe, even forever.
Because the large dress is in their genes,
So, it goes far, much further than what we think.
***
The humble don't know how to protect themselves,
Or maybe, they don't dare.
So, when they take from them the table, the chair
And even the bread,
They sit on imaginary chairs, at an imaginary table,
And eat the imaginary bread,
And it is sad,
Because reality is a killer,
And imagination is another killer.
***
Suddenly, we find in a casual word
A witness to what we are, to who we are.
And the only judge is us.
***
Suddenly, we find a picture of our oblivion,
And all we see
Is a vase with cut flowers.
***
Everybody returned.
Only the dreamers remained far,
In another place of reality,
Because they grew used to be alone,
And to wait.
***
Maybe poets have something masochistic about them.
The shoot the words,
And they know they'll bleed.
***
They shoot people at all the walls of the world,
So, sleeping is dangerous,
And waking up is nightmare.
***
Sinners are hedonist by nature,
And maybe what makes them tremble
With the deepest pleasure
Is the feeling of sin. The beautiful demon.
***
The blind violinist
Plays
Beneath his consumed coat and his consumed fate,
That gave him, at times,
The best tears.
***
Someone sits on a bench,
And around him, the aura of infinite patience.
He waits for something he saw in a dream.
And we go away, because so much infinite,
And so much patience , and all the rest of the saints.
Scare us.
***
The man and the woman die,
And they want to be buried together,
Because the bodies of love may be useless,
But the hands, the infinite hands of love,
Are not.
***
Maybe, the fortunate ones
Are those who never knew what life is,
And the blessed ones-
Those who had a dream, and they struggled, and they gave it roots.
And a delicate ray in the immense twilight,
Is the only reward.
***
The perfect crime happens all the time,
Not only when we didn't see,
But, where nothing seems to have happened.
And it is strange,
Because always, around us,
Nothing seems to have happened.
***
There are many kinds of escape:
The dreams, the journey far from ourselves,
And the scarf we used to cover our photo
That looks for something in our face.
***
We die in a crowded room,
Because all those who used to forget us, come,
And those who forgive themselves, and those we don't forgive,
And of course, the ladies of pity
Who can smell something to pity ,and were ready at the door.
So, dying is not a private affair.
***
We are dying, and our hand
Half dead or even more,
Moves strangely, as if it wanted to reach the past.
Maybe, towards the imaginary friend that made the childhood real.
***
Doors are not safe,
And yet, we open them,
Innocent, unprotected,
Utterly unready for a new sadness.
***
We should be careful when we think,
Because the miserable, the deserted
Can read our thoughts.
Maybe, suffering opens other senses:
A thought- whisperer or a medium.
And they know that they scare us,
Because this strange sense scares us,
And because our thoughts are what we call:
Our home, our castle,
And we want it to remain so.
***
Some moments, we don't recognize ourselves,
We feel almost like a saint.
We let the insects in our closet
Eat their small share of our things,
Because no one will be saved.
***
The humble lower their eyes
When they are in court,
When someone points a gun at them.
So, they are guilty.
***
We lived everything,
Yet, we never knew how infinite is life
When we wait to be shot at the wall.
And how small is the wall,
Too small for the death of a man.
***
Maybe, our life waits somewhere, almost complete,
And it expects our suffering in order to be complete
And then, to begin.
So, maybe, we are born, and we are not empty handed.
We bring our treasure of sadness.
***
We don't write poems today,
In order not to lose from our sight an exquisite spot
Alone in the infinite horizon.
Maybe, it is a bird, in the moment between stillness and flight.
And it is the best poem.
***
At times, the strange feeling of quiet,
When everything is in ruins.
Maybe, we pretend to own something: a calm leaf,
In a world where we don't own even the leaves.
And maybe, we realize suddenly,
That anyway, no one will be saved.
***
The blind violinist
Loves old songs that feel true,
And he doesn't know why the others don't play them,
Because truth is never old-fashioned,
And for sure, not feelings.
***
There are many kinds of perfect crime.
There is the murderer of someone poor,
And the poorer, the better,
Because they are nameless,
So, no one died, and no one is guilty.
There is the stranger that no one knows,
So, no one will notice that someone is missing,
And we don't realize his child knows,
And he keeps a stain of blood, a stain bigger than his life.
And there is death.
***
There are the big names,
And they say that they keep our destiny in their pocket,
And we never understood how someone can do it.
Because destiny is a wild animal,
And may kill, when the pocket hurts it.
***
Before we sleep
We close the drawer with the old photos,
The old post cards, the old ribbon of a girl,
And the evening smells of eternal departures.
***
No one seems to like us,
So, we have no choice.
We write something nice about ourselves.
When we die, we'll take it with us,
Because we all need to be liked, or even loved,
Somewhere.
***
We know too little.
We don't know who will answer us,
And who will resist up to the night,
And we don't know who shall we be tomorrow.
Maybe time is a mother,
And it gives us the hand of a mother, the infinite hand,
And it leads us to the night, and to the tomorrow ,
And to new places in reality.
***
We should take good care of our shoes,
Because our destiny
Is to walk always towards something:
The next hour,
The next hundred hours of work a day.
One day, they should bury us barefoot,
Without our shoes, without the next hour,
Without the next hundred hours to walk.
We are tired.
