HAND-MADE WORDS

Raquel Angel-Nagler

REMEMBERING I. RITSOS

R
ROMIOSINI

Nothing begins in the nothing.
Trees begin in the sky,
Homes begin in the family of faces,
In the two big Saturdays in the eyes of a child.

There are places hard as a closed face,
Where roots squeeze the shadows,
Where trees squeeze the sun,
Where fists squeeze the light.

There are places where water is thirst.
People drown in the thirst,
People become thirst,
People drink the saliva of thirst.
Thirst has no tears.

There are places
Where the hands continue the earth,
Where hands continue the feelings:
The love, the rage, the trust: a silent hand shake,
Where hands continue the answers.
The questions continue by themselves.

***

ROMIOSINI
There is not enough sky,
And yet, everything chooses a place under the sky,
Place enough to breathe.
There is not enough sun, and yet, the light is black, sun-burned.
There is not enough rain, and yet, it rains into our lives, like thirst,, like pain.
The laws of nature are everywhere.
The light trusts the world.
Life trusts the world, it sows itself in the deep recesses of earth, in the deep recesses of a woman.
We don't know we cannot change even a comma in the laws of nature,
We don't know we can change a whole phrase in the laws of man.
We made our journey, and yet, we are here, in this place where shadows seem innocent,
Where the break the rain into dust.
We are thirsty.
We die without dying, a series of small deaths.
We have to fight.
The bullets will begin from our thirst,
They'll begin from the person in our head. He is free.
We are ready to die for life, but it is not enough.
We should be ready, beyond rage, beyond pain, to kill for life.

***
.


THE MAN WITH THE CARNATION

The killers hide inside the eye of a gun: the big zero. The hate.
It becomes a big number:
The infinite has endless zeros behind a number.
But, inside you: the silence.
We forget words, but not the silences: mothers of stone.
It was strange to see how your motions continued without a grimace.
The motion of the lips was visible, inaudible.
You count, silence by silence, the dimensions of time, the distances of a spring.
You stitch, needle by needle, the shadows of a laugh.
There are faces like halted clocks,
They don't know what time it is in hope, what time it is in the sun.
There are fists in your pockets, each fist alone in the pocket,
Each fist with your dead in your pocket. In your fist all you hear are the dead.
They are not silent.
The day cuts the motions of living, finger by finger,
The day, the factory of life, producer of reality. It bleeds.
In your pulse: the pulse of the most distant star. In your pulse: people.
We'll return from the big death, to the small deaths of living,
Which are never really little.
We have to take our life back.
We'll return from the big abyss to the small abysses of living:
The ground floor of life.
We have to take our life back.

***

MAKRONYSSOS

Whatever you took in your sack:
The key that belongs to the door,
The key that opens the quiet,
Everything was lost in the rust.
But you are too tired to notice, to tired to feel what it means.
And yet, some evenings, when you look in your sack,
Your hands forget themselves in the sack,
And the silence is deeper than what you forgot.
You find the key. You find the door.

Your hands grew big from touching palms.
The breath in the hand of your mother was woolen, soft,
You didn't need to touch the others.
Here, your hands have many mothers.
They learned the stone inside the work, the stone inside the patience.
They learned how to raise high, up to the uphill of pain.
Now, your hands are quiet.
They sit on your lap, small suns on the sea of your lap.
Now, when palms hold your palms
You feel how much a silence can hold,
And you touch on the palm a silent map of your life, of thousand palms,
And the map of the tomorrow.

ABC
They were big letters drawn on the spine of Makronyssos.
3 brigades: A B C
Makronyssos was blue:
The sea, the light that drew the birds, the salt in the sea, the blue rocks
That maddened the shadows. They were innocent, they didn't know what the letters meant.
Only time knew how to read.
ABC
Time read the dead.
Time read the barbed wires, the skull on the metal thorns of those who tried to think.
Time read the missing hands, the ones that didn't sign, that didn't confess.
In these blue rocks men were shot. The shadows were a curl of hair, a handful of feathers in the hand of a child.
In this place everything became red, like the blood from the slit throat of a child.
Suns drown in this blood.
This place was a big thief, the biggest:
The hands that were stolen, the blue that was stolen, the motions of living that were stolen, The motions of love.
ABC
You learn the alphabet of death, of thieves, of pain.
ABC
We need another alphabet,
The alphabet of an eye you see and it sees you,
The alphabet of a gesture impatient, beyond rage. inevitable as a breath. Alive.

Old Karas is ill.
The sun in his skin is ill, it burns his entrails.
His son by him:
His eyes: the soft grass after the rain.
His eyes: two lambs ,grazing the tears.
His eyes: shepherds of suns. Two brown sticks. Two hands full of water.
Old Karas is healing, and we are healing too, because healing is contagious.
Maybe, one day, we'll heal others, those with clouds in the shabby cloths,
And there is no umbrella of mercy.
Maybe they'll heal us. We are drenched. It rains into our life.

Our eyes: two black holes in the stone, like old volcanoes.
Our eyes: two stones baked in the sun. Suns may be pain.
There is something ancient burning in our eyes,
There is time in our eyes.
Time flows in the stone, it rolls down all its abysses.
One day, we'll climb on the uphill of time, on the uphill of our life,
And something deep will burn inside us.

They cut the hands of someone who wouldn't sign.
They cut the tongue of someone who wouldn't confess,
And they don't know that the person in our silence is free.
He signs his name. The name of a man means something, remembers something.
He confesses in the mother tongue of the people.
He uses words that have the same meaning for everybody:
Mother, pain, thirst.
The big thirst life is made of.

We don't know how much we resemble each other.
We use words that have the same weight for everyone: mother, pain.
We weigh the sun on the back of a man, on the back of the days,
The same weight, the same impossible weight. This place makes the impossible, possible.
We try the motions of our hand, it crumbles with the whole night inside it,
With the whole body of a woman in it. The tremble weighs our soul.
But, our eyes are different.
We look, alone in our eyes, even when we look together,
Even though we look at the same thing.
Some eyes are silent, some eyes speak, some eyes are closed, there are no eyes inside them.
And we know that our eyes should look together, like a series of compasses, they should see the same north.
And we know that if we don't have the same north,
We have nothing,
We'll freeze each in his own north, alone.

Summer
The light is hard on the stones.
The light opens the windows, it makes you visible.
You put your hand on your missing eye,
Maybe it will hide you.
But the shadows are hard too.
They touch your shape. They try you.
They touch your pain. They try you.
And you have no choice.
You put your blind hand on the only eye left.

Someone is dying. A peasant.
It's night. The moon in a puddle of the yard
He will have a grave,
But no one knows if there is a cemetery big enough, for the sun, for the wall where he was shot in his hands.
In his hand: the shepherd's stick, the only weapon he ever had.
In his hands: the last letter of his son: a handkerchief as heavy as all last things,
As heavy as truth. Truth is never light, even when it is a drop of rain drowning in the rain.

The men around you: boys.
Beneath the rage, beneath the absence,
They are beautiful.
Beneath their rage: lice of stars walk.
Beneath their rage: a sapling, grass glittering with dew.
They are only boys, but they know already they have a debt to life,
They know the debt is big ,
One has to struggle in order to pay it.
And they have a young stubbornness,
The stubbornness of a young stone, the stubbornness of water.
They are only boys, so, their debt to life, their stubbornness shape them:
Who they are what they are.
Maybe stubbornness is a river, it shapes the way to go, it finds the way to the sea.

Dawn.
The empty tin cans shine like false moons.
The shadows on the ground: the remnants of a nocturnal cry.
Everything is military brown:
The earth, your words.
Maybe beyond it's summer, but you cannot see it.
You cannot see the city: the workers, the hairy sleeves,
The women knitting life.
You cannot see the train, the 10th station in the journey to human.
But, it doesn't matter.
In your silence you are free. In your silence you walk in the same direction,
And you walk towards yourself, almost more, always deeper.

The wind shaves our shaved heads.
We are hundred men in Makronyssos, hundred layers of men.
Our back is the age of stone.
Our back is the age of pain.
Our back is the age of time.
And the mules are everywhere, out, inside us.
They are stubborn, they are innocent.
In their innocent eyes: innocent shade: a place to graze the hey, to graze the silence.
The mules are always more, and we are always more,
More silent. More stubborn.
When we climb the uphill of death,
Stubbornness is power.

There was no time. We didn't sing yet our song.
We left behind a voice.
The voice: a place to hang the sun.
The voice: a place to cut the deep rope over our throat.
But men come on immense metal insects,
The metal talons cut into two the sun, they cut our voice.
But the truth cannot be cut into halves.
Here, in makkronyssos,
The shadows are hard, they are stones,
And they are dust, like the dust our voice left behind.
Dust has no numbers.
There should be a staircase,
We would climb on the uphill of memory.
We would sing what was unsung, we would sing even the silence.

Everything is layer beneath layer.
The wind.
Beneath it, our life, the wind slices it, and the voice of the dead, the wind slices it too.
Beneath it: the thirst, the opaque thirst.
Beneath it, the tomorrow; a clear lake in your hands
You see your eyes in your hands: two small Saturdays in your eyes.
Everything is layer beneath layer.
The night.
Beneath it: your shoes, your wounded shoes. They hurt.
Beneath it: the dead bleed, but they go on.
Beneath it: the way they have still to walk.
The horizon is in the tomorrow, the untouchable in a touch.

Our elders from the liberation war, in Makronyssos.
From time to time you see them coming.
Elders, old men, wars grew old inside them.
They smell of earth, the sleep of the sleepless, of big metal hands, of silence,
Of the fruit in the trees by their smile.
At time, when they shake their metal hands, there are sparks,
As if the old war didn't end.
They come to Makronyssos: another place of time.
They brought their life, they brought their stubborn smell.
They keep in the metal hands power,
The power to be soft, the power to be silent, the power to be obstinate.
They remember. Memory is a poem they repeated again and again.
Death is careful. It walks far from their windows.

Here, it is the address of oblivion.
You forget the everyday life that was you,
You forget the woman that was home.
The silence that fell from the clock. It was a leaf of time, nothing more.
The cats, the stray cats, the acrobats of roofs, scratching the night, the immense circus.
Here, things arrange themselves, like earth, layer beneath layer.
Beneath the cold: the loneliness.
Beneath the loneliness: the fear.
Beneath the fear: the gaze of an empty eye, a war veteran.
Beneath the fear; death.
Even the cats are layer beneath layer:
Beneath the wilderness: the patience.
Beneath the patience: the silence.
Beneath the silence: life, life at any cost.
Cats are the acrobats of life in the terrible circus: Makronyssos.

Here,
The stones are sun baked,
Our lives are sun baked.
We are thirsty.
We are thirsty for the rain, the clearest rives, in our palms,
For the life drizzling over us, inside us,
For the well on the way home.
And the wall where they shoot people is thirsty,
It has blood in its calcifies veins, but it is not enough,
And then; the night in its arms, the dry dust of a man.
We dug so much, and we didn't realize
That our thirst is the root of human,
That it is the way home.

The desert followed us here.
The yellow dust of time, the dust of our body, the white dust of pain.
We carry stones, and we carry, like anybody else, time, and our living and our dying.
We struggle with the stones, with the dust of everything,
We struggle beyond rage,, beyond the shouts.
We are tired, we forget many things,
But the person in our head asks, he doesn't fear the mine field beneath the wide feet of a question. He asks beyond guilt beyond rage, why we are here.

You don't remember the shape of a tree, the shadows between the thighs of your summer, the summer between the thighs of a woman.
You don't remember the naked shape of water, as naked as the river beneath the tongue of a woman.
You don't know how to measure the suns. There is too much sun and too little sky.
You don't know how to measure the days. There are too many days in your day.
You don't remember the belly of a woman, the roots in her belly.
And you don't know
Who will guard what you forgot,
Who will guard the summer in the thighs of a woman,
Who will guard the belly of a woman,
Who will guard the drop of dawn, a single drop, in the belly.

MAKRONYSSOS, THE CONCENTRATION CAMP
1. We didn't have time for beauty,
And yet, beauty found us
In a color that drowned in the rain,
In the leaves of twilight that fell over us, inside us.
We found beauty because on the cross road of nothing, it was a [path,
A secret path to the world.
And beauty found us
In the big red hand of a man, the hands that became white sheet.
They were a tribunal, they testified, they condemned,
And their truth was water, not glass. It was clear, it was stubborn.
2. Always
The day, even the most unjust,
Gives you some justice, if you know what justice is.
It gives you the justice of feet that share the same baked stones.
In this place there is no earth. The earth is ancient. It is stone and fire.
It gives you the justice of thirst that you share.
In this place water is sweat, a sweating sun.
It gives you the justice of a silence. You are free in your silence, you are alonne in your silence,
It gives you the terrible justice of sharing the day, and in a corner of the hours: the wall.
The wall is for everybody,
And yet, we cannot share death.
Here we die together annd one by one.

3. ready
The days come and go, everything changes,
The stones climb on rocks, the dust is deeper,
Time rolls down all their abysses.
The trees are older, their cracks harsher: a calendar of centuries.
On the sea, the shadows tear the water, they leave each day old fish with a new death.
And you are different.
You wake up each morning, one night older, one night closer to the big cross road, the biggest. Life, death.
You have no choice, the cross road chooses for you.
The motions of your living, have the wisdom of daily life, even your rage is wiser.
And you are more silent,
When you love too much, a woman, the people, words are not enough,
And you don't have enough silence.


Dik
There was the dog Dik.
He was killed because he loved too much the prisoners.
He knew how to love, absolute, whole, the way only dogs know.
He belonged to no one, he had no leash. Leashed are slave traders.
He was ready to bite the big silence between our words and the shadow of the guard.
He was ready to bite the ankles of the wall, the mute barbed wire.
He died for us, the prisoners of war, the prisoners who didn't want to die,
Even though he didn't know it,
All he knew was how to love good people, he didn't know the good people were criminals,
That their crime was good.
He was a victim of love, and the victim of a life without a leash.
He has a grave inside us, inside us he continues to bark at all the barbed wires of the world.
Maybe he continues to love.

The sea.
The place where rivers lose their name,
But we are not rivers,
We don't lose our names, we own them.
And we wouldn't let the future to be lost, we own it the way we own our past.
We learn the alphabet of the dawn, the place where all the futures happen,
Like a leaf, like a rooster.
And the moon may seem torn, like a useless paper, like us,
And yet, it counts time, it raises the sea in the precise hour.
And we know that the sun never loses its way to the sky. It is near. It will come.

Alexis
You seemed quiet. Your sleep was quiet, your shoes, your shoes full of earth and time, were quiet. And the scratches on your legs, your huge legs, were quiet.
You were quiet like someone who knows what to do, like someone who does what he has to do.
You were quiet, and your love was quiet. Two saplings grew around your smile.
They condemned you to death.
All that was left was your quiet bed and the last cigarette. It was quiet.
The bullet was innocent, but the hand that shot was not. Some hands don't have tears.
They buried you, but your legs were too big, they remained above earth, like a flag. Flags are not silent.
We miss your quiet, we realize your quiet was love,
That your gaze walked up to the end of the corridor of pain,
That there was more dust in you than a storm.
We realize your quiet was power.
We realize that the past is full of future, so it is hope,
And you, old friend, your quiet was full of future, it walked towards you, always more.

***


AWAKENING

The war left in you a black hole. A dead well.
The bones, half buried, are stone. They are stubborn.
They till the earth, they were the way home.
They cut slices of pain, like an eternal knife.
Tomorrow, they'll cut the pain again.
And yet, there are big hours, hours as big as the eyes of a child,
The eyes bigger than his face, bigger than his life.
And the hours, the small, the big, bear us, each day more, each day deeper.

Everything is far and close.
The leaves of sun in the garden,,
The silent fruit in the belly of a woman.
The woman, the tree,
Everything the same life inside them.
There is only one life, here, on earth.
It is far and close,
It gives reality to the horizon, our giant.

Everything is far and close.
At night, you cut the belly of earth,
The belly that bears, that buries.
You look for the dead:
A familiar jaw, a poem, a picture, a watch at zero.
Then, you stitch the belly.
Tomorrow you'll cut it again.

Everything is far and close.
This man, somewhere near, gathers fruitts in the rain,
The fur on his shaved hair.
His body; a dry river.
In his hands: the first vendor of the first fruit.
The first market ever.

Everything is far and close.
The men who recognized death,
Returned different,
Maybe the way they walk, the way they are silent, in the gaze; something deaf.
No one recognizes them.
They are here and they are somewhere else, maybe the war didn't end everywhere,
Maybe it continues inside them, wars don't know how to grow tired.

Remember; the way home is endless,
You have to return, each day from the beginning.
You have to give life what it needs. Life is hard work.
And all this death will fall, persistent, precise,
Like rain, like thirst, like time,
Into your life.
There is no umbrella.

You can measure nothing.
You don't know how tall is the path, how tall is courage to travel from hour to hour, from day to day.
You don't know how heavy is a snow flake in the nostrils of earth, in your breath.
You think it will be difficult to become smaller,
You don't know how small can small be.
You don't know how big are the dead bodies, the dry bodies, the fragile branch in the arms.
You cannot measure the silence in your silence
You don't know how much time you need, to learn how to speak,
To learn a new language, words that don't begin in stone,
How long to learn how to listen.
Maybe, one day, you'll count new words, quiet, under a tree,
The exquisite fruit in your tongue.

Your hands look always more like soil.
Your hands look always more like iron, they till the earth out and inside you.
You count always more the size of the thirst,
You count always more the size of closeness, of a touch,
You count always more your mothers:
The hands, the iron, the earth, the thirst, the closeness.

The village: the roofs stitched by the sky. The eyes are torn like glass.
At night you look for the dead, you look for the feet of the dead by your door.
There is no more room for the dead. There is no more room for the silence.
The silence is a dead star.
You look for a way out: somewhere high, in the uphill of life.
Remember: wherever you are, the world sees you.
Wherever you are, the world is.
Remember: whatever you love, the life you loved enough to live for to die for,
Is the way home. Your Ithaca.

Here, in this place, the laws of nature and the laws of man entangle.
In this place, the sea doesn't diminish the salt in your eyes.
In this place, the silent well carries half the weight of your thirst.
In this place there are no names on the doors.
In this place, each door is the way home. Each person is the way home.
In this place, the shadows follow the people, like the past,
And you shouldn't forget that the shadows rain from the sun,
You shouldn't forget that the future rains from the past,
And there are no raincoats.

In this place the bodies are modest,
But you can guess the sea between their thighs.
And you should remember, love is an act of faith.
In this place, everything affirms, even the denial.
The old man sit in the old cafe.
The coffe is strong, too strong.
They sip what they cannot say.
In this place dawn comes like a writing on the wall, spelling of hot colors,
It comes like an immense graffiti,
And this dawn is for everybody.

You passed here with the vertigo of someone who is thirsty.
The army passed through the road,
And the road passed through the army,
They were one.
The hot bullets, they burned the stones of the road,
They burned the stones in the breath.
Your bullets were ancient, they were a power of life.
They brought life, like the first fire of the first man.
Like the first man, you gave your night stars,
And the stars gave you the world.
Like the first man, you painted your cave with horizons, white, warm horizons.

There are too many men under earth,
And there are too few living,
There are too few who know how to own their life.
But the dead made this earth their own,
And the ones who own their life, will also own the earth.
And the earth will own them.
And we don't know who will guard what we own,
Who will guard what owns us.


***

Epitafio ( mourning over the tomb)
Your fifteen years look at me.
We never parted.
We sang together the songs of tomorrow,
We dreamed together the dream of tomorrow,
And you gave me your eyes. Your eyes knew how to see.
My son, my beloved son,
You died, but the tomorrow didn't.
My son, the tomorrow will be your song,
The tomorrow will sing your song.
My son, the tomorrow will cry
For those who cried for it.

***

BIG THURSDAY OF EASTER
At night,
The ship docks inside their light, the trains wait inside their light,
They make the shadows more visible,
As if they were a tree walking towards the sun, a farmer of light,
And beneath the shadows, the leaves, farmers of coolness, farmers of dew,
As if their motions of living were a truce,
The shadows inside the light, the night inside the dew, inside the dawn.

You forgot how to see, you forgot your eyes,
And you don't realize that your eyes didn't forget you.
You don't know that when the eyes are in the right place, at the right height, in the ground floor of life, they see.
When you don't see the shadows are immense, they are fear,
When you don't see, the fear of the shadows is immense.
You don't realize that the world is a big farmer of shadows , light, and all the hues in between,
The farmer of truce.

You would like to have again
The innocence of the eyes,
To keep the world: a huge bird,
Nestling in your eye lashes.
You open your eyes and it flies, natural as magic, simple as magic.

You want to oppose the night
With your blood.
Somewhere deep you know
That your blood, your dark blood, in your dark veins,
When it bleeds, it bleeds light,
The deepest light you own.

There is no silence bigger than words,
Words are the photo of who we are, what we see, what we feel.
There is no word bigger than the silence.
We are free in our silence.
So, we have no choice.
We speak and we are silent at the same time.

We came out of our cave,
We began the journey to human:
One small step, bigger, much bigger than our life,
Foot prints in the forest of time,
One circular gaze , like the round eye of a child,
Facing the circle of the infinite.

The clocks throw on the floor, with each pulse,
The sad blood of time. A heartbeat that ended.
We walk on the floor, naturally, quiet.
At times we feel time in our steps, and we don't know who bleeds.

You sing, in order not to speak.
It is easier to say what you don't want to say
In a song.
It is the poet who is nostalgic, who is lonely.
It is his song.
You are invisible in your song, you are invisible in your nakedness.

A thin layer of what we touched: people, songs,
Remains in our touch.
I touch you in my touch: a choir of songs, it is exquisite.
In my touch :the song.
My touch: my song.

We belong to earth, the deep earth,
Like the root of a tree.
No matter what nets of light the sun uses,
The tree comes down to earth.

The paper boat of a child can go far, further than dream.
Their delicate bones: delicate wings
Fly in depth.
They may be a lost dream,
But they continue to fly in our depth.
We build homes: space enough to keep at least one lost dream.

The paper boat of a child can go far, further than dream.
These boats may be a dream,
But they carry us for years, for ages.
We may forget how to dream, we may forget the dream,
But it doesn't forget us. It remembers.


DISTANT ISLAND
You came here to forget.
You came from a planet of sand, from dry seas, from dry time, a time that forgives nothing,
From a planet where the night was held by nothing.
You came from the 4 seasons, you came to the 5th season.
Trying to be silent was useless, and trying to forget was useless,
Also the trying was useless. Everything was remembering, even the forgotten.
You realize that when you close your eyes, there are no birds, no sky,
But opening the eyes is pain.
The absence was everywhere: inside you, in what you hold, in what you feel.
You heard people speak, but they were not inside their words. They were absent.
You saw children, you saw Malaria in the small well of their eyes. They drowned in this eye.
You saw fevers in a tiny child, five fingers, inexplicable fire.
You saw the fish in their bloated bellies. Silent fish, unbearable silence,
It devoured their entrails.
Then, as if a sliver of moon fell, a big pebble, the silence broke.
Seeing was still pain,
But you began recognizing the shadow that kept the tree in the graveyard standing
You recognize the animals: the mules, the goats. They were tired, they were stubborn,
They were someone who continued to worked in the middle of the nothing.
You recognize the 4 seasons in the face of a leaf.
You recognize the sea, the absent sea, in your plate: the precious salt.
You realize that big things, the big suffering, cannot be forever,
And that the small ones will be more eternal. A tiny nail in the soul,
That maybe the small things are big, bigger than what you imagine.
You recognize, in the space of the impossible,
your voice, inside it your thirst, your truth,
The strange ensemble of life.
And you regret the forgetting, like an apology to life,
And you don't realize that the 5th season, from the first moment of the first hour, was the way home, it was your 40 years in the desert, your 40 years to the Jordan in your back yard.

***


A LETTER TO ZOLIOT CURIE

Zoliot,
It is not that we are silent, we simply forgot how to speak.
Death speaks for us, it writes poems on our lap, the last poem.
It is not that we are silent, but all this death seeped in our voice, liquid mercury in our voice.
Zoliot
We dug the night the roads,
We dug coal of shadows, of absence.
We were black, like the first Homo Sapiens,
But we are too tired to feel human, too tired to know.
Zoliot,
We are too tired to see.
We are in the sun, and we don't know the shape of light.
We are by the sea, and we don't know the shape of water.
We are in the sea, and there is no shore.
Zoliot,
We forgot too much.
How the twilight, the immense twilight,
The shadows weave themselves in the light,
How to feel the truce.
How can the breeze bow in a branch, tender,
How can the shadow of your mother on the wall shine, quiet.
It is not that we forgot, we only don't know anymore how to remember.
We remember only what we could never forget: our dead.
Zoliot,
Among the voices of the dying,
Among the voices of rusted moons,
Among the slit throats bleeding a whole eternity,
It is not easy to hear the quiet, of a drizzle walking on the sand,
Of light walking on a window.
It is not easy to believe that quiet exists.

Here, we've learned big things.
The justice begins in bread, the last slice on the plate.
Big things may seem small, but it doesn't make them small.
Hunger is never small.

We forgot how to read the world,
Someone, maybe you, will have to teach us again. The alphabet of mothers, there are so many mothers, the memories, the tongue the memories speak, the soil where the memories walk. The alphabet of small day, to know it is never really small. Here we learn the alphabet of pain, the alphabet of a bullet.
The day: a slice of light in our pouch. The sea walks towards our shoes,
A bunch of simple people, people simple like salt and water, and maybe, nothing is really simple.
They carry us from island to island, from pain to pain, and we carry in our pockets
A picture of a life that doesn't exist, of a home that doesn't exist.
Maybe the pictures know they are dreaming.
And we carry in our mouth, like everybody else, a breath, the single breath diving, uniting, life and death.
Zoliot,
Some left their hands in an island, they didn't sign,
Some left their eyes, they can no longer see the way home,
Some left their ears, they cannot hears the silence anymore.
They were island of stone, but the stones were metal.
There were bullets in the voices ahead, bullets in the voices behind us,
There were bullets in our pain,
The world was like a siege, it had blind walls, blind holes: they were fear:
The blind holes in the eyes of a guard. The bullet were a nocturnal animal, they saw.
Zoliot,
The nights were too short, too short for the truth of the body, too short to recognize your truth.
The nights were too long, too long for the dead moon inside us, too long for the fear,
And the silence was too much and too little,
Too little to hear what couldn't be said.
Too much , when it was the only voice left.
Zoliot,
It is our mother lad that hunts us, the beautiful mother,
Her hands made of earth, like a root.
We believed that the people are the only mother land,
We believed that the people were the only mother tongue,
We loved our beliefs.
Zoliot,
Our mothers are always more alone at the table with the empty chair,
With a chair that knew the shape of our thighs,
With the empty shadow on the chair, the big absence.
The roof of rain, rains loneliness.
Zoliot,
Here, no one dies easily.
We are the image of the world, what we remember, our motions of living.
When we die, one of the images of the world dies.
We cannot afford it.
Zoliot,
Our window is high in the wall, the wall of death,
And yet, some nights, a sliver of the moon hangs from the window,
And we feel the whole beauty. And it is only a sliver.
Zoliot,
Our life is a burned city, open , no roof.
It rains pain over us,
It rains beauty: a forest, leaves of a cloud,
It rains the whole world.
Zoliot,
There is too little earth, and too many graves.
Maybe these graves will be root, a forest.
We are still fruit gatherers: we are still the sad fruit.
Time becomes always deeper, we roll like a stone in its abyss.
Our poems bleed in all the abysses that exist, they bleed the broken bones.
They are nor pretty,
Zoliot,
We invent our songs, like a god, in our image.
Our songs are a broken mirror, opaque,
And we wanted our voice to be water, not glass.
Zoliot,
There are bars around us, there are bars in our eyes.
At times, a seasons falls, a leaf, among the bars.
But, we don't have bars inside us,
Yet, some nights we don't find the key to ourselves.
We don't have time to collect the star dust, the seed of man,
To grow the drop of dawn that rained some yesterday.
Life waits for no one.
Zoliot,
At night, the sky becomes a child, it recognizes us,
And we begin again recognizing who we are.
Beyond rage, beyond hate, beyond bars,
We are human.
We made the long journey, and here, at the 12th station of the night,
We realize we know how to love.
We realize that the person in our head has no bars. He is free. His love is not a slave,
He loves, the way a free man loves, bound and free at the same time, like a white summer cloud, like the flight of a bird.
Zoliot,
One day, the world will be enough.
One day, the dawn will be enough,
And it will be for everybody.
Zoliot,
Many have wrote this letter,
Also those who grew suddenly old, before they had the time to learn how to write.
Yet, they knew the alphabet of bars, the alphabet of pain.
They knew the alphabet of love in capital letters.

***









THE EXILE DIARIES
DIARY 1, 2,3,

21.11.48

The boys grow,
They put their hands in the pocket,
Each hand alone.
They meet the loneliness of a boy,
They realize the loneliness of an adult,
Their mothers give shape to the loneliness of the old.
They are not silent,
They simply forgot how to speak.
The traffic light on their way home is red.
They don't know how many departures does an arrival contain.

***

Another Sunday.
You are tired when the week begins,
You are tired when the week ends.
Maybe you should remember that the weeks are not the dimension of a line.
They are a circle. They whirl, they dance a circular dance.
You can add your dance to their dance.
When you dance with others, like homes living, feeling, shoulder to shoulder,
The dance is more, much more than a dance.
It widens time, it widens the joy.
It is an act of faith.
You trust the hands you touch, you trust what you feel.


DIARY 1
21.11.48
Sunday with my uncle.
I understood I know little.
I've never learned how to draw a straight path,
The way home,
How to live, each day up to the end of the day, how to know each day is a separation.
How to laugh with all the laughter in my belly.
How to say so much in the so little, when I love
How to read time
From the small, patient, stubborn motions of nature:
A turtle, a mule.
How to ride them for the rest of my life.

***
21.11.48
I don't know why names exist
When the night, the sea, the lamp, the mirror
Dissolve into each other.
When the mouth, the factory of taste
Closes inside it hundred hungers in one single hunger.
I don't like names that wear dark glasses,
That I cannot see what they see.

***

Maybe the sun will understand the earth.
Maybe the earth will understand the tree.
Maybe the tree will understand the thick, oily shade.
Maybe the shade will understand
How to cover all the things that bruise my existence
In one great moment of not seeing, of not mindin

***
22.11.48
The strange November.
The light is black, sun burned,
At times it weighs like coal, coal, at time, like ash.
My eyes are closed outside, open inside.
I don't see the light,
It is as if the night continued, even though in nature nothing continues, not even contiinuity.
As if the huge moth continued to bite the corners of the hours,
The lines of what I remember, the big holes in what remains of the day,
The big holes in the moth balls. The last battle with the moths of time
Is lost.

***

23.11.48
There is a dog in the yyard of the prison.
It know nothing about the tomorrow,
It know everything about the 'now'.
We feed him.
We don't expect thanks, and other explanations of what one feels.
And yet, it wags its tail , dusty, warm, happy in a language I almost undertand
And I don't know if I could love like that.

***


14.11.48
Suddenly,
The memory of a bird in our memory.
We know the orbit, we know where we should go.
The orbit is an immense cage.
Suddenly, in our memory
The pain of cut wings, The heap of feathers in our hand
Is useless.

***

12.11.48

The words that match me, don't suit me.
The silences that match me, don't suit me.
The hours: a stray dog.
I try to deny the fence inside me, out side,
But it iis not enough.
In the window: a shadow broken into squares,
A face broken into squares,
Nothing more.
The stray dog is broken into hours, but it doesn't care.

***

13.11.48
You work until the last muscle,
You work more, much more than the last muscle.
Everything is simple arithmetic's:
Each motion adds gravity to gravity,
Each motion subs tracts hands from your hands.
There are no hands left to carry your life,
No fingers to count your sadness.
***
13.11.48
It's a long time you didn't see something tender:
The table in the kitchen, the family.
The table cloth like a soft hand.
The window: the colors change slowly, time enough to see, to love,
To know what time it is in your life.
To know time may be gentle.

***

13.11.48

I hang pictures on the wall.
Photos, a bunch of faces, illegal, smugglers of time, smugglers of dreams.
And the photographer: my face out of the wall,
Sentenced to loneliness.
The only photo is on the walls of the convicted, which is another sentence.

***
16.11.48
We forget. We learned how to forget.
We left the suffering in a dumpster.
Maybe, some scavenger will find it,
But selling it will be hard work.
Somewhere far,
People suffer, they remember,
But we sit at the table, we are quiet.
The scavenger didn't come.
Everything is well.

***
24.11.48

Today, everything is soft, everything is stone.
The sun, the trees, the shade, time.
Everything is the way it should be.
Words, forgotten, remember they were said,
Moments, forgotten, happen again.
And yet, the forgetting is not silent, perhaps it remembers.
The motions, small, patient ,inevitable,
Wait for something they don't know.
Waiting is hard work.
They are silent, like everything else.
We don't trust the faces, so we say nothing.

***

25.11.48
The family is far.
Even the word ''love' is censured.
Anyway, words die in time, in the cold.
The cold, time, are the biggest censures.

***

26.11.48
The winter is harsh,
It freezes everything: the words, the silences,
The shadows freeze on the walls.
And the separations are everywhere:
The motion of a hand, it leaves the arm, it goes nowhere.
The bed with a broken limb. They freeze, each one alone.
The lamp lengthens the shadows, their hands, the long fingers fall from the shadows, as if belonging didn't exist
You close your eyes in order to see.

***
27.11.48
A new order on the fence: frugality.
The sun rusts the tin cans,
The dreams chew our eyes.
We smoke,
We pretend that everything is as it should be,
And we sleep, as if everything is as it should be.
We sleep with our eyes closed out, open in.
We discover the night with our fingers.
We discover our manhood, alive, a stone, with our fingers.
The semen, mother of stone, mother of time.

***

27.11,48

Everything is a number,
Even a deck of cards.
The king, the queen: the law of big numbers.
We play with number sendlessly,
Maybe one day we'll win.
After all, winning is just another equation.
You divide the big numbers into small ones,
You hold them in your hand, they are paper,
Glittering paper, nothing more.

***

29.11.48

Everything is censured, even your name,
You are nameless.
You try to think all the thinkable
But then, there is the unthinkable, you're lost..
The door handle used to be a hand:
The scarred skin, the five fingers of warmth,
But now, it is a frozen glove, it lost its touch, the priceless touch of a human.
You cannot put a price tag on the priceless.
We said: there is time , the chain of production, it will produce what life needs,
But we didn't know what time it was in truth.

***
30.11.48
When the snow melts,
Maybe our silence will melt,
Maybe we'll recognize our voice.

***

1.12.49
You forget how to see,
To see, simple as a breath,
To see the images of the air in the air,
To see the wind, to draw its smell.
To know like an animal in pain, how to hurt,
How to rip the pain when it rips you.
To measure the dimensions of the barbed wires in your world.
But, time is not enough.
You have to carry out the dead, and the garbage: rusted bones in tin cans,
Poems, the silence.

***

2.12.48
You forget how to see, to see, simple as a breath.
To see the images of the air in the air, to see the wind.
To know, like an animal in pain, how to rip it when it rips you.
To measure the dimensions of the barbed wires in your world.
But, time is never enough.
You have to carry out the dead, and the garbage:
Rusted bones in a tin can, poems, the silence.

***

2.12.48
You can fit nowhere.
There is not a hole big enough for your silence,
Not even a hole in the air.
There is not a hole big enough to listen, to hear.

***

3.12.48
Time flows everywhere.
Everything gets rusted:
A fish in a tin can.
The words gget too heavy, you cannot speak.
But the silence has gravity too, it is not a solution,
And the waiting is the closest thing to eternity you know.
The waiting is everywhere: for the food, for the open air of the world, for yourself.
But, it doesn't make you eternal.
Slowly you learn how to die waiting.

***

4.12.48
The way to sleep
Is full of lost hours, lost maps.
The way is full is full of the rotten bones on a newspaper of yesterday.
You need a childhood lullaby
To bring you to your bed, to bring the sleep to you,
An empty sleep that remembers nothing.

***

5.12.48

The boy in the yard.
He is sleepy.
Pieces of dream melt in his mouth, mingled with an old tune.
Young boy,
I'll take away what words took from you,
I'll leave the old tune. No word can loot it.

***

6.12.48
When the signal was given,
You were not here, You were somewhere else,
And anyway, you didn't have the power to refuse.
In the biggest circus of the world; life,
You are an acrobat, you walk on the tight rope
Between the fear and fear, between fear and the refusal.
There is no net of safety.

7.12.48
Everything is a number, even life, god.
You live and you add time to your time,
And you subs-tract something, maybe the lullaby of a child.
Suddenly you have the courage to cry.

***

7.12.48
Everything is a number, a lottery number.
Here in prison you got a number that has lost, again and again.
You count and recount the numbers,
You are careful, you don't want to miss something, something priceless,
A winning card:

The first light you remember, as close as an eye,
A poem, as close as a breath.
There is no price tag on thhe priceless,
There are not enough numbers to count it.

***

9.12.48

I keep the dust of your hand,
Your hand light as dust, deep as dust.
We were on the train, two faces, real as love,
And yet, I was on the tracks, I saw you on the train.
The tracks are a line of time,
They bring us far, they bring us close.

***

9.12.48
Dawn..
The sense of forgetfulness is a shadow on the wall.
I am here, and I am not, as if I was air, ubiquitous.
Time flows in its rhythm, its not my own.
So, I don't remember things, because I am not in time to see.
And separations are everywhere:
The window closed. I remain in.
Only my shadow, smuggler of borders, is out.
Shadows are important, they make the loneliness less,
They let you continue alone.

***

10.12.48
We don't realize
The mine field beneath the wide feet of a question.
We ask, and we don't know what hit us.
We go on, without an answer, without a leg.

***

11.12..48
The floor is clean,
Yet, at early dawn, they put out the lamp,
They bring back the night:
They bring back the nameless tiles the night is made of,
The mosaic of dreams that didn't dream,
Of the forgetting that doesn't forget.
Slowly, carefully, we step on the floor,
Slowly, it steps on us.

***


14.12.48
The days follow each other,
Nothing begins, nothing ends,
After all, days are the substance of time.
The voices are dressed, their shoes shine,
They don't realize that the times are hard,
That whatever you say is suspicious
No matter what the words wear, no matter how shining are their shoes,
They don't realize how suspicious is the silence.
There is nowhere to hide. You are guilty.

***

14.12.48
There is a line
Where the road in no longer a road.
It is a dust path.
It is strange to think
How much dust our steps, our motions, our words, our silences, our gazes,
Shed.
It is strange to walk in your own dust, slowly, carefully, towards the last dust.