***
Who didn't ever open a window or a door
With the illusion that the same world
Still exists.
After all, we have to trust something,
And having the same world seems safe.
***
Dreamers walk out
With a lamp in their hand,
Like a modern Diogenes,
And when they ask them what they look for,
They don't say 'Man', they say 'People',
In the incomprehensible language
Of those who give new meaning to 'people'.
***
I believe in the uncertain steps of the humble
Who create, slowly, patiently, history,
While walking.
***
We are deserted and alone,
And suddenly someone,
Someone silent and humble.
Puts a hand on our shoulder and says:
I see you,
And this hand, and these words,
Are a mother.
***
It rained,
And the old man gave old bread
To the stray cats.
He was humble,
And maybe he didn't know where is Paradise,
But the cats knew.
***
Maybe, the dreamer walks day and night
In the near-by room,
Because he has to go far.
And it is sad, and it is beautiful,
Because he may not arrive,
And because someone else, a new dreamer,
May move into the room.
***
We age,
And we still call our friends
With their nick-names,
The way their mothers called them.
No one wants to grow old.
***
It is the first man and the first woman
And the first sin,
And they are exiled forever.
They are only human, but it changes nothing.
Maybe, one day, they'll forgive.
***
The crucify the dreams in all the cross-roads,
No matter what dreams,
The dreams of the saints or the dreams of people,
Because some dreams are dangerous.
They are awake.
***
In the corner of the street,
The old woman of love.
Her hair falls like a sigh,
And she tries to smile,
Like all those who are afraid,
And we don't realize
She tries not to cry.
***
All the things we didn't know-
That's what nostalgia is made of.
And the poets gather all these things,
In order to write their life.
***
Everything is an enigma:
Life, love, us, a poem.
And maybe, some enigmas are not to be solves.
They are to be lived, or at least sung.
***
We knock on the door, desperate,
Like a dream that makes us disappear,
And we don't know
That we dream the way we live,
On both sides of the door,
So, we disappear on both sides of the door.
And maybe doors don't protect us as much as we think.
***
We prepare the rope,
We stand on a chair, and we hang
Our conclusions, our hopes, our despair,
And other useless things.
So, we are dead, but we feel quiet.
***
We need urgently something eternal
In order to believe in life, in the world.
So, we go to the market
Where the poor and the humble sell everything,
Also themselves.
We ask for something that lasts,
And they give us a handful of sadness.
So, we have the eternity we need.
***
The blind violinist in a corner of the evening,
And in the hotel of love
A man plays violin on the body of a woman,
Strangely tender, strangely light.
Like a concert for two violins and one body,
And it is exquisite.
***
Maybe, our destiny is an empty sack,
And we fill it with strange things:
With a knife that will kill one day,
With a dream that will save everything,
And with a rope that may save us,
And with a poem that usually saves no one.
***
Our days are quiet,
But, in the evening people understand better,
So, we take the deserted side streets of life,
Because the truth is that we die alone,
Because we want to die alone.
***
We lose the talent to be happy,
And each night we lose it more,
And countless other things.
Maybe, that's why we wake up tired,
Because losing tires us, and the sadness.
***
We lose the talent to be happy little by little,
So, we have time
For the small hotel of love and for love,
And to show someone
the remnants of our talent,
Before it is too late.
And strangely, at times,
The body of love and the love are a cry.
***
Maybe we dream too much
And we live too little,
And maybe, all these dreams
Are our share of the life we didn't live,
So, we dream life.
We dream of the future that could be for everybody. The beautiful future.
And we dream of the beautiful past
That left no one alive except itself,
And yet, it made us what we are.
And we don't know where we belong.
To which dream. To which life.
To which place in eternity.
***
Our mothers were not saints,
Because they sang romantic songs
And wore romantic dresses,
And because they didn't believe in penitence.
They forgave everything.
And their hands, their consumed hands,
Could hold inside them the infinite of a child,
And the infinite tenderness.
***
The humble, when they are humbled,
Look in one point in the infinite,
And they stay there as long as needed.
Maybe, one day they'll shout.
It will be the first shout,
And it will be infinite,
Because there is an old debt, almost eternal,
To pay.
***
The humble are easily frightened
Because they don't trust their fate,
And why should they,
And at times, their clothes hang empty,
As if they were utterly lost.
Because even though fear closes us,
We lose ourselves,
The way one loses himself in a locked room.
***
We know so little about the room we live in,
Because we don't know how to see,
Or we don't have a free minute to see,
While the room looks at itself and at us,
Because it is its most important work,
And maybe, that's also how life looks at us.
So, even when the room paints itself
With all the shadows that exist,
We don't notice.
***
The conjurers, the beggars,
And the other miserable-s in the street,
Have the best stories to tell,
Because they have time enough to see,
And because they realize
That the suspense in the street, the thieves,
The murderers, are the best story.
Maybe, they could sell it to the newspapers,
The newspapers would love it,
But they are not ready to betray names,
Which the newspapers wouldn't love.
***
The public urinals,
And the murmur of perversion.
Maybe, they are the cemetery of love.
And maybe, there are many kinds
Of cemeteries of love,
Even in our bed.
***
The babies, the beautiful babies,
Even the flies love them,
And we have to protect them from too much love.