***

15.12.48
There are days that are a road with an end,
And yet, we go on walking.
The ones who are too weak to walk, arre too weak to live. They die.
The walking is hard, the wind is a wild bull.
Our shadows fall down, they make the road on all four.
We walk on our shadows,
The shadows contain so much of ourselves,
We don't walk anymore, we run to catch them,
To catch ourselves. Loosing ourselves has, like everything else, a price.
. We cannot afford it.

***

19.12.48
It was cold,
But the works in the ward continue.
Someone combs his hair,
He doesn't know that combs are not simple,
That they have too many teeth to trust,
That they try to discipline our face,
To organize, tooth by tooth , root by root, who we are

***

20.12.48
The wind.
The lightness of everything is blown.
There is no lightness left.
If someone laughs, it is because of denial.
The laughter possesses something:
The stubbornness in our motions of living, of loving, in the motions of joy.
Stubbornness is a mule. We should ride it for years. For a life time.

21.12.48
Mirrors are a mystery.
We don't know what the glass face remembers,
What the face behind the face remembers.
They are alone, with all their memories
So, from time to time, they tell you something they remember.
You have to be patient, to wait. To be on time.

***
22.12.48
We go to urinate at night.
The moon; the color of urine, a yellow water color.
We never realized that the same genes of life are in everything,
Even a drop of urine, or the semen of stars.
We never knew that we urinate moons, that the semen of stars, mother of light, drips in our groin
23.12.48
The knives beneath the wrinkles,
They multiply, the cut you deep,
Like denial, like the eyes that don't see you.
Some wrinkles are innocent,
No knives in their flesh.
They soften by the years,
Like hand softened by a touch,
Like a drop of dawn, a single drop,
Mother of time, mother of light.

***


24.12.48

There is no sky,
Only the flight of a bird, migrating to the sun,
Smuggler of borders, smuggler of dreams.
You look at them, until you feel sad.
You borders are a line on a map, they are a wall.
Your eyes can make two holes in the wall.
You can smuggle only the sadness, a gaze. Nothing more.

***

25.12.48
The window is barred.
It brings the world in with bars in its eyes,
As if it was a prison,
As if the world was a prison,
And you don't know if the big prophets
Had such a window in their words.
Innocence dies in a bar, the iron grave.

***

25.12.48
The ceiling, thhe floor, two dimensions.
I count them. Two numbers, two fingers.
Everything is a number, even god,
But I cannot find the right number,
Or maybe there are not enough numbers to count him.
Maybe there is no number,
So god doesn't exist.

***

2.1.49
We can walk. Like the strangers,
Like those exiled from places where the world died,
Only on part of the street.
It is strange,
We are visible,
And yet, we are the big invisible of the worldd.
Also the sky doesn't see us.
Anyway, the sky is empty

***
5.1.49
The deserted night. It lies on the ground, like someone whose existence is bruised.
The lit lamps. They magnify the shadows. They are useless.
No one is left.
And yet, we remember only the memories that forgive us.
Maybe the shadows, the shadows we tried to exile, the shadows we never understood, forgive.

***
6.1.49
Stars have many rows in their numbers.
There are not enough numbers to count
The series of stars, to count the big void.
Here in prison, the stars empty our eyes, they count the biggest void, ours.

***
8.1.49
He said;
I left everything unfinished.
The best things are the unfinished ones,
They have where to go.
I walk with my unfinished leg, it was cut,
I walk towards you always more, always deeper,
Always unfinished.
I have to pay my debt to life, my unfinished leg, my unfinished struggle
My unfinished love.

***
10.1.49
You have to tie your hands.
You don't realize when you untie them.
There is no date for the beginning of freedom.

***
12.1.49
Slowly you learn
To ask the mirror too much,
Because you can break the mirror,
And it can break you.

***

***
13.1.49
The window
As if it puts the whole sky on your back.
It rains,
And there is no square glass of square mercy.
You have no choice, you accept. You have no choice, you don't think.

***
15.1.49
Everything is an equation.
You double the yellow of a bee, you prolong the nectar.
You add truce to truce, you create houses, shoulder to shoulder.
You use a line, you move things,
And suddenly all these things
Are an orbit. They move you from day to day.
You cannot fight such an orbit.

***
18.1.49
The room is prison.
It is the only home left.
You know it, it know you, wall by wall, the bars in a corner of silence.
The poems: beyond the fence. Smugglers of borders. Smugglers of dreams.

***

20.1.49
He speaks. Simple words.
But you know that nothing is really simple
Not even simplicity.
And you understand, because you are, like everything else, like words,
A seed of something.
Nothing is simple about seeds

***

21.1.49
Tonight you are calm, you search for nothing.
It is not that you found your deepest self,
But you let things, big, small, patient, restless, inevitable, barefoot, with shoes,
Come to you.
You hum a song, a song that came from very far,
From the place where songs shape our life.
The song found you.

***
22.1.49
You lean your head,
Your elbows hold you.
It is the elbows that let you lean
Without falling, face down, without surrender.
They let your sadness lean.
Sadness is the victory of a human.
It is strange,
There is no poem about the elbows.

23.1.49
The mirror was covered for too long.
They covered it with each death.
Now, it sees you.
It sees the tongue that was cut.
Tongues are dangerous. They speak.
It sees your mute shout, the terrible shout of a human.
It celebrates the victory that defeated you.
The defeat that was defeated in your shout.

***
24.1.49
We lean too many things on the tiles of a memory,
And we don't ask if it can resist,
If it would fall, with all the gravies in it.
We'll have no choice, we'll gather the pieces of remembering, of forgetting,
The only floor available.

***
25.1.49
The old man gazed at the storm of time.
His gaze was peaceful, a deep well.
Old men agree with the world,
They had no other choice.
But you, young, a battlefield of everything,
You don't agree even with yourself.
You lose, even when you win.

26.1.49
We compare the clouds
To various animals,
But the clouds are simply themselves.
In the hour of truth, the rain,
It rains clouds, no wings, no hoofs.

***


30.1.49
The night can wash away nothing,
Because everything has a smell,
Because the first man inside us, in our dark cave,
Feels, discerns.
The smell of rage, the smell of what wasn't said,, yet should have been said,
The sweat of fear.
The caves were, like everything else,
A teacher and a pupil.

***

31.1.49
You cover your face, the shawl over your mouth is thick.
Maybe you were speaking to yourself,
But, it is not easy to speak to yourself
When no one listens.

***

31.1.49

The night: a lover.
The moon in the water, and the black holes in the moon, in its motion,
Like any other love.
You drink the moon, you drink the black holes in the moon.
The holes inebriate you.

DIARIES 3

18.1.50

The war.
The corpses are too many,
There are not enough numbers to count..
We have no choice.
We teach the person in our head how not to count,
We teach our eyes how not to see.
We draw the theatre curtain over everything.
The show ended.

***
27.1.50
He said:
You can draw on the prisoner's body anything;
A bird, smugglers of cloud,
A wave, smuggler of the sea,
But the true smuggler is the person in your head:
His pulse beats with the pulse of thee most distant star,
Smuggler of borders, smuggler of dreams.

***
3.2.50
The dead are many.
Our fear is strong, and our rage, stronger.
And yet, we are not strong enough to cross the night.
No one can cross his night and remain the same.

***
3.2.50
In the biggest arena of the world: life,
The naked gladiators, the oily muscles,
The fear of death,
The rage of having to die.
The fear of freedom,
The rage for freedom.
Even in the ancient arena,
Relativity is everything.
At times, you are stronger than something. At times, something is stronger than you,
And yet, you die for the last time, absolute. There is no time left in your time.

***
7.2.50
The shadows are the barred wires.
Behind them, you are a river that loses his name in the sea,
Behind them, everything is still, even time. A statue.
The statues are awake,
But they don't know it.
They don't know that stones come from very far, they remember,
That stones know what fury is.

***
15.2.50
The barbed wire penetrates us. It bleeds.
Whenever we tried to crawl over it, beneath it:
The sharp metal in our silence.
Maybe we came to this world to build and to escape what we built
The walls of fear.
Or to plunge our hand, tumultuous, vibrating, into our secret body,
The pulse of blood and metal,
To find the ancient wound, the semen of stone and fear.

***
19.2.50
The sun is frosty, it chills us.
The conversations freeze in our mouth.
We remain out of our voice.
Anyway, words are good graves.

***
21..2.50
The people who understand a lot,
Their words are simple,
Maybe because they are so close to the truth.
They have a key
To their silence, they visit their silence.
In the evening, their sleep is calm,
It is not the sleep of a child,
It is the sleep of a man who knows.
Storm wait for such people

***
23.2.50
The moon, swollen,
Like a belly full of love.
We feel it will be a child of light, the marriage with light.
On the ground: pieces of bodies touch each other,
The terrible marriage.

***
24.2.50
On the ground:
Dead pieces of dead bodies,
Living pieces of living bodies,
A cut arm, a cut leg.
We are no sure what is whose,
And we don't know how to shape the pieces of our bodies,
We cannot bear ourselves again.
We have consumed all the beginnings available.

***
3.3.50
Night.
Lying on the ground,
The exiled and their sacks.
They have to be careful.
Here, everything is suspicious.
Even a tiny torch can see
the dark, the dark inside the dark.
It is should be shot.

***
24.4.50

Your crime is
That you love life, that you don't want to die.
Hunger is a crime too, a threat.
They hang people what much less than that.
Your shadow on the ground; a fallen leaf.
You believe in nothing except the world.
The sky is empty except the clouds,
The omens :a big void in our eyes.
You: a small man, alone in the arena,
You killed the gods.
You are guilty.

***
25.4.50
We sit on the rocks, until they take our shape,
As if each one had his own river, the magic of water.
Fear is not blind, and yet, it cannot find the door to escape from itself.
Your fear :a drop, a single drop of dawn, mother of shadows, mother of light.
You forget only what you could never remember, and yet, you forget nothing.
Your fear remembers.

***
1.5.50
Someone steps on a branch of the evening, a forest.
How easy you step on something.
How easy you go on living and stepping,
As if you were a stranger in the world,
As if the world was stranger in you.
You don't know that the world will haunt you, outside, inside.
Your crime: you were a stranger in life,
In the biggest tribunal of the world: nature,
You are pronounced: guilty.

***
3.5.50
The sun
Undresses the people from their coats, the boots.
In the armpits: a marsh of sweat, mosquitoes of heat that drink from the glass of your veins.
You are quiet.
You try to die less,
To grow old invisible, patient, silent.

***
4.5.50
The star rain over earth light, heat power, beauty.
They are exquisite.
The lamp post magnifies the shadows.
They step on the ground slowly, carefully,
They stretch down in and out of the fence.
Shadows fear nothing, they are the smugglers of fences, of walls, of rocks,
And yet, we fear them.
Maybe we fear this immense hunger to be free.

***
5.5.50
Some people owe you,
But maybe you are too shy, or too afraid to take what's yours.
So, you owe them.
Someone has to pay the debt to life.
You have paper: money,
But life is not a bank, it is a factory of reality,
You have to give something real, something alive as a breath.

The list of what you owe is endless.
Each moment you were here, locked you , but you were free in your silence.
Each day of missing sun,
You forgot how to see, but you found your deepest eyes, the eyes that see the dark inside the dark.

You owe them more than what you imagine,
And you don't know how will you pay the debt

***
6.5.50
The hospital is another kind of jail.
A siege of barbed wires,
The barred window; a siege of suns.
We speak.
Words grow old even before they left our mouth.
Someone says: we won
He said: the desperate is the winner.
We don't have any desperate left. Only the void.
We don't know how the void can win.
He doesn't know that wars defeat you, no matter what you won.
He doesn't know that we barter hope, and the void.
And the void, it hurts less.

***
7.5.50
The light is black, sun burned.
It paints the stones, the faces.
We stand,
A herd obedient, patient.
Around us
Voices, barks, dogs,
There are teeth in the voice.
They discipline our death.

***
8.5.50
We sit on the sand.
The barbed wire: a halo,
It doesn't make us saint, but it makes us invisible, it makes us alone.
And it enters the eyes people. No one can see you with a fence in his eyes.
There is no place left to meet the invisibles.


***

9.5.50
We sit on the shore,
The soldiers around us, they don't notice us,
We don't exist.
The twilight is a giant.
The twilight is, like everything else, layer beneath layer.
The shadows beneath a shadow: dark, unknown.
The delicate cloud of sand around our face makes us deaf, blind,
Ready for nothing.

***
10.5.50
The shack, unfamiliar.
Both side of the door are silent in a language we don't know.
A small man gazes, with bars in his eyes,
At the road of people,
If you are hit, if you fall, if you bleed.
This gaze is the only safety net available.

***
11.5.50
The building, the big noise of stone, somewhere far,
The noise is dust.
Old men sit in the cafe.
Their lips move, as if they were drowning in glass.
So many voices,
And yet, everything is silent .
The new papers were old, even before they were written.
And the money: yellow paper, even before it was used.
And everywhere, the repetition of motions,
Change after change, patient, inevitable.
They make us different, even the sameness is not the same.same.

***
13.5.50
Here, the day lasts for very long, and suddenly, it stops,
As if time paused, as if they were waiting for something,
Maybe for the future.
No one is ready for such long days.
No one is ready for his future..
We try to save ourselves. We sleep,
But time turns also in a stopped clock: our old dream.
No one has lived his in
old dream, no one is certain if he is ready.

***
14.5.50
We got used to be invisible, non existent.
We got used to have no address, no letter can fins us.
The days are beautiful, pure glass,
We got used to walk, our shoes consumed, almost transparent,
On the mosaic of broken glass,
We got used to bleed.
But we didn't get used to the armless statue,
There were many faces in his face, there was sadness in his missing arms.
We didn't know whether he would point, if he could,
At us.
There is no tribunal to condemn statues, to condemn the hand that killed
With one motion of pointing.

***

15.5.50
The guard behind the fence, behind his rifle.
He sits with his back to the sun,
He doesn't see it.
Rifles have a big shadow, bigger than themselves,
They kill, the death bigger than themselves.
But the shadows blind them.
They don't know what time it is in their life, what autumn of shadows,
They don't know what time it is in our life, what time it is in the sun,
What time it is in our hope.

***
16.5.50
The exiled in their tent eat supper.
Everything is as it should be.
The soup, the fat panting in the soup, shipwrecked in the soup.
Even the fish drown in the sea,
And us, on the sand, feeding the soup, spoon by spoon, our hunger.
Everything is as it should be.

***
17.5.50
The hospital boat.
The shadows in the water are exquisite.
The morning was glass, fragile,
Like the face of a young exile.
The broken glass in his eyes is cureless.
They abandon us in our wounds,
We plunge our hand tumultuous, vibrating,
Into our secret body.
We'll find the deep wound: the bars,
One day, the iron pulsating in our veins, will kill the bars,
The biggest cure available .
Evening.
The moon immobile, the trees immobile, we are immobile,
As if everything expected something. Something unknown.
At night, the shadows cut the woods,
They made walls without ceiling.
They gave us the sky.
The sky waited for us.

***
19.5.50
The times seem milder,
And yet, the mad ones multiply.
They add their scream to the waves, to the broken raft, to time,
To the eyes: the eyes at the edge of the city, the distant cry,
To the storms; they dance half naked.
No one is ready for the scream of the crazy,
No one is ready for the mad man, the courage to cry like a child, inside him.

***
22.5.50
Time arrives like a stranger.
The borders it smuggles, the dreams it smuggles,
Are in his sack.
The passport; the proof that it exists,
No one was eternal enough to issue it.
Time arrived like a stranger,
But we have to meet it, to know where it goes,
To know what time it is in our life.

***
24.5.50
You have to die,
In order to have your poems read.
You have to be ready to die
When you write simple words,
So simple, like something close to the truth.
And now , that the times are milder,
And the 'we' is not a sentence to death,
You still don't dare saying it. It doesn't fit in your voice.

***
27.5.50
Here
When the sadness was exhausted,
You are lost.
The sadness was a company, the path to human.
Your eyes cannot see themselves, but there are mirrors:
The gaze of someone, a broken glass, an old jug of water.
No one is ready for his mirror.
And the tiny motions, trembling, stubborn, the motions that go nowhere,
Are a mirror of sadness, they see you.

***
28.5.50
You have to drown in order to see how fish open a hole in the water,
To protect the first word ever said, the ancient word,
The beginning of everything.
After all, we came from the water,
Maybe even god was a fish.

***
29.5.50
We study the forgiveness.
It wasn't the bullet at a wall,
Because you have to forgive also yourself.
There is no arithmetic of the soul, adding, subs-tract the eternities of what you are,
And the earth over your naked body, is layer beneath layer of memory,
It forgives, like memories, when it is too late.

***
30.5.50
There are days
When the soldiers, their monotony glued to their beard.
It doesn't come off easily.
They have learned how to live without memories,
But they don't know how to forget.
In the evening, they bring us a jug, and the moon in the water.
There are days that are so simple, so inexplicable, like a breath.

***
31.5.50
Someone writes to you.
She tells you how you can see the beauty, the truth of the world, in a garden.
She doesn't know
That here we put a pane of glass,
In order to hear the world, the truth.
Maybe truth is just a motion of the lips.

Someone write to you.
She tells you how you can see the beauty , the truth of the world, in a garden.
She doesn't know the only garden we have, is a garden of stone,
And the bones of men beneath them.
We don't know how to read the truths of stones, the pyramids inside each stone.
We don't know how to read the truth of death. The blind semen.
And beauty is a deep cave in our eyes.

***
1.6.50
Morning.
The white washed sun, the white washed eyes..
Twilight
The shadows mingle with light. The missing legs, the missing hands
Find each other piece by piece. A truce.
Night.
The dead ones gather
They write poems on their shrouds,
Poems like illegal moons,
They enlarge time, they let it go a little further, a little further.
Today, everything is as it should be.

***



GESTURES

In the prehistoric theatre,
The world, ancient, young.
I am a builder of stages, I am a poet-
Builder of worlds.
My hands: the mud of earth, the mud of phrases, waves.
The only flag that means something,
My hand, a holy road sign,
So far from Jerusalem, so far from the Gangue.
My hand, a beehive in the coral of everything, a rose of time,
People will come, like a crowd of bees,
For the nectar, the nectar of a song, the rose of time.

***

We let the days grow, like pauses of sun.
Who let the sky close with electrical wires, secret segments.
I hold in his hand, the electrical hand,
The roads, the bullets, the semen of twilight, the hedgehog in his fear,
And yet I am prisoner: of laws, of rules of square windows, of the geometry of walls,
And I am prisoner of earth, the harsh mother, the chains of mud.
I am a prisoner, and yet, I carry life in my ancient sack,
And I plunge my hand, tumultuous, tender, into my secret body
I look for the ancient wound, the wound that knows who I am,
A wound like a rusted key, turning, turning.

***

My eyes closed.
Money is paper. Money closes them.
Who wants to learn how to live.
I am closed in what I became,
In a dizzy sound that blinds me.
I am blind, deaf, ready for nothing.
The rotting rise, like a macabre forest,
Towards the sky.
Time flows in everything, also in a prison:
Change may be pain, it may be a promise,
The herd of men may become a human crowd.
The person in their head, will walk barefoot,
His wide feet, like the feet of a question, unstoppable, inevitable,
Towards what human means, always more, always deeper.

***

You are afraid of words,
Bursting inside you like a coral , the secret rose of time.
You have no choice,
The motions of living place the coral rose,
Gently, very gently, in your body.
And you don't realize that you began doing it from the first moment of the first hour.
And your motions, the inexplicable motions of a child,
Putting the pieces of pollen inside you, syllable by syllable,
They gave world to your world,
And they let the world walk towards you, always closer.

***

You grow old.
You move from the top floor,
To the ground floor of life.
There is too little sky, too much trigonometry of walls.
But, some twilights, you bend towards the airshaft,
If your neck can still bend.
You see the top floor: the Everest.
You are a bird, smuggler of borders, flying over the white cold peaks.
You are happy.

***

You are too old for discoveries, and even inventions.
Nothing is the same, not even the sameness.
The world is wrinkled, as if it were a sandy beach.
Reality is a wrinkled place.
The only thing left is the sand castle of a child.
You were safe in the castle. You were free in the castle.
You invented the world in a castle of sand.
You invented yourself in a castle of sand.

***
You wake up in the dark.
You don't see in the dark, but you see the dark, the dark inside the dark.
Seeing may be pain.
You turn on a lamp,
As if you were the guard of the invisible,
And you don't realize that the invisible is fear
You don't realize fear is the true guard,
It pulsates metal and blood in your veins.
You don't realize that it is a violent equation:
It adds fear to fear, it adds metal to metal.
The equation of fear is simple, inexplicable,
Like a motion of living.

***

In the basket, oranges,
Like a pile of illegal suns.
They are beautiful.
We are sun eaters from the first moment of the first hour:
The roots of heat, the power of a leaf to grow, real as magic, invisible as the useful.
We don't know that when the sun will end,
All that will be left will be the carnivorous shadows,
And someone with a peel of an orange in his hand.
There will be one last question.

***

Nothing is simple, not even simplicity,
And yet, we feel how simple we walk from hour to hour.
We feel how simple we forget, especially what we could never remember.
We feel how simple we make plans:
To tidy who we are, where we go.
We don't realize that life is not a tidy place, and for sure, not simple.
We don't know why we dream so much.
Why dream our life, who we are. Dreaming is simple.

***

There are habits everywhere,
The seasons of time, the seasons of a woman,
Weaving themselves in each other.
The slow motion of living by a tea cup. The quiet habit.
A cigarette half smoked, like the habit of separation.
The dead semen in your hand, it loves without making love,
It is the habit of closeness, the habit of separation, in one motion.
It goes always further, it goes towards you, always more, always deeper.

***

In the biggest circus: life,
The gestures of the hours are precise, they follow the rhythm.
The gestures of our eyes are out of rhythm,
They don't know when the rhythm comes closer, if a tear is a rhythm, where it goes.
The rubber woman is a cloth on a cloth line. She folds meticulously the cloth,
She follows the rhythm of time, she folds it inside her.
We are afraid, so we mimic the others.
And only the clown understands everything.
He mimics the others , he magnifies their motions, because he is not afraid.

***

You are somewhere. You don't speak, you don't listen.
Your motions: green blue, like the bottom of the sea.
They are quiet like the bottom of the sea.
You hear the water beneath your silence.
You look at the others:
The cacophony of gestures, the hectic motions of small fears,
Multiplied in the fingers. The waves break in their eyes.
And you are not sure who has drowned, who is drowning,
Who knows how to breathe water, who knows how to survive,
And most of all, who knows how to live.

***

At times, words walk towards us,
The way a tree walks towards the sun,
The whole tree: the leaves weave the generous shade, they paint the light green,
The roots invisible, the way all roots are.
And we walk towards the words,
We give them their reality.
We need words in order to feel more real.

***

Children may be brutal with their toys.
They rip them, they empty the entrails.
Maybe they are curious,
Maybe they feel that the toys are alive, they are an animal in pain
Maybe it is an exercise in sadness, maybe, an exercise in death.


***

After the rain: the snails.
They walk everywhere, calm as a rain drop.
On their back: small castles, like the sand castle of a child.
Someone asks if snails remember the loves, the sadness, the slow time in their time.
He doesn't realize the mine field beneath the wide feet of a question.

***

They prepare the house for winter:
The carpets, the thick shutters.
The only window left is what you remember.
You can see yourself going away, walking backwards,
Passing by yourself so close,
That you can feel the breath of time in your time.
It is strange, how memories go against time,
In order to find time,
They go backwards in order to understand the future.

***

The old X-rays of T.B.C..
They don't know your name,
They don't know the small, patient repetitions of a day,
The motions that perfected your pain,
And yet, they are the only proof that you existed.
Maybe they'll keep them, the picture of fragile bones,
Of the glass in your breath, in a silent drawer.
When you die in an x-ray, you are buried in an x-ray.
There is not enough earth for the dead.

***

The man nailed to the window for years.
He sees the changes. He sees the things that try to be the same; the churches, the towers, they refuse to change, and yet, time peels them, skin by skin.
He sees the paper kite of a child. Its colors are fragile, yet, it flies.
As if there was a weakness in everything,
As if there was a separation in everything.
Weakness is not weak. It enters you, a stranger, it separates you from who you are,
And it is not innocent. It kills you from inside out, long weak fingers full of the remnants of time.
The biggest separation.

***

The thirst to fly is ancient,
It began, each shaman again, each child again.
But reality has enough wings: the birds, the winds, the fallen leaves,
And all that's left is to fly, like a visionary in his vision.
Visions are power, and they are generous.
People fly in their wings, until the uphill of the soul.
The tallest mountain.

***

At times
The people declare a strike of silence.
They refuse to say what they should say, how to say. Rules are holy.
They refuse the observers that wanted to change the grammar of what they think.
Observing is a power,
It uses not only the eyes, it uses the fear of being visible,
And fear is a power that uses us.

***

It never rains in the mirror, whether it rains or not,
As if it were magic, a magician wise enough to fake a dream of draught.
But magic needs, like everything else, a home.
And when you are homeless, no nail to hang a mirror, no mirror available,
It rains into your life,
And there is no mirror of mercy. No magician in the mirror that doesn't exist.

***

The dead woman on the bed.
In the room: secret prohibitions, unsuitable rituals, the deep smell of semen, a dead rose.
There was silence in the phrases between the two grammars: the living and the dead.
Phrases were old even before they were spoken.
The sound of metal, absolute, final, forges another kind of silence, the silence of those who leave.
When they'll return at night,
The house will be empty,
They'll sit on the floor like ancient mourners,
But the floors are hard,
And anyway, they forgot how to mourn,
They don't have the courage to cry.

***

The rules of politeness are strict, a stone statue, the cloak deeper than the ankles.
So, you hesitate when you want to call on someone, close as a touch.
You want to exit your phrases.
But you don't dare smuggling the borders. You use the calligraphy of words, beautiful, illegible.
You say as little as possible in the most words possible.
Obscurity is safe.
At last, you decide not to call at all.
The silence is safer. It betrays nothing.
You are lonely in a polite way.

***

The hanging mirror.
Whatever you do, whatever you say is a tree, upside down.
You hide in the stillness,
But the hanging roots are naked.
Some days, you don't resist, you climb the tree.
You want to be on the balcony of the branches,
While you climb you remember the longing for the sun,
The sun that will dry the roots, one by one.
The sun is a love. The sun is a killer.
You realize that the trigonometry of the world is playful, that everything may be upside down. That there are hanging roots everywhere, visible as a hand breathing the future beneath it.

***

Our poetry came from very far.
Slowly, the civil war between the content, simple as water,
And the ornaments: the glittering rain, has ended.
What was left after the war was the inevitable,
What was left after the war was poetry.

***

You write.
You need, badly, words that are an ambush,
Words that will jump at the neck, yours, the others,
In the middle of a phrase where everybody feels safe, protected from everything,
And the poem is another ambush.

***

You stand at the wall,
You become one with the wall, with the white washed gazes of stone.
Maybe you become a statue, a moment before the bullet,
Or even a moment after.
You are utterly naked, an ancient statue,
The plaza, the emptiness make you even more visible.
And the eyes, the eyes, they make you even more naked.
Your sad genitalia, bigger than life, heavier than life.
Undress the eyes. Undress the nakedness up to the limits of nostalgia.
They leave you in the middle of the plaza, your nakedness white washed, your nakedness cracked.
People become statues all the time: the semen of stone in the eyes,
The coral of stone in what they feel,
And their gestures: a stone in the bottom of lake. It drowns.

***

Your steps are not heard, as if they were snow.
The hand that wipes the foam from your chin is snow.
Maybe you are a nomad in the world,
Maybe the world is nomad in you.
Maybe you wouldn't be able to understand the world:
The big smuggler of borders,
If you would have a clear address.

***

The house is full of empty rooms,
Even the full ones are empty.
Maybe you need empty rooms in order to find yourself.
Maybe the emptiness inside outside you makes you more visible.
Maybe you hear a sound in the emptiness,
The sound of someone asleep. It deafens you.
It is sad,
You have to sleep in order to speak free, inaudible.

***

DEPARTURES 1
They left.
The empty rooms became bigger, the house, more narrow.
You sit on a chair like someone shipwrecked, you grasp the last board.
Outside, pirates, the sea, hardly room for earth,
They changed the iron in their voice to paper. Their voice is paper, their voice is money.
The furniture and even the mirror, forget each day more, each day deeper.
The faces of those who left don't exist.


DEPARTURE 2
Maybe the ones who leave us, look back for a moment.
Maybe memory dies slower than ourselves.
Maybe they realize they can postpone nothing anymore.
They don't realize that the small repetitions , the ones that change them, the ones that exhaust them, didn't end, that death will repeat itself inside them, endlessly.
Bones die like us, from inside out.
We die, our shape has no color, death is the big scavenger: life, colors , memory, who we are.
It is intact except some holes: the eyes, the nose, the mouth.
Our shape is empty.
DEPARTURES 3
You hold the handle of the tea cup,
As if you held a door knob,
Two half zeros.
They are beautiful because they are unfinished,
Maybe they look, each one for the other,
Maybe they don't know that perfection doesn't exist.
Zero is unfinished, like everything alive.
It may want to stay what it is, but time is the big changer,
It has endless zeros behind the number.
The zeros will continue to change its shape, to change what it means.

***

Slowly people become less,
Slowly they exist less in their feelings, in the seeing,
The gazes, the pulse of iron and blood in the veins,
The ten fingers of a touch.
They don't know how bruised they are,
Their life, the lives of other.
They don't know that the world may be infinite,
But there will be always a last question.
It will be lonely.

***

You repeat the daily motions,
You tidy the hours, you tidy the silence sitting on a sofa.
Your motions are finished, they are perfect,
And yet, you feel they are not finished.
You don't realize there are circles everywhere,
Even when things seem square,
In the seasons of your hours, in the seasons of a home,
In the seasons of silence.
You have no choice,
As long as you live, whatever you do, you didn't do,
Whatever you say, is a circle.
The shadow of the infinite, the shadow of the unfinished.

***

In the plaza things happen.
They have new flags, wild winds in the cloths,
They have new hours in the loud speakers,
They make the air bleed.
The people don't raise their heads,
Seeing is dangerous,
Their look tills the ground.
Their eyes fall,
Visible as fear, as tired glass.
Eyes have glass inside them in order to see the clarity.
The people don't raise their heads,
The plaza shines: exquisite shards in their second hand shoes, in their second hand life.

***

They store the flags in moth-balls,
But you cannot store the motions of living in moth-balls,
You cannot store the motion of a touch in moth balls,
You cannot postpone time, life, a dream in a moth ball,
You cannot postpone death.

***

Some people come to repair your house.
They restore the stillness to the sofa,
They give the clock back its time.
You see their hands:
The hands that came from the past,
Each time with a new hammer, with a new sow,
Each time with a new greasy oil.
You see their hands, you see the thoughts walks towards the hand,
Always closer, always deeper.
You don't realize that a new hammer, a new sow,
Could be a big adventure. The biggest.

***

You get absent minded
Gazing at the path of the bees.
The tiny boy, the wings, like a toy of life,
Yet, their flight is tall, as tall as the last petal.
As tall as the last nectar.
You look at your wings, the yellow black wings,
You are quiet.
The debt to life was paid.

***

The feast of the harvest.
The house was finding its silence again,
It became wider, the way silences become.
The only sound: the creaking of moth balls,
Where people keep what they remember:
Other festivals of seeds, the silence of the dead, it speaks: they are hungry.
You cannot store the hunger in moth balls, you cannot postpone it in the moth balls.
You cannot keep the last bread in the plate in a moth ball.

***

Some places seem inexhaustible.
You explore you home, each day from the beginning,
You think you know by heart all the corners,
You think you know all the corners inside you.
You don't realize everything is motion.
You see the animal furs on the ground floor,
You don't remember them.
You see the bullet strung on a golden chain,
You don't remember it.
You don't realize that forgetting is a motion,
It moves always further,
That beneath the forgetting, there is another forgetting,
It moves towards you, always more: the fur in your skin, your skin on the floor, the bullet in your cry.
No one is ready for what he has forgotten.

***

It rains.
The hours outside; indifferent, without an umbrella of mercy,
They don't get wet.
It rains.
Your motions of living are drenched, but they are unmoved,
As if they were thirsty no longer. Thirst was dead.
You get used to everything, nothing surprises you, not even the rain,
The drenched motions, the dead thirst.
Everything seems the same,
And similarity seems like continuity.
You don't realize the sameness begins, each moment, from the beginning,
That nothing is the same, not even the sameness,
That continuity begins, each moment from the beginning. Continuity doesn't exist.

***

What you see dissolves the curved lines: the clouds, the earth,
It thickens the air,
And the twin of seeing, not seeing,
Creates twin shadows.
So you are always on the inexplicable border between seeing and not seeing.
You don't realize that the border is the life. You don't know it sees you.
It sees you eyes open outside, open inside, it sees your eyes closed outside, closed inside.

***

The rope in a corner of silence
Keeps the paintings hanging.
Maybe, there was a man behind the painting, hanging on the rope.
Painting is a subtle art. It draws on the same canvass,
It hangs on the same rope,
The past, beginning each day from the beginning,
The man hanging each day from the beginning.
Time flows in the canvass, but you can postpone nothing.

***

It rains.
The wet hues enlarge the walls of the hours,
They are a wonderful magnifying lens.
You see the houses: shoulder to shoulder.
You see the houses: autumn to autumn.
The rain drops, each one is another sequence of time,
They make time bigger.
The sequence of time inside each drop, a single drop, is unfinished, like everything else.
Little by little, the rain stops, unfinished, infinite.
You see the houses: the red tear of dawn. The first light.

***

We prepare ourselves for something.
We use dictionaries, manuals, organizers.
We use tax bills that know who we were, that we had a name.
We use electricity bills that prove we were parsimonious.
These bills come from somewhere in the past,
But there were postponements, delays, temporary measures.
No one is ready for his past, for the debts of the past, still due.

***

The red mouth, gluttonous,
The red mouth that annuls me,
The red mouth that let the words grow old inside it.
Mouths are open road, there is no traffic light in the mouths,
And yet, the light is red.
What you think, what you feel go nowhere.
You find no word to smuggle the traffic light,
You find no word to smuggle the silence.
There is no traffic light to Ithaca,
There are small words, patient, deep as a breath, tall as a daily truth, waiting on the road.

***

The back is a dangerous place.
The past attacks you always from the back,
And the number of the convict on your blouse.
So, you learn how to live with your back at the wall,
Accused, defending, afraid, fatalist, silent.
You don't know that they shoot people with their back to the wall.

***

You wear your artificial hands, the gloves,
So that you wouldn't touch the skin of words.
It is safer.
When you don't touch the words, they become a foreign language,illegible,
They don't touch you.
You forget that words have not only skin, but also a soul.
There are no gloves for the soul.

***

You say; the immobility is the secret of art,
Maybe you mean it is the secret of death.
You sculpt death, statue after statue.
Your statues go nowhere, the frozen feeling, the paralyzed thought, the big absence.
It is the end of the journey. The last grave.

***

You gather images, the copies of natural things,
But the copies seem real,
You can lie on the painted grass,
You can count the uncountable: the silence.
You need these copies,
When you'll die, you'll leave the world intact,
You'll take only the copies, you'll take the silence.
There is no copy of death. No copy in your luggage.

***

The shouts are warnings, the shouts are smoke.
You don't know if they are allies, if they are enemies.
They tell you to shout, you are disciplined. You are hoarse.
They tell you to shoot, so you shoot,
And when you lie in the ambush you realize suddenly
That you learned how to shoot long, long before the slaughter.
You knew how to be ready, you knew what you do, clearly.
The slingshot of a child was a big leisure in the game of hate.

***

You are alone. In the colony of humans, no one is left.
Your thoughts hang you, like the rope you hanged yourself. They are visible as silence.
Your thoughts remember.
They remember all the little deaths, that were never really little,
That were daily and yet they came hour after hour.
You remember the time you were young enough to live between death and death.
You remember the time you were old enough to die between life and life.
You look for an album
Albums are beautiful cemeteries, precise cemeteries.
You want to know what was the time in your life, how could your life exhaust time.

***

Morning.
The night evaporates in the room, like steam, like dew.
The flies on the window pant, pulsate,
They don't recognize the glass, the brutalborder.
The bullet was familiar, it was shining in its own way.
Noon.
You kept the night in mothballs,
You kept the buzz in moth balls,
You kept the window in moth balls.
You don't know that you cannot keep anything in moth balls, the night, the buzz, the windows of time.
Memories are moth balls. You cannot put time in a moth balls.

***

Words tall, important, absolute
Walked on the narrow lane of time,
They walked on the narrow lane of rules.
What they told us grew old in their mouth even before they spoke.
An age of heroes immense, immobile, like statues. An age of angels, they weighed no more than marble , they weighed more, much more than dawn.
They left behind broken marble, a path drenched by time.
The path is slippery, it can be a killer.

***

Even the air we breathe grows old inside us.
We wear our clothes, third hand, patchy.
They are too big.
Maybe we thought too much. Thoughts may consume us.
A cigarette box, creased in the pocket, creased like pleasure.
A rack sack, and an old train ticket we don't remember
Where we go, why.
We board the train and we forget the rack sack,
We left it in the train of a child, it travels to dreams.
There are no memories left, and maybe there are, mysterious, silent.
Maybe we are nomads in time, we run with time, we run against time.
We are the proof that memories are real. The big runners.

***

There are more powers than what you imagine.
The power to recognize, closed eyes, each part of your body, the body
That grew old in the second hand clothes, to live each moment, from the beginning,
A first hand moment, a first hand life.
The power to recognize the dark, the dark inside the dark, to recognize the drop of dawn, a single drop, in the dark, to see the light.
The power of tools: the pen, the counting beads, the measuring tape,
To measure the height of a human, the ax that breaks the stone inside the stone.

***

In the forest
The axes, a rope hanging from the branches like a swing, like someone hanged.
You sit on the ground, in the shade your shape is human: a wingless bird.
And yet, you'll roam over the trees, wingless, you'll cut them, you'll defeat them, wingless,
One day they will defeat you.
They'll let you hang on the rope you prepared from the beginning, wingless,
They'll plunge a branch pulsating iron and wood
Into your secret roots, they'll find the wound, the wound of rage, that makes you kill.
They'll hang the wound on the same rope where you hang, a double death.
There will be no safety net of mercy.

***

You count the moons in the water, they are never the same. Will you remember. The hands: a shadow over the water, the hands full of water. Will you remember.
The rope that was prepared carefully, a branch over the water, the patient, the quiet rope that gave you the power to be sad.
Will you remember.
You have to remember everything, so that you know where to return.