So, the babies see for the first time
The sky, and the world caught in a net,
And that's where their sense of reality begins.
***
Nets made of wind,
And the mad, and the children, and the conjurers,
Throw inside them the most beautiful birds,
Because the mad, and the children, and the conjurers
Know how to see, how to make the invisible visible.
Maybe, it is the way our dreams see us.
***
We hang ourselves somewhere high,
So, we jump out of all the useless things,
And we jump also out of the only useful thing
We ever had. Life.
***
The rain saddens us,
Because it reminds us all the irreversible departures,
And there is no umbrella of mercy.
***
In the evening
The city cries like a dying stray cat.
And maybe, it is the sum of all the cries:
The houses, the cars, us.
Because death is an epidemic,
And because cries are always
A stray animal.
***
It is winter
And the poor use old newspapers
To warm themselves,
So, they know some truths of the world,
Creased, and utterly questionable.
So it is useless,
Anyway, they know the truth of hunger,
That the newspapers never discovered,
So, hunger remains a mystery. A secret caste.
***
At night, there is a certain order of things.
From far, faraway, we hear the murmur of eternity.
And closer- the sob of our dead mother,
Maybe for her orphan life,
And closest- our sigh, because memories love Sighing, and life.
***
It is simple.
We stand at the cross-roads
With all our dreams in our luggage,
And they come and crucify us.
And, they have no choice.
They want to make sure we take the right way,
And the dreams.
***
We love risks, so we love life and love, and dreams.
And it is really a risky affair.
They crucify us in all the cross-roads of the world,
Because we love life more than the after-life,
And also our dreams were not the right ones.
So, they taught us how to love.
***
Maybe, we are always strangers,
And we feel our life
Like a book that someone else wrote,
And someone else reads.
And we forget the time before we knew how to read,
And we read the mother-tongue of life.
***
We have this nostalgia
For something we've lost the moment we were born,
And maybe we lost in that moment
The eternity when everything was possible.
A moment before the impossible existed.
***
Some nights
We kneel in one of the cross-roads of life
And we ask the world where to go.
They crucify us, because we are suspicious,
And because the world is not a temple.
And our only guilt
Is our innocence.
***
We remember so few things of ourselves.
The empty hours of an afternoon.
Some words that remained unsaid.
And the curtain that decorated the desertion.
And we are orphans,
So, we have no one to ask
Where was the rest of our life.
***
There are too many heavens inside us,
So, we don't have enough time to stay on earth,
To live the life before the after-life,
Or at least to eat the warm bread
Before it grows cold in eternity.
***
We can find hell everywhere,
Even when we don't expect it,
Like when time is diabolically fast,
Or slow and empty,
Because time is the artist of hell,
Maybe that's why the hours burn
With a strange beauty that hurts us.
***
We are sad people,
So, we take a woman for an hour,
To share the body of love,
And we stay together for years,
Because we cannot share the sadness.
And the habits sadden us,
Because we sit at the table and we talk
To an empty chair.
***
The twilight is a useful hour
For those who lost hope,
And for those who find it in a sudden light-ray.
We don't know how strong is hope,
Even in a small 'maybe',
And how fierce is losing or finding it.
***
We look all the time inside ourselves
And it is exhausting,
Because we are not simple,
And we don't know how to be simple,
And maybe, even when we were a child and we drew ourselves,
Nothing was really simple.
And we have no choice. We have to live our non-simple life, and it tires us. And it is strangely beautiful.
***
Maybe we listen to the others too much,
So, often we lose the way.
And maybe, we listen too little,
So, often we lose the way.
We don't know how powerful is listening,
So, we should be careful when we use it.
***
Memories.
They kept more than what they remember.
They kept who we were,
Who we are.
***
Everything is an eternal return,
Because the past repeats itself in us,
And we don't know why it repeats also
The suffering, the empty hours, and the murderers,
We are sad people.
***
They call the poor-poor,
And they don't know they have the treasure of the future:
The winters that will be always more,
And the cold, and the suffering,
And the rich will be always more,
And they'll give them more hunger,
Which is another kind of treasure.
***
The blind violinist
And the 7-th hand coat,
Like a cemetery of so many lives.
And the dark tremble in his body
Is a cypress by the grave,
Because it is alive,
And also the music is a cypress
And it trembles.
***
There are moments of beautiful feelings,
Of beautiful truths,
But, when we look for them we cannot find them. We forgot.
We are sad people,
And maybe this forgetting makes us even sadder.
***
There may be adventures in each side street,
But we are afraid, or maybe too old,
So, we take the main road,
And we think we've saved ourselves.
And we don't know how crowded is the main-road,
Because many want to save themselves.
So, there is a stampede and they stampede us,
Which is another kind of adventure.
And we lie on the main road, dead and safe.
***
Some people go the long night with a dream,
And then, in the morning, they suddenly stop,
And go back on the staircase.
Maybe they felt it is not time,
And maybe they were right,
Because, at times, we have to wait for time,
Or for ourselves.
***
We are passerby in life,
And life is passerby inside us.
So, all we can do is visit hurriedly each other.
And to think that these hurried visits
Are the only witness that we lived.
***
Time does what it should do. It runs.
So, we have to bury the hour hurriedly,
Because we don't have time,
And because the coffin of another hour is ready.
***
Dreaming is insidious.