***

The shadow of the invisible at the open door.
In the world: more pauses than words, more silence than words.
The mine field, the bullet, underlined by the motions.
The invisible will leave, and yet, it will return.
You die full of invisibles, full of the things that were there and you didn't see.
We plunge a hand trembling, pale, into our secret well, we pull out the deep wound , a branch dripping clear water: the invisible.

***

Cemeteries are a huge cross roads,
The direction of the living, they live each day a little more,
And the direction of the dead, they live each day a little less.
The cemeteries are the biggest museum of holiness: crosses, marble angels, sacred stones.
And the cross roads is strange: you don't have to choose, you were chosen.
It is inexplicable, life is innocent, but maybe you are not.
The autopsies show almost always one thing; you die from inside out.
You are guilty.

***

The dress hangs in your closet for years,, for ages,
Like a thief of something: the youth, the laughter of a body.
It is empty,
And yet, you are in it.
The curves of your past, the breasts, the curves of a dream.
Some nights, the dress is not empty,
You wear it in order to let the dream love you closer, more.
The dress is innocent, the past is innocent, the dream is innocent,
And yet, they violate you, they plunge a hand, tumultuous, hot, into what you remember,
Each night more, each night deeper.
They are guilty.

***

After the rain, the transparency.
You see the houses, houses are diaphanous too after the rain.
You see layer beneath layer, the past.
You see the old men still foaming, layer beneath layer
Your motions rise, higher than ever, more clear than ever,
A pilgrim to somewhere.
After all, each motion, each whisper is a traveler to something.
In diaphanous days you can discern where it goes.
In diaphanous days you realize one can see only what he has seen already.

***

You return to unexpected times.
The absences come back to find you,
Like a journey you thought lost:
The keys, the handles, the dreams, the windows.
All the openings you didn't open,
All the partitions of the void.
Maybe the journey gave them meaning,
It connected the absences, the partitions, the void,
To the motions of living:
A thread so strong, because it is invisible, a line so long because nothing is continuous.

***

The table looked as if it waited for someone.
The absence came back to find you,
There was an old echo in the absence,
The sound slowly multiplied in the walls, the door, the table,
And other sounds melted on the roof: the rain, a giant leaf.
Autumn returned to the house, and yet, it never left, as if it were the past, the memory of the past.
There is no eternal return.

***

Your hands tremble in the trembling mud.
You didn't know how afraid the mud could be,
You didn't know how afraid you could be.
Your tremble, persistent in the tremble of the mud.
The mud: prisoner in your tremble,
And you don't know if your hands will be free one day,
You don't realize we are prisoners in what we imprison.

***

The small nocturnal hotel
In the room, the deep recesses of love, a woman,
And dolls, cloth dolls, soft,
Perforated by the cigarette butts, by hands studied as a crime.
The dolls, dyed yellow, like a festival of harvest,
Like a ceremony of life that forgot her.
The dolls remember what she cannot afford to forget.
They are essential, the only harvest available.

***

The numbers on the doors mean nothing.
You forgot the pass-word,
And even the rows of names on the doors are meaningless,
You don't know the pass-words to names.
You feel alone, deserted.
You don't know that the pass-word is a motion,
The motion of passing opens doors, the motion of soft feet,
And doors are a motion too,
They repeat themselves, in order to be different,
They make you live and die on both sides of the door ,
No matter what pass word you remember.

***

You are trapped in your clothes,
They have too much of you inside them.
You have to stay in the trap in order to look like the others,
Difference is not safe.
You stand still, like someone who waits for something,
Maybe to be saved.
You don't know that the game of trapping and trapped
Is the same thing: fear.
The biggest game in the world. The saddest.

***

In the biggest circus of the world: life,
The show begins, it is Sunday.
The acrobats walk on the tight rope with hammers in their hands,
Nailing them to the moment.
The children ride on huge mules, stubborn, patient.
They'll ride the mules for years, the mules will ride them.
And the woman-rubber in her suitcase.
She is silent. After the closed years she forgot how to speak.
And only the clown, a red tear painted on his cheeks,
A red laughter on his lips,
Understands everything.
No one is ready for what a clown knows.

***

They know how humans, papers, pens lie,
But compasses don't.
They have the magnetic circle inside them, small, immense.
There are many compasses:
The seasons of the birds, the seasons of leaves, the seasons of a tide.
They know the way home, the square sky in the window that knows who we are.
But we don't use them.
We go to war without a compass, to a place that is not home,
We fight in a place that is not home,
And we know that this fighting is not a compass, it will never be the way home.
We'll die far, very far from who we are.
You'll die in a war that is far, very far from who you are.

***

In the biggest circus of the world: life,
There are no masks, only faces.
You cannot imagine how many faces you need
In order to live, to love, to hate, to struggle, to speak, to be silent.
You don't realize how many faces you own, and own you,
How many faces you need to die.

***

Repetitions change us,
They change the meaning of what we say, what we do.
With each repetition we are different, even the sameness is different.
And the repetition of the motions of living, of loving,
The motions of the words, of the silence:
A window that repeats itself in order to be different.
The small patient motions, consecrated by repetition.

***

Whenever there are flags in the plaza,
The blind men cry, it hurts them,
As if they saw meaning, what it means.
Maybe the ones who are handless,
The ones who hold the flags,
Are the big blind of the world.
They don't see how much the hands miss them,
They don't see the wild cruel motion of a flag, the wind like a knife in the motion.

***

The rain postponed some things;
People meeting in the open, a choir of faces,
Sunday's walk under a Sunday's sun.
You have to be prepared for everything,
The world, when it rains, when it rains over you, inside you,
When it postpones life for a moment.
The moment passes and everything changes
There are no rain coats available for the moment, for the delays, for the change,
Maybe they never were.

***

Inside and out of the window,
The same evening, the same beginning of the moon.
The woman sits, quiet, she knits socks.
The man looks at his hands, the earth scarred him as if it were made of time.
He puts the socks on his hands,
He stretches his hand towards her.
The motion leaves the hand naked. It is beautiful.

***

The trigonometry of the world is everywhere.
The circles in the house, shadows of the infinite:
The clock, the circle of heat, the plates, they give shape to the soup,
A poem that ends when it begins.
Your body, straight by the window, your body a circle of seasons.
It's autumn everywhere,
You know what time it is in the infinite of your clock.
You are a raindrop, a single raindrop, a circle inside the circle of seasons.
The shadow of the infinite is washed, you fall diaphanous, clear, mortal, endless.

***

The wind comes from all directions, like life.
It blows in the walls, under the floors, in the legs of the table.
Nothing is wind-resistant.
You go out.
The wind outside is different, it is not a gentle wave,
It is a violent motion.
You don't realize that violence is not always bad,
That these motions sow seeds far, and pollen, and roots.
They add life to life,
They add time to time,
The strange algebra of the wind.

***

The world is not a tidy place.
There are trees with their roots up,
Maybe they are tired of the claustrophobia of the dark,
They want sun, like everything else,
They don't mind growing old naked,
Like the old woman in the window,
Inside her, the madness of walls,
She walks, like an image, inside the glass,
She walks towards the sun.
She holds her naked breasts high: roots.
She grows old, each day from the beginning,
She is naked, each day more, each day deeper

***

You are in the kitchen, at the table, you knead the hours.
You are at the window, you see what the window sees, you weave the twilight.
The twilight is, like everything else, layer beneath layer, the shadows fall from the height of time to its depth, in a motion tumultuous, precise.
You look at the twilight:
The light and shadows mingle. A truce.
People, the holy, small, patient motions of living.

***

You walk, each hand in a pocket, alone.
You try to pull out your hands, to leave them naked, visible,
To bring finger to finger, close, the most beautiful mosaic.
But the pockets feel safe,
And the fear of nakedness, of being visible,
Paralyzes you,
As if loneliness had an open account with life.

***

The place is patch over patch:
The walls, the faces, the grimaces,
The dead men's shirts that people wear.
And the journey from day to day is patched.
Its motion is blind, immobile,
Because it doesn't know where to continue,
In the traffic light of the hours the colors are patched. Red over green, red beneath green.

***

You talk with ugly gestures.
Your shadow on the wall sees you.
Beneath the black shawl your silence sees you. Its sweat is cruel
Only the dog came close, it sniffed you,
It recognized the smell of shadows, of the silence, of the cruel sweat.
It betrays you. It barks your smells loud.
It is innocent.

***

You write on paper, light paper,
A delicate shawl over your shoulders: the pain of the wingless .
You don't realize your poems are naked,
You poems are a handful of fluff,
And yet, they flew like a bird,
Smugglers of borders, smuggler of dreams.
You had wings.

***

You live like someone who wards off the end.
You postpone life, love, looking at the window,
Opening the door.
Postponements calm you.
Even though you don't know for how long they'll last.
Time waits for no one.
One day, you'll die. They'll bury you with all that could have been.
The grave will be exquisite.

***

There are many criss-crossing solitudes,
But deep in the center there is only one solitude:
The circus, the clown.
A small man, alone in the arena.
He walks, his noisy steps, the noise bigger than the legs.
He moves, the noise of his motions bigger than his life.
The red painted laughter, bigger than his mouth.
The red painted tears shivers on his face, bigger than his face.
He looks at the crowd, he reads gazes.
It is strange, he reads the closed eyes,
The eyes that find his red tear, his red laughter, the big noise of his motions.
They find the empty arena in themselves.
You come to the circus two by two, then by ten,
No one can resist alone what a clown feels.

***

The dead don't wear shoes.
They left enough shoe prints, harsh, irreversible, unforgivable,
And the mud in the shoes scarred them.
We don't realize that they enter our shoes,
That we carry, in each shoe, the past,
The whole gravity of the past.
We don't realize that each journey begins with the dead in our shoes.

***

Children believe that stars open holes in the dark.
Later, much later, they learn the truth.
It was the uncombed woman, the uncombed gaze,
The head naked beneath the wilderness of hair,
That open the hole.
The only star
Close enough to fear.

***

The lamp lighter
Digs water wells
In the middle of the silence,
In the middle of the thirst.
They shine.
As if he knew that even a small lamp
Is a mouthful of light,
That light is thirsty.

***

The sense of beauty is always interweaved
With the sense of the indispensable.
You fight for beauty,
For you, beauty is money, even when it is paper.
For you, horses are beautiful, a promise of power.
Power is beauty,
Even when the horses are wooden, an ambush of pain.

***

The unsaid words are an old friend, they grow old in your mouth.
They know your shapes:
The shapes of what you feel, of what you don't feel,
The shapes of what you fear, words may be unsafe,
And they make the words you say bigger,
You don't imagine how much unsaid curls in what you say.
They are the only way to speak: a glass door,
You see the lips move, you see what you didn't say what you didn't say,
A confession to the glass.

***

In the mirrors: white and black circles,
They are beautiful in a dreamy way.
You said: that's what poetry can do.
I don't know if it can save us, if it can blind us,
It the circles can turn: blind and save at the same time.
You don't know that circles are the shape of the infinite,
Maybe small infinites,
That may disappear when you look at them,
After all, one sees only what he has seen before.
One reads only the poem he has read before.

***

He asked: where do we go.
No one answered. Everything was possible, nothing was possible.
The road seemed elsewhere, somewhere far, inexplicable, like poetry.
He said: maybe and poetry: so many words in so little.

***

Night.
The hands of the dead are glued to the handle.
You don't dare entering, you don't dare exit.
You realize that everything is a handle,
It opens something, it closes something,
That the hands of the dead are in the handle,
And they are in your hands.

***

Night.
A few men enter the hall.
They are tired, too tired to know who they are.
They sign a paper.
You don't know if they signed something against them, for them.
So, there is only the paper,
A napkin where you mopped the smell of your sweat.

***

You look for something you've lost, something beautiful,
Maybe the photos of a child.
The birds wait at the window,
But you go on looking.
At last, your hands fall from your shoulders,
They lost the motions, they lost the photos,
And the window is empty. No birds.
That is what poetry is like.


***














SUMMER TUTORIALS

You kept it as if it were something yours,
The way you walked, the feet disciplined, the feet playing with the foot prints.
You kept it, the way she looked, the beginning of a gaze that spreads out.
At times, at twilight, you find a shoe, a bare foot, always further.
The beginning of a gaze: a black hole. The cemetery of stars, the address of the bullet.

***

Night in the village.
Beneath the murmur, everything is the courtesy of the silence.
Everything exists, nothing exists,
Like a thought, like a dream.
Everything flows into the rivulet of time,
It makes time real-unreal,
And only your motions of living, small patient, stubborn, daily,
Repeat reality in their motion.

***

You are out.
Inside you, the freedom of the night, of the trees.
You forget that everything is free and bound at the same time,
That there are traffic light on the road.
You stand, you don't walk,
Even what you decide is bound to what you say, to whose are the words.
That it is free as your silence. Silence is an immense freedom, if you know how, when to Be silent.

***

Night.
A man with a shovel on his back walks slowly, his feet choking.
The shadow: a hunch back animal, angry in a silent way,
As if shadows don't copy only our body,
They copy what we feel.
Shadows betray us, the silent traitors.

***

The woman's breasts are for nursing. A nest.
You accept, you have no choice,
But memories are rebels.
You remember the feathers of a bird, the white flesh in the feathers, over your lips
You miss the bird.

***

The vacationers left.
The silence feels deserted, cold, salty.
The chairs, the tables are closed in a glass cage; the shop window.
You see them. They are prisoners of time, like you, like what you remember.

***

The lamp post turns on, and then is out.
For a moment you see shapes.
The crossed arms of an old man and a woman, the hues of a double loneliness.
A chimney taller than the silence.
The fence between what exists and doesn't exist.
You see yourself on both sides of the fence.
The years didn't exit.

***

You climb the ladder.
You want no one to hold it.
Even if you fall,
You'll have the safety net of the shadows you gathered,
Of the memories of your body,.
It learns the art of falling,
Each day from the beginning, each day better.
You live between climbing and falling, you love between climbing and falling.

***

The trees entered the house through the line of closed windows,
The line stretches beyond numbers.
A plate full of leaves. On the table, a chair, the body prints, countless.
And the cicadas, repeat their small numbers, like a song than cannot be forgotten.
What secret sequence
Made this simple place uncountable, half understood.
What secret sequence
In the deep recesses of a woman,
Made us visible, secret, a number before so many zeros.

***

The motions of light:
A precision, a habit,
Or a way to look at things, the existing, the, non existing,, closely.
To realize nothing is continuous, not even the light, a like to the infinite.
To feel the impossible dimensions of a star in your soup.
After all, we are star eaters: the heat, the dust, the iron in our pulse.
So the soup is possible.

***

The suns, strong over the windows, they multiply themselves.
Everything criss-crosses,
The light, the shadows, the love song of the cicadas, the big silence.
The high moon raises the wind,
It kills the air with dust, the old skin of moons,
With the newspapers of yesterday, of the tomorrows,
As if it erases time.
Everything: the dust, the news was hand made by time.
And the moon too was a clay cup of time. It drank there the evening tea,
The moon dies elegant, exquisite manners.

***

A few cypress trees, in the infinite of the sun.
Tired of protecting the silences of the dead.
Among them: birds, the semen , ancient, drips from their bodies.
You don't know if they are a picture
If they have a meaning.
Maybe the beauty is enough.

***

You bring you hand over your bed.
You crease a shadow
That ties the seen to the sun,
That will save your eyes, the stubborn, the fragile eyes of a human,
From the depth of light, from its heights.
No matter what the poets say,
Light can defeat you, it can make you too visible, too vulnerable.
Light may be dangerous.

***

Women are bees, farmers of life.
They don't realize it.
They don't know where is the beehive in their body,
They don't know where the drop of honey dripping on their face, comes from.
Their simple face, so simple that is close to truth,
And the honey over the face,
The secret nectar, real is magic.
Small women, patient, stubborn, the holy repetition of motions that makes them always Closer to reality , closer to time, closer to seasons of time, the four fingers of time.

***

The man and the woman on a bench.
Haven't the repetitions of longing, of trust got tired.
And the girl who repeats her naked body in the window,
Doesn't she get tired.
But spring is stubborn,
It repeats itself, because the seeds have to repeat themselves.
Seeds repeat themselves in order to be different.
They were programmed to long, the only thing they can do,
The infinite thing.

***

Some people feel alone, even when they are together.
Feelings are like a finger print of who we are.
Some feel in pulsating in their veins, green blood and metal, the veins of a leaf, the seasons of a leaf, they are a season in the seasons of a leaf, a drop a single drop of semen
In the deep recesses of the shade.
Some feel
That leaves are foreigners in their life, foreigners in their fate,
Alien veins, alien seasons.
The big loneliness of a stranger.

***

The rusted door leans on the ground.
It can protect nothing, not even itself.
It has no choice. It trusts the rust.
It learns how to be more fragile, more pliable,
How to be open, even though the ground closes its face, tight as gravity.
Our little days: small doors, patient, stubborn, humble, generous.

***

You protect yourself, always. The fear of loss is a giant.
There is always something ;left to lose,
Even when you are slowly drowning.
You protect your silk hat, the dark glasses
That don't see
What time it is in your life.
Maybe life is the art of loosing, but you could lose gently, natural as magic.
And fear is another art: a knife in your cry.

***

You live. You count everything.
After all, everything is a number,
Even the answers you need.
Maybe at twilight there are less numbers, less questions that were not asked.
There is a truce of shadows and light,
Shadows and light are numbers too, so it is a truce of numbers,
Like an equation that delayed for so long.

***

Someone knocks on your door.
You arre undressed.
You open, naked at the door.
You waited for someone, but there is no one.
You feel violated by someone, where there is no one,
You fell violated by your longing.
You violated yourself, the hymn torn, it bleeds,
At your open door.
Longing is in our genes,
The deep recesses of the body,
The semen drips.
A drop, a single drop of thirst.
Life is thirst,

***

They went into the room.
The bodies of love were beautiful
The rivers flew beneath their tongues,
But, beneath an hour of love,
Everything hardened: winter, cold flesh of sun.
No one is ready for his winter,
No one is ready for the cold animals in his raw genitalia
Without a shield of mercy.

***

He walked away.
The dust like incense. It was choking.
Behind him
The silence was immobile. A statue
And the evening, another statue. Immobile, like someone who postpones something. It didn't let the light melt.
It is strange,
How the small, stubborn, persistent motions of living,
Can soften time , can make it flow invisible as the useful,
How can they postpone it, make it immobile
. How can they be mothers of stone.

***

He left his shovel down.
He said:
The soil breaks your hands, your veins pulsate earth and metal.
And all you get is the last bread on the plates.
There was no poet there to write pretty words.
There were no pretty words left.
Hunger is already in our genes,
It was not programmed to be pretty.

***

Everything is a repetition:
The motions of the sea, of the trees, of the sun,
But the sun repeats itself always in the center,
After all, the sun is a huge engine,
The engine of warmth, of power, the engine of living.
The machine of the world is in the center,
And what it needs is in the center.
After all, nothing can stand before the needs of life,
Nothing can be more central.

***

Someone is drowning.
His voice is lost, like his life, in the wave.
In the ship, everything is familiar, everything is different.
Each one of us drowned a little.
Each one knew he cannot breathe water.
All he could do was to remember.
But memory is a rain drop, a single drop in the sea. It is beautiful. It struggles.
Gently, invisibly it loses itself .

***

Knives are a tool, they are innocent,
They cut the bread,
They crack the closed window,
Knives don't kill, the hand that holds them is a killer.
The hand that cuts the dawn in your plate, the exquisite fruit,
Is a killer.

***

The sunset slowed by the houses.
The shadows take the shape of things, they leave them shapeless.
Each day is defined by the small repetition. They make it different.
You are alone, you make a wide motion,
As if to stop the unstoppable,
There is no traffic light on the street of time.

***

The adolescence.
You hang your clothes and thr warmth in your clothes,
You touch the manhood in your pants.
You are not sure what you feel, maybe you feel everything at once:
A passion older than yourself,
The semen, diaphanous, infinite,
The laws of god.
You pull your hand out of the touch.
Your hand pants alone.
You don't realize that what you felt was beauty, naked, clear beauty.
You don't know you have to protect this beauty with your whole body, with what you feel, with what you remember.

***
You sit on a rock. Still.
You don't want to see, to feel, to remember..
Suddenly, the last light.
It reminds you that you have to be always ready for something,
To use the unused time to see, to feel, to remember.
There are more reminders that what you imagine,
And yet, no one is ready for what he remembers.

***

The shovel on the ground, and the dead bodies.
You sleep in order to forget better.
The nature around you is tender, as tender as a leaf, a green sister,
But nature doesn't dig graves for its dead, not even a leaf.
You'll have to dig them alone.

***

You are old. You live in front of the window.
The window is made of sky,
You can touch the sky in the window.
It is strange to touch the sky in something called sky.
It is strange to think
It is the only sky available.

***

Quiet humble Sunday in the alley.
The houses, shoulder to shoulder,
The people at the table, shoulder to shoulder.
Small delays between the emotions.
Everything is inevitable, nothing to add to, nothing to substract.

***

Summer noon.
The light is black, sun burned,
And the heat too.
We want to be naked,
To feel the salty lungs of the air in our breath.
But no one undresses,
Nakedness is a threat, it is too visible, too vulnerable.
Maybe a child feels no threat,
And the nakedness of the body of love forgets it, for a while..

***

In the old men's house
Everything is as it should be. Quiet.
The bird crashes on the window for the last time,
The full stops that make our phrases silent,
The full stops dare going nowhere, not even close, before the silence, somewhere with phrases unfinished, like life.
Everything is as it should be.

***

The huge moon.
The boats don't need their lamps,
They pass
Unsuspecting that the light could reach the depth of the sea,
That time is mischievous,
That it waits for them in the line between white ,black and the void.
The border of safety, the border of fear.
Borders never travel alone.

***

You walk in the street of the night. You are alone.
Suddenly you feel a knife in the warm darkness of your back.
You try to pull it out, but you cannot.
You forget that the past comes always from the back, and there is no shield of mercy.
Maybe the person in your head can save you,
He may explain yourself to yourself.

***

Someone enters the building from a street full of sun,
He closes his eyes for a moment.
It is strange,
In this moment of shadows,
He sees deep in the dark,
He sees whatever the light cannot see.
Shadows may be a blessing, no matter what the poets say.

***

A farmer lies under a shade.
His eyes: a deep abyss. He is beautiful, like chiseled stone.
His manhood, well shaped, like a statue.
In the depth: a tumbling house, no windows, no gazes.
Nothing to measure the depth of his abyss,
Nothing to confess the warm marble of his manhood.
It is sad,
When we don't see the beauty, it doesn't see us.

***

In the kitchen
You forget the window, tou forget what it see.
One day, you'll see.
After all, windows are gift givers:
The sky, the sea, the people, the world,
And most of all,
They give eyes to your walls, the big blind of the world.
It opens holes in the stone, the way the stars dig holes in the dark.

***

The vacationers have left.
The window is empty.
The sky, curled in a corner of silence.
The foot steps of an old man, he goes nowhere anymore.
The void is light.
The void is spacious, uncounted.
There are not enough numbers to count the void.
There are not enough numbers to count the experiences that you forgot,
Because you don't resist remembering.
No one is ready for what he forgot.

***

The vacant village.
Everything walks towards the silence, always more.
The empty chairs, the big motions of women.
The doors with the names of people on them. They are closed
Maybe the proof that we exist is not a name on the door. We have to open the door.

***

In the hotel
The motions of life are busy,
They cook the endless appetites,
They sweep time from the yard.
There is no unused time.
Anyway, even when we are still, we use time.

***

Summer tires you.
Maybe there is too much light, too much visible.
You sit.
The ceiling comes closer, there is too much gravity in the light,
There is too much gravity in what you remember.
At night, it comes even lower, the gravity of the dark,
It carries the weight of all you postponed: moments, love.
The moment passed and everything changed.
You are different, only what was postponed is the same: its you.

***

Everybody left.
The shadows painted the house.
Suddenly, a flock of moons, rare birds,
Entered the rooms.
They weaved themselves in the shadows,
An exquisite cloth.
You felt that truce is possible.

***

Maybe time is a picture.
The colors weave themselves each in the other.
It is exquisite.
The picture is stuck firmly on the wall.
Maybe only memory is persistent enough to unfold it,
To turn it to its back,
To see the damp paper, fluid lives that are looking for a shape.
They see the childhood of time inside you.
Time has a different childhood in each one of us.
Our story has endless beginnings.

***

The trees, the houses among the leaves,
The roots silence the soil.Old mmenn sit on a bench,
They hold, each one, a small mirror,
In order to remember themselves.
In a corner: a man keeps his hands in his pockets, each hand alone,
In order to remember to trust nothing.
Nothing is safe.

***

Mirrors, like everything else,
Are layer beneath layer.
So, they are faithful, loyal, silent,
Maybe because they fear the beast in the depth.
Mirrors are not innocent.

***

At times, we break the mirrors,
They become a river of glass,
They measure the dimensions of who we are.
At times, the mirrors break us.
It gives us the pass-word to all the beasts inside us,
Visible, transparent as glass.
Mirrors come from very far, they carried the shapes of our shadows from the first cave,
The pictures of our beats on the wall.

***

The sea, the waves, uncontrolable.
They rust the silence of the houses,
The church, salty, the yellow smell of wax.
A woman comes to light the candles,
She is blind, humble, fearful.
She has to believe in something,
Something to protect her from her fear, from the rusted life.
She needs something to save her from herself,
The biggest savior.

***

Houses can disappear, when we don't look.
They are glued to earth for too long.
They hover somewhere high; stone birds.
All that's left is a space, abandoned, free, quiet.
Ready for the small engine of light: the moon,
And a bench for people strange, ancient.
Moon believers.
The wait for the moon the raise the sea,
To remember better.
The sea has no graves. It remembers.

***

Time flows, so everything changes,
And the weather, a child of time, is unrecognizable,
Even though, deep inside, you recognize it,
Because your seasons are the family of time.
You think that the change will free you from the past, from what you remember.
No one is free from time.
Some autumns you feel bewildered,
A vague dead line.
You lie down, you glue the fallen leaves over your body, the forgetting of leaves.
You feel more free, less visible.
You don't realize that also forgetting is a captive of time.
No one is ready for his season.

***

Absence may be inexplicable,
It may be endless.
It empties the landscape: houses, trees, people.
You are alone like the sun,
You are alone like the light. Light may have the cosmic void inside it, the cosmic loneliness. The void has no eyes.
It is strange,
But light may be absence.

***

Sometimes, a circular sound appears among everything,
Like a song around a fire, the song that came from far away. Deep. Visible.
Like the circular dances, a waterfall of hands
That unknowingly, feel each other.
The ten fingers of feeling, a touch.
Touch is the biggest sower. It knows when to sow, where to sow itself.

***

Someone is missing for long, very long.. There are no traces.
Yet, someone is missing. We see the hand prints on the wall,
Clear, muddy,
Like someone who came from very far, the hungry past. The past is always hungry for time, hungry for life.
Someone trying to climb out of a deep cave,
To walk towards us.
There is mud on our hands.

***

It's early in the village.
The motions of the farmers say much in so little.
They know more about dawn than us,
The beginning of things that don't really begin,
They continue something.
The farmers have a strange simplicity in their words,
A strange clarity.
They don't think that simplicity is never simple.
They don't think that clarity is hard work.

***

The sun is too strong..
It blinds us, it blinds itself,
And things are lost in its vastness. They are forgotten.
We wait for ourselves till the night,
The shadows are enormous: a magnifying lens,
They copy our bodies, our motions.
It is strange,
Our shadows know us better than the light,
The black mothers. They forget nothing.

***

The spiders focus on the corners of silence.
The mule focuses its big soft eyes on grazing.
In the landscape, a man. He focuses on himself, the way men do.
He looks, the way men do, for the shapes of the unknown,
He cannot focus on them, one cannot focus on something he feel it is lost.
He doesn't know that the unknown is faithful,
It is inside everything: in whatever he sees, in whatever he thinks.
A deep shield from the unthinkable, the true unknown.

***

Dusk.
The shadows mingle with light,
A truce.
And the people at the table, mingle theor gazes,
Which is another kind of truce.
And yet, human fear the twilight,
They want a bigger truce: a truce with time, the endless time, a truce with eternity.
They go on all fours to pray for eternity,
But four limbs are not enough.
Time is a fast runner.
***

August.
The wheat fields are endless:
The gods of the bread.
The shadows are painted by the sea, by the golden chaff.
The light walks between the legs,
And the cicadas run, they chase the light.
No one thinks of happiness.
No one realizes he is happy.
No one remembers how much existence could bruise him.

***

The day is glass, diaphanous, fragile.
You collect the pieces of glass, meticulously, carefully.
You want to glue them: a mosaic,
A floor, the shape of light.
After all, everything in the world, even our silence, our stillness,
Is a repetition of shapes: the biggest mosaic.
It is exquisite.

***

Sunset. The houses close.
But the world continues to enter.
The time of the world: a boat floating in the light, the light that is lost.
The rocks wash their feet in the sea.
They are not human.
They don't know that they see in the water themselves.
They attack the strangers with the surf.
Everything is simple, inevitable: the giants drown in a giant.

***

Young bodies, the pores open,
They let the world in.
To sow the drops of salt, the semen of the sea,
To sow the urge to love.
To love like a wave entering a wave,
Wild, deep, strong.
To love like a body entering a body: holy, infinite.

***

The heat rests on the cloth line.
The earth rests in your shoes,
And yet, nothing is resting, everything is motion.
Everything runs with the biggest runner: time.
You cannot postpone time.
You cannot postpone yourself

***

Usually, we don't see the cicadas,
So, the cicadas are sound.
They sing the summer,
And the summer multiplies their voice.
They sing in all the octaves of the sun.
We forget that how we change the world:
The cicadas make it sound,
The blind make it touch,
And the animal of pain inside us makes it smell.
We forget how we can give the world its senses,
The five fingers of feelings.

***

It is not easy to begin, each day from the beginning.
It is not easy to think you've exhausted all the beginning, but there are more.
It is not easy to look, each day, with new eyes.
There are too few new eyes left,
And too many people.
You have to sow new genes for new eyes
In order to continue the beginnings .

***

Sunflowers, mad noon eyes,
Blinded by their shine, blinding.
Even the shade beneath them: a petal of light.
Sunflowers give a shape to light,
They give, like any artist, shape to our eyes.

***

The house.
Windows made of square skies.
The motuins of the woman:
Small, patient, tidy, consecrated by repetitions.
Out of the door:
A little garden of Eden,
Before time, before sin.
Maybe time, the runner, the nomad, will rest here for a while.

***

Someone wakes up, and floats beyond time,
Forgetting, remembering.
And the leaves wake up, naked,
They reach high, green birds.
Maybe that's how Adam and eve woke up, naked, beyond time.
Maybe they bore us today.
Maybe, the world begins, each day from the beginning.

***

The noon: molten steel, metal shadows, iron cicadas,
The sea: fluid mercury.
The emptiness: no one to agree , no one to refuse.
Your words have lost their echo. Your words are lost.
A vein of water bleeds under the rock,
Yet, everything is thirsty. The thirst is rust.
Maybe at night, the shadows will be generous,
They'll melt the metal in the thirst.
Maybe you'll drink your face in the water, the cool marble of your face.
Shadows may be a hand that gives you water, no matter what the poets say.

***

Everything sunk in the light,
As if it was the bottom of the sea:
Diaphanous, green, silent.
The corals, suspended under time, they remember, they forget.
Only an ancient man remained
In the unused shade,
To foresee the waves inside an answer.
Answers come like series of waves,
Sudden, inevitable, a molten battle,
They bear more questions: an ambush of water.
No one is ready for the answers of life,
No one is ready for the questions.

***

The night walks through the leaves of the shadows,
Always further.
But nights know countless roads,
When it's time, they'll walk towards you, always more.
They'll be an ancient song that repeats itself,
Patient, tender, stubborn,
And is never the same.
Each one carries along the song that remembers him,
Each one who goes into the night, needs to feel that he existed, that he was real,
No matter how much existence bruised him.

***

Supper
Slowly the night finds the way. There are no maps available.
It leaves behind another season: diaphanous, almost unreal.
It leaves behind the chairs in the yard, each leg steadied in its own silence.
It leave behind the toy of life: a child.
Children learn, even before they know how to speak,
How to play with the loneliness, how to draw on the loneliness the truth of an imaginary friend.
Children learn, even before they know they exist, how to remember.

***

Autumn
The sea invades the house, conqueror, conquered..
The sound of the waves; adventurers, restless.
Someone still moves in the house.
The autumn outside and inside are a heavy siege.
He measures the width, the depth of the siege.
The remnants of summer
Bring for one more last time,
The sea into his veins, the veins pulsating salt and blood
The veins pulsating the ancient wound that make him who he was, who he is.

***

Noon
The walls are made of heat,
Time is made of heat.
Each moment burns itself, and often, a few more things.
The light drowns in the sea.
The sea gulls scream, they bite the air,
They bite the silence of a deserted body.
There could be the arc of Noah, the ancient number,
Continuing the numbers to the next flood:
After all, everything is a number, even god, even the flood,
The repetitions of the flood, out, inside us.

***

At the shore
We study the death of a pebble,
We study the death of the sand.
We guess the waves that will drown in the sand.
Waves die like us, little by little, and then, all at once.
They die from the deep wound dripping the semen of salt and pain, out.
No one is ready for his wave.

***

The light is a journey that doesn't allow excuses.
At high noon, everything floats in the light,
As if gravity was a lie; trees, houses, people.
But each thing creates its own shadow,
The shadows copy you, they copy your motions,
So, everything floats.
Everything is tied to the ground by his shadow,
Like fear, like something inexplicable that was postponed,
It remained tied to time-the biggest shadow.

***

You hold, like a child, the imaginary wheel of a car. It is still.
You deny, like a child, the things you wanted, but you didn't do.
But when the denial becomes too complicated, you escape.
The stillness becomes a road, the imaginary wheel becomes a car.
You know, like a child, how to escape into your loneliness,
How to leave nothing of yourself behind, not even a dream.

***

The twilight.
The distant lights mingle with the shadows.
A truce.
The fishing boats weave themselves in the water, in the ambush of nets.
A truce between a human and the hunger.
But the fish are too dead to refuse, to agree, or at least to postpone something,
Something small, a decision, the rest of their life.
They are too dead for a truce.

***

The small cemeteries by the train station.
It is strange,
Do people die in the train,
Did they know that the middle of the journey will be the end.
Do they bring their own shrouds and other important things:
The memory of a body on the beach,
The sea was everywhere, in the air, in the sun, in the motions,
And your body learned you, for the first time.
Maybe you remembered so much, that you didn't notice that you died.

***

The twilight comes, piece by piece.
The shadows walking in the cicadas' path,
The longing for a secret car, that will let you slow down
Maybe they'll put a traffic light at the dead end.
The sea breeze, it brings the sea to your lungs.
You can glue the pieces into a big mosaic.
A floor of truce.
After all, each thing finds its truce in its own way, in its own time.
The sea pulsating in your veins: the big truce.

***

The sea gives and takes, like life.It can give you the life of a fish, woods for a maimed roof ,for a nameless door.
And then, the moon pulls it high,
It washes away everything: the fish, the maimed roof,
The nameless door, your name.

***

You love, your body inside another body,
Nothing can come between you,
But the separations are everywhere.
The night in your body is always more far from the other night,
The cigarette half smoked, the beginning of a smile that doesn't continue.
The feelings too small to remember, are forgotten, even before they remember.

***
.
It is strange,
The farmer is alone and happy.
He is the semen of trees, of leaves, of fruits,
Of the silent pauses between the roots, of the small delays of the seeds.
You look at the orchard.
No one can take the semen from his secret body.
His hands prolongs time, deepen it,
The way semen does.

***

Things seem to end at the same time:
The leaves, the birds, your paper.
You want to put an end too ,there are too many memories,
You are too busy forgetting. It is time.
But the person in your head is human: a wingless bird,
And yet, birds fly through him, smugglers of dream
You have to negotiate with him the price of ending: a dream.
You cannot afford it.

***

Evening.
The first dampness in the chairs, in the innards of the old,
In the secret body of a lover.
The silence is an empty hand.
It has nothing to remember, nothing to forget,
And yet, it deepens time.
Silence plunges in our secret body, it finds our deep wound: time
The star light is a hand too.
. It comes from very far, it carries the distances with it,
It remembers and forgets, at the same time, like us.

***

In the picture;
The grandmother, the mother, the grandson.
They are bust.
They sweep the floors from useless memories,
They mop the dangerous silence,
They gather the pieces of the motion of living, they broke
They were fragile, they couldn't follow time.
They throw in the damster the gazes that saw too much
They all smile in the picture.
In the family front everything is quiet.

***

The youngster leaves his shirt on a rock.
He'll bathe naked.
The white shirt on the rock shines,
And his white back, warm marble, glittering.
He enters the sea, deep, and the sea enters him,
The way love does,
And time bounces amidst the two white suns,
Like everything else, it has to choose, who will return, who will continue.

***

The old man called again and again, his son.
But sins are rebellious nowdays,
Calling is not enough,
Even memories of family meals, family feasts
Are not enough
They go on their own way.
They need their own memories,
Somewhere to return to, that is their own.
They don't realize how the past bruised and healed their existence,
How much past waits for them , patient, stubborn, a somewhere to return to.


***

The white washed sun,
The white washed gaze.
Whatever is dark is naked, visible.
The fly in the lamp. The longing for light is a killer.
The dark fence that divides the 'we' and the 'they'.
The grey cloud. Its glued with a black tape to the sky.
The nostalgia, in the border of existence, it has no color
Time walks on the steps of the white of the black.
Time is color blind.

***

The young man, his body, warm marble,
His eyes of marble, deeper than time.
The night loves him, and the sea.
Maybe he was a statue,
But he knew how to die , how to be loved.
There are men who don't know how to be loved,
They need too much space around their motions of living,
Too much space to the let the motions reach them, tender, gentle.

***

The tree: immense leaves.
You look and suddenly the leaves
Open like a palm, like a caress, over your head.
Green sisters,
The green family of the world.
In the city, at the edge of the night,
A drop of dawn, a single drop,
Mother of stone, mother of light, mother of geern suns inside a leaf.

***

Old men walk carefully,
Their stony feet
Leave deep foot prints,
Like a thread in a labyrinth.
It is strange,
But it is they who defeat the beast in the labyrinth,
They repeated so many roads
In each repetition they find the different in the sameness.
Maybe they find the secret beauty of the small patient repetitions
That let them continue to repeat time, to enlarge it.
There is too little time left, and too many repetitions.

***

You hear everything, as if behind a glass, a beautiful aquarium.
You see the lips moving, a fish, a man drowning.
You see the shape of numbness in the lips,
A line: the infinite, a round dot that magnifies the numbers, that make them deeper. A black hole.
The memories you forgot mumble to the memories that remember you.
You count the line zero of the said, the number with many zeros behind of what the Unsaid beneath each word knows.
After all, we count everything, even the uncountable.
You don't miss the voices, the danger of the unsaid inside them. The glass is safe.

***

Pregnancy is power.
When you are pregnant you have something strong in the way you walk,
In your silence.
You have to be careful.
Your strength measures you,
It measures all that is impossible inside you,
How to use the infinite: a seed,
In order to bear a human,
How to love more than anything else, the possible,
How to love the infinite inside a child.

***

I go into his room. His shoes are huge; two boats.
He left the inevitable in a corner of silence.
I go into the house
To eat what he left:
The whole sea in a fish, in a cube of salt.
I will look at the other side of the mirror.
The other side of the mirror is a black list'
It keeps all the faces beneath the face,
Even the ones you deleted or you thought they deserted you.
He will be furious
Even the dead have the right to be dressed.

***

The branches of the evening over the shore,
The branches are fragile, green glass.
Memories forgive, the absence is quiet.
The wave, the windows, the silences are diaphanous.
So many voices cut softly the glass.

***

Everything is as it should be.
The road: the black sister, the asphalt,
Our second hand shoes give it its shape.
The branches, hands that touch our second hand life.
Even the memories are second hand, that's why we forget so much
Everything is as it should be.
The human sadness, inexplicable, inevitable.
The second hand life is first hand sadness, the whole sadness.

***


FLOOR PLAN

You should be a mule,
Stubborn, honest, trustung.
The needs of life stand before anything else,
And you should ride the mule for a life time.
You should love him, the way you love life:
The best thing you'll ever have.

***

The rainbow in a rain drop
Chooses all the colors,
The fruit will be exquisite.
All the hues of a scent in your mouth,
The rain drop, like a drop of dawn,
A single drop,
Semen of light, semen of our eyes. The most beautiful fruit.

***
Each beginning has power.
And yet, the beginning of a smile stops in the middle,
As if it was not the right time, the right words, the right smile.
You'll have to begin, from the beginning, to feel the power of something that begins,
To plan, secret, inevitable,
Where beginnings go, where the smile goes.

***

Men come, one by one,
We don't count anymore.
The door opens, like a hand,
The soil opens, like the face of someone who knows us.
Whoever should be here is here.
The wide hands of pain keep us close.
You are mute.
The chords of your voice are unwind, too loose, too soft.
You hide
In all the corners of silence,
But hiding is pain.
You come out, your hand stretched,
Like Moses, face to face with the sea.
The void is open.

***

When the wholeness breaks,
When again, the crack of your smile,
When everything enters:
The world, the people, the beauty,
And you chew it, like bread.
The world could be beautiful,
If not for the paper that is money.
If not for the fury of a line on the map, for the rage of a flag on each line.

***

Everything is repetition, even pain, rebellion.
You repeat in order to be different,
In order to be the same in a better way.
You repeat the cry, and it repeats you,
The cry that lets you live, the cry that kills you.
And you should learn how to repeat it,
The way the soil repeats itself, the seed that tears its enttrails.
Repeat the cry
Simple as the finger of a child,
Counting the first wound.

***

He said:
We are human,
Which means human feelings.
We are everything that is life,
We are everything that is death,
We are everything that is love,
We are everything that is denial.
We roll the dice to know who we are today.

***

You should call things by their name, or by their number.
After all, everything is a number.
You say: market, the number of the slave traders, the fresh hands that were sold,
You say: Auschwitz: the number of a slave tattooed on his arm.
You say: Hiroshima. The number of the infinite inside an atom.
You should count the right time. You never know what is the right time for a slave, for death.
All you can do is count the right time of a human. Call him by name, like a friend, like a mother, like the child that remembers you.

***

Everything needs preparations,
The calm, the caution, the endurance,
The repetitions that change things.
Remember:
When you don't sell your life, you own it. You exist.
You are 'we', even though you are you.
You are on a train, you are on the tracks,
You travel to the next station to human,
You see yourself travelling.

***

Everything is as it should be.
The branches of the evening inside a tree.
The sea inside a boat.
The voices of the men: an anchor,
It ties them to themselves.
Love is a ripple, the exquisite salt.
Memory and forgetting are everywhere.
The older we get,
The more we are busy forgetting.
Remembering is hard work.

***

Death is not a reason for betrayal,
And the night wouldn't save you.
You have to go out in day time,
To see the light, to see the shadows inside the light,
To learn the alpha bet of faces,
In whatever they do, in each gesture.
They hear you. Speak, with your eyes open out, open in.

***

So much dying among the living,
So much life among the dying.
And you don't know where you belong.
You cannot count all the deaths inside you, all the lives.
You don't know where you are, in which kingdom
You don't know who is the king in your kingdom.
You don't know if kings exist.

***

You hide behind your silence.
Who buried the water. Whose childhood drowned.
You are responsible for everything,
Like each human,
And like those, you are as guilty .
Silence is not a synonym to innocence.

***

The times are hard.
No matter if you point at someone guilty,
No matter if you are guilty.
Suspicion is a power, it is a kingdom
In the eyes, in the point of a gun.
Innocence is dead.
Let the new king live.

***


No matter if you confess or not,
They burn the words. Words have too much ash inside them.,
And humans become ash, they have too many words inside them.
Living ash, because someone remembers.

***

The museum.
You slip inside an ancient coffer, built to hide.
The mummy comes from very far,
You don't know if it is silent, or simply it forgot how to speak,
You don't know if its stony gestures
Will confess, will betray you.
Museums are the most beautiful cemeteries,
They cultivate the culture of death, in a polite way.
But you don't realize that ancient things let you understand the future.
They are alive in their own way.

***

The darkness is everywhere,
Behind the train's lit windows,
Behind the glasses in the cafe,
Behind the sliver of a moon,
Behind the unfinished cigarette.
They don't see in the dark,
They see the dark, the dark inside the dark.
They are your allies,
Seeing the dark, the dark inside the dark, is the beginning of something big.

***

Again, the repetition of the motions.
You repeat what you didn't confess,
You repeat the silence biting your lips,
You repeat the wind in the flag: your breath.
You repeat the erotica bleeding in your groin.
It bleeds unused seeds, the repetitions of life after so many lives.

***

You are human.
You are responsible for who you are, who you are not.
You are the most loved,
The most betrayed,
The most lonely.

***

They killed a man at the wall.
Behind him: shadows,
The toys of life: the memories, the loves, the dreams.
He played with them for so long,
Now they came here to play with him.
Their silence was the biggest confession.

***

FLOOR PLAN
1. Your hands made of clay,
So fragile.
Your hand creased like a hoarse voice.
It is strange,
They break only when you sell them,
The paper that is money
Creases their voice.

***

2. The years of exile. You return.
In your shout: windows, open gazes,
But the windows are not enough.
There are holes in the wall,
They hurt.
One day the walls, the holes will sing you,
Their voice will be white washed, their voice will be creased.

***

3.You go out of the house, secret, at night.
Dead stars fell everywhere,
But you didn't notice.
You didn't notice
The death in the gaze of a man.
He noticed you.

4. So much fury on the lines of a map,
So many flags.
The flags walk,
But there is no one beneath them, no one to carry the big gravity of a flag..
The flags are alive,
But there is no one living left.

***

5. The dead fell.
The earth; the only shroud.
I lie on the shadows in order to be close to the sadness,
In order to remember more,
In order to believe better.
Shadows are not silent.

***

6. Words are a picture for a child, for a poet.
But, they are not faithful,
They can leave you alone
In a place that doesn't exist,
In a place that should exist.

7. Papers everywhere,
But most of them seem unsuitable for poems.
But, you are a poet,
Poems breathe, invisible, inevitable, in your fingers.
You may write your masterpiece
On a leaf of a toilet card,
On a napkin that tasted your mouth and the soup.

8. The times are hard.
In the markets: the they sell the smell of bread.
On the street: the only shroud is the torn blouse.
You are hungry. You are human.
You down loaded everything, your name, your address, the address of your pain
But there is no machine to download the sadness.
It remains, heavy, secret, tearless, in your pockets, your hands in the pockets,
Each one alone.

***

9. In the plaza, the stopped clock.
They didn't know that time rolls everywhere,
Even in a paralyzed clock.
In the house: the humble repeat the hunger, the rats, the moths, the drop raining in the walls, the worms.
The house tumbles, but not the door. It is closed. It is safer.
They don't know that they live on both sides of the door, they die on both sides.

***

10. In the fields you feel nothing is better.
You don't notice the rebellion of the humble:
The flies, the rats, the worms.
You need the poetry of a bird,
The exquisite bird that hunts the humble.
The bird is a harsh poem. Real.

***

11. The only way to salvage what was, who you were
Is remembering.
Memory is a power. A mirror of the past, the mirror is fragile, it can crack.
You see yourself.
You see your fear of suns.
You say, you are too visible at day time,
You grow easily old at day time.
And the memories become too many to remember.
You have no choice. You are busy forgetting.

***

12. Everything is where it should be.
The light on the table.
The oil lap on the lost ship.
The hole in the roof of the cave.
You have to learn how to see in the dark, how to see the dark inside the dark,
Like a root, like the blind that invent the light with their fingers.

***

13. The last of the prisoners left.
The windows were a mine field of light
You don't know if they saw in the window themselves, the world left outside.
You don't know if the glassy eyes of the windows can see.
If they can notice the details of things: a hole in the wall, the grass bleeding the day,
Walking patient, stubborn, inevitable, towards the whole.

***

14. At night, sounds magnify themselves.
The door opens. The door closes. An invisible bird flies, the wings are a cry.
Everything is bigger than itself. An imaginary threat, real.
And you try to measure the dimensions of everything, the depth.
There are not numbers enough to count fear.

***

15. You analyze things, you dissolve them like water.
The small deaths inside each motion of living,
Each motion, that agrees, that refuses.
The water is cold,
But, you have no choice, you have no other place to live,
To agree, to refuse, to love.

***
16. You think. You slice the void into pieces:
Big thoughts, small thoughts.
You try to glue the thoughts to each other,
In order to see yourself in a glass, in any mirror avaialble.
But thoughts fly in and out of you, restless birds.
In order to glue them you have to catch them first.
Thought catching is hard work.

***

17. There are things that are a promise:
An olive tree,
An ancient marble in the stair case.
A woman with a belly full of love.
Their promise enlarges time, it enlarges the longing to continue.

***

18. scissors, like a knife, are a tool.
You can fashion a new dress,
You can rip the belly of a human, like rage.
Everything is as it should have been.
You sow the dress,
And in the next room: the ripped belly. The plasticized sadness of a shroud.

***

19.Often people agree for the sake of agreement,
Maybe they don't know how to agree, how to refuse, how to bring a truce,
And they go on arguing, until time, frustrated, tears the air, tear the words in the air,
Like an eagle, like a vulture. It tears the hours, they grow suddenly old.
No one returns from the battle with time the same.

***

20. There are many shapes of the impossible.
A fish drinking from a nipple,
A torn hymne of a virgin,
A smile you bought in a shop.
And all the impossible, flows towards you, close as a breath,
Close as the possible.
The person in your head came from very far, the magician of the tribe,
He made you human, he used the possible inside the impossible.

***

21. You don't know the purpose of things,
But, in nature, everything has a purpose,
Even the repetition in the motions of pain. The last repetition is the last.
Or of a bee climbing to the absolute of a flower, the last petal.
You have no choice.
Mistrusting nature is not an option.
You have to find in the vague purpose, the clarity, the clear line that knows where to go,
Why to go.

***

22. The derailed train. You survive.
You armpits are a swamp of sweat,
You have a battle with giant insects: mosquitoes.
You don't know where to look, where to go,
But, that's how you survived from the start,
Before trains were invented, before derailments were in fashion.
You fought the insects, you fought the beasts deep inside your caves.
You fought yourself, in order to be human.

***
23. The palace.
The heads of horses on the walls,
The sadness of horses on the walls,
And the beautiful embroideries of horses running. They are dead too.
You don't know what is alive in this palace.
Maybe the vultures.
The dead horses are on their menu, always.

***

24. The repetition of human in your soles,
The repetition of earth in your soles.
You step on the soles of earth,
And they step on you.
Your step: heavy and light, as belonging, as the limits of nostalgia.

***

25. There are no obstacles for the sun rise.
It flows like words that were never written,
That write themselves each day, from the beginning.
Maybe they write you too,
Maybe you add, like everything else,
A syllable to the opus of the world,
There are no obstacles on the way of the syllables,
As long as you write a syllable of reality, a syllable that writes you,
Each day from the beginning.

***

26.The fruit,
Your life, love,
The bowing floor.
You think that this hour is not infinite enough,
You carve on the floor the unthinkable, on the limit of thought, on the border of life,
At the edge of nostalgia.

***

27. The small storing room,
Is the treasure island of a child.
Even the paper boat, was something to escape,
To carry whatever you own along.
The indispensable: the imaginary friend, a dream, a legend book,
Something to return to, when the sea was too foreign,
When the need to belong was as close as a breath.

***

28. You repeat your words, after all, living needs the repetition
Of the hourly, of the daily.
The small patient lips of what you think, what you do,
Consecrated by repetition.
And repetition by repetition, they make you different,
You may say more in less.

***

29. You have your sun glasses,
No one can find your gaze.
You choose all the time. To see or not to see.
You choose to see in the darkness,
But no one knows if you chose to see the darkness,
To see the dark inside the darkness.
You are safe.

***

30. The ship passed.
It left behind the nostalgia for the distant continents of life, dreams,
It left the face in the glass, the fish in a jug of water.
They have no choice left: to dream or to drown.

***

31. Flowers, like many other things,
Are a symbol of something: of love, of beauty.
You don't think, when you cut them,
When you let them whither in a beautiful flower vase,
There is no symbol left.
Death is as real as their life.

***

32. We inhabit time in all the places possible.
In the wash room, in the kitchen, in the cafe with the newspapers of old news.
And time is motion, It waits for no one. When you postpone something,
The moment passes. Everything changes.
You leave behind unused time, a slice of the void.
You may not think about it, but if you don't believe in the motion, you lose the belief in the future.

***

33. People come out of rooms,
And the sun blinds them.
The blind know the feeling of blindness, of the black surge,
They invent with their fingers Ithaca:
The way home.
To the limits of nostalgia: to what you didn't see and yet, that's where you have to go,
Each day from the beginning.

***

34. The times are hard. Everything is suspicious.
In the plaza: A dead man's hand. A statue of a hero,
The old man with the red tie,
And a man with hand cuffs.
We have to choose, always.
They have to choose who is more suspicious,
Who is the biggest threat to themselves, to who they are.

***

35. What deepens and fills
The unused eyes, the unused hands,
With unused time.
What let them see, touch the world, feel the motion of the moments,
Slowly, like a lover,
Like an old man in the last night.

***

36.. The enervating echoes from the mouth on the wall.
We dream a gap in the chalk and the black board.
We dream again the unused time.
We didn't leave in it even our address in life.

***

37. In the Hamam, everybody is naked,
Even the servant boy.
He kneels, a basin of red water,
He washes all the genitalia,
Slowly they bleed the color,
The most beautiful flower,
The most beautiful pollen, a life after so many lives.

***

38. With the most simple words,
With the most common acts,
We come closer to the child.
We may learn how to listen: the deepest wisdom.
Children are exquisite teacher.

***

39. He says:
Balance is simple if it is not the tight rope in the circus.
He says: You step, you slow time in your motion, one foot after the other,
You rest, one body after the other,
You balance, one life after the other.

***

40. Small postponements of the darkness:
A window, a street lamp.
A whisper whispers all the candles,
They postpone the darkness with their tenderness,
Like a belly full of love, like a hand planted in quiet water.

***

41. The flower pot was always on your way.
You break it.
You sweep its silences, they disturb you,
You mop the open petals,
The petals that gave you dreams, open naked as themselves,
That you didn't dare use.
You fear nakedness, you fear beauty, you fear dreams,
There is fear in your motions of living, your motions of loving are immobile.
Fear is a harsh room mate.

***

42. The old mirror
Was replaced with a new one.
Your red round face was replaced by another face.
It wants to grow old serene, natural,
But beneath the mirror, the years of red color don't let it,
What it remembers, doesn't let it,
And mirrors don't know how to forget.

***

43. The woman in black
Refuses to die.
Maybe she found some good reason to go on getting old,
And strangely, time helps her.
It gives her a day that never happen before,
It gives her a face that never happened before,
As if the raining years softened her.
And it gives her a pain that never happened before,
But even the pain has no death wish.

***

44. The way from the cemetery.
The dead left like a photo from the past: yellow- grey,
Hardly legible.
The living looked at the slow motions of the world:
The sky folding, unfolding.
They looked for the smoothest path out, without black holes, without climbing the uphill of their soul.
They don't remember the thoughts, the thoughts beneath the thoughts.
They are too busy forgetting,
They are busy using the unused time.

***

45.You can feel the presence and the absence,
Their wide feet advancing at the same time.
You can see the clock in everything, even in an hour that doesn't exist.
You can see time, used, unused.
You are human. You invented all these things: the presence, the absence, the clock, the unused time.
You invented also regret, the only eternity available.

***

46. Whatever you see can give you something,
And you have to give something else.
Even a child builds a sand castle, and then it leaves it to the surf.
You see the separations that are in everything from the start.
The child gave you the sand castle, and the separation,
And you give him your gaze. You see. You understand.

***

47. There are things that cannot be packaged and sent,
Like the eyes of the old man who lives and dies at the window.
His gaze tills time deep, slow, diaphanous.
No one can package time, no one can send it.

***

48. You don't realize what words are made of.
The first clay in the clay mouth.
What you remember, what you forget, and yet, yo remember.
You don't realize that each word,
Like an autumn left on your bed, a leaf,
Like a journey on the tracks of a train, without ticket of return,
Could be a hand, pulsating, tumultuous, plunging in your secret body,
Looking for your deep wound.

***

49. Everything can burn, even time.
When your journey smells of burning,
When the wind burns the wild ash,
When a forest burns, red and dark,
They burn time.
They burn a black hole in your astral body, in the infinite.

***

50. Stray dogs remember what you've done.
A hand that gave them water,
A caress on their shaggy head.
We are human.
We invented written memory: a poem, a legend.
We invented forgetting.

***

51. You choose colors,
You spray them on a canvass,
Your cigarette burns a hole in it, a black hole, infinite.
You don't know when you feel it is your masterpiece,
You don't know that a masterpiece is lonely, that you produced loneliness in colors.
Maybe you are also a masterpiece of nature. You are alone.

***

52. Among the small pauses of the diaphanous,
You are not silent,
But you cannot pronounce all these small verbs, all these adjectives.
You are not silent, but life is inarticulate.
You don't know in which chapter you exist,
You don't know what is the phrase that contains you,
The whole of you.

***

53. heroic music is suspicious. It loves wars.
You are human. You don't want to die,
And yet, you get on the train,
The t fruit in your mouth, you bite it.
The slaughtered lamb is slaughtered again, with each bite,
The beautiful fruit.

***

54. He said: truth should be simple, but it is not.
It's what i say, it's my silence.
It is the steel scaffoldings, visible.
It is the dead man that defeated the scaffoldings. Immobile.
Truth is, like everything else, layer beneath layer.
You have to learn to plunge your hand, into its secret body,
To find its deep wound.
To know that truth is the deepest wound, the most beautiful one.

***

55. whispers are candles.
They are lit and they melt.
In your room, the books are not enough for all the whispers.
They melt in your bed.
It is the melting books that left you alone.
Candles are not eternal.

***

56. the circus is a harsh place.
The acrobats, the tight rope, without a safety net, a net of mercy.
The clown plays the animals' tamer. They don't run.
The fur at the end of the show. They know there is a dead animal in each fur.
The clown, a small man, alone in the arena.
The dead animals kill him little by little.

***

57. At night, you cry with your dog,
For the same reasons:
You need love, you need to belong,
The leash on your voice.

***

58. The women gather flowers,
But, one of them gathers other things:
Whatever her eyes see.
She sees a boat drowned in the sand,
The bodies of the drowned full of mud.
Exquisite flower pots. The saddest flowers.

***

59. You are human.
You pretend to be many things:
A window, a door, a picture on the wall.
But things don't pretend. They are what they are.
You sit at the table. You hide under the table what you want to be, what you are,
And the table cloth assumes all the shapes:
An actor in the theatre of a table and a man.

***

60. The voice of the rooster is heard,
The seer, it knows when dawn will come,
Precise, a moment before dawn.
In the market:
The voice of the fruit salesmen next to the rooster.
You trust this voice.

***

61. The rain fogs all the glasses.
In the ground floor the soldier takes off his shoes.
Inside each shoe there is someone barefoot, someone dead.
They don't know the pass word to a truce,
To be alone in the shoes.
Maybe they want to die once alone.

***

62. The child asked; what can I do.
The woman asked nothing.
She repeated her motions so many times.
They know what to do.
And the small separations inside her silence.
She'll leave alone, without the child.

***

63. The office is shabby.
The spiders on the broken glass, like an abstruct picture.
The documents in a deep shelf. They are blind.
And someone says:
I had too many names to remember.
Give me the passport for lost names.

***

64. You fear the day light.
You are too visible, too vulnerable.
You wait for the dark, the arena for the hunter, for the hunted,
And you don't who will raise your head,
Whose shoulders, whose hands.
You don't know who will remember.

***

65. You distance yourself
In order to be close, to see clear.
The diaphanous days, the black holes:
Like hijackers in the cloth of the day.
You don't trust the nature of things.
Things weave themselves in each other,
There are no hijackers that can kidnap their nature ,
There is no hijacker of even a leaf of nature.
It begins where it ends, in nature.
***
The diaphanous days, the black holes:
Moths in the cloth of nature.
There is no excuse for the moths,
Yet, you accept them. Maybe, one day, you'll not only accept,
You'll trust the nature of things.

***
66. Everything happens on the reverse.
The woman closes the curtains when the light turns off,
Who will guard her secrets in the dark, behind the dark.
And the owners of the store have sold everything,
Who will guard the open store.
Who will guard the last thing they can sell: some secrets from a war that was lost long ago.
Who will guard them when they sell themselves.

***


67. It was raining.
Someone had a raincoat,
Someone had an umbrella,
And someone had a window.
And yet, it rained into their life.
Windows leave small pauses between silence and silence,
A rain drop, a single drop, enters,
Semen of clarity, semen of dark clouds.
Semen of truce.

***

68. nothing is continuous, not even the line of the endless.
Each piece of the infinite is divided into small infinites
We don't know how much infinite contains a piece of infinite,
And yet, we look for continuity, amid the discontinuous.
After all, we need to believe in something:
A god without pauses,
The motion of a seed that postpones nothing.

***

69. Insects.
Tiny strange creatures, more ancient than ourselves.
They use the gardens, the homes, their living room, their bed room.
Their erotic motions are too small to notice,
They are too strange to believe they cry for us:
The young creatures who don't die for love.

***


70. The woman of love waits. She doesn't undress,
Tere is still too much light,
She is too visible, therefore, too vulnerable.
The secret recesses of her body, the deep cavities.
She'll sell them to the blind man at her door.
She doesn't know that his fingers invent her in the dark,
Her body, from the beginning, the wound beneath all her gestures.
She'll be visible, more beautiful than ever.

***

71. The little turtle is in a hurry.
He feels the smell of love.
You follow it, you are human, so you are curious,
And you never ran to be on time for love.

***

72. The clay still in your skin, in your hands.
You shape a naked body.
You shape another body inside the body,
The deep recesses, more naked,
The secret cavities, more naked.
You are already human,
You know that one body is not enough to survive,
That one nakedness is not enough to live, to love, to understand.
And even two are not enough. You need more clay to shape the family of people.
It will be enough

***

73. In the country side
Night is diaphanous.
You can see yourself in the clarity:
Human, conqueror, conquered.
You can see the river of the night,
Everything flows, the reversible is irreversible.
You are at the banks of the river, and you are in the river,
The world passes by you, always faster.
No one can stand by the banks of the river, and remain the same.

***

74. Colors, shapes,
Submission to the day.
How quiet people walk on the street of the hours,
They don't know that even the reversible is irreversible,
That tomorrow they'll be someone else, a stranger.
That there may be a red traffic light on the street of the hours. A dead end.

***

75. You photograph the sea,
The diaphanous blue-green.
Even the sea gulls are transparent, white.
You photograph the invisible.
After all, when you photo a human gaze,
The eye out closed, the eye in open,
You photo the invisible,
Each visible is made of the invisible beneath it. You cannot see it.
However, the sound of a tear is visible.

***

76. The flower shop is closed. Dark.
Maybe they'll bury the owner
In a big flower pot.
After all, his roots are the whole space.
His body: a drop of semen, a single drop. Mother of seasons, mother of huge nostalgia.

***

77. children look far,
Like someone who learns how to look at the horizon.
The horizon is never near.
And they have to learn how to measure the distances between the hoorizon and their life.
So, they have no choice.
They follow the horizon.
They are always more distant, more alone.

***

79. The tree in the yard.
You look at the names incised in the bark.
Trees are, like everything else,
Layer beneath layer,
You cannot decipher the name beneath the name,
You cannot decipher the small pause
Between the name and the forgetting.
Between the name and time.

***

80. You wash your hands.
Between your fingers: pauses, windows.
You have the whole sky in your hands,
And the pauses are round, circles ,
Where the infinite plays like a child,
After all, the infinite begins each day from the beginning.

***

81.It's spring in the village.
You say: I'll leave,
As if you said:
Someday I'll come back,
Like the wild grass to the rain.
The deepest return. A promise of roots to survive.

***

AS NIGHT FALLS

1. Nothing has changed,
The birds fly away to a somewhere only they know,
And you wait in all the caves, inside and out,
For people to come. The caves bruise you.
You wait for the closeness to invent the warmth.
One day, you may invent the fire,
And you don't know what will the closeness do.

***

2. You measure the words you want to say, the pauses, the full stops,
But the house seems like a place after the storm:
Clothes, cats, no people.
You have no choice.
You measure what you can afford telling yourself.
Words can leave you bankrupt,
They can become like money: paper.
You have to remember that the season you have: words, phrases,
Is the season you lost.

***

3. You sell everything:
The sunshine, birds, the statues,
You invent something ancient: cut head, dust.
You invent the girls: more naked than dressed. The girls: a toy of life.
You have no choice, you have to sell more goods.
You sell your childhood, the biggest product, the most beautiful, the most hurting,
You sell the toy train of a child, the train that brought you here.
You can go nowhere. You are immobile like someone who has no future .

***

4. The sky inside the barbed wire.
On the ground: turtles, lizards,
Patient, stubborn, invisible beneath their skin.
We owned nothing.
We owned everything:
The sky, the turtle beneath our stubbornness, the invisible beneath each visible.

***

5. The passing theatre group was in a hurry,
Things, faces bodies fell from the wagons.
It left behind the rope walker, the rubber woman,
And the clown.
Clowns understand the visible that becomes slowly invisible,
I don't know if he understood the wall behind me, the holes in the wall.
It was invisible when I came here. It floated somewhere beneath my conscience.
It becomes each day more visible.

***

6. On the wall: slogans, the names of the dead, publicities for kitchens.
Time flows in everything,
The writings melted into each other, close as a breath, illegible as a breath.
But at night, the blind violinist sees them, the dreamers, the sleep walkers,
The artists of the invisible.

***

7. The conversation with the long words was dispersed.
The silence measured the empty seats,.
The unused time, the unused words, small, patient,
Didn't remain in the air.
They were the only ones that were taken along.
They were small enough to be close to the truth. They were immense.

***

8. Summer night.
A good time for the strangers to sleep on the sidewalks of life
In a card board box.
A good place to die, secret, quiet.
There was no unused sadness left.

***

9. In the afternoon
Girls grow old suddenly.
They sit on the front steps
With the other women,
Withering quietly, patiently.
They are busy with the small talk
The ones that keeps the world going.
Keeping the world going is hard work, it adds time to your time.

***

10. The red nocturnal animals, a halo of blood.
Vultures patrolling the curves of earth.
Everything is a circular measure,
It begins and ends in the same equator.
It doesn't begin, it doesn't end.

***


11. The big recognition was recognized. It was a train. The station zero.
There were other trains too:
Words that lead you to the nowhere,
Steps that don't know the way home.
For the blind violinist, the invisible is a song,
The invisible is the unsaid, mysterious, diaphanous.
It is a hand, walking into the map of your body,
Looking for your secret wound.
It is midnight. You are at the twelfth station of the train.

***

12. He had never time enough to wait.
The watch was the king in the kingdom of numbers,
After all everything is a number, even life.
It turned him in the secret gears,
But, he couldn't come out of the gears, the way a bird cannot come out of the sky.
He remembered and forgot
What time it was in his life.

***

13.The village celebrates.
The huge meal, but the spice was not enough, it burned nothing, not the memory, not the forgetting.
The wild grass, the turtles, patient, stubborn, are on time for the feast.
The stray cats that see in the dark, in the dark inside the dark, see the blood.
And the murdered hog.
They pierced your veins. They were open at the wall.

***

14. You leave the house at twilight.
Behind you: the woman.
She feels the loneliness is here, yet far.
She speaks to herself, the way one speaks to a friend: her life.
She doesn't know how rare she is, how priceless,
How few have made their life a friend.
You cannot put a price tag on the priceless.

***

15. The smoke dreams, like us, the sky,
It is innocent, no matter how dark it is.
Maybe wee judge things too harshly,
We shoot them at the wall because they are suspicious:
Too dark, too silent, the eyes too tall, the shoes too low, time consumed itself in these shoes.
We shoot them, without a shield of mercy. The closed eyes.

***

16. You know the place,
The smell of a childhood.
The white washed foot prints on the ground,
The white washed gazes, they are somewhere far.
The afternoons
When the girls suddenly age,
Their dolls play with love.

***

17. The afternoon
When boys suddenly age.
You were not ready for your age,
You were not ready for your body, it discovers you. You are a map, you obey.
Maybe it's better to age at twilight, slowly, patiently.
To let you discover the secret recesses of your body, to love them.
To feel they are holy. A gift.

***

18. You made a hole in the sky: a bullet.
A bird falls from the hole,
Its veins open, like innocence.
Its beak closed.
It pierces you through the hole you opened,
Like a blade of nature.
You are not ready to find the whole nature in a bird, to be sliced.
A man alone in the arena of nature. You lose. Thumb down.

***

19. You cannot find the poem,
It has to find you.
So, you have to walk, like a modern Diogenes, with a torch.
The poems see you, they may follow you,
Even the darkest poem loves light.

***

20. The bird tears the air.
The wounded tears his skin with his shoes.
The one who were killed like an animal, with a knife in their cry, are invisible.
Only the cry remains visible. It holds the knife, it tears the silence.
Innocence is pain. You need power to be innocent.

***

21.The bathroom, the water flows on your tiles, a waterfall .
You undress in front of the mirror.
The mirror measures the dimensions of your bones
The depth of your secret recesses, the height of your age.
It guesses what time it is in your life.
Your eyes tied to the mirror, slaves of themselves, of what they think, of what they imagine.
You don't see the wild water flooding your floors, like time.
There is no boat of mercy.

***

22. Something was stolen, silently, something precious.
There were witnesses everywhere,
But we are not suspicious, or maybe we don't look deep enough.
One day they may steal the sun, and we wouldn't notice.

***

23. Distant dreams.
They come closer, further,
The sound is a promise, a threat.
For you, risk is not an option.
You cut your ears, like a modern Van Gogh.
You are safe.

***

24. He said:
I left the battle field.
I took with me only my shadow.
I left my gun, to someone who was maimed, the cut arms.
I could have been called a hero or a coward,
But I simply didn't want to die,
I simply didn't know for whom I should die.

***

25. In the cafe
You face the new moon.
You want to make a wish,
But the night ages men suddenly.
You are too tired to make a wish, too tired to wish,
Too tired to drink the moon in your glass.
You are immobile, as if the future didn't exist.

***

26. In the room; fallen leaves.
There is no time to count what time it is in a fallen leaf.
There is no time to learn the art of loss: life.
There is no time for bibles.
You don't realize that living teaches itself, learns from itself,
The only manual available .

***

27. You look out of the window,
Like someone who wants to choose something,
But all you see is the void. The void, semen of stars. An empty semen of who you are, of what you remember.
You choose always, even when you don't.
The void chooses you.
It will magnifies your empty semen, you can forget only what you never remembered: who you are
It will magnify all your silences,
But you never knew what your silence says.

***

28. People come from everywhere
For a small, humble ,generous celebration.
Even time doesn't know its date,
But the people know something that the infinite: time, doesn't know.
What time it is in their joy,
What time it is in their closeness.

***

29.The anticipation of an evening.
We always anticipate something.
A raindrop in the fingers of a girl,
The rainbow of a touch,
And the open air of the world,
It closes nothing.
The statues somewhere in the sky are visible: the gods.
They are beautiful.
They are a theatre of giants, of a legend, an anticipation.
We watch the theatre, the stage, the actors the heroes, the big motions,
That make our life more real.

***

30. He said:
Take care of the houses.
Houses wither when no one sees them.
Remember: the holes in the sky are ancient:
Stones, arrows.
Be careful.
Gods fall from the holes again and again.
No god is ready for the earth, they wither like a house.
They leave the sky an empty tavern. No miracles, no eternities in the menu.

***

31. The simplicity of the fence, half open,
It closes nothing.
The white wash is clear. It's blinding
It is strange,
When the clarity is too clear, too wide,
We don't know where to look.
We lose our eyes, we find them, we lose them again,
Like the longing when it is too close, too wide,
We lose it, we find it, we lose it again.

***

32. Nights are no always silent.
The half moon in the window is a whole cry.
The two old bodies, the old springs of the old bed
Are rusted, they squeak, they scream.
The steps of something postponed, somewhere far,
The distances magnify the sigh of whatever was postponed. It is too late in the sigh.

***

33. People come and go,
They salute the coming, they salute the going.
After all, life is the art of gaining, the art of loss.
And whatever we think is a small equation.
The unthinkable waits for us.
There are not enough numbers to count it.

***

34. Summers may be rough. The maddened light.
The winds melts the light, they rule it,
They blow the dresses of women, a colossal balloon,
The string thin white, like legs.
The wind undresses the old bones of the old.
Old bones are like us: they like to chatter.
The secret surface where everything is whispered,
Our whole story in a small talk of old bones.

***

35. Tonight, the moon rises erotically.
Tonight, the moon is fertile,
The black holes in its body are secret deep recesses.
After all, light is born secretly, silently,
Before it grows visible.

***

36. The rough shawl over the night.
The shawl shines, the salt: salty diamonds.
Ships come and go,
They are always far, they are always near,
And an old man looking,
He wants to bring something, something naked, close.
Closeness is now the only power available, the only gift.

***

37. The window open to the sea
Is not safe.
People drown in such sea, like the rivers.
Yet, they leave part of themselves seated on a sofa.
You cannot measure the dimension of what was drown,
Of what was left.

***

38. Salty summer, undisciplined.
The sea drowning in the houses,
The houses drown in the sea,
And the girls grow old suddenly, their age drowns,
And all that's left is the forgetting,
It will protect them from what they remember,
Memory is a drop of semen, a single drop, that carries all the ages of the sea in its deep recesses.
It is not easy to feel suddenly the old ages: the weariness of old salt, the dying semen ,
The absences inside a womb, visible, vulnerable.
Forgetting may be a wide palm. It soothes us.

***

39.You leave on your stairs unseen suns, unseen time,
They magnify the absence.
The distances between the stairs and the summers you remember:
The sea you used, the taste of salt you used,
Are always further.
You are too weary to remember, to use what you remember. It walks towards you, always more.

***

40. You have nothing left, no words, not even the silence.
And yet, the repetitions remain.
You repeat the motions of living, they remember you.
Repetitions are a power,
They protect you. They repeat you so many times,
That they know you, they know where you are, where you go,
They know where to find you, in which word, in which silence,
They make you repeat your life, always closer to yourself.

***

41. The vacationers magnify the sea, the beach, the sounds,
And yet, they are the silent ones.
The void around them is grows, each day from the beginning.
Maybe they need the big distances around them
In order to let their motions move alone, unhindered, the silence big.
Maybe the closeness is fear.
Maybe for them there is no regret, no loss.

***

42. The swimmers left, and the salty chatter.
You are alone.
But the sea, the sun never left.
You are never alone
When you let them melt inside you,
When you feel the world, the huge mosaic of small infinites , as close as a floor,
As close as your bare foot on the floor.

***

43. The mule is in the field.
A loneliness, patient, honest, stubborn.
Its shadow falls from its belly,
An owning of mercy
For the insects in the soil.
There is sun in its patience.

***

44. The blue of the sky is not the outmost color.
There are the wide hands of the old, the open palm is black, sun burned, soil burned.
And the black cat is not an omen. It is a silky black, cuddly, like any other cat, hungry like any the stray life.
The white washed wall where they shot people, is black, as black ac the mouth of a gun.

***

45. large white rooms,
Where all the postponements didn't change us,
As if time was immobile.
Where everything forgave us,
As if the unused time could be still used,
It could enlarge our motions of living,
Always further, always closer.

***

46. The humble light. Simplicity.
The smell of something clean.
Simplicity is never simple,
And the cleaness is the feat of small things.
You look at the mirror,
You don't belong here.
In your hands: bullets,
The smell of war.
There is no clean war available.

***

47. You forget a shovel in your hands,
The earned innocence.
Innocence is not a gift, it is hard work.
It may be shot at the wall
And all its guilt is the honest, patient shovel in its hand.
Shovels don't go to war, they believe in life.

***

48. You left.
I wait for you among the heliotropes,
Ii wait for another kind of sun.
I wait for a sun that will burn the distances of time,
That will burn the small infinites that become always bigger.
It will bring you close, like smoke, like a bridge over the absence.

***

49. Night.
People come, sudden, unmovable.
You have no choice,
You give them bread and water.
You remember vaguely, you know the faces.
They shot you at the wall.
It is too late to eat,
It is too late for revenge,
It is too late for forgetting
We come from extinctions.
You have to remember.

***

50.
The white washed sun,
Your white washed gaze.
In the forest, men kill animals, with a knife in their cry.
Someone is busy with all the meanings of the meaningless.
He tries to make the impossible possible,
To white wash the cry.

***

51. big ships
Carry people like a flock of voices,
To a somewhere.
You don't sit on the chez long of the deck,
You sit in the carpenter's shop,
The small patient motions that make your hands wise:
The longest journey.

***
52. You find a mask, discolored, deformed.
One hole for the mouth, it looks like a cry.
Fallen at the feet of the sea.
There are no masks in the sea.
Masks don't survive naked things: the water, the salt,
The drowning of a cry. Cries drown always naked.