At times it gives us a flower,
While what we need is earth,
The whole earth in our feet,
We need the whole earth in our dream,
To save us.
***
Maybe nostalgia in an infinite mother
And it cures us,
Because it knows what ails us,
And because it loves us,
And it forgives everything.
***
The dead leave behind
The treasure of the past.
Silver coins for the future.
***
People are fooled easily.
Maybe they need it,
And maybe, at times,
The truth is so incredible, yet, it is truth,
So, it doesn't fool them.
***
The incredible life we had, and the loves,
Are too far to believe.
And then something, something small,
Comes and tells us the incredible truth.
And it is moving
How something so small
Crossed so much past
To remind us we exist.
***
In court
The dreamer is sentenced to death,
Because his dreams were a crime and a sin.
And when he hears it,
He smiles and loosens his jacket,
As if he has returned somewhere inside,
To his most private life.
***
A woman passes near us,
Her body has the motion of a tree in the wind.
She says something,
And her voice is calm, like those who endured much,
And she is blind, and she looks somewhere behind us,
As if she found in her dark
Something she was looking for,
Maybe the last sun she has seen.
***
It was winter
And the old man sat in a corner of the street,
His leg was missing, and who knows what else.
Maybe he was waiting for a coin,
And maybe for humanity.
And it rained over him softly, infinitely soft,
The way it rained over the dead bodies, and the Humanity that died in war.
And the rain continues.
***
At times, we play the mad one for the others,
Because they pity us, and because they laugh.
And the pity and the laughter sooth them.
The magic herbs.
***
Jericho was betrayed by a woman of love
Who gave the keys of the city to an Israelite.
The old aunt
Survived from the biblical Jericho,
And now she hands out,
Like an infectious disease,
The key to the city.
Because Jericho was betrayed and it bled
In countless cities.
In Hiroshima, in Nagasaki.
So, we keep the key,
And the blood continues.
***
Poets write such sad poems
That the hours grow old, and the days.
And they are not afraid of words,
Even though they know that words can kill,
Or at least disappoint us.
***
Dawn, and the moon kills its light,
Like a caress that we keep in our hand
And we kill it. We retreat.
And maybe, each day we kill something beautiful.
***
The flood grows always taller,
But we prefer it to dying without rehearsal.
So, we live quietly
And we drown our cries like the drowned ones.
***
We are city gardeners by passion,
And sometimes, we see all the gardens of Babylon
Blossom in a flower pot,
And it is strange that we can be gardeners of happiness.
***
People have so many worries,
And so many things to do.
But as for ourselves, we are guilty, because we are poets,
And we take care only of how to torture ourselves,
And because poems without torture
Or at least sadness,
Feel unreal, and for sure, too shallow.
***
People stand laughing at us,
So, we feel we fulfilled our destiny,
Because when some dreams begin,
They seem like a clown for all seasons,
And like all clowns,
They recognize the cry in the laughter.
***
It is evening, so we look far,
Somewhere where our life is on sale,
And we are not present.
And nothing can sooth our rage
That we were excluded, and that we were sold,
Without a word, without a sigh.
***
The statues are silent, like an old beggar,
Because they saw too much,
And because no cry is enough.
***
We try to fool our age,
And it is a common habit.
Even walls do it,
They cover themselves with painting of spring and flowers,
And only the leaf that fell from a picture
Betrays them.
***
We leave
And our ghosts will have to look for us
In another street of reality,
And they may be different,
Because ghosts are fashion dependent,
And they change when the street of reality changes,
Or maybe, the shops.
***
There are treasures that no one wants to steal
Like the treasure of our worries,
Even though we leave our door open at night,
And also the beggars refuse our charity.
So, we have no choice. We keep them.
Strangely, they are always pregnant,
And their offspring-s go far, much further than life.
So, the treasure continues.
***
We need to look at our life
With more mercy,
Because the only thing that was real about it
Was the sadness. This, and the dreams.
***
We become a sleep-walker
Because we love the beauty of useless things.
To give a dream to a child,
To give the night to the bodies of love and the love,
Or to leave a tender leaf of autumn on the bed of the old.
***
We lie on the train tracks
In order to travel in a childhood dream
With the last station in the infinite,
Or, at times, in order to kill the dream and our life.
So, we travel to the infinite,
Each in his own way.
***
In the evening
We cry
Like a traveler who crossed all the continents,
And suddenly, lost himself forever, among the walls of a small home .
***
We have many dreams,
And maybe some are a sin, or at least a crime.
So, we have no choice. We become a statue,
In order to be silent,
And that no one will suspect our silence.
Because the silence of humans may be Dangerous.
***
No matter how much past,
And how great is the past inside us,
We are just a human of our century,
Simple, inexplicable, and mortal.
***
It is summer,
And the gardeners gather
The miracles of the sun, of the rain, of earth,
And of their hands, their consumed hands,
Their infinite hands.
***
We enter the night
Unarmed as a vowel,
Because the sigh is a vowel, and a cry,
And the rain on our face.
And their only armor is that they feel.
***
Eternity is in a hurry,
So, until we go down stairs,
Our life has passed.
And it is strange,
Because also the poor go down stairs
To the cellar where they live,
And they die even faster.
So the staircase is not the only guilty one.
Also the cellar of the poor, and the poor,
Are guilty.
***
We travel in a cubicle of earth,
Room enough for the body and what the body remembers.
But it is the bones that will survive, and what they remember,
Even though they were broken day after day,
And it is they that will take us to eternity.
And it is strange,
Because the poets, the scavengers of eternity,
Never write about the bones.
***
We chose always the right road,
The right address, the right habits,
Because we were afraid of mistakes.
And maybe
We could find in the wrong places
Something beautiful. A garden of people.
***
There is always something in the past,
Something that humiliated us, and our whole life.
And the murderers kill in order to forget it.
And maybe, even in war,
We kill in order to protect ourselves,
And in order to forget it.
***
The biblical floods are inside us,
And there are no umbrellas in the bible,
So, we have no choice.
We drown inside ourselves,
Like the cry of a fish,
Or like the shriek of the humble that never left his mouth.
***
The merchants weigh us
And they find we are too heavy,
We have to get rid of our dreams.
Anyway, there is a new fashion in dreams,
Much lighter, beautiful feathers,
And they sell better.
So, we have no choice.
They sell us with a dream in fashion.
And only our life cries more often.
***
The architect measured us,
And couldn't find a place to build a home.
And the truth is we are too poor,
And the only roof we ever had was inside us.
So, we have no choice. We remain homeless,
And with a roof that grows tired and old inside us.
***
We stand by the window and we look at the passersby,
The faces of humanity.
And it is sad,
Because in the depth, behind each one,
We see the whole desert that follows him.
And there is no oasis of mercy.
***
We meet our family at times in the corridor,
Or in the dining room, but for centuries, we didn't really see them. At least, until the time of the biblical Jericho.
Because, when the walls of a city fall,
Maybe also other walls fall,
And we see each other.
***
The old tailor
Mingles the threads of the clothes
With the threads of the streets,
So, he draws a different map,
And people lose their way.
And it is sad,
Because we use so may maps,
And yet, we lose each other,
And we lose ourselves.
***
In the plaza
The birds eat, like us,
The crumbs of journeys that never happened.
Food for the wingless years.
***
We stand in the train station,
Ready for the journey, maybe a journey to the nowhere,
Like a poet who writes his life,
And leaves his fear of death silent,
Even though it is written in each word,
In each full-stop.
***
Maybe we had a destiny too,
But we gave it to charity,
And all we kept was the old chair of our mother.
We carried it to the four winds,
Because she was too dead to stand.
And maybe, in each destiny,
Even the new fashion ones,
There is an old chair of a mother.
***
The piers are not a safe place.
They tremble because of too many departures,
Like an earth-quake our a tsunami
Which sooner or later will kill us.
Because departures are an earth-quake,
And a tsunami, and a killer.
***
We live with a thousand clocks in our life.
The clocks of the body: the clock of hunger,
The clock of love.
And the clock of the thought and the worries.
And of course, the clock of death.
And when they ask us, we play it cool,
And we say that time doesn't matter.
***
We live with a hundred clocks in our hours,
Because we have to make it on time to history,
Like all the historical heroes.
And it is sad,
Because they never knew if they made it on time.
***
Lately, people don't trust us.
They ask for receipts, accounts, contracts.
And some become the artist of suspicion:
The private detectives, and the lawyers,
And of course, the bankers who manage our money and they don't trust us.
And we don't shake hands anymore.
It is not safe, too many hands were lost.
***
Maybe the poor die in order to have some time to think,
Because in order to change, at least something,
In the eternal law of the poor,
They need to think,
And in order to have time to think,
They have to die.
***
We have a passion for remorse,
So, we feel guilty
For the stick of the blind,
For the fly in the light bulb,
And for the sinners who look for someone to forgive them,
And of course, for some gazes that left our eyes, they were killers,
And they don't forgive us.
***
Living would have been much simpler,
If it were not for this strange passion of life
For enigmas.
And we don't ask much, not even why we live,
Why we die.
But, at least a simple answer
Of how to live, how to die.
***
They put us in the mad-house
Because we lost the key to ourselves,
Or because we found it.
So, keys are dangerous.
***
They say that it is strange,
That we are modern,
And yet, the demons,
And the man-sacrifice, remember.
Maybe, they were somewhere secret
And they waited to come back,
And maybe they were always here,
Hidden in full sight.
Because they sacrificed men in war, and in other rituals , each day,
And the demons held our hand.
***
We waited always for something special,
Something beautiful,
And that's how the special, the beautiful,
And the waiting,
Stole our life.
***
The friends of the dead die,
And it is sad,
But we know we'll be remembered, and our dreams,
Because history remembers the dreams that change it, and the ones that didn't change it, Because one day they may change it.
***
We make a big circle
Before we return to our address and to our life,
Because regretting needs time,
And because everything is irreversible,
So, it is useless.
***
Our parents die,
So, we are orphan,
A deserted child
Who leaves his childhood
Silent and alone.
***
The birds are not as carefree as they seem,
Because wings are a responsibility,
And the dreamers know it, and the poets.
***
Poems
Are a key to the open door of a poet,
And yet, there is always a locked closet
Somewhere in the depth of the corridor.
***
Statues have also their hours of sadness,
Because they see too much,
Or maybe, because they have too much eternity to think,
But we don't know it,
Because, like those who silenced their face,
They try not to cry.