***

53.In the afternoon,
Everything becomes smaller.
Small patient postponements,
Small patient defeats.
One chair is enough.
The only thing that becomes always bigger,
Is the space you need around you,
In order to be safe,
In order to let the illusion of freedom to stretch its ten fingers, ten solitudes.

****

54. The divers raised ancient statues from the bottom of the sea.
Strange men, the salt made them shine.
One day, they'll arrest them,
The statues they raise lost all the wars, with themselves, with others.
Broken arms, shattered heads, missing legs.
They need badly glory
In order to go to the war before the last.

***

55. You find a motorbike in the middle of the street.
You don't know how to use it,
You don't know what time it is in its motion.
After all, the motorbike stores in itself
Small machines of time: velocities,
Moments that end before they begin.
And you carry already a machine of time in each motion, in each word, in each silence.
That's enough.

***

56. The floor seems like a chess board.
You pass to the white,
You pass to the black.
In the trenches: a simple soldier.
He doesn't know everything was a game.
He doesn't know a game can kill.

***

57. You go for a walk,
And the details walk with you:
A cloud in a balcony, the white washed snow in the light.
It is strange how few details, a square, a triangle, a circle,
Can be the outmost artists, real, surreal. To invent the algebra of the world.


How everything adds itself, like a mosaic of shapes,
The equation stars are made of. The equation of beauty.

***

58. August.
The night over the altar of the church.
The night, and all I confess:
The sweat that melts my hands, black ,sun burned
The black gestures of men, ten fingers of coal in their motions.
Everything will be burned again.
The fire purifies all the impurities.
There is no black purity, there is no black innocence.

***

59. The giirls are here,
A dance of colors.
One day they'll be farmers of life.
The air is diaphanous, too diaphanous
To see the farmer of time,
In the dance, in the colors, in the bodies that long to discover themselves,
To discover the deep recesses, the life of a seed, after so many lives.

***

60. You let the unsaid pass through you, defeat you,
The way the arena passes through you, unsaid, the shining muscles invisible.
Your fear is silent. Your fear is loud, it is chocking.
They wait for the body to fall, the last gladiator.
Their thumb is red. Their thumb is down.

***

61. The big duck flew away.
In the tavern they look for another victim,
Winged or wingless.
After all, they buy human hands for breakfast,
The broken clay in the fingers:
Repeating a receipt that came from very far,
The first- hand cuisine, ever.

***

62. The apple on the table.
The worm hides inside. Up to the last bite, up to the point of no return.
The worm is innocent, a quiet farmer of earth.
It doesn't know how it arrived
To the middle of a war:
The red apple was beautiful.

***

63. So much the invisible.
Each invisible has the visible inside it.
You try to draw the visible,
All you can do is draw things you understand, you feel,
It makes them visible.
You draw a mule. You understand the mule:
The patience, the stubbornness, the motions of the useful, the innocence beneath the eyes,
A heap of invisible inside the visible.
You ride this mule for years, for a life time.
You see it.

***

64.Everything seems second hand.
As if it was a memory of someone else.
Nothing can fit your dimensions,
Everything is too tight, most of all, the silence.
Maybe it's fear. There is no second hand fear.
You don't know how to tame first hand things: the daily fear.
You don't know how to use a first hand life.

***

65. There is no manual for living,
But, the useful can advise you.
It can tell you how use all the unused time.
And something you forgot, something that came from far:
How to do things with your hands,
The motion of the hands is clean,
It gives clarity to the motions of your thoughts,
To your motions of living.
These clarities may walk in each gesture, in each gaze,
Each day, from the beginning.

***

66. Trust is a strange creature.
It is innocent,
But you should know how to use it:
There are hand shakes, studied as a crime,
There are oaths studied as a crime.
Innocence is hard work,
And using it is a power.

***

67. The old women sit on the front stair.
The small talk is never useless,
The small details of everything,
The small delays that are always on time,
The lamp post when it rains shadows,
And what the old bodies of love remember,
Drip innocence.
Everything is indispensable,
Everything is close as a sigh.

***

68.time began long before we began,
It changed us.
There were beasts that awakened in the caves outside, inside.
They bled the substance of time inside us,
There were the forests where we hunted the animals of pain,
We caught the fish of time in the river of time,
And the red fruit, a life of a seed after so many lives, in our deepest bodies
It made us what we are.

***

69. The black rain over the white washed church,
Into the windows with the pure icons.
The plaster peels off like scratching nails.
Everything is reality. Everything is poetry.

70. someone left on a table in the cafe
A grey blanket, tied with a rope.
The people don't want to be responsible for anything,
Not even for themselves,
The way to human is long.
They were not there when the blanket was left,
They were not there when the bones fell on the table.
They were somewhere else. They are innocent.

***

71. The old woman yawned.
Her toothless mouth was lit.
She repeated again and again her name.
She was alone,
And the name is a faithful companion.

***

72. In summer
People grow suddenly old.
The light is so lit that it is heavy. A roof of shining metal.
The things we don't see: a bird, a spray of sea,
Blindness makes us heavy.
Maybe we loved too little ,
Love is a strange creature, when we love too little, we become heavy.
But we have no choice:
We grow old from one heaviness to the other.
Gravity is a killer.

***

73. He said:
Everything is an alibi:
To be naked, to be dressed, to speak, to be silent, and poetry is a useful alibi.
He said:
There are no masks.
Everywhere are the faces we need in order to live.
Poetry is a face, even when it feels like a mask.
It is the face in which you can speak, you can pause, you can remember, you can forget.
He said; poetry is your failure,
There is no word that is a substitute for life, no phrase.
Life is the most diaphanous, the most secret poem, the saddest.
It writes itself in all the motions of your loving, of your thoughts, of what you feel.
It invents itself, each day from the beginning,
The way a masterpiece does.

***

74. The traffic light on the way to Ithaca is red.
The lost ones give directions,
Time violates the red light,
And a woman stands there,
She wants to be violated,
To arrive to her own Ithaca:
A belly full of love.

***

75. He exhaled the light simple as a breath.
But light is stubborn. It leaves traces. It knows where to find itself.
He wanted to draw the shadows, to see the dark, the dark inside the dark,
He didn't know that shadows fall from the light like a fruit.
He didn't know that shadows are the enigma of light.

***

76. You sign the date, the hour of your poem,
The transformation of a god, of time, of life, here, now.
You forget that time transforms by itself each fraction of a moment,
That life transforms by itself each syllable into motion,
That gods are as fixed as a stone. They go nowhere.
Who will guard you in the transformation,
Who will guard the poem, a red tear of dawn,
From the date, the hour of its dying.

***

77. In the dark
The house was filled with ships.
Nights bring the sea to your feet.
In the room: a wild bird tied. It drowns,
Until the old woman with a huge broom
Sweeps the sea.
It has to return to where it came from.
The bird is salty, the sea inside it. They save each other.

***

78. The sea is everywhere,
In the air, in the walls, in the window.
It closes everything, like winter.
But memories are stubborn,
They are an octopus, sharks
In whatever you remember.
After all, you came from the sea.
There are not enough numbers to count
The depth of a memory, the depth beneath a memory.

***

79. The day, diaphanous, up to the end of the horizon.
Time dips in the body of the day, it is diaphanous.
For a moment we see the small gears
Turning, turning,
We see time. A gift. The sadness.
We walk towards the diaphaneity
Always more, always deeper.

***

80. everything is layer beneath layer,
The colors of the earth.
You look for the deepest layers, the deepest colors,
The most anonymous,
In order to understand the future.

***

81. Death is everywhere,
In the city, in the shed,
In a newborn, white masked elf,
In rebel seasons.
Life is a living shroud over everything.
Our naked life.

***

82. You played with words,
And then, with bullets,
But bullets don't know the rules of a game.
You were shot by an ignorant bullet.
The words were buried with you, and the pauses inside the words.
Only the shadows play over the stone.
Shadows are playful, no matter what the poets say.


***

83. He got used to the delays of time.
He knew that nothing will be restored: the sofa, the chair,
Without time inside them, without what time remembers,
That nothing will shatter
Without time inside it, without what time knows .
His motions of living were patient,
They were stubborn ,as stubborn as silence.

***

84 Nights are possessive.
When they come, everything belongs to the night.
What you think, the words, the silence,
The shadows magnify the dark,
The moon dust falling,
And the old man at the door,
He dies, like everyone, each night from the beginning.

***



LATER

1. The open door is a crack, nothing more.
It lets in a yard, a chair.
It lets in the visible, the thinkable.
The invisible, the unthinkable are too far, too near.

***

2. At night
The shadows shape something invisible, a translucent shoe,
But you can hear the footsteps on the stairs.
You never knew that shadows are sound, that sound is a shadow.

***

3. In the room: a bee, the buzz.
It is farming the world, the exquisite nectar,
Like you, my beloved,
Farming our life, you plow my hours,
You give me the life of a pollen, a life after so many lives.

***

4. The light suspects nothing.
Only time knows
How death mingles with each moment.
It is always a season of death.

***

5. The mirror magnifies the sounds:
Cicadas, children.
You never knew that sound is a mirror.

***

6. The little orchard.
The mule, stubborn good natured,
Grazes the moon in the grass.
Animals feel the moon in their mouth.
They grow quiet.

***

7. Small island school.
The light house nearby is closed
You have to learn how to count the dimensions of a silence,
The distances inside a lost ship.

***

8. Fertile night.
The insects among the thighs of the stars.
The growing leaves have a sound.
And the beautiful moon: it multiplies itself
In the water, in the grass, on the walls.

***

9. You: a time runner,
The daily marathon of living,
And you return: a mountain runner.
You are at the peak of your silence, at the peak of your pain.

***

10. You'll treasure the night,
You'll treasure the silence that speaks.
You'll treasure the circular dance of the birds around the moon.
At night, the flight of the birds is taller,
They are moon lovers, feathers of moon light.

***

11. You open the door,
The cold wind enters,
It breaks everything: glasses, voices,
Everything except your silence.
It was immobile. It was the best motion, the motion of roots.

***

12. The hand, the long fingers
Putting out the fire beneath your skin.
The next morning, the breeze healed quietly your burn.
You didn't know it carried behind it desert winds, lonely.
Another fire,

***

13. The snails you gathered.
You look at a snail
Out of its shell, out of reality,
Unprotected, like you,
Like you, it doesn't know what time it is in its life.

***

14. In the air:
Star dust, salt, time.
A man in an open window.
He says yes to the world, yes to life,
Yes to the winds that leave, they make room for new ones.

***

15. There are too many denials.
We don't confess. We were not here,
At the crime of the century,
And our only witnesses are the broken window,
The sounds break in the glass,
And the boys with the erection by our window.
The erection blinds them.
We are guilty.

***

16. The night is made of old stories,
Quiet deaths, frozen leaves from the silence.

The rooster cried, a moment before dawn,
As if it had the clock of suns inside it.
And the train tracks begin running far,
Much further than the train.

17. Humble hours.
Rumors splashed with sun and salt.
Secret conversations
Between walls and the night.
Further,
People, fish, statues of heroes,
They stand with the sea at their feet,
And everything is made of time.

***

18. The old house. The small lamp.
How far the circle enlarges.
A siege of light, of the birds, of the day,
Of the black spots here and there.
It is the circular dance of time, real as magic.

***

19. Evening.
The boys; the erections suddenly are there,
There is no unused love. It is all used for love,
And yet, they are not ready for love,
For the secret recesses, deep, humid, where time becomes infinite.

***

20. Eminent night.
What an acceptance, what fear.
We accept what threatens us,
Because fear is a power,
It may be the secret rage, the big tamer, the last beast, the roar.

***

21. The old house.
The yellow weary grass.
A family tree on the wall,
Leaves fall at the feet of the wall, prostated.
You gather them like a small scavenger of leaves,
Like the big scavengers: history, time, the infinite.

***

22. The vespers; shadows on the wall.
The sound is a candle, molten wax. It is beautiful.
The voices breath time, they make it deeper.
The voices flow towards you, always more,
And they flow far, they long for something endless.

***

23. The sky, the distant sea.
The lorry full of suns: lemons.
You are alone, you belong to nothing.
You belong to everything.

***

24. The sky: shy, affable..
The nakedness everywhere;
The sun, the fields, the motion somewhere far.
The picture of a perfect day, perfect nudity.
You dream of perfection.
You are not sure is you are naked enough,
If you are naked in your dream,
If you are naked beneath your clothes.

***

25. vertical lines; the names of the killed.
Horizontal lines: the distances between life and life.
You draw small squares, the picture of a chess game,
But there are not enough numbers to count death, there are so many deaths in the death of a life.
The chess game of history is still unsolved.
Remember: it is check mate or death.

***

26. The trees giants as a threat.
A flag, full of bullet holes. Also symbols may die.
Inside: the clock of a church stopped somewhere far.
In the fountain: the blood of the wounded. Also the blood is full of bullet holes.
Blood is not a symbol, no matter what the patria says, what the poets say.
It is a drop, a single drop in the deep recesses of a body,
Semen of life, semen of pain.
And you don't know who will guard the drop,
Who will guard the deep body,
Who will guard life, pain.

***

27. You walk in the island,
Among the crowd of words, of things.
You feel the humbleness of everything.
Nothing is big except the humbleness.
Nothing is eternal. Everything is eternal.
The smell of the morning,
The black holes in the smell: old bullets.

***

28. You speak. You cheat,
As if remorse never existed.
You walk towards the sea,
And the storm, the raining angels of rage
Are real.
And there is no umbrella for remorse. It doesn't exist.

***

29. You know you postponed something,
The silver night you left unused,
The time you left unused is breathing on your naked neck.
Between the fear of passion, and passion,
You postponed something, something living,the beginning of a gaze,
The moment passed, everything changed.
And you don't know how to postpone yourself.

***

30. The times are hard,
And yet, you eat , you drink, you sing with people.
Each sip enlarges your mouth, each bite enlarges the void in your mouth. the black holes insatiable .
In the yard: a tree. It is beautiful. The roots: a corpse, the shroud of earth is warm.

***

31. The deep voices remained
Where they honored the beauty,
Where they measured the depth of the beautiful.
In a corner of the picture;
A wall. Dead men.
There are not enough numbers to measure the depth, the roots of the wall.

***

32. After the prayers
I saw the old women.
Their motions of living were another prayer.
They gathered the wheat in a sack.
A mule waited, patient, stubborn, innocent,
Like a prayer,
Like their motions of life.

***

33. Everything is unfinished, like life.
Also the beautiful face,
Time continued to walk on the face,
And it continued to change,
Slowly, patiently, courageously.
You didn't remember her,
She was now beautiful in another way.
Her beauty made her face as close as a breath, as the inevitable.

***

34. In the window,
Your face: an animal.
Your hands: two animals.
You killed, with a knife in a cry.
Four animals. One innocence.

***

35. The birds flew away
Like a messenger of triumph, the triumph beneath the defeat.
You plucked their wings,
And then you taught them how to fly.
They flew on their secret deepest feathers, the last ones.
They wanted to fly far, further than pain.

***

36. The snow man melted slowly,
But, at times,
A statue masqueraded as a snow man appeared.
Only time can melt the stone,
Slowly, patiently, inevitable.
And you don't know if time can plunge its hand, tumultuous, vibrating,
Into your secret body, to find your deep wound,
To melt the stone in the wound.

***

37. Christmas.
The cheap boarding house.
The cold is always colder.
The tree lit.
Leaves fall from the tree:
Forbidden whispers. Forbidden ears.
They fly to the side -walks where forbidden bodies, forbidden lives, walk.
They are beautiful.

***

38. The snow flakes,
Like pieces of torn paper.
Words give shape to the petals of paper.
You have to solve the delicate puzzle
In order to know what they say.
The snow flakes fall, patient, little by little,
They give shape to a secret quiet,
To a moment where time is generous.

***

39. You begin, each day from the beginning,
To live, to love.
It is strange,
To live each day from the beginning, to be so beautiful.
You are human.
Your hands big, scarred like roots, like an animal in pain,
Each day from the beginning.

***

40. He said;
I am a citizen of life.
I belong to everything,
I'll smuggle the borders,
Like a rope walker over the road.
In my hands: a mirror with a drop of dawn in it, a single drop, semen of light, semen of life.
I'll carry the mirror.

***

41. They go down,
One holds an ancient statue,
The other: a bronze ax.
They came from very far.
They know nothing about gravity.
The stair case cannot hold so many infinites.
It falls. It is forgotten.
Maybe, one day, it will be ancient enough to remember,
Ancient enough to be real.

***

42. The sea is everywhere: in the air, in the ship.
Horses wet their feet in the sea.
Suddenly you discover the moon in a corner of silence. It's beautiful,
Like a half naked child whose body discovers him for the first time.

***

43. The white washed sun,
Your white washed gaze,
An ecstasy in white.
You walk with air in your steps, almost weightless,
You almost fly.
You walk always further, to some distant promise,
You walk always closer to yourself,
And you know there are no departures, no arrivals.

***

44. We found the sea again,
In a small boat.
And we found the sky
In a bird,
In the quiet rain, pieces of sky softly falling,
And in the smoke rising high,
From a fire that began before we began.

***

45. You commented on big things
With small words, small gestures,
Motions as inevitable as a breath.
It was beautiful.
It was hard work.

***

46. The diaphanous day.
The big forgetting that absolves you from yourself.
The memories will come later.
Your life has nothing fascinating about it
Until it becomes a memory.

***

47. You fashion a body.
The old hat is the head,
The red straw makes it you. The red straw is a secret wound. It bleeds.
You sit, you feel the distances from what you were,
You don't want the red straw hat to be you.
You don't want to remember, you don't want to bleed..

***

48. There was nothing to say.
There was nothing to listen to.
There were pauses between the words.
There were pauses between the silences.
Time is sand.
You feel you sink.
You look for a reason to live, to save yourself.

***

49. You named the opening and the closing;
Beauty.
You don't know that a master hides his weaknesses,
And the grand master uses them in his art.
You'll never know what beauty is,
Strong in its weakness, nameless, the open veins.
It makes you bleed.

***

50. They painted the barbed wire in sand color.
It was an ambush for those who were more tender than life,
For those who were tougher than life,
They were both stamped with the same stamp: pain
As if tenderness and the tough were one truth,
The same sea in their veins, the quiet salt, the wild surf.

***

51. The lizard on the wall,
Tthe patience oof the wall.
Nothing is continuous,
The lizard, the wall, the patience, time.
Everything is made of small infinites,
Dividing, dividing,
And you, a human,
You come, in your head , one pat, one god, one heaven.
You don't notice how they divide, how they divide you.

***

52. You pass your hand on the grass,
The green smell.
You know that everything is uncertain,
That there is certainty also in the uncertain.
The rain will come when it is time.
The sadness will come when it is time.
The uncertainties and the certainties are one truth,
They weave themselves in each other,
The delicate cloth of the world, the toughest.

***

52. The evening deepens the colors.
The barbed wire is black.
The light tower flashes and un-flashes.
It cannot see you. It is programmed to see the dark,
The black beast in its dreams

***

53. You listen to the flags,
Flags are not silent.
You listen to the lines on the map,
The fury, the rage of a line.
Somewhere in the future
A geyser waits,
Patient, exact, immense,
In the middle of everything.
There will be no seas left, only one ocean.
Lines, flags don't swim,
They cannot shout with a mouth full of salt.
They are silent.

***


THE WHISTLE OF A TRAIN

***

You watch, you measure, in order to see,
But you don't see,
You don't know how to bring the visiible inside you.
The sun delays at the window,
Your voice delays in the room.
The steps outside delay your ears.
The engines of heat in all this sun: black tar. They delays the light.
Someone says: lets add all the delays,
Let's give time to time,
Let's give time to the details, the small patient motions of living.
Let's give enough time to the longest journey: home.

***

The paths cris-cross each other,
And time flows in everything,
The seasons of time change, change.
The ancient names, the tall ones cross the new ones.
The new names have another dimension,
A line of names , shy, strong,
That travels in the journey of names.
You said: I miss my eyes. The eyes that miss look at me.
You said: I want to see big things. Time rolling down the abyss inside a stone,
The big noise of stone.
To see the big shadows falling from the hands on Sundays.
Sundays widen time. Everything is big on Sundays, the weariness, the small truce with the world, that is never really small
Even the journey from day to day is fatigue.
You said; I want to see your big motions of living, closed in stubbornness,
Closed in time.
You don't divide your motions in hours, in days,
You don't divide your big love, as big as the beginning of a gaze, the beginning of a touch.
You don't divide yourself.

***

The island is the story of stone,
The big time on the shoulders of a rock,
The stones that turn on a secret axis to look at the sea,
To see the seasons of the sun, each season: an eternity, each season: mortal.
Each season made of the substance of beauty.
Here, when you throw a stone, it falls out of history. Here, stones are history.
They remember the legend of heroes, the big names.
They remember the shipwrecks of ancient cities,
Men made stone ships, always bigger, they made stone cities, always bigger.
Everything was heavier than gravity, heavier than time.
They had no choice: they drowned.
The common people in the island
Don't know the ancient names,
That's why they talk, natural, simple, to the stones.

***

The night is like that night when you left.
In the forest of the night, the breath of birds is deep,
As deep as flight.
It sips the moon in the water,
It pierces holes in the moon, to drink the deepest light.
In the house: the woman, naked, with the breath of ironed sheets around her,
Her face is open to another dimension, secret. She is alone in her eyes.
There is only one shadow:
She found no longer a reason to love.

***

Autumn in the island is lonely.
There are too many departures, the arrivals are too few to measure, to know if they exist.
You don't know where they go, why they go,
Even the jelly fish have their own journey, to love.
You don't know what things mean:
The departures that didn't part,
The arrivals that didn't arrive.

***

The times are suspicious.
Everything can happen in your sleep,
The soldiers running towards you,
They are cold, the guns are wrapped in a blanket.
A distant silence that solidifies over the voices,
And yet, you don't know what you can say
That doesn't have silence in it.

***

It is autumn, the season of shadows.
People grow old in these shadows,
And the shadows grow old inside them.
The shadows are cris-crossed by light,
Like a truce,
The big truce between light and shadows.
A woman comes downstairs,
By her: the silence that remained on the leaves of summer,
The silence is the shadow of voices.
The kites, the wires in their armpits, are a toy of life.
How silent they fly over the nigh, over the pain in the wires.
They have no ticket of return.
The house.
The child doesn't know where he goes when he sleeps.
Someone takes off his shoes, someone covers his sleep,
Someone takes him, barefoot and helpless,
To the other side of time.

***

The rain seems close.
The wandering sales men gather their things,
They gather their hands, whatever is precious.
The fatigue spreads quietly, like a silennt floor.
People take their shadows for a walk,
And the postponements that began.
Between one delay and another, they die.
They cannot postpone time. The moment passes. Everything changes.
Maybe it will rain, but you'll be different.
Maybe you'll dig a hole in the clouds, like a child, to see god.
Maybe you'll have a paper boat, you'll discover the sea in a puddle,
Maybe you'll invent new distances between the raindrops,
You'll invent new solitudes.

***

The big trains left.
Whispers are spent, whispers are candles, how easily they melt.
The way to summer is closed.
You accept the cold, the rain,
You accept the bird dead in the glass.
The shadows in the house are heavy,
They have the gravity of years inside them.
You think of doing something:
Closing the house from the world,
Closing yourself from the world.
The silence is immense
You can hear a chair that fell years ago,
You hear the saliva in the mouth of a child.
Who will guard the chair, the saliva of a child , solidified in your silence.
Who will guard the world that rains inside you.

***

Twilight is the hour of loss.
In the dark, the departures leave, leave,
In the memories, in the dreams, at home.
Someone light the room,, the light magnifies the shadows.
Faces carve themselves on the shadows, they are translucent,
As if they never left, as if they never arrived.
You watch. You remember.
Departures are in your genes.

***

Autumn.
The clouds chase each other, like a child,
Like a game of celestial bandits.
The rain, pieces of sky fall. Remember it. Remember it.
Memories are a place to return to,
They plow your mud hands, and the mud plows them.
They carve other dimensions,
They carve the life of a seed, after so many lives.
An old woman, bent, as if she was closer to herself, as if she heard herself better.
If everything would have happened earlier,
It could be a song, it could be something to say.
But everything is unfinished, like life,
Everything is in the middle of something.
The night comes slowly.
No one is ready for his night.
The small incomes:
The memories, the old shoes, the words, the tired sweat, the silences, the seed,
All in moth balls in the big box:
We don't realize how big they are,
We don't realize they are enough to pay the debt to life.

***

The light comes slowly in the big dawn.
The light come slowly in the small dawn.
Time may be generous.
Someone said; the light used to be big, too big,
I loved the small light, tender as a whisper.
He said; who will guard the small light, the tenderness, the whisper.
Who will guard the ten fingers of tenderness.
Truth grows big in the small fingers. Who will guard the truth.
I miss the whisper.

***
We cannot remember everything accurately.
We delayed even the memories for later.
We didn't know that no one can delay time, love, a seed.
When the moment passes, everything changes,
Nothing is the same, not even the sameness..
We don't know where to find ourselves,
We don't know if we want to find ourselves, each moment, from the beginning.
Change is hard work.

***

We spoke of union and contrast.
We didn't realize everything weaves itself, one in the other,
The same letters weave words, phrases.
And the silence that waits inside each word.
A truce.

***

We think of change,
We measure the silence of stone,
We measure the big noise of the rust,
But we postpone it.
Now, there are covered trucks on the road. Red patrols.
Stranger, give me your hand,
I need to trust something.
The dawn delayed itself, for so long. It came suddenly,
Like a pass word to the sun,
And there was light.

***

Autumn.
The wind prolongs time.
The man was old. He spoke patient, polite,
Small words, almost invisible.
He spoke about debts and incomes.
We didn't know that the first debt is to life.
We didn't know the incomes: the motions of living, the seed, the memories, the hand that gave you water.
We didn't know that he didn't take the income, the debts of himself,
He named them a gift for everybody.
No one knew he has an open account with life.
No one was ready for the gift.

***
Summer makes time wider.
You think about the black and the white. What makes them melt, what separates them.
You draw your shadows with coal, it is strange that you recognize your hands.
You draw the guitar in a moon ray, in a moon-shadow.
Music loves the opposites, the opposites that melt, change it. It is different.
The long hands of the sea. They look for the ship inside you, the ship that is far and close, like the paper boat of a child.
At times we meet, two neighbors of the sound of the sea.
At times we meet, two neighbors of the memory of the sea.
We left them, the way you leave something you think was lost.
You left, and yet, the only home was the sound of the sea.
The sound of the sea is the dream of a ship coming to your door.
We gather the water of winter, water for the rainless years.
We gather the gazes that saw us, water for the rainless years.
We don't know who will guard the moment when the white and black melt,
Who will guard the truce.

***

Sadness is a sunset in our motions of living, of feeling.
The sadness doesn't choose us. There is no fate.
It is us who choose it.
Yet, at times we find the path where white and black melt. A truce.
You leave, your shadow fills the door.
Standing with your shadow at the door is an act of faith.
They build houses with their back to the sun,
In order to dream the sun,
To feel the light with no interruption.
You say: things should be always like that:
To understand how things melt one in the other, to feel the melting: sea out in the sea inside you,
The bodies of love behind a rock, salty as love, glittering as love.
There should be clouds,
Because above the clouds there is always sun.

***

You walk. You have no map, but you feel the rhythm of the road,
As if it was the way home.
You walk, the deep peace of earth moulds your feet.
Earthquakes wait for such peace.
You cry.
The only response is the world, it greets you, in a language you forgot, yet, you feel.
You need answers, more than anything else.
You don't know the big questions,
The questions of loving, of not loving, of people, of being alone,
The questions of wheat in a grain.
You don't know there are too many answers,
And too few questions.
You have to ask, always more, always deeper.

***

Nothing is really small,
And anyway, you know the art of additions.
Each life hhas inside it many lives. You have to add them.
The moon in your glass is not enough, you have to add the shining.
The sunset paints itself in the window, in the glass of wine,
And it paints itself in the oblique mirror.
The sunsets in the oblique mirror are so many, the day doesn't end only once,
There are not enough numbers to count them.
You light a candle, the picture of someone near it.
Candles are a whisper of light, you add whisper to whisper,
The candle burns without limit.
The lemons in the basket are knots of light and time,
They tie knot to knot, they prolong time.
There is no day that begins and ends the week,
They are a circular dance.
You add dance to dance,
To know if it is not too late.

***

The colors of time are here.
The roads are traffic lights,
They tell you what time it is in your journey,
And the rain, a glittering calendar of a season,
The fallen leaves: a calendar of sadness.
A soft winter is heard: an umbrella of mercy,
But there are no umbrellas for time.
The wind blows hard. Windows bleed.
The glasses close you in a secret circle,
You don't dare stepping out, you don't dare
Knowing what time it is in your storm.
The stars are ancient, immense, the long fingers of the star light,
There are not number enough to measure what time it is in the fingers.
Time is here, and it is not here, it flows,
And you don't know what time it is in your life.

***

Summer.
The light hardens the streets,
The windows break into squares of light.
The light hardens your eyes.
Who will guard your eyes, who will guard the softness beneath the light,
Who will guard the sun, the big semen, from hardening.

***

At midnight, a moment before dawn,
You need compassion, more than ever.
The steps outside, steal the silence,
The shadows steal the moon.
The journey of the coffins at night. They steal whatever you ever wanted.
At midnight, all the sounds that exists are inside you,
They teach you how to hear, even your sleep.
You need compassion for what you are,
And you need compassion for the cross roads:
The meeting place of the four guns
Inside, outside you.
The meeting place of all the infinites available.

***

Autumn is a water-color of what you see, of what you feel.
The slow motion of living, they are patient, small.
A girl walking,
The smell of soap in her gaze, in her childish thighs.
In a corner of the wind: a paper.
A few lines written, unwritten. A dead poem. A dead leaf.
Nothing was left of summer, except the sea in the air,
In the silence. It's salty.

***

The home. The mother.
She triies to tidy, her hands full of quiet, life.
She tries to make life a tidy place. Safe.
Time, half here, half parted, goes forward, a slave to its ticket.
Nothing can go backwards, not even a cry.
A human walks, the consumed shoes, with a hole in the shoe, alone, and with time.
The hands in the pockets, each hand alone, the motion of time in the fists.
Who will guard us from our loneliness.
Who will guard time , adding its steps to our steps, adding the alone to the alone.

***

Autumn.
Everything is old, even you, your mortal tremble.
They try to pull out the paper boat of a child,
The boat is yellow, like a poem that came from far, from the past.
The wind: the big punisher:
The trees, the lamp posts,
The shadows kneeling on the ground,
A fallen leaf lies on your sheet. An omen.
On the road: a bleeding shoe. The missed foot has left.
You don't know if what you know will save you,
You don't know if you'll find silence, only silence,
You don't know there is always a last question.

***

WAR IN GREECE
The war began here:
In the newspapers, in the radio, in your indefinite fear,
In the flags that were taken from the moth balls,
In the memoirs of someone important, creased like old paper,
Like a war that began long ago.
Your eyes always try to meet the eyes of others, to see what they see,
But they delay,
Maybe they melt in a place beneath time, beneath words, beneath the mine field of a question.
The war began for everybody, no matter what you believe.
Everywhere pictures hang, like a wall of faces that came from far:
Legendary heroes, the gods of war.
Everything seems indefinite, like the unthinkable that becomes a thought,
Everything seems indefinite, and you don't understand
Why so much rage, so much fury, for a line on the map.
You don't know that wars are hungry, more than anything else,
For paper. Money.

***

Someone says: fear is time.
Time is a journey to fear
Fear is a journey to time.
There is the old man in the old bus station.
He travels with time each day. He is too old for fear,
He sells tickets to the journey from hour to hour,
And he can never find where are the tickets of return.
He doesn't know there are no departures ,there are no arrivals.

***



TOP PLAN

1. There are people who hide behind other.
There are people who hide behind themselves,
The face, a mask, a beautiful art.
Fear is never a safe place.
They burn the jug of water and the water,
They burn the lives of those who drank it,
And their fear is another fire. It burns them.

***

2. In this tribunal
The accused sit with the wall in their shoulders. It is heavy.
No matter how innocent they were, no matter how guilty,
They will be shot. The wall is ready in their shoulders.
Innocence is dead.

***

3. The silence enlarges the void beneath everything.
The empty chair at the table
Is emptier than ever,
The empty chair is full, too full of past.
It will be burned.

***

4. You are tightened in a shining uniform,
Your motion is heavy.
You are a guard at the museum.
The statues look at you. They were restrained in one motion, forever.
Prisons have many shapes, many bodies.

***

5. The war ended, like all wars, without ending.
The alleys are full of men in their grand suits.
They are bankrupt, the money is paper
And the salesmen who have nothing to sell
Except a post card to hunger.
But who will fill the alleys at night, how much loneliness.
Love is bankrupt.

***

6. You are a man.
The biggest destroyer.
The biggest builder.
The biggest killer.
The biggest healer.
The one furthest from his kind, the closest.
The one in the journey from the alone to the alone.
Responsible for everything..

***

7. At night, the dead walk on the street, their shadow bodies,
And the cars kill them again and again.
At time, you see in the last moment a face.
He holds a piece of wood for a coffin,
But it is too late for the gods.

***

8. The most difficult part of a door
Is finding the handle, to open the door.
The most difficult part is standing out of the door,
Visible, clear, alone.
It is an act of faith.

***

9. Your white washed back,
The white washed wall.
You bring your fingers over your eyes, your open fingers,
In order to see better, in order to multiply the suns.
This is not your last motion.
It is the one before the last.

***

10. This world, cracked, intact, refracting, opaque,
Needs all the cracks in our lips,
All that is intact in our eyes,
In order to enter us, to be visible,
And maybe, be understood.

***

11. You'll repeat the moment,
Each moment from the beginning,
Each hour from the beginning.
The hours have many life-times inside them.
You'll repeat the hour, life time by life time.
You'll repeat it the way a raindrop repeats the rain,
The way a raindrop repeats the Hieroglyphs of the world in a glass,
Of your face in a glass.
For the first time you'll understand the repetition.
Slowly you repeat your death.

***

LANDS OF SKY AND SEA

1, The stars look like pretty lemon slices
In an immense blue tea.
They sit in the most exquisite tea house of the world.
In our eyes, an almost invisible tremble.
No matter how many times the stars repeat themselves,
They are always different.
The tea, the infinite hues of the blue is inebriating. It drink us .

***

2. The stars are plump.
They drink the warm honey of the world,
So they smell of flowers.
And our eyes come from everywhere, like bees,
To drink the exquisite nectar.

***

3.Everything is a journey, so we travel always,
Even when we sit.
The sea sits in our lap, like a child.
It writes a letter to god, like a child
A letter of water and salt.
It doesn't know gods don't know how to swim in reality.

***

4. Your eyes: two lakes, liquid silver,
Two moons in the water.
I drink you from the lakes,
I drink you from the moons,
And I drink you when you look at me.

***

5. Your hair: feathers.
Your hair: black wings.
You lie on me,
Soft, airy, absolute as a bird.
You invent the sky, the beautiful transparency,
You invent my eyes.

***

6. On the white cloth
The shadows play: wars, the shadow killer, a movie.
But, the shadows need light in order to exist.
The lamp went off, the movie ended,
And another movie begins:
The moon . The play ground of poets.
Shadows fall from the poems, they are different,
They are the poetry of shadows.
Shadows may be tender, no matter what we think,
They may be a love poem.


***

7. Under the bones of the last pain, scent grew.
Plants don't panic,
And for sure they don't pray for an after life,
One world is enough.
And they are patient,
They live one season at a time,
They live one life at a time.

***

8. Meaning is not always simple.
Like the small days
You have to climb the uphill of your life, and downhill,
In order to know your height,
In order to know what real height means,
In order to know what a small day knows.

***

9. You cannot forget time.
Time is strict in counting.
It counts the cells in your laughter,
It counts the cells in your pain.
Who will guard your body made of time,
Who will guard the time in your body,
Who will guard a cell, a single cell
A tiny pebble,
Mother of stone, mother of all your eternities.

***

10. He said:
I'll tie time to my hair:
Seven birds, seven skies, seven wingless days.
He said:
There is no bird that can fly out of the sky,
There is no day that can fly out of time,
There is no thought that can fly out of the world.
He returned on Saturday,
There was a broken ladder in his thoughts.

***

11. The magic Sunday's circus. The circus of mirrors.
In the mirrors you were an acrobat.
Your body over the tight rope, your hours over the tight rope.
In the mirrors you were a runner, the marathon of your days, each day from the beginning, Your sweat running by you.
And the clown cries: Monday begins.

***

12. Everything is a seed of something else:
A word, the silent cafe in your silence,
The stillness: the hard skin over motion.
Seeds may be a tame journey, they may be huge rebels,
Even a bee, invisible in a flower
Can become a storm of pollen,
On the other side of the street, on the other side of the infinite.
Pollen is a storm without dimension.

***

13. You are the tree, you are the fruit.
It's spring in the world,
You fall soft on a shadow that fell from the tree.
Gravity is everywhere:
In your hands, in the hope, in the shadows falling like pieces of the night.
The fruit is invisible in its beauty.
Gravity is invisible in the fruit.
You are a tree, but you are human,
You make gravity visible, in the waiting for the harvest, in the hope.
You make gravity visible in your roots.

***

14. You stand far from the sea,
All you see are the immense pieces of glass, blue transparencies.
You feel that the sea is a horizon:
The closer you are, the further it goes,
And yet, you are human, you need the adventure of distances.
You go always more, always closer.

***

15. In nature the motions of everything penetrate each other,
The motions of beauty, the motions of pain, the motions of seeing.
It is strange
How something among all the embraces of motion,
Something like the eyes of a child,
The eyes bigger than his face, bigger than his life,
As big as pain.
How something can be beautiful in such a terrible way, so cruel,
That you have the courage to cry.

***

16. Night.
The wide leaves of the shadows,
The wide leaves of water.
The water melts in the shadows,
And the tree of shadows and water
Is a choir of images. They weave themselves, each in the other,
They sing together, the exquisite cloth,
They sing, each one alone, the thread of a voice .

***

17. You said:
The night was not room enough
For the song of the shadows,
For the dance of the moon in the leaves.
You said;
At times, time is not infinite enough for beauty,
Not infinite enough for dreams,
Not infinite enough for the hate of flags.

***

18. Time is lost with the birds.
At times, they bring it back, at times they don't.
It is strange,
Birds carry time so easily,
Even though they are just a bundle of feathers.
Maybe only humans count time. Counting makes everything less infinite.
Maybe the infinite is the light, because there are no numbers to count it.
The most exquisite feather.