***
Maybe fame is a killer,
Because it kills what we are, who we are,
And it leaves our clothes empty, deserted.
***
Maybe fame is a rough guy, a butcher,
And it cuts our flesh, piece by piece,
So that we'll have its shape.
And we had a choice.
And we chose to mop the stains of blood from the floor and from our life.
***
Maybe, we should give wreaths
To the ones who are shot at the wall. The defeated.
Because the bullet killed also the one who killed them,
Even if he doesn't know it.
So, we don't know who was really defeated .
***
We dream of a rainbow
In the hat of the mad,
Because it rains too much
In their naked mind, and in their life.
***
The sicker we are,
The sicker are the legends we show our children
On all the screens of the world.
So, we need a hospital to cure us,
And a hospital for the legends,
Because children die when the legends die.
***
The forgotten need so little.
A gaze that sees them.
A tiny reminder that they exist.
***
It was not silence.
We lived with dead music.
And to think that everything is motion,
So, everything is music:
The steps, the water, the light, the shadows,
And the dreams.
But, the dream died,
And we continued with dead music.
***
Some seasons change quietly,
And some, like an earth-quake, like a tsunami.
Maybe they are the seasons of people,
Because these seasons may change
Like an earth, like a wave,
That were quiet for too long.
***
We were a child,
And our only friend was an imaginary one,
And he gave us our childhood.
So, we had no choice. We became a poet,
Because the imaginary friend
Was a poem and a poet.
***
We are always in a hurry towards something,
Something we don't know.
We don't realize we hurry towards eternity,
And we don't know that the only eternity left for the living are the dead:
The dead chair of our dead mother,
And the dead bullet of a dead we loved, in war.
***
Maybe, we sing in the evening
Because the end is an exquisite song,
And because it remembers the silence
With which everything began:
The First Light, the belly full of love.
***
We are poor, so we have to fool fate,
And the rage, and the loneliness, and being lost.
So, we go to a cheap wine-house,
And the vapors fill us with kindness,
And people speak, words that were said a hundred times, like the seasons, so, they feel
Like an old friend.
And when we return, drunk, the dead that were always inside us,
Show us the way home.
And for one evening maybe we fooled everything,
And for sure, ourselves.
***
Whatever we had is worthless,
Because we trusted the wrong people.
So, they take us to court.
And only our trust is guilty,
Because it was innocent.
***
The dreamers stand in the plaza
And they spread handful of seeds.
Because seeds dream.
And maybe the plaza is the earth of the dreamer, because people grow there,
And people need dreams.
***
The beggars have nothing to sell,
So, they sell us themselves,
And maybe, a moment of infinite.
And we feel immense, and yet, we cry,
Because a man sold himself.
***
Words grow
In the evening, when we are alone,
Because we push 'replay' on all that was said,
And we turn it on loud, so we can hear also What wasn't said, what could have been said,
And what each whisper meant.
So, the words become giants, and they hurt us.
We have a passion for suffering.
***
Words grow in the evening, when we are alone.
Because words are shadows of what we are,
Of who we are,
And in the evening, the shadows are giants,
And they write us on the wall.
***
The old woman washes with naked hands
The panties of the women of love,
And then, she goes to a corner and cries,
Because the naked hands remember,
And because she doesn't know they are beautiful.
***
We are an adolescent
And often we plan the perfect crime:
A patricide, a matricide,
Because we have to save our soul
Or at least to own it.
And maybe, it is an ancient ritual.
***
We were not born in our age,
Old and tired.
So, in our dreams
We danced with our mother,
The way a man dances with a woman he loves.
And it was the best lesson of loving.
***
At times, a big adventure crosses the street.
We run, but the others arrive before us.
And to think that this trying, this daring,
Was the best adventure we ever had,
Because we are the best adventure we'll ever have.
***
We sit in the cheap wine house, we drink
And we say nothing.
After all, there is nothing that wasn't yet said.
And even the poets have to wait in a corner of their sleep,
In order to steal new words from their dreams.
***
Dreamers
May seem vulnerable like the icons on the wall,
Like them, exiled forever from the sky,
And like them, their dreams are contagious
And fierce.
So, we have to choose. We have to choose only one dream. No more.
***
The blind violinist
Loves to play in the afternoons for the children.
It may seem useless to give dreams to a child,
But that is what he does,
He gives them the best dreams,
And they never forget it.
We never forget a dream that loves us.
***
Lets follow the humble lights in our street,
Because we don't know where the streets,
And the street lamps of the sky go.
So, maybe we wouldn't lose ourselves
In the nights that cross us, in the life that crosses us.
***
We know each other.
We are acquaintances from an old crime,
Maybe a war, or maybe selling the life of the poor in the market of meat.
And we don't know who killed whom.
And we don't know who will forgive .
***
In the dark,
The street lamps make the night more inexplicable,
And the poet hides in a corner
In order to steal a mystery,
Or at least a new meaning of a word,
Because the old meanings were used up.
***
We were a child
And each morning when we woke up,
The mystery was bigger.
Maybe now we use different eyes,
Because only the mystery of suffering is bigger.
This, and the mystery of the body of love.
***
At night, we close our eyes
In order to save our soul,
Or at least, to sleep.
Because we have a deep sea in our head,
And the shipwrecks need rest.
***
Behind the mirror
Someone waits for us, someone who cries in our sleep,
And when we look in the mirror in a certain way, like pity or like sadness,
It is easy for this someone to come out of the mirror,
Because our ghosts are real, as real as a cry.
***
We don't know why we committed the murder.
Maybe we suffer of the mania of self destruction, which is human, and therefore
Inexplicable.
Maybe, because we don't believe in heaven,
And maybe because we had to revenge everything at once:
The humbleness that killed us, and the dream that we killed and it kills us,
And the brother dead in war and in vain.
So, they'll hang us and we wouldn't know who was guilty,
Who murdered, who was murdered.
***
In the dance hall
They dance the tango,
And even worse intentions.
Because the demons don't look for the body,
They look, like the angels, for the soul.
***
There are family crimes
Where they kill each other
In all the ways imaginable,
Because some crimes need imagination.
And they kill because they love too much,
So, they are innocent.
***
It is winter
And the cold makes the life of the poor bleed,
So, they dig a hole in the ground,
Hurriedly, because time is money,
And they don't have time for the poor.
And the bloody snow flowers cover them
Softly, infinitely soft.
***
Maybe
Children understand
When they say 'mother'.
There are very few words.
***
The long journey.
The stations disappear as fast as the seasons
Into the future,
And somewhere far,
The smoke from an old war.
So, we never know where we are, in which place of eternity, and where we go,
And we go on, ready for nothing.
***
In the small hotel of love,
The maid, her body used up, and her hands,
And around her, like a strange halo,
The mystery of a life that was consumed,
And the mystery of a debt that was paid.
And the mystery of the hands, the used up hands, the infinite hands.
***
Maybe the ones who suffer
Had a previous life
In which they suffered too.
So, they learn how to suffer better.
Everything has a reason,
And justice exists.
***
They never bury us alone.
They bury also those who killed us:
The murderous gaze,
The bullets in a whisper,
A hand shake studied as a crime.
***
Maybe our life was a lost place,
And only the memories tell us where to go,
Like the blind violinist
Who shows us the way.
And maybe, the past is not as blind as we think,
Nor the music , the infinite music.
***
The day, wrapped in transitory things,
Does what it should do, it leaves.
And the dreamer carves his dream on a stone,
Like the ancient dreamers, and the stone bleeds.
Maybe he wants to challenge the pain of dreaming, and of a dream.
And the blood continues.
***
At night, faces enter our sleep,
Because we cannot lock it:
Sad children who look at our hands,
Maybe they were beaten too often,
So, hands are a threat.
Women of love with their fallen skirts,
And there is no body left, because it was used too much.
And people we loved who died in war,
And they take out the bullet from their flesh
And they give it to us.
And to think that this is our sleep, the gift of the gods.
***
Maybe each moment is a different life.
Of course we carry inside us all the moments of the past,
But, it is not enough to begin a new life,
In another place of eternity, in another place of reality.
So, we live always bewildered, unprepared,
Lost.
***
Each moment struggles with events,
Because there are so many events
And only one moment.
And maybe our life is the magnifying lenses of a moment.
***
In each age, another life waits,
So, we have to learn again
How to live, how to love.
And it is nice
To think we have so many lives in our life,
And it is sad,
Because learning is always harder,
So we live the way we die,
Bewildered, awkward, lost.
***
The street may be a sad place.
There are faces stubborn as a cry,
And the street artists move their hands
Like those who drown,
And the pavement trembles from so many departures.
And suddenly, in a corner, the blind violinist,
And the music plays the day in a different way.
It repairs it.
***
The inheritance the world leaves us
Is too long to cite,
But, strangely, what we remember
Is the suffering,
And we don't realize how strong is the memory of suffering.
The Waterloo of man.
***
In the corner of the street
An old woman sits
And covers her face with her hands,
Like someone who found a quiet place in his life,
Or someone who has paid an old debt,
And he has still a few calm coins.
***
Poets stand silent
Even when everything around them is in ruins,
A slaughter,
Because the mystery of death inspires them,
And because they imagine their own death
In order to challenge their pain.
***
No one travels light,
Not even the birds.
They carry with them the tree that was home,
And the whole past
That taught them how to be birds and flocks.
***
The birds love the sky the way it is,
They need no god to repair it.
And when the flock flies
They have each other,
Which is the best prayer.
***
We need the tiny telephone booths,
In order to speak to each other,
And in order to remember how alone we are.
***
Things happen
And we don't know what,
And if they happened to us.
And to think that these things are the only witness that we exist.
***
Pain comes, before we are ready for pain.
And old age- before we are ready to be old.
So, we move in our life
Awkward, bewildered, unprepared.
We are not pitiful,
We are just human,
And we need pity, at times.
***
Maybe poetry is the nostalgia
For something we lived once,
Before the impossible existed.
And whenever we see a garden,
We feel that the child we were
Is buried like a lost toy, like a root.
***
The twilight
Is the poetry of something that was lost forever,
And the law that we'll never find it again,
That makes us what we are.
***
It is our love for life that is to blame,
Because when we love
We lose ourselves, and we forget the rules.
So, maybe while loving,
We committed the crime of loving
The poor with their dirty nails,
And the humble with their dirty knees.
So, we are guilty.