***

19. Graves grow tight to each other,
They are breathless,
And they are tight in our glass.
Some feelings are compressive, they leave no room to feel.
We remember, and we don't know how to forget.
But some evenings, we drink our wine, alone and together,
We laugh.
The brotherhood of mouths. The rebel mouths.
The exquisite rebelion.

***

20. We are still gatherers.
We are still lost in a corner of the infinite.
At night, we gather stars.
At night, the road signs, they know where we are, where we go,
And in the mornings
We gather a drop of dawn, a single drop,
Semen of light, semen of hope.

***

21. Roots grow everywhere,
Even among the irons of autumn, the rebel irons,
Invisible in their strength.
Inside their claustrophobia of the dark, they carry a scent from the past,
And the fluffy drops of a dawn ,
Roots are a big power, the past inside the dawn,
They can break the irons, they can break the autumn.

***

22.You are a stranger, from another corner of the infinite.
You sleep on the side walks of life,
You lost everything except what you remember.
You forget that the past is a ladder,
A metal ivy on all the walls of the world.
The past climbs inside you, and you climb inside the past,
Each sun from the beginning, each struggle from the beginning.
The steps are a struggle,
And finding a place in the sun is a struggle,
But the scent of the metal ivy in your hands
Is exquisite.

***

23. I'll wait for you
There where they hang the moon in the window, in a door, on a rope.
There are people who bring the moon closer,
There are people who bring the moon infinitely closer.
The light in the center of seeing in a gaze,
The longing in the center of seeing in a gaze.
I'll wait for you there, in the gaze.

***

24. You are young,
Your beauty is young, and your motions.
You plant a wreath of feathers, a rainbow of lightening,
Over your door.
The door flies.
Doors don't like flying, they squat, they break, they let the whole sky in,
Like a bird.
And you, your beauty
Never had a door.

***

25. Fruits are a shape, they are colors, they are scent.
They are numbers: a plump zero, a circle of the infinite,
And you say: it is simply a fruit.
But, nothing is simple, there is no simple fruit.
You have to learn from the start, how to eat,
How let the infinite create your mouth.

***

26. Life is hard work.
Even the honey is the sweat of the bees,
And the sugar, the sweat of the beats.
Sweat is the magician of change,
It changes the sea in its salt,
Into something sweet.
It invents your mouth, each day from the beginning.

***

27. Grapes are fists. They are a power.
In the small arena,
They struggle to become fruit,
They struggle to become wine.
We drink it and we feel this power,
The power to change, to become something else, someone else,
The power to invent ourselves, in a small tavern, each evening from the beginning.

***

28. You are a strange child.
Maybe you believe that the world is home,
Or at least, a corner of the world,
A place where the oil of stars cooks your supper,
And the sliver of the moon is an infinite hammock,
Threads of light.
When night comes, you don't havve to return home,
Because you are home.

***

29. Sunset is hard work, a farmer of time.
It sows the seeds of new suns,
Seeds are an infinite journey.
Sowing is hope, the whole joy, the whole sadness.
Maybe that's why the sowing is so beautiful,
Maybe that's why the sunset is so beautiful.

***

30. The sun set is beautiful.
A jewel in the water,
Washed from the dust of the day.
Beneath the light it is naked. It is innocent. It was condemned from the beginning to drown.
Maybe the sunset lets us see the sun for the first time.

***

31. You build your home over the past of stones.
Someone else lived there, in another corner of eternity,
And you don't understand why the dust in your life, the dusty poetry.
You don't realize that the dust is patient,
That you can write over it with your finger,
The naked, long finger of a human,
Your own poem.

***

32. Time has one sun divided into two:
The red-black, and the golden.
Their purpose, invisible in their beauty.
The golden one is a factory of time:
The human hands, the seed, the hues, the pollen.
The red-black one is another work shop of time:
The love of the bodies of love,
And the dreams: the work shops of the yesterday, of the tomorrow.
So, we have no choice,
Whatever we do, we work for time,
Whatever eternity does, it works for time.
Whatever the gods do, they work for time.

***

33. The more we live,
The more time we produce,
The more time we consume.
We don't want to have open accounts with time,
Time is a harsh accountant.
We pay our debt to time, each day from the beginning.
Only death is the big moratorium. The biggest.

***

34. You don't know how important is the wind.
Who brought the sea into your room. The sea is a blue bird.
Who filled your room with world, a rainbow of places,
The balloons of a child that became your face.
Also your home is a wind that froze for a while. One day it will fly.
And the wind brought time into your room,
The wind gives shape to time, your room gives shape to time,
And you, you give shape to time.

***

35. Dawn.
The light becomes ships, ropes, hands.
Dawn. A drop of dew, a single drop,
Semen of light, semen of hope.
Dawn. The most tender skin, your open palm.
Dawn. An adventure story of nature. Small men, fearless, that let the sun begin,
Each day from the beginning.
Maybe it is a children story.
Maybe the good ones win.

***

36. The train left, and the tracks too.
Nothing remained, except the earth and the sky.
They were too parallel, too close to speak.
Maybe they'll meet in the other side of eternity.
Maybe you'll know where you belong,
Maybe you'll know who populates the sky,
If there is someone in the sky.

***

37. often songs come
When nothing is left.
The autumn of leaves, the autumn of stars.
Songs are the magician of seasons:
They paint the sound with green:
The green leaf in our voice.
They paint the sound with stars:
A lonely infinite in our throat.
As long as we sing we defeat time,
We sooth the loneliness in our throat.
Maybe that's why we sing so much.

***

38. There are hours that you carry under your armpits,
Between your thighs, like love.
There are hours when your sweat is no longer a swamp. It is a lake.
There is a moon in the lake. It swims towards you.
There is a face in the lake, it swims towards you.
And you swim towards everything,
You come from all directions,
Like the circle of seeing in your gaze, the storm in the circle,
Like life.

***

39. The deserted village
Was never really deserted.
The people left, but nature remained.
The petals, the fruits,
The bees tilled them, they tilled their colors,
They tilled the pollen, semen of the infinite.
Because the earth is for everybody,
And nature was also in the deep ravine:
The black birds of water in its depth,
The last border between the deserted and the desert.

***

40. You are home.
You are not at home in your home,
The quiet is a fence.
Suddenly, the foot prints of soldiers on the fencing.
And you don't know why you got out of the door,
Out of the fence.
You don't realize that the person in your head is not at home in your head.
He thinks, he feels, he knows what wars mean.

Who will guard the person in your head,
Who will guard the footprints of the soldiers,
Who will guard you, a man out of the door, out of the fence.

***

41. We marry the world in whatever we do, in whatever we see.
We put the wedding ring, invisible in its nakedness,
On the finger of a woman, of a leaf, of a butterfly, of a wave.
We are monogamous.
We marry one world, only one.

***

42. Summer, the beautiful summer, the hot colors,
The volcanoes of shapes,
May be a killer.
The lava burns your eyes, your tears,
The tips of your touch,
And the shadows fall like a cry.
You may die by the deep sea of salt and water,
By the immense sea of people, by the absolute sea of the sky.
You may die and no one will notice,
There are many who die in summer,
Because they don't have the power to bring the summer inside them,
To make it their own.

***

43.In the big sieve of spring
You sift seeds,
You sift butterflies, insects, bees,
You sift the pollen,
You sift the love in the deep recesses of love.
You don't know it,
But you sift time,
You sift the honey of time: eternity,
You mingle the semen of the yesterday with the tomorrow.
A truce.

***

44. The white house.
The balconies made of sea and sky.
Somewhere far, people climbing on the uphill of their day.
They plow the earth, they plow the bread,
And the solitary cypress in the cemetery,
Plows the dead.
After all, earth is the greatest mathematician
It adds life to death.
And you don't know who will guard the joy inside the sadness.

***



PELOS

1. Your shadows didn't know what is war,
And yet, after the war, they are never the same.
They mimic you.
The motion of a hand writing without a hand,
The motion of walking , the missing leg in your arms.
You have no choice: you see your picture, how you are, what you are,
A child of pain without Madonna, without god.
You curse the shadows, not because they are dark, inexplicable,
Because they are something worse:
They are too close the truth, as close as pain.

***

2. You grow wise, not because you are old,
Because you know the repetitions in everything.
You know the repetitions in a tree,
The repetition of a moment inside a moment,
The repetition of earth inside earth,
The repetitions of death.

***
3. The forest is a forest of fog.
The hunters, the fog in their eyes,
Try to kill life.
After all, they began killing long ago,
With the first butterflies pinned on a board.
It wasn't a game. When children play, they are serious,
They repeat the motions of killing,
In order to kill always more,
The hunger for killing kills them, always deeper.


***

4.worst of all, songs die too.
The song that sang your story.
Maybe when the world will end,
There will be one song left.
It will be human. It will be lonely.

***

5. You pull out the nails from the cross.
After all, you are nomad in life,
And the nails follow you,
With or without the cross.

***

6. In the holocaust of empty rooms:
The shoes of children,
You cannot wear them,
You cannot be a child again,
You cannot be burned again.

***

7. Whatever should have been said,
Was left unsaid.
It is strange,
The unsaid remained between us for so long,
Until there was no word left.

***

8. You sit in the last row of the circus,
So that you can escape the soonest possible.
From what a clown feels,
From what you feel.

***

9. Days like a river of mud.
You drag your body,
You drag others by the boots. The boots are mud, they are dead.
And you don't succeed
Crossing from one hour to the other.

***

10. All the bodies meet in secret water.
The pool between the thighs of a woman,
The dark lake thighs are made of,
And life, the clear life, the white washed life,
Is born in secret water, in the shadows.
It is strange,
Shadows are a drop of dawn, a single drop,
Semen of light, semen of life.

***

11. You see the sunset.
It is unbelievable how everything can end in a moment, one dark moment.
You kneel,
You have to believe in something,
Even the unbelievable can be a belief.

***

12. Words are repeated, truths or lies.
We postpone time always, we repeat ourselves.
Maybe we postpone also death.
We die only once, unrepeated,
No matter what the poets say.

***

13. You are human,
So, you need reasons for everything.
You feel naked without reason.
And you have to choose:
To live naked like someone who is born, each day from the beginning,
The love for life, the deepest love, the root, the only reason available,
Or to jump from age to age,
Looking for the child.
To remember you choose each moment, and it chooses you.

***

14. You inhabit the ground floor of life,
And you want to climb higher,
To be closer to the views, closer to your eyes.
There is no staircase, only a ladder,
And you don't know where the ladder goes,
To which number of skies: the first, the seventh,
To which black hell inside the mad heights..
But it is enough to know it continues, without limits.
You know that the arithmetic of the infinite is simple:
You can always add another number,, another step.
You don't know how many infinites can a step contain.

***


15. Inside you the river of time,
The moon in the water, the sun in the water,
And yet, you are thirsty.

***

16.You said: loving is a sin,
And not loving is a sin.
You said: sin is the highway to someone.
You said; you have to choose always.
You said: choosing is pain:
All the streets, the alleys you didn't choose.
They could have been beautiful. The sin of love.

***

17. meditating in front of a wall is pain.
You see the phantoms of pictures that, the phantom of faces,
Grey strange phantoms on the wall.
You see the empty nails.
Maybe the pictures could be beautiful, if they were ever painted, if they were here.
You feel that your life is the story of lost things,
Of all that didn't happen.
You touch your body in order to find yourself,
To know that you happened.

***

18. The inexplicable dimensions of water.
Your face in the water,
The fish of time in the water.
You don't know if your face, the fish
Are deep or shallow.
You don't know if you can grasp your face,
If you can grasp the fish of time: the moments.
You don't know if you may lose your face.

***

19. You leave always something of yourself on the way,
And the way leaves always something of itself inside you,
Like a market of loss.
But things are not really lost:
The ancient coins of stone, the coins of bronze,
They are dusty from the endless road, they leave dust in your hand.
Dust is patient, stubborn.
They are priceless.
No one can put a price tag on the priceless.

***

20. The hand that walked towards your hand
Remained still.
The plate of water for the stray cats,
Untouched.
As if everything was waiting for a sign, for a traffic light.
Maybe there are too many traffic lights on the way,
Maybe there is too much anxiety in your eyes, there is no visible, no invisible,
And you don't notice that the closest traffic light is green.

***

21. You'll momentarily rediscover
The way from moment to moment,
And then, what?
The moment passed, everything changed.
There is the sameness that is the same,
There is the repetition that could be different, yet, it is the same.

***

22. Bridges can be a good place to be alone.
They measure the distances between you and the others.
You can see your face on both side of the bridge, both side of the water: two faces,
To shout for help, each face to the other.
When you are on that bridge,
It is the only help available.

***

23. In front of the mirror: your two bodies naked.
It seems as if you covered your genitalia,
Strangely, this motion, clear, secret,
Leaves you even more naked.

***

24. Often words are too clear, too abrupt, They fight you bitterly.
You need a truce
With what you say, with what you think, with what you feel.
You have to give some silence to the words,
To give some words to your silence.

***

25. The old wise man of the tribe
Advices you to reveal yourself little by little, each day more.
After all, even the light comes slowly at dawn,
And the lightning begins long before it began.
You have to reveal yourself, each day from the beginning.
The only revelation available.

***

26. There are marbles that become statues,
And there are marbles that don't.
Yet, they give shape to the wind, to the rain, to the sun.
They are real, because they are surreal.
As if they were a drop of dawn, a single drop, invisible in its nakedness,
Semen of beauty, semen of stone, semen of light.
***

26. Twilight comes gently,
Like a truce between shadow and light.
But you are not ready for the truce.
Your eyes out closed, the eyes inside open,
In order to cry better.

27. The holocaust in empty rooms.
The bones like legs of chairs, of tables.
You turn your back, your blind back.
You look at the window,
The window reflects the bones,
It reflects your face. You don't see what you see.
It reflects the holocaust in your deserted face, your inexplicable face.
Slowly, very slowly you see, you understand.
You have the courage to cry.

***

28. Poetry is the art of gardening.
It is not an architect.
You sow a word, and it grows,
The leaves, the fruit are not simple, they are hard work.
And your poem is a slow truth, as slow as growing.

***

28. Art is the highest form of hope.
The shape of joy, the shape of sadness, silently beneath the joy.
It could be a drop of dawn, a single drop,
Mother of light, mother of shadows.

***

29. They break statues. They remember too much.
And they use the marble to build other statues, other gods.
They don't know that stones are the home of time.
They don't know that earthquakes wait for such statues.

***

30.The hands of builders speak when they build,
They speak to the power, to the inevitable precision,
To the un-forgetting truth.
All the rest, the earth, the stones, come later.

***

31. Home is the place
To hide at least one dream,
And the only sigh is your face in the window of the train,
And your hand waving to the face that leaves.

***

31. You hide all your yesterdays carefully, silently, each yesterday from the beginning,
And the only sigh
Is the cave inside you, around you,
And the strong knife
A moment before it learned how to kill.

***
32. You lose your way again and again.
Maybe you don't know the way, maybe the way doesn't know you.
Maybe you don't know how many lost ways
Forgetting can contain.
The biggest archive of loss.

***

33. You don't take often your memories with you,
Even when you are alone.
The killing, the shoes of children, the gold teeth of the old.
Your face: a holocaust of bones.
Your face rolls beneath the line of zero.
You don't know how to resist the holocaust in your face,
How to resist living beneath the line of zero.

***


34. We are suspicious creatures.
We don't believe in leniency
When we see people walking from one day to the other
Calm, uncomplaining, humble as a breath,
We believe they hide something beneath the clarity, something dark.
We believe they may hide the phantom of innocence.
We believe no longer that innocence exists.

***

35. someone spreads a carpet on the street,
A garden of hues and threads of hands.
The passers by are suddenly quiet..
They look at the carpet, the madness of colors,
As if they knew something.
And the children play as if in a puppy flower field.
They don't know that one day, in one war,
They'll be puppy flowers.
Their open veins will be a waterfall of puppies, a red tear of dawn.

***

36. Yellow noon,
As yellow as the letters we've kept,
As yellow as the poems we wrote,
As yellow as the wrinkles that use to be a smile.
You don't know where is the poem in all this yellow,
You don't know if your yellow life is a poem.
You crouch, deserted, alone, human,
And you cry. You cry for the yellow pain waiting at the road side, for the hand that stretched towards you. It never arrived.

***

37. You strike hot metal on hotter metal,
And the sparks fly like insects of fire,
Like the first fire of the first men.
Storms begin in such sparks
Mothers of pain, mothers of suns, mothers of time, flowing, flowing.

***

38. On the canvass:
The trigonometry of a motion.
All the shapes:
A square table. Round buttons,
Elongated fingers,
And something uncountable, unfinished,
That weaves all the shapes
A moment before change.
A truce.

***

39. The light house is a lonely place.
Ships come and go over old shipwrecks.
You sit there, by the light,
You count all the shipwrecks your remember, because you don't know how to forget.
They are uncountable.
They were inevitable.
You know that usually you shipwreck inside yourself.

***

40. There are no masks.
We simply need many faces in order to live.
So, the hunter with the gun,
Half face white as innocence, as white as hunger.
Half face red, it bleeds fire.
And the black insects of fire paint your hands, dark and read.
You don't know who is the mask of whom.
You don't know if masks exist.
The weaving of colors and shapes is an exquisite cloth.
It is alive. It is real.
It doesn't cover you face, it is your face.
Like a skin, like the ten fingers of a touch, like bleeding fire.

***

41. It is strange.
When you are killed,
Your death avenges nothing,
Not the death, not the blood: the tree that shed your body.
You simply die life . innocent, guilty, un-avenged.

***

42. Words are never whole.
They are perforated, they are the pauses between feathers,
In order to be able to fly, at a moment's notice,
From themselves, from meanings.
And yet, you use them for the big promises, for an oath.

***

43. The dead continue to die with their goal,
They continue to live with their goal.
There is always the magician of the tribe.
He sees our death in the dead,
He sees our death in the goal.
He doesn't see the death of the goal.
He knows that goals come from very far and they continue,
Stubborn, inevitable, patient.

***

44. Everybody does what he should do.
The shopping :the pills for hunger,
Bathing, soothing the dust of the hours, the hours of stone,
Sweeping the pain.
A moment, like illegal quiet.
And you don't know that when you do what you should do, patient, silent, the hunger that grows old in your mouth, it is in your genes, the consumed broom of pain,
Makes the quiet illegal.

***

45. The sea.
The rocks: teeth,
They chew the waves, they chew the earth,
They let them mingle:
A truce that repeats itself, like everything else,
A truce
That happens only once, like everything else.

***

46. You lie,
You think you remember the fairy tales of childhood.
You don't know that children sense things, like little animals,
That their time runs faster,
That they'll arrive to the end of the fairy tale
Soon, much sooner than what you imagine.
Fairy tales die, like the child in the legend, racing.

***

47. You made a bargain.
Then you empty your pockets,
In order to put in your hand, alone,
In order to count the fingers,
To know who was lost.
Bargains are big thieves, the biggest.
They steal your fingers in a hand shake,
In a motion of truce.

***

48. Nothing is really nothing,
No matter what you feel.
Because feeling the nothing measures you.
You have the power to feel,
And this power is something.
Because the nothing, the void, thinks you,
The way it thought the world.
The thoughts of the nothing
Are a semen of something:
Stars, birds, dawn, your thoughts.

***

49. The war.
You don't know where your power comes from:
The body, the past, the rage, the pain, the dead.
You don't know that power has many mothers. A tribe of mothers.
Mothers don't let their child die.

***

50. In time
Cities return to their place, changed.
There were floors on the way,
There were roofs on the way,
But there was no dead end. The road home is never a dead end,
Because home is a journey.

***

51. There are magnifying lenses in the circle of seeing,
In order to see better the visible.
It is not easy to see the visible,
To see the details of the weaving of time, light, color.
To know the arithmetic of each detail, to add detail to detail, like a small infinite.
To let the invisible to the poets

***

52. They put barbed wire around the sea,
But the waves don't know it, and the wind, and the birds.
The fish know it.
They live with barbed wires in their eyes,
And you, looking at the sea,
You bleed fish eyes.

***

53. After you look for yourself in the mirror,
At times, you don't put your Sunday face,
You put the everyday one:
The tine trees of wrinkles around your lips,
The consumed smile,
In order to understand better the journey from day to day
That makes you what you are.

***

54.You put the flowers in a vase. The only garden available.
The flowers in a vase madden you, sadden you.
The delicate necks bleed like the slit neck of a child.
Beauty is guilt. It is punishable.

***

55. Death is inconceivable in spring.
And the children, the bellies full of love:
Death is the unthinkable.
And you don't believe that the unthinkable, the infinite unthinkable,
Can become a thought.

***

56. You swallow words,
The way one swallows pain killers,
For a pain he doesn't know the name.
Three times a day, or even more,
But the pain continues.
Maybe you should do something else:
Plunge your hand, tumultuous, aching,
Inside your secret body,
Find the deep wound,
Find the drop of dawn inside the wound, a single drop,
Semen of light, mother of hope.

***

57. Glory is a harsh mistress.
It lets you bleed for it.
It lets you die for it.
It puts you on a huge silver carriage
That is not your own,
That brings you to the only home available:
A glorious statue where you die each day more, each day deeper.

***

58. The road runs.
Beneath it; bones.
You climb down, you come up to here
With a sack of bones:
Your dead in war, in the mine field under a question.
You sow the bones among the bodies.
You don't know if a forest of bones can grow,
A forest of difficult trees, difficult roots.

***

59 The light is black. Sun burned,
Like the breath of the dead.
But you don't notice it, you don't imagine it.
The power to imagine is nothing short of a miracle,
Yet, it can be a miracle of pain.

***

60. In the biggest arena of the world: life,
The gladiators oil the muscles of their body,
The muscles of sadness.
They shine like mirrors.
The people get in, they want a seat in the between,
The way they live, between the tall and the low.
They come two by two
Because they cannot resist alone the oily death in the arena,
They cannot resist alone to see themselves in the big shining mirrors.

***

61, it rains in the world, in your words, in your thoughts.
But the fish of time: the moments
Swim through you, through what you think, what you feel, as usual.
They'll write your best poem:
They write time with time,
They'll write the rain with rain.

***

62. People made of clay,
A city made of clay.
If you never felt the clay inside you,
You felt nothing.
If you don't conquer the city
You conquer nothing.
If you don't live, soft-hard clay, in your city,
You live nowhere.
If you don't feel the clay soft-hard in your poem, in your city,
You'll have no city, no poem.

***

63. You sow your deepest words.
They create roots, a tree.
Your poetry is not architecture,
You don't close the words in the madness of walls, in silent floors.
Your poetry is gardening: like nature, like imagination.
The forest will grow, tall, deep.
It will be alive.

***





STONES

***
The sound of the water behind you: unstoppable.
It comes from the past.
The sound of the water inside you: unstoppable.
People drink their face from the river,
Their faces diaphanous, watery.
The river changed places, colors, shapes,
Time is a restless creature.
The river is still here, because it is past,
Like a maternal paradox of time,
It carries you always to the precise moment between who you are
And what you lost.
It carries you towards time, always more.

***

Words are defined by their silence,
So, when you listen, listen to the silence inside the word, to what they don't say.
It is incredible how big things:
The emptiness, the postponements, the separations that are everywhere,
Even in the beginning of a smile, a cigarette butt,
How they can hide behind something small: a daily word, consumed by repetitions.

***

Broken statues are sad.
A stone head that came from very far,
Raised as if waiting for something,
As if it knew tonight the head will be cut.
Tonight time will delay for a moment,
A moment of stillness for the something that was lost:
The cut head of the past, the neck bleeding like the cut throat of a child.

***

You ring the bell.
Inside, everybody feels the deep ring,
Also the one that rang.
And the ringing says different things to each one:.
To hear the ring, not to hear.
To open the door, not to open.
It is sad,
Because no one could silence the ringing inside him,
Because we live on both sides of the door, we die on both sides.

***

Maybe the statues feel awkward.
They are too naked,
Their motions too stony.
They invent an arena of marble, they don't know the arena of time, the biggest gladiator.
They don't know they are the child of a mad artist,
Skinny, short, small,
That he gave them the only reality they have: his dreams.

***

The imperceptible schism in the sea, black and white, without intention.
The light shines everywhere, without intention.
And only our shadows, gigantic, sweating their dark,
They climb on the wall,
They want to be our reality.
They want us to be their shadows.

***

Keys are important.
The simple device, the deepest exactness, the obedience.
They allow you to return home,
Whenever you return from the journey between day and day, the longest journey.,
Whenever you need empty rooms to find your silence.
The key in your long fingers is power.
It is not easy to close your loneliness, it is not easy to open it.

***

You go somewhere, you don't know where, why.
There is no road, no black sister: the asphalt.
You are exhausted from walking, from not knowing.
You realize that the first one to die is the body.
The dreams, searching the way to humans: your first Ithaca,
Searching the way home: the second Ithaca,
Die late, much later.

***

The cafe.
In the glass: the flies cling to the light,
A piece of a second hand sun.
A bird dying at the glass,
It doesn't know what glass is. It dies in the strange dimension of the unknown.
You want to run away,
You don't know you are a face glued to the glass.
It is strange how small things can trap us.
It is strange, the clear, the dangerous longing for transparency.

***

Someone runs on the street with a flag,
He tied a vein to the flag, he steps on it.
Around him: the big precision of lines. He smuggles the lines.
And the people shout: don't believe him, he is mad.
The flag: a bird on a stick,
The lines are lines on the map: borders. They are closed
The circles among the lines: the kings.
They shot him.
Madness is guilty.
The lines on the map, the veins of a flag are hungry.

***

Some men were killed, some left.
We remained few.
We found our way when we found the rhythms
Of time, of the shade, of the light, of the road.
Roads walk, secret steps, in our shoes. We have to hear the sigh in our shoes.
And time rolls on the road, it leaves us in the precise moment between who we were ,who we are. we have to hear the precision.
We found our way when we found the rhythm of everything inside us.

***

The slab of marble, never became a statue.
The lines where the hands should have been, the finger nails, the hair.
Maybe it was the best statue.
The lines were naked, unfinished,
They continued into the summer, into the lizards in the cracks of summer,
They stopped nowhere, they were an unfinished motion.
Motion is the magician of life, the mystery of living.

***

The beach.
Men sit under the trees with the sun spots.
They play backgammon,
The laughter painted on their lip is older than themselves.
Something is glued on their fingers. They lick the fingers,
But this something is stubborn, strong, as if it were the taste of time.
Time has countless tastes, sweet, toxic, all mingled in the tongue of a moment.
It refuses to be removed.
A child sells his childhood inside soda bottles.

***

He was different, in a way we didn't understand.
He was silent, in a silence we didn't understand.
As if he discovered something nameless, something un-answerable.
He was too distant for words, as if he were a saint.
He said nothing. Only his silence was available.
It spoke in a language we didn't know.
We crucified him.
Maybe we were all guilty, the crucifiers, the crucified.
He was too high on the impossible ladder, too high to hear our silence.
A simple silence, in a language we know.

***

People change all the time.
Some become rage, a vague rage at everything.
The hands that used to shake our hands: twisted roots, rooted in nothing.
Somme grew always further,
We see them in a glass mask: a window.
We see how clear they are: a crystal river.
We see how afraid they are.
They had to protect themselves somehow.
Fear is glass, fragile, the shards bleed in the glass.
They bleed like the slit neck of a child.
Fear comes from very far, it was a child once.

***

The body fallen on the ground.
The face is almost a smile, like a cartoon of death,
Like someone who sees himself in a river of clear water: time.
His finger nails: red, fierce,
As if they were piercing all the paradises that exist.
As if he wanted to die for the last time.

***

People are killed and die,
But mostly, they grow old.
Their eyes are strangers,
The mystery of growing blind, when no one sees them,
Is not a mystery, it is a tool.
We learned how to use tools in order to survive,
To survive the beasts of the forest, the beast inside us.
They use our eyes.

***

The things we carry with us from one place to the other.
We give them a fate, and they can do nothing about it.
But people are not things,
So when we wander from one place to the other,
We give each other something of our fate.
Fate becomes simple. Adding fate to fate.
Fate becomes complicated
Because we have no choice, fates add themselves to each other, naturally, obsessively.
No one knows how to add choice to choice, the choice-less to the choice-less.

***

You adore the teacher,
So, betrayal is inevitable.
No one can live always just, always virtuous, always understanding.
No one can walk over the mine field beneath the wide feet of a question.
He is tired, fatigue makes everything more visible,
So he betrays himself long before anybody else betrays him,
And the thirteen men at the table
Don't know that everything happened already inside him:
The betrayal, the court, the verdict, death.

***

We eat at the table,
We don't look at the clock,
We don't know what time it is in the world,
What time it is in our plate.
We don't realize we are time eaters,
That the hunger for time is a deep wound.
We forget that without time, we die,
Hungry, thirsty, a moment, ages before eternity.

***

The blind violinist in the corner of the street.
His face is lit. It stares at the sound of the shoes, second hand shoes,
The sound is warm, it soothes him.
Suddenly someone assaults him.
He doesn't recognize the voice,
But he feels it goes towards him, like something inevitable.
He is quiet.
He holds the violin, like a child, under his coat.
If they shoot, they'll have to shoot together
Him and the child.
And they'll shoot the songs, the beauty, and the warmth of second hand shoes.

***

Landscapes are motion.
Everything moves far: faces, what you remember, what you forget.
You are not sure
If it is the things or you that moves,
You don't understand how one can move far from himself.
The only thing that moves towards you is death,
It is as close as a breath, as close as pain.
And yet, you resist.
You continue the rituals of daily life.
The rituals that can slow time,
Like the afternoon tea sips in your lips,
Like comfortable words that wrap slowly, very slowly, the moments.

***

We are not alone in our body.
The world, the people: the big unknown inside us.
So, when we eat, we feed the unknown,
Our spoon careful, slow,
The way a man feeds someone old, older than what he remembers,
The way a man feeds a woman, each drop of semen is precious, each gaze dripping, slow, tender.

***

Nothing is really simple,
And for sure, not life.
It feeds what exists: the body.
It feeds what doesn't exist: the big forgetting, the dreams.
This life, this infinite mother, can give both honey,
It can give both a spoon full of poison: the hunger, the pain.
No one is prepared for the poison, for the snake of hunger, for the venomous animal of pain.
No one is prepared to be betrayed by life.

***
A manual for miracle.
Some are vindictive,
A black system inside them,
But, they see the dark, they see the dark inside the dark.
Innocence rarely own the eyes of the dark, the talent of the dark.
Maybe one day they'll see in the dark,
Maybe they'll see in the dark their face, their eyes,
Maybe they'll have the courage to cry, the miracle of a human.

***

The days pass, you postpone time.
You don't look when the landscape is ready,
You don't love when the body of love is ready.
The moments pass, everything changes.
You age suddenly,
The words you say are old before you speak,
Even the water in the well is old, tired.
Everything obeys time, even eternity.

***

The storm was vicious,
Only the rocks remained, the cave in the rocks is shattered.
You miss the cave.
You don't know if time can walk backwards,
If time can forget,
You don't know if you can remember all the caves you are made of.

***

You walk slowly,
But time jumps from age to age.
You grow old before you were young.
At supper: the sad plates, the tremble in the hands, in the spoon.
Who is eating, who is trembling.
The supper is small, but also the hunger.
Hunger can grow old too, too old to be hungry for something.


***

You close your senses,
In order to erase the bullets, the killers, the killed.
But the senses are power, you cannot close them so easily.
You don't see any flag at half mast,
You don't see any eyes at half mast.
But you see the mine field beneath the wide feet of a question.
You ask.

***

You are in a prisoner camp.
Time is so slow, that it doesn't really exist.
The differences of shapes, of light are so small, that they don't exist.
You see so much, that you don't really see. Seeing is dead.
Someone says: the clearer the eyes, the more they see the nothingness,
They see how the nothingness is tortuous, shining like a glass, vulnerable as glass,
As if it was the way to mystery: your Atlantis.

***

So many empty jars: jam, honey, sugar.
People enter the jars,
They eat the jars, and the jars eat them.
All they remember is the heap of jars: the only world available.
They don't know how to leave the jars where they belong: the dumpster of humanity.
The scavengers will use the glass, and the pieces of flesh, of life glued to them.
They know how to make trash attractive, tasty.
They know that trash is easily misunderstood, that it is never simple.

***






ENCLOSURE

***

The big circus.
The great magician takes naked skulls.
His helpless helper repairs them:
The rolling hair, the fleshy lips, the translucent eyes.
They look perfect. They look aliens.
We go to the circus two by two
Because we don't resist feeling what the helpless helper feels.
Disturbing the death of someone is pain.
The helpless helper is pain.

***

You don't let the shadows fill the house.
You use candles, lamps, white washed floors.
You are afraid of death.
You don't realize that the shadow of death is different.
It has work to do, so it uses , like an eternal Diogenes, its own torch.
It walks inside you, until it finds your core, your truth, until you are utterly lit,
Like a wild forest fire,
And the fire kills you from inside out.
The shadows are innocent.

***

The hard times reached the distant village,
Like a sea that rose high, over the highest road.
People need news. What to do, where to go.
But the postman is missing.
He drowned in the road before the sea rose,
He drowned in a bag full of seas that rose already.
Fe drowned in the far that became close.

***


In the broken clock, time is your slave.
But you don't know
What time it is in your day,
What time it is in your night.
You don't know what time it is in the picture of a child
That fell from the wall,
You don't know that you cannot keep forever the child hanging on a nail
Like a saint, like a crime.

***

The gun fire, the dead.
You hide the bones somewhere.
You make a list of the names, of what time it was in their age,
What time it was in their death.
Remembering is pain. So you let the lists remember.
You feel you have the right to forget. You are innocent.
The lists remember instead of you.
You don't know if lists cry.

***

They search your home, but you are innocent.
Everything is the daily things of years like all others.
But, they surprise you,
They find a love letter.
You don't remember you knew how to love,
You don't know how you wrote what you didn't feel.
You don't know who left this letter in the middle of your life.
You are suspicious. They need a name. You have no name to confess.
They hang people for much less than that.

***

The times are hard in this hard land.
Even the proud ones, their pride is helpless.
They carry them on a leash, like lap dogs,
They tame them with pieces of flesh,
The pieces smell like a human.
They don't know that everybody has always a way out:
The power of rage .
That the rabies in their mouth is a friend.
They'll bite, with all the poison in their teeth, the leash.
They bite themselves for one last time.

**

You are a prisoner.
They make you jump from a window to the nothing,
Like a circus of pain.
The windows are each moment tighter, each moment taller,
And the road beneath, each moment deeper.
You have no choice, you jump. The thuds, circular,
They follow each other.
Your open skull spills out what you remember,
What you didn't know how to forget,
It confesses what you didn't confess:
You were another kind of hero.
You didn't want to die.
It confesses you were ready to live and die for life, nothing else.

***

There is no way to go out,
And you don't know how to stay in,
A naked scarecrow, paralyzed by pain.
Among the madness of walls, the barbed wire in your tongue,
Crying is not an option.
A scarecrow among wingless birds,
They come polite, clean, the feathers shine.
They invent a polite, clean death.

***

People die and leave behind them the strangest things:
A three legged table, an invalid of life.
A blind window. There was no sky.
Time was paralyzed in a clock. There was no time.
The people didn't know
What time it was in the world, and they didn't mind.
They knew what time it is in their death.
They died punctual, respectful, when it was time.
Their possessions:
Remembering people, the ten fingers of a hand shake.
The best tombstone.

***

The embalm the aged ones:
They put them in the house of the old:
A pyramid of the living.
They make them beautiful,
They erase the tree of wrinkles by the lips,
They plant feathers in their head , where the hair flew forever.
They seem a toy of life,
Which is suspicious.
They are too close to death, a moment before eternity.
Eternity is too old, and maybe too tired, to be playful. It plays with no one,
Not even with time.

***

You are summoned to appear soon,
Where? When? Why?
But the page is silent, you fear the silence.
You know how many bullets, barbed wires
Can even a short silence contain.
You know that the silence will hurt you,
Like a knife in the middle of a cry.
You'll meet the silence inside a cry.

***

The carnival
You dress as a demon, a devil of death.
You don't know how dangerous can a costume be:
The black, the red, the hands in the bones, and the tamer: the nine tailed whip.
You don't understand why people avoid you.
You don't know that death should be invisible, up to the last moment before eternity.
You forget that death begins from inside out.
Your naked entrails falling, falling.

***

Traps should be secret,
And yet, they leave them in the main road,
Where people take a Sunday walk, They digest the other six days.
And you wonder what is a trap, how does it work,
Could it be the main road that you chose,
When there are so many other paths.
Could it be Sunday, the day of the god.
You don't believe that god exists,
And even if he exists it doesn't matter.
So, maybe the big trap is inside you,
The choice so clear, so secret.

***

The names, the unused words,
The lectures of silences.
The mule tied to a pole, like a slave.
Maybe it doesn't mind, it is too busy working.
The people around mock it.
They don't realize they are tied to another rope: the hunger,
The biggest rope, the biggest slave trader ever.
It squeezes whatever remained of the neck.
It squeezes whatever remained of their life.
And there is no safety net of mercy.

***

They interrogate you
In a room that is a corridor
From one mute hell to the other.
The floors don't slope down, like the usual entrance to hell,
They are horizontal,
As if all hells were on the same level of silence.
Everything accuses you.
The mask that paralyzes your face, the stitched lips,
The holes where eyes used to be,
A perfect, devil
The picture of a child in your pocket. He holds a plastic gun.

***

They wall you in with big pieces of stone,
With big pieces of silence.
Outside the world continues,
As if unchangeable,
As if tomorrow exists.
And yet, there are so many changes in the unchangeable:
The dictionary of pain, the names of money,
The verbs of death.
There is not only one death.

***

No one can repair the door that slammed.
The house doesn't it, it is foreign,
So, the wind, the rain can hit it,
The house knows them. They arre old visitors.
You have no choice. You get use to the open door.
You get used to the strange faces who enter the rooms,
The faces in a drop of dawn, semen of shadows, mother of light.

***

The mirror brings the sun into the room,
It plays with the sunset, as if it was a toy of life. Painless.
The necklace of rain: pieces of sky. You love pretty things.
The world is full of small miracles.
You love them because they are what they are,
Because they don't know they are extraordinary, miraculous.

***

You don't know where to begin, where to continue your poem.
The house is too full of past, there is no room for anything else.
The wooden door peals off, leaf by leaf,
There is an ancient rain in the walls.
The potholes on the floor fill with water, a puddle of a child that is somewhere else.
You walk, you leave behind huge shadows,
As if the shadows of motion were bigger than what you are.
You don't know if you can save the house,
You don't know if you can save your poem.
Maybe you can add past to past, to make it your biggest opus.
The opus may walk towards you always more, towards who you were, who you are.
The biggest journey, the biggest poem.

***

The thinkable we can think is not infinite.
There is the unthinkable.
The changeable we can change, is not infinite.
There is the unchangeable.
The small talk of the women in the yard of the house
Is a good place
To change what is changeable: time, the motion of the afternoon,
To think what can be thought.
To know the world stands on this small talk,
On words so close to each other.

***

The children in the choir.
The song passes out, into the rain,
They mingle.
The birds, somewhere high, are another choir,
They mingle with the clouds.
Somewhere there is a basket with a lamb,
It died with a knife in its cry,
A choir of veins, a choir of sadness.
The children leave, the birds leave,
The song crouching, deserted , panting, alone,
Remains behind, the song and the dead lamb.
Songs don't leave the dead easily.

***

Things inside us, a whole life time,
Wait patient, silent,
To become a song.
They erupt suddenly, like delicate lava.
They are a song that forgives us for futile things, miserly feelings, the forgotten wide palms that used to be home,
Because we don't know how to forgive ourselves.

***

Outside; the builders, the big noise of stone.
Inside the house
Everything is tidy:
The flowers in the vase,
The face in the mirror,
The bodies of love in bed.
Only the shadows roam everywhere without limit,
They repeat, shape by shape, life.
Life is never a tidy place.
It is the big noise of stone, without a net of safety.

***

She said: I don't need men.
I love the statues, I love their beauty.
She dreamed among the marble bodies,
They were cold, they were stony.
They forgot how to love.
She cried, dreams evaporated in her eyes.
The loneliness of stone was left in her ten fingers, each finger alone.
Stones don't evaporate easily.

***

They call you to arms.
You are young, shy, insecure.
The uniform is not your size,
The harsh shoes not your size.
And the undefined fear of something foreign,
Is not your size.
And they send you to war, unprepared, unrehearsed,
Too tender to kill,
Too tender to die,
As if death was your size.

***

He defended his position.
He used a chalk,
He drew lines on the map.
He said: these are borders.
He said: I don't understand why so much rage, so much fury
For a line on the map.
He didn't convince us, but he didn't mind.
Maybe he believed in birds:
Smugglers of borders, smugglers of dreams.

***

You believe in poetry, and in death.
So, you believe that eternity exists, that the end of eternity exists.
When you write, in rains in your fingers, so the sky exists.
When you write, the poem exists, you exist.
When you die, you leave all that exists.
You die, and you don't know who will guard all that existed:
The eternity, the end of eternity, the sky, the poem, the beauty.
You don't know that death was always in whatever existed.
You don't know who will guard their death,
Who will guard the existing in the existed.
***

His words were polite in an offensive way,
As if he was detached from what hhe said.
You felt angry, you, your anger wasn't polite.
You chewed such words for breakfast, lunch, supper.
You felt the need to vomit,
To clean your body from the polite poison.
The words that make you bleed, for your own good.
Some words know, better than you,
What you need, what life needs.
And you know that what life needs comes before anything else.

***

Someone important
Comes to the prison to speak.
In the middle of his gentle venom
He looked forewords at the wall,
As if it was glass,
As if he could see things you don't.
He forgets that you live with the wall, back to back, face to face,
For years, for age,
That whatever he said was already said,
That whatever he saw, was already seen,
That walls reveal themselves little by little,
Like a slow struggle, like the slow root of a motion,
Like the rebellion of stone.

***

Mirrors have a hidden space
A black hole,
A miniature of the cosmic black hole.
You don't know what the hole contains, whom it contains.
You search the mirror for long, you look deeply in the dark hole, in the dark within the dark.
You realize the hole remembers:
All eyes open inside that you forgot, the futile things, the miserly feelings.
Yet you continue to look at the hole.
Nature has no trash bins.

***

The poor house, humble.
The chairs, the table, second hand or even third.
They are beautiful because they work, punctual, meticulous.
The woman, closed eyes, rolls a ball of dough,
A blind motion that began before she began.
She feels, closed eyes, what the dough says.
The last bread in the plate.
She is too tired to think,
And crying would save nothing.

***

Freedom moves all over our body, if we know how to feel,
In the motions, in the words, in the silence, in the beginning of a gaze.
Often we forget
That freedom is hard work,
That freedom is not infinite,
It is free and bound at the same time,
Like love, like the big motions of living.

***

Remembering yourself in your room,
Is not enough.
You forget the corridors, the journey from door to door, the small-big journey
Also our bodies have corridors,
They breath their secret life into each other,
They open their deep doors, like open veins.
Remember the corridors beneath the skin of your room.
Remember, they are stubborn, they are ancient,
The doors open like a palm, like the red tear of dawn.

***

The shooting,
And then, the stain of blood
In the streets, in the words, in the faces.
The stain was too big to forget, too big to forgive.
We had to forgive ourselves,
Which is not simple.
Nothing is simple in forgiving,
Nothing is simple with blood in our silence.

***

He said:
The exact knowledge of what words mean, what silence meanns,
Is human justice.
But when you speak to people
Who are too tired to hear, too tired to think,
The exact knowledge of the last bread in the plate,
Is the biggest justice, the only justice possible.

***

They were courageous.
They took the old chair to the cemetery,
They sat in the shade of a cypress.
They counted their struggles, grave by grave, a worry bead of bones.
They counted the stars.
They knew what time it is in the infinite,
What time it was in their night.
They were survivors. They survived themselves.

***

In the biggest circus of the world: life
The acrobat hangs his life on a rope,
He closes his eyes, he has, like everybody, the fear of depth.
He jumps, the ground finds his feet,
But the eyes remain closed.
The fear of depth repeats itself in his eyes,
He doesn't know that closed eyes see somethings :
The fear, love, the past, the pain,
better, deeper.

***

In the biggest circus of the world: life,
The acrobat hangs his life on a rope.
His genitalia hang too: two red balls. They float.
He jumps.
The ground fins his feet, and his bloated genitalia,
And the clown gathers them, a balloon for the children.
Clowns use all shapes of life in the show,
They use the tears in order to laugh.
They use their big motions, in order to be invisible.

***


You return.
The deserted house, the fields are stone.
The wind blows. It brings earth from somewhere else,
Red earth, warm. Nomad earth.
A beggar passes by. He says: with old little gifts we can go on living,
The only gift available.
You go out, you are a nomad in life, you take your life again somewhere else,
You take the gifts, small, almost invisible, in order to go on.

***

You march for days. The earth is stone. The earth is white fire.
You have to arrive to a secret house. It will save you,
But you don't find the house on the land, in the mmap,
It is too secret.
You have no choice,, you enter a cave,
You draw a secret house on the walls,
In order to remember,
In order to believe that the house exists.
Maybe you are mad, a romantic,
But life went on with such small things, such madness.

***

The misers offer big things:
The moon in the water,
The shadow of a bird on their fingers.
They offer whatever their eyes remember,
And when nothing is left,
They create more memories.
After all, they are not god, they cannot create reality.
And if god exists, maybe he can come to the hungry in the shape of food.

***

You feel you've exhausted everything
Inside you, around you.
You forget that the past is inexhaustible.
You can discover your Atlantis floating by the moon in the water,
You can walk in the agora
To purchase pottery, fruits,
And from the old ones:
Words that are so close to truth,
That they have to use simple words, small ones,
As if they knew that small is big.

***

You finish your words. Everything is tidy, everything is framed,
The questions, the answers.
You don't realize everything is matter, the magician of change,
That you have finished the n'th version of something.
You don't realize matter changes you too.
You know all the answers, but you forget the questions.
Change is not a tidy place.

***

You drift away, almost hypnotized.
Maybe it is the multiplication of the shadows in your life,
The shadows, hypnotized, hypnotizing.
And then, sometimes, something small, a question, an answer, an awakening.
The sound of leaves falling in your bed,
The sound of bark chewed in your teeth.
You are not sure
Who inside you asks the question,
Who inside you answers.
You don't realize
There are too many answers,
And too few questions.
You don't realize that the question you didn't ask, betrayed you.

***

The artist moulds the clay,
And the clay moulds him.
They look almost the same.
The same color in the cheeks,
The same shadow in the thighs.
He doesn't realize it,
But he put a drop, a single drop of his blood, in the clay.
So, he doesn't know who bleeds when he bleeds,
He doesn't know who breaks more easily,
Which pain is his.

***

No one has taken care of the building, for ages.
Yet, this year, the building blossomed, as if by itself.
The white was replenished: white butterflies on the wall.
The rust returned to what it remembbered: clean iron. It shines.
The windows; a clear vision.
In the staircase the tools: the beauty of purpose.
The corridors: the veins of the house, they lead to the whole body.
The house lasted till deep twilight.
It mingled with the shadows, with the light.
The big truce.

***







THE GLASS DOOR

***
There is this small violence that kills.
The radio that tells you what to think, what not to think,
To die for the Patria. Death is cheap, and yet, you don't own it.
How to live
Guilty of everything, even dreams are a crime, they can hang you for much less,
And no one tells you that innocence is dead.
How can you live dreamless?
How can you die dreamless?
How can you be naked
In order to love, to believe, to dream.
You should know that the first purity is the naked dream,
And the second: the naked body of love.

***

There are the seasons of traitors,
The seasons of bribery,
The seasons of killers.
These seasons make the days small.
Beneath the benches of the small days, the small suns in a fruit,
The country is a market,
But it is bankrupt, it has sold everything.
When you sell your life, you have nothing else to sell.

***

The theatre is empty.
The lamps magnify the shadows,
The lamps magnify the emptiness,
The lamps magnify the holes in the stage, in the seats.
The theatre is empty,
And someone , a poet, maybe he doesn't know that poetry is bankrupt, it became paper, like money.
He reads a poem.
Poems are candles.
They shine as long as they have something, something real, to burn.
Paper burns easily.

***

It is not easy to believe that you live in order to die.
You are ready to die in order to live.
Your mule, obstinate, humble, innocent,
A fierce soldier in the war of the bread.
Its eyes closed, but it is too stubborn to die.
Outside, the army passes.
They killed the bread so many times,
But they cannot kill the hunger.
Hunger is a mule. Fierce, too obstinate to die.

***

The morning is a mine field.
Inside the houses: bread, love.
But you are out and you don't know how to enter,
Your life bleeds, your memories bleed,
And you know you have to remember. Urgently.
In order to have somewhere to return.

***

The train in the station, the smoke, the whistle.
You move among the miracle vendors,
You have to delay something: time.
But the moment passed. It is too late. Everything changed.
Only the miracle vendors remain,
They come from very far, from the deepest past.
They are the magicians of time.
They sell memories, they slow time.
You can see all the trains you didn't choose.

***

You left.
I pulled the tree from your neck,
I took some fruits, I took the tree
In order to remember,
In order to know how to leave
When time ends.
When time ends there are few choices left:
The half words, the long silences, the screams.
And you vomit the tree that silenced everything, even the silence.

***

Maternal hospital.
Everything was white washed:
The walls, the windows: there was no sky, the cold, the dark,
The gaze of the new born, the mirrors: there is no face.
You don't know where to find yourself.
You don't know that white is not always innocence.
You can white wash everything.

***

The big funerary orbit.
People come, they leave, they'll come again.
There is also the orbit of chairs:
Plastic chairs, ancient, even though they are new.
You move them with clumsy hands, from one death to the other,
The way you move in the orbit of the house.
You don't know how to sit. You don't dare lying, it is too final.
And you fear the orbit of the final.

***

Maybe the woman of love is a statue. Sad marble.
She keeps her thighs in one motion for years, for ages,
The thighs wide, the nakedness carved deep.
One knee crouches, bent.
Only her smile is small, closed.
It is too tight, too tight for her face.
It is too tight for her life.

***

In the room: the absolute. The absence,
The change, the agreeing, the dissent.
In the room: two men. Tow comrades.
In the room: the carousel of the chairs.
They face each other. They don't face.
They don't know that also backs know how to cry.

***

Above: the cloud shines like sharp metal, like a cut.
Beneath it: yourselves.
The hands: wings, rebels of gravity.
You don't know how much can a wing weigh.

***

Premonitions are the magicians of time.
They hear the past deep inside you, the old fears.
They hear the time in the most distant vulture.
You wait. You want to know what time it is in your life.
But only the silence comes towards you, and the big fatigue of waiting.
The premonitions are busy somewhere else.
In the morning, the mask of patience falls from your face:
Pink stucco. It breaks like a cry.

***

He said: there were those who said they violated the sun.
He said: from then on there were many suns,
And summers were a holy fire.
They didn't know that no one can change the thighs of nature,
That when the wine will die in their mouth, in their dreams,
There will be only one sun. Virgin, old, dying, eternal.

***

You saw the hours: the daily course of human.
Your eyes touched, with all the ten fingers of a touch, the most distant star,
There where everything began, where you began,
So, how could you say you were absent.

***

Your eyes are slow to open.
You define your space in the window.
You are close, you are far from the bars in the window.
At times, you see the men on the other side of reality,
In a distant road that knows where to go , in a quiet season.
At times, you see the bars in your eyes.
They are another reality. They are not a road that know where to go, except to rage.

***

In the arena
The gladiator falls on the ground.
His naked blood makes him more naked.
Caesar is silent.
The gladiator holds up his hand. Thumb down.
Inside himself he is free.
Inside his hand he owns he owns his last freedom: death.

***

The basic mistake
You need to be loved, loving is not enough.
This need is a thief. It steals what you see,
It steals whatever you are not sure if it loves you.
The basic mistake
Of passing by a river, blind, deaf, ready for nothing.
You didn't know it, but you were ready for the water: the quiet depth, the mute cry,
You don't know it, but you were ready for the river of time, you were ready to drink your face from the river, and to be drunk, to be inebriated, to see, to hear, a moment before eternity.

***

You begin each morning from the beginning, step by step.
There are small miracles in each step, small victories:
The journey from moment to moment, the immense journey.
The journey to things, invisible as the useful , the beauty of the inevitable.
You feel that in this 'here', in this room,
You paid your debt to life.
You are happy.

***

You sit.
The river flows between your legs.
You don't know it is the river of time.
You don't know that whatever you see in the water, is a souvenir of time:
Old peels of fruits, the sweet smell of something rotten,
Yellow masks that grew useless. You have new ones.
A song that was repeated by time, or maybe, by yourself.
It was too young. It feared nothing.

***

The less you have,
The more wraps you need around you.
The old newspapers, whole sheets of them, to cover your nights.
Letters to someone else, words like a wrap,
That pretended you have somewhere to return,
And a bag of potatoes, empty.
You don't know there are no bags big enough to wrap the hunger.
Your hunger is naked, clear, unwrapped,
And you don't understand why you are invisible.

***

The stars are in an orbit of nature,
Precise, austere.
And yet, they seem arbitrary, foreign,
You don't trust them.
Maybe, one day, deep in the journey to human,
You'll plunge your hand pulsation, tumultuous,
Into your secret body,
You'll find the deep wound inside you: the dead star.
You'll know who you are, what you are.

***

The evening
Makes things endless:
The corridors, the closed doors, the silence bbetween the cries,
The blindness of a beggar,
The blindness of age,
The blindness of fatigue,
The tiredness of rage.
The age, the fatigue, the endless.

***

They announce that murders happen before they happen.
They all were dark eye glasses, eyes may be a confession.
And he, his eyes naked,
A kitchen knife in his hand, a slice of bread.
He will murder someone, maybe his hunger.
He is guilty.

***

Those who were not killed
Returned in the evening
To the hanging poles.
The hanged ones were unrecognizable.
The swollen faces were huge,
The tongues fell out of the mouths.
They recognized them.
They put between the giant lips
The last cigarette,
The ash fell warm, lit,
As if ash was not only forgetting.
It can remember.

***

Mornings that begin, half consumed, from the beginning,
Forgiving, unforgiving..
The gods of stone in the quarry: a staircase of marble.
The sky: yellow, blue, a parrot; it repeats you.
There are the motions of living: the sun in a slice of bread.
There are the motions of living that forgive you,
And you forgive yourself.

***

They tell you: good journey.
You are in the station, and you are in the train.
We never know how to leave,
With all of ourselves inside us,
We don't know the art of leaving.
Slowly we learn how to miss ourselves,
To miss whatever was left behind.

***

Suspicion is contagious,
You suspect and you feel you are suspected.
You are alone.
Even the world raining into your life,
The footsteps that rained on the map,
Are not an umbrella of mercy.
Closeness could be a roof, a tent in the desert of rain,
But closeness is hard work.
It is not easy to trust yourself.

***

Statues are a repetition.
They repeat the sadness of ages, the hollowed stone in the eyes.
The violence of white marble in your body,
A sword pointing somewhere.
You hold the missing hands in your arms,
You hold your missing eyes in a marble tear.
The sword points at you, and you know it.

***

Fear is a motion, a harsh motion.
It may be deep, deeper than space,
It may be tall,, taller than time.
You swing amidst the double fear.
Who will guard you from the fear,
Who will guard the fear from you.

***

Your shoulder at the shoulder of someone.
You know both that the perfect cold wouldn't last.
The pieces of ice will melt in your mouth, in your motions.
You are not prepared to live naked,
You need the ice to wrap you, to wrap what you remember, to be safe.
You cannot forget in order to be saved alone,
You cannot forget for someone else in order to save him.

***

Yn the window: the woman, naked, beautiful.
The bird between her thighs bleeds.
You stand by the window,
You enter the door.
You don't know how to bring all of yourself into love.
You don't know how to bring all of yourself into life.
You protect yourself from life,
And you don't know that your life protects itself from you.

***

The person on the scale.
The knees in the torn trousers,
The kitchen knife on the trousers.
There are no scales for rage.
The rage of a torn trousers, they cannot kill the cold.
The rage of the kitchen knife, it cannot kill the hunger.
There is no scale for hunger.

***

You explore the person of the mirror:
A man of glass, translucent, fragile,
And your dreams, they are glass too.
These dreams may defeat you, they may shatter.
No one can cross the night, the broken glass on the floors of the night,
And remains the same.

***

You are at home in your home.
You see yourself in the spaces, in the windows.
Maybe you are eternal enough,
To see yourself, cool and fast motions of the eyes,
In the cage of a beautiful parrot.
But you don't see it.
Cages become invisible when you don't see.
They become eternal.

***

The wall is too tired and too thin. The black holes; bullets.
You hear the voice behind it, the hoarse lips,
But you cannot discern what it says.
And you carry the wall with you wherever you go, the wall and the holes,
And the voice behind it.
You are not deaf, but, like the wall, you are too tired ,
Too tired to understand the fatigue of waiting,
To know the holes wait for something.

***

You work the clay.
You create small statues,
Like the icons of the nomads.
You create a world in clay.
The clouds are a threat.
You cover the soft clay, the clay world,
The desert of rain, in a tent.
The wise man of the tribe is silent.
He forgets nothing.
His motions : a path to the sun.

***

You work the clay,
You create small statues,
A world in clay, blind, deaf, immobile.
It rains.
You leave the soft clay, the clay world
Under the rain,
In order to be less alone.

***

Beneath the words,
There are other words, distant, near.
We create our phrases, layer under layer, like everything else.
We don't realize that the word beneath the word, began everything.
The language we understand: clear water.
The language that we don't understand, but we feel.
And the silence that only the deaf can understand.

***

You don't realize
That words are only translations,
That you cannot trust words,
You can trust only the shape of the lips, the shape of what you feel.
You can trust what you feel.

***

In the arena of the night,
The gladiators fall, drunk,
The belt loosened, the white fat.
The golden cup in the hand.
They won. They raise the drunk cup, they empty it.
It is strange,
How we are drunk by what we win,
How we are too drunk to know the cup is empty.

***

He said: the only way to build a city, is to build it before, long before the fist stone.
The only way to win is to fight before, long before the first bullet.
The only way to die is to die before, long before you die.
He said: somewhere inside you, the battle before the first bullet,
That's where victories, defeats begin.

***

Necessity is an old teacher.
It teaches you while you teach it.
It is a map creased as life, as the world.
It shows you where you are, where to go.
It is a cave crouching in a rock, deep as time ,
Where you share what you miss, the way you share the silence.
Necessity didn't invent yet the precise words to say: silence.
You miss them.
Necessity didn't invent the precise words to say that what life needs comes before anything else.
You need these words.

***

Whatever you wanted to say,
Your motions of living said it already,
They leave you visible,
Like a ruined house,
The hole in the wall, bigger than the wall,
The hole in your chest, bigger than you chest,
The holes, the open veins are not silent, they speak.

***

The fish scales shine
In the sunshine.
But necessity is not always beautiful.
It spreads the dead sea inside the dead fish
Over the plate.
We have no choice: we eat death.

***

The unsaid is never really silent.
It fills the words people say,
If you know how to hear,
If the perfect triangle of your ear: the three corners of hearing,
Become a circle: the endless corners, a circular dance,
The skirts fly high, the thighs of the unsaid are visible, naked.

***

The bar at night.
The lights are secret x-rays.
They see the white stripes: the bones,
They see the fractures,
As if the motions of living broke you.
They pour in the wine deep into the grey fat of the bones.
You drink the pain, and it drinks you,
As if pain was the only pain-killer.

***

The circles of the night.
The circle of the light: the moon.
The circle of seeing of the blind.
The circles of coins in the thighs of a prostitute. The coins are rusted. They bleed.
The circle of a bullet in the round fist of a man.
At night, you see the circles clearer. At night you close your eyes in order to see better.
There are many circles inside each circle,
And we never understand how nights change us, how they make us deeper, how they leave us floating at the surface.

***

The journey from day to day is habit,
It's struggle after struggle,
It is need after need,
Gravity after gravity.
And yet, some nights
You see a moon drop in a stone, a pearl,
A beauty torn from an animal of pain.
You hold the moon drop in your hand,
The light inside the pain: a truce.

***

You try to find the limits
Between shouts and shouts,
Between flags and flags,
All you find is a border on the map, untraceable.
And yet, there is so much rage, so much fury on the border.
It becomes visible; it is a line on paper.

***

Behind the locked doors,
The houses are alone.
Behind the locked doors,
Your poems are alone, the poems are you.
You try to masquerade the poems,
But you cannot masquerade a man alone in the arena: a clown.
You try to masquerade them as friends,
But you cannot masquerade the drunk crowd,
The only friend available,
And you are not ready for what a clown feels.

***

The person in your head, and your body.
Two big rivers. The timeless water , Euphrates and Tigris.
They drown in each other, each day, each night, from the beginning.
It is sad,
You suicide, because waiting for truce, for quiet water, tires you.
Waiting is hard work.

***

The statue in the plaza tires you.
It is a man alone in the arena, the battle of gazes,
It sees too much, it is too silent.
They should make a garden of statues,
Like a garden of people,
They should give them leaves
To sooth the holes in their eyes,
They should give them shade to be less visible,
To have soft branches in their eyes.
The marble could blossom.

***

The man in the aquarium is drowning.
The exotic fish around him,
His eye glasses still in his eyes.
He can see his death in a man made sea.
We drown often in man made rivers:
The mirrors, the windows,
And we don't know if it is suicide or murder.

***

You stand out of the village,
Your eyes full of rain.
People stand at the windows.
They don't know that eyes full of rain are not always innocent. They see too much.
They may be killers.
They don't know that when the eyes are washed, they may lose everything:
The wall, the hole in the wall, the window and their face in the window.

***

You build the floors, the ceiling
Parallel to earth, parallel to the sky,
And you use a map, parallel to the sky, parallel to the earth.
You walk through space, you want to hold something,
But everything is parallel,
But the small acrobats: your hands, your feet, your eyes,
Are perpendicular to everything.
You don't know how immense you are when you touch, when you see.
When you climb down the rope,
Natural as magic.

***

You pray, more than everything, to yourself,
If you know who inside you prays, what he prays.
You ask forgiveness, more than everything ,
From yourself,
If you know how to forgive yourself.
You baptize an old bench in the street: church.
You pray.
Strangely,
People look at you as if they understand,
As if they had a bench of their own.

***

It is a different circus.
A clown, alone in the arena.
He walks thhe tight rope. He is unstable.
His painted tears pull him down.
The painted laughter pulls him down.
He may fall.
Strangely,
The audience is quiet,
As if he reminded them something,
As if they touched, each, with secret fingers, the rope tight in his pocket,
And the red paint: the red tear of dawn, where time begins again.

***

The unsaid is power.
You say what you need to say,
And you leave the rest unsaid.
In whatever we do, we leave something of ourselves, in the motion of pain,
In the motion of silence, in a step between one hour and the other.
And words leave something of themselves: the unsaid,
It makes the words big, bigger than themselves.

***

The evening.
In the street, less light, aged light.
Everything is suspicious, because everything is fear,
It slows time, it slows the simple motion of living.
You don't know if you were betrayed,
If you betrayed someone with a corner of a gaze,
With the beginning of a silence..
You cannot hide in the basement.
There is a mirror hidden in the wall.
Mirrors know who you were, who you are,
They betray you, uninhibited, easy as a glance.

***

The train passed.
The maimed ones waved with their missing hands,
The blind: with the eye in their palm.
That's how the lost ones returned.
They were on the train,
They were on the tracks.
You never return whole.
Part of you still leaves, others are left behind,
As if they never left,
As if return doesn't exist.

***

The interrogation.
Your words are recorded, repeated,
You hear them all day long.
You don't recognize them, they are foreign.
You don't know the power of a word,
You don't realize that words know where to find you,
In which basement of yourself, in which claustrophobia if the dark,
In which silence..
The words you said return to you. Always.

***

The times are hard, the fear is suspicious.
In the cemetery,
The lonely lamp makes everything more distant.
The windows are walls. They are shot.
The voices are walls. They are shot.
Even the names of the dead are a living danger,
They use pseudonyms.
They take from you the only thing left: your name.
The name on the grave is fake.
But they cannot take from you your death. It is real. It is yours.

***

The magician of the tribe says little.
He just shows you images, real in their beauty, beautiful in their illusion:
A woman moaning, soft white marble,
A forest between her thighs.
He knows how to see her,
He knows how to see the mad sperm in your motions.
He gives you a choice:
To let the illusions run inside you, beautiful, eternal,
Or to kill them.
You don't know how hard it is to kill an illusion. It is bullet proof.
You don't realize that the person in your head, the one you trust more than anything else,
Is the artist of illusion. He is the destroyer.

***

The water has aged too,
And the birds in the garden: a handful of feathers.
You sing a song that began long before you began,
A lullaby,
A song written on the walls of the caves.
You sing a lullaby to pain.

***

The hungry
Eat in front of a mirror,
The food is multiplied, it becomes more.
And they put a mask over their hunger,
For good manners.
And yet, they devour everything, skin and bones.
Hunger is not a polite place.

***

You dance your feelings:
The tight rope in your wrists.
The tight rope in your smile.
You don't know if people are ready for your feelings.
You are a clown.
You don't realize that people come inside the crowd,
They are afraid to feel what a clown feels, alone.
You don't know they keep their hands,
Each one alone in a pocket,
Each one palpating secretly its tight rope.

***


You cannot chase something away easily,
Not even a stray balloon, a fake bird,
A stray hunter of souls, with a fake shout.
The shout should be deeper than a shout,
It should be real,
In order to chase it away.
You cannot chase away what doesn't really exist.

***

The clown on the tight rope.
His jumps could be beautiful, the jump of a cat, real as magic,
But his feet are tired, they fall from his legs.
His smile is tired, it falls from his lips.,
As if life was nothing,
Except the acceptance of defeat.

***

In the cemetery
The trees grow tall,
But the green is besieged at night,
As if it was touching the moss on the bench, the moss in the mourning,
The way someone touches his hand in a funeral
When speaking is not an option,
He touches, he feels something deep speak.
Which is the same thing.
We speak touching, we touch speaking.

***

The times are hard.
The fear and its brother; the suspicion, are everywhere.
There are spoken words that are forbidden,
So, you have no choice, you sing them.
The tune covers the words, they are almost invisible,
The tune travels, it makes them deeper, closer to the voice,
The tune lets you travel, closer to who you are, closer to what you want.
Our songs come from very far, they know the road is endless, the road exists.

***

Earth is, like everything else, layer beneath layer, inexplicable, mysterious.
You can understand when you kneel,,
Your hands, your finger nails deep in the mud.
Knowing is not enough,
In order to understand better,
You have to touch what you know,
You have to sense what you know,
With all the five fingers of senses.
You have to kneel in the mud,
Maybe you'll made with the mud
A jug of water.
Maybe you'll drink with mud in your mouth,
You'll know what the mud knows

***

Sundays are full of expectations
The steps go nowhere, and you expect,
The pebbles in the road with the moss, and you expect.
Maybe you could learn how to expect yourself,
To come visible, clear and secret like a human
You could tell yourself you've waited for so long.
There were separations everywhere:
The corner of a gaze in the mirror,
A fist closed like silence,
And yet, you expected.
Expecting yourself is a big act of faith, the biggest.

***

You stand in front of your door.
You don't know if to open, to come in.
Opening a door is an act of faith.
You hesitate, maybe you fear,
And it is sad,
Because anyway you live on both sides oof the door,
You die on both sides.

***


The day is white washed,
Only the grape harvest has red feet.
The invisible is everywhere:
The dead beneath the rocks,
The river of time that was slow in some places;
People sleeping in the caves, the caves awake deep in the people.

***

Night.
The woman alone in the bed.
She is thirsty for someone, someone who'll drink her thirst.
The guns of the soldiers, they are thirsty for war, or maybe for peace. They arre tired.
The last bread on the plate of the poor. They are thirsty for bread, the deep river.
The man with the cross in his body, they crucify each other, they are thirsty for more god.
We never quench our thirst. We are thirsty people, thirsty and sad.

***

Quarries are another kind of war, the war with stone,
The big noise of stone
Deepens all the other sounds,
So, the day is simple, it is what it is, pure war. It is as complicated as war.
A war without regret, without masks, without the tears painted red on the mask,
Without the screams, without the dead.
The dead stones, in the shrouds of dust, are silent. Maybe they repeated their death so many times. They've learned how to die.

***

In this land
The hunger stabs you in the back
As if it came from the past.
The white table cloth is yellow,
As if the blood was washed one time too much.
And the people eat at the yellow table cloth
Behind closed doors. Hunger is a crime.
They know that eating is survival,
It is no longer a celebration of life.

***

In order to learn, you have to know.
You have to plunge your hand, tumultuous, vibrating,
Into your secret body,
To find what you know.
Learning comes later.

***




SUMMER NIGHTS
Creation doesn't repeat itself.
The fig tree sheds its leaf, its softest leaf, for Eve.
Eve, visible in her nakedness, visible in her beauty,
The leaf guards the deep recesses of her body,
It touches the deep recesses. It will never be the same.

***

It is late.
The silences closes everything:
The small cafe by the beach, the ships, the sea in the air, the salt.
It will leave in the morning the rough skin of the silence,
The rough skin in the eyes. Some memories in the skin.

***

There are men who have the sky in the window,
They want to reach the infinite.
They are too lonely to love,
They don't know how to touch the small infinites in a belly full of love.
They don't know that even a small infinite is infinite.

***
Wee buy salt and we sell salt: nature, the people.
The sweat on the skin, the sweat in the eyes, the shipwrecks dripping in our hands, the immense salt shaker in our daily soup : the sea.
We are big merchants in the big market of sadness: life.

***

The shots remained in the forest.
The sound stampeded the grass.
The echoes weaved themselves in the leaves.
The sound, the echoes prolonged the dying,
As if they were a bullet in the center of an arena.
Thumb down.

***

The delicate bones of the thief.
His steps, so soft over the skin.
Beneath his youth, he is naked. It is the first time.
The whole past, all the bibles, the fear of sin
Steal his hands, the tenderness, his urge for life
His motions freeze. They tremble.
Maybe tomorrow he'll return,
He'll take back all that was stolen:
The hands, the tenderness, the urge for life.

***

The small nocturnal hotel.
It is late, too late for love.
The bodies are no longer naked,
They are covered with a soft, almost invisible layer of something unknown.
They are alone, each in his own layer.
The woman speaks. The man doesn't answer.
The distances between them are invisible in their depth.
There is nothing that can measure the distances of a question
That wasn't answered, of an answer that was not there.

***

By the sea,
Everything is more, everything is many.
The suns are many, they are high and they are in the water.
Your eyes are many: high and in the water.
Beneath the waves there is another sea: deeper, quiet.
Beneath your eyes: floating, surging, there are other eyes,
You cannot see your eyes, but they see you.

***

Our words, like everything else,
Are layer beneath layer.
We speak,
At times, beneath the voice the shout is deeper,
At times, beneath the voice, the quiet is deeper.
We speak, and our voice knows where to find us. Always.

***

It is a world of mirrors.
The crab carries slowly its loneliness,
Your gazes carries slowly its loneliness.
Beneath the steps, life is deeper.
The waves carry swiftly their cry,
The salt in your throat carries swiftly your cry.
Beneath the cry, the quiet is deeper.

***


THIS WAS THE SONG

It is early, and yet, it seems something is late.
People don't look anymore for what they longed for. They are tired.
Fatigue makes the shoes heavy, full of time. Your feet don't exist.
Doors are everywhere, the handle is the whole loneliness, it doesn't open the door.
There is the big noise of neon, it deafens whatever we say, what we don't say.
There are bodies that know, almost in a mysterious way,
The journey of a body inside a body, and the departure.
There are things thrown everywhere. Maybe their stillness means something,
Maybe they rebel against time.
Maybe time stopped here, in the trash.
There is a strange feeling of something infinite sliding over your hand,
You try to grasp it, in vain. How softly in the infinite lost.
There is someone who walks inside his stillness,
And the stillness walks inside him, like an old photo, the yellow stillness.
There are names that bite delicately your tongue,
That tremble in the chords of your fingers, and now, they are paper, a pale letter,
It goes nowhere.
Some things continue to stand straight, patient, in the night:
A tree, a man who looks for someone, a child measuring the stars.
They diffuse in the shadows,
And maybe diffusing is uniting,
Maybe they know something.
There is much wisdom in patience, there is much patience in wisdom.
They sell huge ice creams in cones:
A pyramid inside a capsized pyramid.
Your palm: a mummy,
Your palm: time, pure time.
Someone plays the violin, he plays only for himself, and maybe, for no one.
The song is visible, strangely sincere, harsh, tender.
It sings the night.
Only a song can count without counting the distances in a silence,
The deep knives inside a chord.
Only a song can count the uncountable: the infinite within a note.
It is a pity that the song sing only for the violinist, and maybe for no one.
Songs are us. They make us visible.
It is late.
The buses have nowhere to go, but they have to continue,
And the faces in the windows of time: they are moments, they have nowhere to go.
Moments lose their address each moment,
They lose the key each moment.
They go where ever time goes.
Maybe the key of the music and the key of the door are the same:
They open the warm darkness inside us, they let us in.

***


CIRCULAR GLOOM

1. He said: time is pain, it is fear, it is a seed.
Between two words, you hear the perplexity of time,
Between two words, your hands lock. They say nothing. They don't give shape to the words.
Between two words: stones. Their deep wounds, their impossible inside the possible:
The past beneath the past, the cry beneath the cry.
Between two words: a naked wall. It protects nothing, not even yourself,
The bullet knows where to find you.

2.Your breath fossilized between the rocks.
You walked among the ruins for too long.
The silence was the smallest interval between one step and the other.
The footprint bear each other, always deeper.
The pulse inside the steps: lit, dark, earthly.
The mountains an observation place, you see the cracks, the abysses.
You are condemned, you are absolved.
You look at the sky. You nail the stars in their place.
You are human, you want to tidy the world,
Or maybe, to tidy something smaller, yet, it cannot be tidied: your life.
He said: everything is motion:
The silence, the words, the stones, the mountains.
Everything unites in motion, everything separates in motion.

3.On the rocks: metal shadows. The iron feet of the guard.
The sun is everywhere: white, green, blue.
With such a sun how can they shoot men.
With such a sun how can they accept the decision, the despair.
With such a sun, how can their body, their young body, grows old in one moment , As old as death.
You halt, in the position of urge.
You don't know whom you follow, whose defeat, whose victory.
He said: in this place of green suns,
Gods walked, saints walked, they are silent. Their feet, as wide as the feet of a question.
They are silent in a language you don't recognize, and you don't know why they cry, if they cry.
Somewhere, a soldier, lets the sun harden his head, a helmet of suns.
He is not defeated. He accepts nothing.
In this place, the suns use the hands,
Five long finger, lit, in each hand,
Dawn begins in the hands.
This place is poor, only the cemeteries are rich,
Their big riches that cannot be given.
In this place, people burn and people give light.
In this place, nothing is wasted, and most of all the fire, the warmth, the light,
In this place they cannot afford to lose it .

***


THE RENTED ROOM
The house you rent, it smells of something used to decay, of quiet defeat.
In the stair case no bars, only the motion of the nothing in your hands.
In the corridors: a quiet truce with the shadows.
In the room: the anarchy of straight lines, the heavy smell of emptiness..
The things in your room are independent, they don't need to be seen in order to exist.
In the windows, something moves: the absence. It is on both sides of the windows.
The keys: each one open another void.
In this place you speak, but you are not in your words, they part without you.
You weigh the void, you weigh the gravity, you don't know if hope has a weight.
The tomorrow is a retreat, it defeats you.
But there is a mirror: it remembers. It remembers the journey of a body inside a body,
And the secret journey to something else, something unknown, maybe death.
What is the meaning of eternity when you get used to the smell of decay.
They build around your house, building like a decapitated body, like a crime.
At night, the big cry of the mortar leaves the place,
The shadows are the only witness, the only confession.
At night, the shadows diffuse, and maybe diffusion is uniting.
At night, the shapes are sculpture's, they sculpt themselves.
Maybe, one day, time will be different,
Things will find their place,
The rooms will return to the rooms,
The void will return to the void,
You'll return to the words you say.
In the corridors: hands full of people.
In the mirror: the secret journey of a body inside a body begins again, the biggest journey.

***

ELENI
You had always the fear of hidden sounds,
Of sounds locked in locked rooms,
Of sounds beneath the tidy hours.
The empty flower pot had inside it a round void, dark,
It didn't smell of flowers, it smelled of a deserted house, of a deserted village.
You were afraid of windows. They made you visible,
They made the twilight climbing on the walls visible.
You were of the bucket at the well, where the full and the empty drowned together and alone.
The twilight was a strange loneliness: abstract, real, patient, conquered,
A light ray among the shadows was the only truce.
Your steps asked nothing. You feared the answers.
You forgot again and again what was forgotten.
You didn't know if something can exist and not exist at the same time,
Like the too late and the too early.
You heard the roots digging, something in the past, like a root you don't recognize,
And you don't know if it recognizes you.
When the war ended, your sleep ended,
Your void felt at home with the shadows,
The shadow of your body: half in bed, half in the nothing
The shadows of people, half alone, half empty,
These shadows were a delicate net over their fatigue. Dying is hard work.
You were afraid of the fatigue of the dead, not of your fatigue.
Little by little everybody left: the parents the sisters, the family.
Now, the anxiety of parting, and the anxiety of meeting again, was useless.
The light in your eyes was fossilized,
As if everything was ancient,
As if the hard shadows were nothing,
What is something that is also nothing,
What is the 'now' if everything is ancient,

***

THEMISTRESS OF THE VANEYARD

Women are the farmer of nature, goden bees.
Each day, they unlock the twelve keys of the night,
They tidy their home, the secret beehive,
In their hands, dawns hang.
And they glide over the wide shadows,
To the vineyard, to the forests in their back yard.
They know what pollen is, what seeds are,
They know it in the deepest recesses of their body.
They are silent.
We don't know how much silence can the deep recesses contain,
And how much honey can a silence contain.