***
The flicker of death somewhere in our depth,
Is a story that has no end,
Because it has no beginning.
So, it is the strangest story, and the most real.
***
Some evenings
We hide our big thoughts,
In order to hang the humble moon in the window,
Because the humble remember.
And they need things the size of a man.
***
We raise our hands
When we are defeated,
And maybe, in that moment, we reach high,
Higher than ever.
We touch the sky of man.
***
We grow old suddenly,
The night when the ghost of a child disappear,
And the child.
And we don't know that there are ghosts
For all seasons.
***
Life is not just, the rich, the poor, the humble.
So, we have to believe
That at least autumn is just,
And the harvest of pain and of death.
And it is sad,
That we have to hurt or to die
In order to be simply people.
Nothing more, nothing less.
***
We are poor
And all we have is a coat old as a cemetery,
And a hunger older than death,
Because the poor die young,
And they have to get used, urgently, to death.
So, maybe the coat and the hunger are mercy.
A gift.
***
We learn how to discover
The murderer inside the clock,
And, in a long, empty afternoon,
The murderer inside us.
***
Our story, and whatever best it had
Will remain forever inexplicable,
So, no one will know we were innocent.
One day they'll hang us,
And our only guilt will be
That we were inexplicable, therefore, utterly Suspicious.
***
We lie in our room and we speak to tyrants,
And we call ancient heroes to defeat them.
And we don't know that tyrants are afraid of everything:
There are shadows in the fog, and traitors,
And there is poison everywhere,
In their food, in their sleep, and even in the silence.
And the shadows and the poison defeat them.
***
Maybe the poor are not afraid of hell,
After all, they grew used to it.
And they are afraid of heaven
Because they don't believe in charity.
***
We age, or we are lonely,
And we feel we are on the other side of life,
And maybe that's why the old and the lonely see more,
But we die on this side of life, on this side of pain.
There is no other place to die.
***
Dreams are a dangerous place.
We play with someone unknown,
A murderous face,
And the cards are creased and ominous.
We lose, so we play our past,
And we lose, so we play our future.
And when we wake up
We are alone and deserted, a ruined city,
Like our life.
And there is nothing left to play.
***
The beautiful feelings we spent on the poor,
And they went to die in a corner, like the poor,
And maybe a corner in our house would be
Helpful.
***
Maybe children are little animals,
They feel more and they have premonitions
Of something dark in the corner of the hours,
So, they cry, and we don't understand.
We don't sense the earthquake of everything.
We are ready for nothing.
***
Some mornings, there are on the street
Faces that are so sad,
That we feel someone should repair something:
The faces, the rest of the day,
Maybe, a historian, because he repairs often the past,
The father of sadness.
***
The poor conquer without battle, the plaza,
Because it is Sunday, the day of the God,
And no one can refuse them to give crumbs to the birds.
And the poor understand the price of hunger and the price of bread,
So, maybe they understand the world better.
***
Each night we die from the bullet
That killed the soldier-almost a child
That was near us,
And in the morning, we mop the stains of blood,
And we pretend that nothing happened,
While everything happened,
But, we don't know how to live with this Everything when we are awake.
***
At night, we are often shot from our back,
Bullets of a whisper that was whispered years ago,
Or even the bullets of something that remained unsaid,
Because the past is no longer a fruit-gatherer,
It is a pain-gatherer.
***
Somewhere inside us we are all guilty of something,
And somewhere inside us we are all innocent.
So, when it rains into our life,
We all need an umbrella of mercy.
***
Maybe we are, each one, the property of the world, or of life:
The childhood, the body of love, the murderer,
That is given to us little by little,
Until we cannot use it anymore.
***
There are some nice ways to fall asleep:
To count the loves and the friends we've lost,
Or to count the people we could know, and Different places of reality: the strangers, the Humble, but we didn't, so, we've lost them.
So, we count the lost sheep.
***
We gather strange things.
An empty cigarette box,
The visiting card of a small hotel of the night,
And the stars we saw, and the dreams.
And to think that from these things
We have to guess who we were, who we are.
***
One day, in our grave,
We may exhaust all our jokes,
Because we'll have the whole eternity to tell them,
And because we'll try not to cry.
***
Maybe death has a sense of humor,
So, it kills us in amusing ways,
Like getting trapped in our home-our castle
Forever, because no one can hear us,
And our cries are hilarious,
Or crashing the car on a stray cat,
Because its sob is funny.
And the laughter continues.
***
Maybe we need an expensive envelope, a perfumed paper, and a precious stamp,
So, that people will open it,
And we'll surprise them with our cry.
And only the cry will be precious.
***
Often, we don't know the depth of our sadness,
And there is the demon of forgetting things.
We don't understand how our hours grew deserted and empty.
Maybe, one day, before it is too late,
We'll embrace what's left of our life,
With all the sadness that we own, or that owns us.
***
Somewhere, sometime, we dream of owning the past,
In order to own who we were, who we are,
And who are the others,
And in order to take, one day, what we own,
Like the Pharaohs, to the grave.
And yet, we die alone, like the Pharaohs .
***
We need inspiration
In order to realize, suddenly,
That we are nothing special,
And yet, we had beautiful thoughts,
And they were lost, without suspecting it, in some cross-roads.
Because the cross-roads are the art of loss,
And life too.
***