***

MARIA
The house.
The calligraphy of shadows: the tree,
And the fence was another shadow, it drew lines on your body.
The two trees in the entrance:
Like two different silences,
Like two quiet rivals.
Maria,
She lived alone in her waiting, she was besieged by her waiting.
She was a ruler. She put order in the wilderness of spider webs, in the wild grass,
In her hands full of seeds.
The sounds rained distant, mysterious.
There were no sounds by the house, no steps that were her own.
Later,
She did nothing. She remained alone in her waiting.
She didn't look for secret meanings in the small motions of absence, of presence.
She forgot the thirst, the wine of remembering.
She didn't speak, not because she was silent, she forgot how to speak,
She heard the sounds of life, inexplicable, faceless, the independence of the sound.
At twilight, she tried the touch of the old wall,
With the same familiarity, with the same consumed way of someone who spoke,
Of someone who has nothing to say.
In the garden, the plants, free in their bulimia,
They bite, they lick they embrace. An empire of mouths.
She deserted long ago what deserted her.
The train of time passed over her, beneath her, inside her, it stopped nowhere.
How can you measure the sadness of a seed.
How can you measure the seed of sadness.

***

THE PUBLIC PARK
This park is the garden of human nature.
Here, no one has a name, so you are free. Names close you.
Here, you meet people, you miss them.
Here, you meet people who are missing. They are not in their face, they are not in their silence.
Here, there are people-turtles. They carry their shell. More than blood, shells bleed fear, the stony fear, slowly, patiently.
Here, there are sad people. God writes letters on their lap. Maybe someone will read them. There is too much sdaness, too little god.
Here, the slow motions of absence in the middle of the visible,
The slow motions of presence beneath the invisible.
The sound of a branch braking, is the shape of your parting. You part every moment.
The night is invisible in its nakedness.
The people are dressed, they need to be visible.
Here, regret sits on the benches, in the caves of two mouths, in the caves of two silences.
Here, on the benches, the shapes of loneliness are magnified, distorted. They are human.
Here, when the birds come, everything becomes bigger, taller, inexplicable:
Your hands, the moon, the rough skin of shadows on your cheek, what you remember, what you forgot.
Here, on the benches, some sad old men. They are bent, they are small.
They don't know they are the height of a human.
They don't know they are the height of sadness.

***

SAD ISLAND
Here, there are no eyes. Your eyes, the big sea in your eyes, are empty,
So, there are no houses, names, they don't exist, they are abstract,
There are no keys to the doors that don't exist.
There are no sounds, the sounds are vacant, and the silence is vacant. It is dead.
The shapes are empty. The trees are absent, their only fruit is the void, the sad fruit.
Time is empty. The big hands of dawn touch nothing.
People came, people left. A secret journey, like deserters from pain.
Yet, someone recognizes you behind the masks of time.
You don't open the door. The handle in your hand: the whole loneliness.
Maybe one day you'll open the door. Walls crumble when you open the door.
Maybe you'll remember how to see. Seeing is power.
Maybe you'll remember that nothing is empty in the world, not even the emptiness.
You'll bring back the houses, the sounds, the shades, the trees, from 'now' to 'now',
The longest journey.

***

BLACK AND WHITE
Simple things halted us in the big journey.
The sound of a train, in the windows: the faces of time, simple moments. They left.
The voice of a dog, transparent, it opens the silence.
A distant cry of someone who defeated death for a whole night.
You said; I miss the simple things.
You said: now I am quiet, I know nothing is simple, not even the black and the white.
The white of the moon: the journey to the night.
The white of the moon: the journey to the day.
The black night: the journey to the morning.
The sun, the immense light, weeps shadows.
You said; your face : a deep well, the white water is black in the depth
You said; time has no color. Time has all the colors
You said: living bears us each day. It is a mother,
And we bear our living each day, we are mothers, the body where we live is our womb,
The immense body, our womb contains it.
We bear ourselves. And we bear life. We bear death, and they bear us.
You said: I still dream bullets. They kill my nights.
I don't remember how many times I was killed.
You said: I miss simple things:
To know that each night ends,
To know that each day ends, the sun, the fatigue.
To know the additions:
How to add my day to the day of other., how to add my nights.
To feel how softly the twilight walks, how softly it erases the colors,
To feel how our shadows diffuse in its shadows, to feel the truce.
And maybe, diffusing is uniting.

***

TORN MASKS
In the puddle: an old Malaria drowns.
The cigarettes of yesterday burn in the saliva of tomorrow.
The white balloons from last night's words, are vapor.
And the scavengers gather everything:
The old Malaria, the cigarette butt, the words, the vapors, the tomorrow.
Your small, almost invisible motions, are scavengers of time.
The morning comes with the anarchy of white beginnings,
In the corner of the window: spiders hang on the threads of light,
They are forgotten: a deep silence in the big noise of light.
The morning comes with white washed windows, with the face of a child.
The yesterday's zero is immense. Zeros change, they grow, the add a number before the zero.
People bring their masks to the sun, they don't realize they are torn. They feel safe.
In their torn mask: a nostril: a breath of what they are, the deep absence that breathes them.. It is visible
Scavengers love torn masks, they love the human glued in things.

***

DIFFICULT TIMES
1. There is too much time inside you, each day, the yesterday begins, or the never.
Each day there is only one road available. There is nothing to unlock.
Each night could be the end of the tree, a black autumn.
Your hands smell of absence and memory, fingers that sweated a touch, that wept it.

2. It's winter.
The colored cloths whithered in moth balls.
Between the eye that sees you, the eye you see, there are the distances of the cold.
Between your eye and what you see, there is the parting, the endless parting.

3. You measure the shadows, they are always wider, always deeper.
You postpone things, the moment passed, time changes.
The new time leaves you behind.
You postpone things. The train passes.
All your luggage is here. All your luggage is on the train.

4. You are alone in the suburb.
The world is far, as far as the news on the radio.
The world is close. As close as the cloud of smoke of the last train.
At night, the whistle of the train is a dream. There is reality in dreams.
The whistle is a face in an old picture, the whistle is something you're not sure it existed.
The whistle is immense. It goes far, much further than what you remember.

5. The shadow of five fingers, the fingers of a child.
Small motions of something that begins.
When things begin, the small is immense.
You wanted to pull the ropes of the world,
And all you did was pulling slowly, patiently, your shoe laces.
You walked. Steps make roads, roads make steps.
Time was in a side street, in the dead ends, in a deserted station.
You try to catch it, but time is the smoke of a train.
There are small motions, almost invisible almost unnoticeable.
They become the yesterday, the now, the tomorrow.

***

A SUMMER RESORT IN WINTER

1.In the yard: the well. In the bucket: a perfectly round sky.
Everything here is the memory of nature: the roots, the cool canopy.
Everything here is the memory of man:
The silent skin hanging from the wrinkles, the circular vases: fossilized eyes. Maybe they see, but they don't know what time it is in the world.
You look around, you don't know what are you looking for.
This silence, this place are the big absence.
In this place you lose yourself, you find it, you lose it again.
2. The train brings the places back to where they used to be.
The evenings come too soon. Everything is locked on both sides of the door.
You can enter what you remember, but some memories need a key.
3. It is windy in the world.
The disciplined anarchy of the houses bleeds dust.
4. You are young. The summer hangs at the edge of a kiss,
The lips smell of winter, of cold,
As if your youth was lost in a kiss.
You are young,
You measure your books, they are too small. The book that brought you here doesn't exist, it was consumed in the cross roads, in roads wide as a question.
The book that brought you here exists. It is in what you remember, in what you didn't know how to forget.
5. The evening stands in the middle of the plaza, like an old statue,
Without hands, without wings.
In the cafe: the half finished motion remains in the table. It confesses everything and nothing.
6.12 o'clock. Midnight. The 12th station in the journey to human.
People with hands full of absence,
People with hands in the pockets, each hand alone in a pocket.
The motion of coins in the pockets:
One side was an ancient face,
One side was a bird, in the moment before flight.
And the journey carries everything.

***

PEACE

As long as there are suns,
There will be light, there will be shadows.
So, maybe, all we can have is a twilight,
The shadows mingling with light.
A truce.
And we go on living between one truce and the other,
Maybe, one day, the truces will be closer,
They'll be as close as pain, as close as the hand of a mother.
Remember, even the hand of a mother, the immense sun, weeps shadows.
It is not easy to keep a truce with life.

***

OPEN CIRCLE
1. The wide peace.
The road did what it should. It went by itself.
And the stones did what roots do: they persisted , they were consumed, time exhausted them , but they were stubborn,
And you did what a man should do.
You said 'yes' to the peace, to the road, to the stones .
The journey consumed you, time was exhausted inside you, yet you said 'yes' to the journey.

2. The secret of a handle that keeps your whole loneliness.
The secret of youth: something is postpones, the moment passes forever.
The secret of the two trees by your eyes , they are cracked, they are tired. The secret of autumn.
The secret of an animal in pain, the secret of prey.
The secret of a man and a woman loving, unloving, loved, unloved.
You say: when we look, everything is a secret,
When we look everything is clear.
You said: we have more, much more than two eyes.

3. The stone separates from the rock. It has its own abyss.
The water separates from the shape of the glass. It pours.
The lips separate from the voice. They speak.
And everything is wide open,
There are no borders except what you don't see.

4.In the cafe of Marieta,
The mirror nailed with nails of sun.
It draws what it sees: the light in the scene of a port.
In the evening, the cafe is closed
And the glasses towards the street are another kind of mirror:
A series of drawings of the sea along the gallery of summer.
Maybe the draw a bigger light out of all the walls, of all the frames of the gallery.
But Marieta needs her mirror in order to understand the light.
Mirrors are a power.
There are too few mirrors and too many eyes.

***


WANDERING MUSICIANS
1. We sang all our songs, and they sang us,
And others sang our songs, and they sang them.
When the songs sing others, they are a power.
That's enough, we are tired and the songs are fatigued.
The silence leans on our teeth.
There were many graves around us.
There was not enough earth, free earth, for our songs.
With which throat shall we sing the earth, white as the dead,
With which eyes.
The night leans on our teeth, our teeth are coal.
With which throat shall we sing the coal, with which eyes.

2. You enter your song, and the song enters you,
The song climbs inside you, always higher, on secret ladders,
On the ladders you are made of.
You were tall, too tall.
Life couldn't contain you, death couldn't contain you,
Only the song that sings you, could contain you. You remained in the song.
Five girls in the orchard,
They raise their arms:
The sea without sky. They enter the sea, the sea enters them,
Naked breasts, a naked blue triangle in the transparent water,
And they drown, like longing, in the sea inside them,
They drown, naked as longing.

4, It is easy for sadness to enter inside us. We are sad people.
It is easy for the sadness to be sang. We are sad people.
Songs fall like a warm leaf from our voice.
There are always small suns in the sadness.

5. It rains ice in our hands,
Even diamonds need coal,
Even the engine of time needs fire.
There are only two colors:
The white ice, the white song that doesn't exists.
The black coal that doesn't exist.
The first alley leads to the night, maybe you'll take it,
Or maybe you'll be lost in what doesn't exist: a white song, without coal, without fire.

6. You: son of petrol, the hands of petrol, the big boots with the skin of the night.
The lords of petrol
Have a white party, a party of moon, of lace.
You cannot come there.
They say there is a knife in your eyes,
And they are right, the knife is , like your eyes, in the right place.
But you'll have your own party:
The cauldrons of petrol: drums.
The hand of petrol: drum sticks.
You'll dance.
The best party ever.
You danced, beyond rage, beyond remorse.
Your dance was black, and there were no shadows. It was clear.

7. The river turned. It didn't go towards the sea.
It denied the laws of nature.
It climbed the uphill of your living.
And it took your song, it took the village, the street, and even the prison,
Like a beast of water, like water inside a beast.
How can you sing inside the water,
How can you drink water when you drown.
Who will guard your song, when it drowns, who will guard its thirst.

8. Death stands quiet at the bus station.
His cloths are a river, beneath the water, everything is visible:
Your room, your kitchen, the white Sunday shirt: ironed, marble.
The shovel by your bed.
But in the water you hear nothing, lips move, but sound loses its reality.
Death wears a white shirt, as pale as the ice in the veins of a crime.
Your shirt is empty, the hands are cut inside the sleeves,
The neck cut inside the collar,
And your motion measures the gravities:
The emptiness weighs like the silence.
The body of shadows weighs like the unreal, like a thousand impossible-s.
And you thought that only the possible had real gravity.

9. The quarry.
The sun baked stones, the sun baked life. The dynamite bakes the sun.
We try to sing, but our words are fossilized before they fall on the stone.
A train was derailed,
It left bodies of a cry, an orphan sky of smoke,
The sky was dense, solidified.
Maybe the train will go on to the quarries of the sky.
We are thirsty, our life is thirsty,
But the only river is beneath our arm pits, it's salty.
We drink it and it drinks us.

10. The song for the one.
The scent of hey and urine was a deep well.
You could drown in it.
The night: deep, blind, reality far, close.
Between its thighs: a forest. A wet forest.
In the odor, smell of sperm, of the salty armpits of crime.
Men that were teeth. Teeth that were men,
They bit tables of stone.
They didn't hear your song. There were too many shadows in their teeth,
Deaf shadows.
Everybody came, except one.
After the feast everybody went to sleep, except one.
He went out.
The smell of sperm of salty armpits couldn't contain him.
The night was a forest,
Leaves created a tree out of their small lights, white torches.
Ants built a huge home.
And then, this one came.

11. The song for the one continues
The one came, wild grasses in his mouth,
Thorns in his eyes; caves.
He was closed in his skin, and empty out of his skin.
And then suddenly : everything was inside the world, his eyes, his pulse, his skin, the thorns.
Beauty was near, silent as usual,
But he rebelled,
He sowed the seeds of a song, the song made the silence less, the silence made the song more.
And with what was left of the silence, he made a new song,
And the song continues, because there is too much silence, too much silence inside us.

***


THIRTEEN SONGS

1. when you are in war, the war is everywhere, inside, outside of your skin, of who you are.
The moon makes the shadows bigger,
The shadows are a mirror, so airy, so opaque,
That you can believe you exists, you can believe you don't exist,
You can believe you never existed.
But wars are not metaphysics.
Thoughts can kill you a thousand times,
But the bullet- only once.

2. There are so many dead inside us, yet, we live.
We live with our dead, we live from our dead.
We live from the flicker of death inside us.
And we drown so many times, as if life was the art of drowning,
And in the depth of chocking,
The yesterday, the tomorrow, we find a strange joy. A truce.

3. You look at the mirror: a sister, old cracked.
You see your face,
You long for clarity.
Sad sister, time flows in your face, it makes you more opaque,
It takes you always further from your face,
But it cannot take the longing for clarity. It is yours.

4. you were white, untouchable.
You burned in a lonely pale flame.
God wrote poems on your lap.
You were afraid of flesh: the impure flame.
Pale sister, you don't know that the love of the body
Is an act of faith. An absolution.

5. You want to give what you own:
Your dream, your tomorrow, your song.
But people don't know how to take.
Maybe, you don't know how to give,
You don't know when you are ready, when the people are ready.
And maybe, one day, people will be ready, they'll take,
They'll take your dream, your song, they'll make it their own.

6.You raise your hand from the table,
And beneath it: a black hole of silence.
Between us: a hole full of absences,
Maybe, one day, you'll look for me.
I'll wait for you in a corner of the hours.
The river of time will close us in liquid muscles,
And the silence will be different.
It will an exquisite vertigo in the whirlpool of time.

7. When you look for the city,
Look for the real city, the living one.
The city of big hands,
The city of people that don't know how to write, and yet, the read the alphabet of pain, the alphabet of a hand shake.
Go look for the city.
In the city; humans.
In the city: the courage to be close, the courage to love.

8. You are not a hero,
But you have the wisdom of daily life, the wisdom of loneliness, the courage of loneliness.
So you know it doesn't matter if you come or go,
You can be lonely everywhere.
And it is sad,
Because coming is a big thing,
And going is a big thing,
They may be an act of faith,
They may be another kind of wisdom.

9. You are young.
You think that you have only the road up, and the road down.
You don't know that there is another road,
That life is the best mountain climber.

10. You are old. You look at the window in front of you.
You see your face in the window,
You are on a train that parts.
Life is generous.
It gives you the window
To see how you leave.

11. We grow old.
Life steals from us life, the body, at least part of the soul, memories.
Maybe we can keep inside us the beauty of having admired something.
This beauty is ours.

12. Like an animal.
We go on with the wisdom of loneliness,
With the forth wall of the alone.
And it is sad,
We were many, and we made the journey together.
We need another kind of wisdom.

13. growing up needs power.
The power to give up.
The power not to give up.
The power to let the cruelty kill you a thousand times,
And to live.
You don't know who can guard at least a part of your soul,
You don't know who will guard what you remember, what you could never forget.

***


PARENTHESIS

1.It is easy to hide big things behind small ones,
Like the silence behind a word.
Silence is always big, and the unsaid, even bigger.
There are no dictionaries big enough for the unsaid..

2. Nothing soothes our thirst,
The thirst for whatever is world.
We hear shouts in all the direction, in all the distances of the horizon,
And we don't recognize the voice, maybe it is our voice.
The horizon grows always distant, always close,
As if it was is the address of our thirst.

3. There are no masks.
You have many faces, and all of them are you,
The face of silence, of loneliness, of the familiar,
The face that won a battle, that lost.
You simply need many faces in order to live, or at least, to survive.

4. The door is open,
Like a tall poem of summer.
The only clock are the shadows, they love time, they give it a shape.
And you stand at the open door,
Free and bound to everything, free and bound like everything:
The summer, the shadows, time, the door.

5. You should own your eyes , each gaze, each glimpse.
Seeing is power. Seeing is lonely.
When you use the eyes of someone else, you own nothing.
The clouds heaped on a hill of the sky,
The wild flowers of the night: the stars.
No one can own them.
All you can own is your eyes.

6. Silent night, immobile.
And suddenly, your eyes, the sea in your eyes,
Feel something you miss for too long.
And then, the storm. You drown in your eyes:
Who you are, what you miss.
Maybe that's how everything happens.
Suddenly so close. Suddenly so far.

5. You climb the uphill of the morning.
The sun is friendly, the dust of light everywhere.
The night and its fears are shadows.
Shadows have bad reputation,
They may be a sift tree in the wrinkles of the night.
And the bench, the wooden bench where you sit, holds you with invisible muscles.
You don't understand yet nature,
And all you can do is paint it with your secret colors.
For a tiny eternity you make it your own.

6. You are home. Alone.
You see a face, you hear a voice,
You don't recognize the face, you don't recognize the voice,
But, when you come out to the street,
With the clouds, with the crowd, with the shouts,
You shout too.
You hear your voice inside the voice of others,
The voices rain over you, without umbrella,
You recognize your voice.
Your voice rains.

7. There are faces,
The disciplined lips, yet, with a secret thirst in the lips.
They are beautiful in their own way.
Remember:
The first jug of water never changed,
The discipline of the clay gave it its shape,
The secret thirst gave it its beauty, the beauty invisible as the useful.
We drink the moon in the water for a thousand years, for ages.

8. The circus of the night.
The music falls like metal leaves,
And the animals- chained to the shadows,
Their pain- chained to the shadows.
Their eyes are not closed. They are free. They cry.
No one can chain such a cry.
And the clown,
The small knives beneath his wrinkles. They bleed.
He understands everything.

9. The afternoon is a deserted city.
The afternoon is a cemetery of hours.
Each hour has someone who was killed.
In the windows: the eyes of the dead, the ears of the dead. Dead dust.
The dust is blind, deaf, ready for nothing.
In such afternoons, even the living are deaf, blind, ready for nothing.

10. To learn how to do things simply,
How to gaze, natural as clear water,
To see, adding nothing, subtracting nothing.
Maybe, to add only something small:
The 'us' to the 'I'.
To learn how to count the 'us' inside the 'i',
The way a child counts all the Saturdays , finger by finger.

11. In the room: the tender light. It hesitates.
The clock keeps the moment in its delicate gears.
Something was postponed. The moment passed.
You don't know how death can come on such a delicate gear,
You don't know how death can come and part inside a moment,
But after all, each moment has its own death.

12. Maybe women made too the journey to human,
Yet, they are not free.
The endless kitchen, the daily chores come chore by chore, chore inside chore, the family,
Are big slave traders.
They are exhausted, their shoulders are hills, stones climb on these hills,
Their hands weep soap.
They are too tired to think, they don't have the time yo think.
Their only rebellion is their invisible silence.
No one sees them in their silence,
Even the moon, the tender light, doesn't see the silence between their thighs.

13. TRIPTICH
a. They sit on the stone. The evening pulsates in the air.
His hand in her hand.
Her hand is a well of time, the moments are closed in the well.
And his hand in her hand says nothing, hears, sees nothing.
Their hands : each in its own silent, dark cell, there are bars in the hands.
And the stone is a statue of a monkey,
Its hands on its mouth, on its ears, on its eyes.
b. The woman of love,
The old moon lights in her body.
She sells her body, but not the moon light,
A candle for the moonless years.
c. Her body: warm earth, warm leaves.
She says; come, lie..
But you say: move.
And she stays, innocent, a naked shiver, the warm earth, the warm leaves are not enough,
Maybe the shiver is too deep, too deep to accept.
And you go on, alone in your freedom. Your freedom is an exile.

14. Poor music.
It's cold and the music is a shiver,
Its coat is shabby, consumed, patched.
And there is no one to say: I remember.
I remember the music melting over me.
No one opens a window to see the old moon melting inside the sound.
It is not easy to play music in a poor neighborhood,
The people are too tired to hear, to feel, to let the sound drench them.
It is not easy for the music to enter, like the rain, their life.
Without umbrella.

15. Evening.
At each door, there is a woman wrapped in shadows, like a secret face.
At each mirror, there is a woman,
Closed in her invisible: the memories, the forgetting, in her nakedness.
In each room there is a woman who doesn't remember her.
Maybe she doesn't remember herself. Maybe, remembering is pain.

16. The window is alone, like someone who forgot how to see.
The world: a journey, the moon on the road.
You are alone too, but you are human,
You can get up, you can see the world, the moon, in the window.
You are not alone.

17. At night,
We wait for the clock of the world; the sun.
This clock is an explosion of time,
The sound of light winds it up, abruptly.
It soothes us.
At night, the silence is a sound too.
It can be the sound of a sudden bullet of shadows, a dark mine field.
It can kill.
It can be a song woven of delicate shadows.

18. You kneeled even in the most strange postures.
You had to keep the river of time moving, working, pure.
Maybe, one life time is not enough to purify the river,
Maybe being straight is not easy when you bend.
Maybe bending is a prayer to life,
And being straight is a shout. You shouts life and it shouts you.

19. You have to learn how to be born, each day, from the beginning.
How to love the eyes that bear you.
How to love the past that bears you,
How to love the song that someone wrote,
The song that people sing and it sings them. It bears you.
To touch gently the things that bear you, that make you who you are.
There are no orphans.
























COLLECTION OF POEMS FROM VARIOUS BOOKS:
ALLUSIONS, AND OTHERS.

***

Someone speaks, and he doesn't know how to continue,
Or maybe he protects the unsaid, maybe he needs all the unsaid protects him,
And yet, he continues with the beginning of a gesture in the hand, a gesture.
This motion is a witness, a confession,
It leaves him visible, naked as the first man ever,
But, it is different.
He knows he is naked.

***

Strange times.
Hours try to get in, hours try to get out,
They don't find the door,
They don't know they don't need a door.
And you sit, invisible in your silence, independent.
You need nothing, you want nothing,
But, you are not free.
You want to wind the clock of another time:
The past, the future,
You want to forget what time it is in your time.

***

Thw station in the journey to human.
The train left.
You are by the tracks,
All your luggage: Whatever you remember, whatever you love,
Is on the train.
The train was yours, it knew you, it knew where you wanted to go,
And yet, it parted , it took the tracks along.
As if the journey had a power of its own, burning coal in its power.
No train can pass here again.
The train left, and you don't know what station it is,
You don't know what time it is in the journey. What time it is in the world.

***

The person in your head is too tired to think, to feel, to be free.
So, you have no choice: you go on the small gears of time, the rusted gears.
You don't realize it is your life on the gears,
Your life, the best thing you'll ever have.
You don't realize you should get up, with crutches or without,
To go on your own journey.
You don't realize that on the gears of time you lose the biggest freedom:
The freedom to choose.
You'll go where time takes you. Time is a slave trader, or the first gangster ever.

***

Maybe you have many windows,
But they are closed as a stone.
Even the wrinkles around your eyes have walls beneath them.
Maybe you should open, one window at a time,
To say who you are today,
To feel your name, a drop of dawn, naked, the rough skin of shadows in the voice.
You should repeat the motion of opening in order to be each day different,
In order to be each day, more you.

***

1. Big trains, nocturnal, paralyzed inside a ray of moon, a delicate spider.
The big noise of life is silent,
Even the motions are mute,
And the tracks have something of the metal of stars.
There is no arrival, no departure.
This journey is a bridge, a fossilized motion.
Bridges measure the distances between solitudes.
And tonight, this stone night, you don't know how to cross it.

***

2. The journey had no arrival, no departure. It was stone, the train was stone.
And it was strange,
Because everything around was motion, wide motion.
After all, life is an act,
And maybe it is a market:
The new nocturnal hotel of love with the old name,
The forgotten cigarette holes in the new sheets.
Maybe the train will go because life goes,
The merchants were selling life for ages,
And selling a journey is nothing.
Maybe life is the struggle of a train to go on, no matter what.

***

Everything exists, the thoughts, the feelings, your life.
They are a picture of the world.
Remember,
The two parallel hands form a center,
The slow motion of twilight, slows time,
The small angels of a hand under a cheek,
It keeps the face, the throat, when they are too light.
Little by little, the inexplicable explains everything.

***

Maybe you are big,
But fear may be bigger, a power, a jail.
It stamps bars in your eyes.
You should remember: prison is not the key, it is the thought of the key,
And the key thinks in your pocket.
Remember: the person in your head is free,
A bird smuggler of bars, smuggler of walls,
Smuggler of dreams. Your dreams are free.

***

You are big,
A tree in the hour of twilight, an island of shadows.
But fear is ruthless,
It may break the tree, it can build an empire of shadows.
You should remember,
Life is the best thing you'll ever have,
You should love life so much, enough to fear for it,
Enough not to fear.

***

The night waits on both sides of the door,
And yet, we wait for the door to open,
We wait for someone to bring a distant night that never left.
We wait for someone to bring in the small nocturnal hotel where the body was a prayer, That never left.

***

Everything betrays you;
The way you walk, the way you look, the way you are silent,
So, there is nothing left to say that wasn't said already.
You continue the small, almost invisible motions of living,
And you don't know how naked you are
With the hands leaning on your body, slowly, shy,
With the hands leaving your body, in a journey to the useful,
The biggest journey, the most beautiful.

***

You are a scavenger, you gather second hand things:
The big nakedness of a torn sofa,
The big innocence of the flies on the lamp,
The slippers of the dead in a dark corridor.
You make the second hand, first hand: the nakedness, the innocence, the journey of the dead.
And maybe there is nothing second hand in these small treasures.
You are a scavenger, but you your life is first hand. You feel.

***
You live in your cloths, your cloths know who you are:
Simple, austere, balanced, maybe too balanced.
Your cloths never leave you,
But in the small nocturnal hotel, your body is different,
It is the color of absence, and of red shadows, like an animal of pain.
And the woman makes love to the absence, to the red shadows, to the animal of pain.
She sold her life too many times, when you sell your life, nothing is left to sell.
The remnants of tenderness in her motions were worth nothing.
She gives it to you, her last belonging.

***

Things happened suddenly.
Your patience, the waiting for a miracle,
Are about to erupt,
Pieces of your body blown in the air.
You gather them,, you place them differently:
You are a small forest, you are a snow flake, you are a soft dune.
After all, the world is a repetition of shapes,
The lines, the squares, the circles, where the world repeats itself.
The exquisite mosaic natural as magic.

***

The order of the floors
Repeats humanity.
The poor live in the basement, face to face with the dark.
The simple workers, in the ground floor of life.
Face to face with the world,
The rich are on the top,
Face to face with the loneliness of high places, rocks.
Face to face with the tall air of the world,
And there is not enough money to pay for a breath,
There is not enough money to pay for the voice, for a cry: help

***

You come into the room,
The dead animal in your hands, like pain, like a descendent of the hunters-gatherers.
You see the faces of the people: the raining sadness, the rain of suns.
Suddenly, you recognize your face in the faces of others.
After all, we have a picture of the world inside us,
And there is only one world.
You recognize the face of the world in your face.
You hold the dead animal in your arms, tenderly, like the past that leaves you, even though it will stay.
You see your face in everything. You are not alone.

***


We are born long before we are born.
We are born with the forms of time, the forms of the world, older than ourselves, inside us.
And we change,
Because everything changes; time, the world, our teeth- we clench them too much.
We'll have a mouth full of teeth, teeth are important.
After all, each thing is a seed of something, and we are seeds.
Seeds bite time with clenched teeth, they bite the world, they bite life.

***

The wind from the south came like a giant of sand.
It covered with sand the house, the faces in the window, the bodies in the dark,
The people, the words people use in order to touch each other.
Deserts can come, inexplicable, sudden, into our life,
And we don't understand why we are thirsty.
We go on saying we conquered the world,
And yet, we are thirsty.
We plunge our hand, trembling, into our secret body,
We look for the world in our depth,
But all we find is the secret wound, a dry well.
We didn't conquer it.

***

The place is dark, the silence is dark, the candle is dead.
We need a hand to touch the darkness,
We need a hand in order to see.
Men darkened everything, even time, the immense time,
They painted the black ages.
All that's left is a hand to touch the darkness, a hand in your hand,
In order to see.

***

People drown
In black nights, in black boats.
The sea has no graves.
So men come
To gather the bodies, the rough cubes of salt in the skin,
The sea wandering in their thirst,
The wild waves in their mouth.
They bury them.
Maybe death becomes more familiar, more tamed
When it is buried in earth.
Graves are essential for the living.

***

You bury people in earth,
And your silence gathers a little bit of earth, a little bit of eternity,
Each day more, each day deeper.
You may not think of it, you may not realize it,
But you take off your silence when you sleep.
The earth on your body, an ancient song: a lullaby to pain.
It soothes you.
You should take off your silence more often.

***

At the table,
Everything gives shape to something else.
The tree in the window gives shape to the wind,
The tall glasses give shape to the water,
The death of an animal in a plate, gives shape to smells,
Death has endless shapes.
And the words, when they are hand made,
Give shape to who you are.

***

In the house, everything repeats itself.
The motions in the pot of soup,
The motions of a phrase in the violin,
The motions of water in the flower.
Often, this repetition tires you,
But at times, when the twilight is quiet,
The motions return, clear as water,
You see them,
Between their wide palms:
The small motions of living
Sanctified by repetitions.
Between their palms:
Hand made life.

***

You are a poet.
You may be vegetarian,
But you need to hunt the beast inside you, in your dreams,
And then, draw the words on the walls of the cave
With the blood of the beast.
Poetry needs the power to be face to face with the beast,
To know there are two looking.

***

Motion is the secret of art,
After all, life is motion.
The hands are motion, the pain in your fists is motion,
The sea in your dreams is motion.
The sea has no graves,
The words without motion sink, heavy, heavier than themselves.
There is no tomb stone,
Only the motion of fish, silent, flying colors, around the drown words,
Which is another poem.

***

You are a strange man.
You don't gather images,
You gather inside you the things themselves.
The square distances of the room, the staircase consumed by the shoes of time,
The kitchen: the smell that tastes you.
Whatever you do, you gather more things in you,
A place to return to, inside yourself.
A place to use your silence. Silence is a tool ,ancient, inevitable. You have to know how to use it, with yourself, with others.
After all, it is not the silence that separates us.
It is the words.

***

The war is liquid mercury, it seeps in everything.
Even the children, as if it was in their genes, like hunger.
The children aim the sling shots at the sky, at the birds, like a gun.
They leave black holes in the blue. Smoke in the wings.
Childhood is dead.

***

Everything is numbers:
The poor, the star, the size of your shoes,
Who you are: the number of your passport.
You don't realize that the world is mathematics:
The triangles of a star in the triangles of a snow flake.
You don't realize that god is a number,
So close to the infinite, but you can add always one number more.

***

DEPARTURES
1. They leave.
The rooms: the holocaust of empty spaces, of children shoes.
The shadows on the ground move around, they protect themselves from steps coming.
The smoke from the stove falls piece by piece, like the fallen feathers of a child.
The black autumn of faces that leave.

***

2. Those who leave are not in a hurry.
They look at the house. It is the same.
The sadness fades slowly, much slower than stone.
Only the silence grows. Uncontrollable, like a root.
Those who leave have time to see
How the way home
Is the deepest river.

***

3. Slowly things get empty from within,
Like ancient bones, the bone marrow consumed from inside,
All that's left are pale bones, shredded holes.
You hold them and you wander how weight can leave the bones,
How the two parallels of the legs,
Still try to find each other.

***

4. Maybe you want someone to wake up,
To feel your absence.
It is not easy to live invisible.
It is not easy to leave and remain invisible.

***

5. You walk from room to room. Empty squares.
The lines meet and part, as if they walked without reason.
You try to be silent,
But it is your breath. It counts air.
And the shoes with the consumed soles, but not their voice.
They betray you.
Silence is an art. You don't know how to be silent.

***

The people with T.B.C. are old, ancient.
Their skin is dusty,
Beneath the dust the lungs are two empty holes, they coughed them out.
The dust betrays the loneliness of someone that no one notices.
The prescriptions on the floor: like small colored papers from a children party.
Maybe they want to live, but the dust hardens in the face, you cannot read it,
And it hardens in the lungs,
Like a sad statue choking.

***

The old man likes to sit by the window,
A hole of freedom, a place to delay time.
He notices the houses that are build,
The houses that are thrown down,
Two motions that complete each other,
Two numbers that complete each other.
One day, he remained seated, immobile, anonymous.
Someone has opened the window,
All his numbers flew out, the numbers that knew who he is:
The passport, The I.D., the insurance,
A nobody's bird.
After all, even his life was a number,
The equation of time and the nothing.

***

It is easy to fly,
Like sleep, like a dream.
They say that freedom lets you fly,
They don't know how many gravities can freedom hide in a feather.
To fly like the child who glued feathers to his arms,
And flew from the terrace, utterly calm.
After all, children learn how to fly
Long, long before they learn how to walk.

***

In the theatre
They declared a strike of silence.
The actors; mute,
Only their lips move, as if the silence was glass.
The electrician carried the corners to the side. Corners like to chatter.
And the crowd was another kind of actors, they used their words, the daily syllables,
And they were so close to the truth,
That their words were as simple as a breath, as water, as the inevitable.
After all, they played themselves, the biggest theatre.

***

You feel
That whatever was to be discovered, was discovered,
That whatever was to be invented, as invented.
There is no aim left, no direction, nno leaf to follow.
Suddenly you remember the kite of a child,
His face painted on it.
The feeling of being weightless,, of going somewhere,
The feeling of inventing yourself, each day from the beginning.
You feel the sadness of the others drowning in earth.

***

There are many places from which you can shoot:
Three feet from the wall,
Three feet up, on the tower of the guard.
They say: protect the sleep of the innocent,
Protect it like a child,
But you are a new recruit,
You know that wars are killers,
They kill innocence.
You know that also the children play in war.
You realize that the sleep of the innocent kills them.

***

Plans are useless. Life is not a tidy place.
The only plan worthwhile
Is to find a way in the chaos: the world.
We live simply, spontaneous, between chaos and chaos,
We remember, simply, spontaneous, between chaos and chaos.
But, we don't forget, spontaneous.
Yet, somewhere deep we feel we have to make room for more memories,
To have somewhere to return.
And we are forgotten, simply, spontaneous. A wave broke.

***

You look from the inside of the window. The window is closed.
You feel safe.
You don't know that one day they'll sell the house,
They'll sell your face in the window,
They'll seel the hole in the wooden frame: the eternal worms.
And they'll sell your time: your hours in the window, the sun lit clouds, the sun lit shadows.
After all, whatever you do, you sell your time,
The hours where you don't think, the hours where you think,
Invisible as the useful, nameless as the useless.
And you buy time when you remember,
When your motions of remembering are invisible as the useful:
The work of living, the work for living. They are hard work
And yet, time is priceless. There is no shop of time.

***

You can sit at the window,
Your eyes open outside, closed inside.
You can sit at the same window,
Your eyes closed outside, open inside.
It is the same window,
But you turn the view like a sock:
Inside out, outside in,
And all you know is that you miss a sock.

***

Winter.
Inside you, small infinites. Circles.
The circles at the center of your magnetic field,
The circles at the center of seeing,
The circles of heat: the seasons of the stove.
And time, a line, you try to tangle it in a circle.
And in front of you;
The window, the silence, the calm,
The moon beneath the stillness, beneath the transparency.
They are a circle, no matter what shape they are,
The circle of a moment. Round time.

***

You left, unnoticed as a breath, everything around you was secret, silent.
The place was sun washed,
Like the bathroom where invisible hands
Washed you, shaved you,
And the nectar spread over you,
A delicate shield for the reality of death.
You didn't want the shaving, the shield.
You wanted your death to be pure death, bloody, smelly.
You wanted to die the way you lived:
Improper, muddy, real.

***

Winter. The drawn curtains.
The only window left is the door.
We can see ourselves walking with reverse steps, against time,
As if we get, as close as breath,
To something we remember.
Walking against time is power.
No star, no earthquake of giants can do it,
Only what we remember.

***

They prepare the house for winter.
The smell of mothballs is everywhere,
In old consumed gazes, in the peeling of the wall, in the ancient jug of water,
In the cypresses.
They are dark, silent smells.
As if the moth balls could guard old winters, as if they could protect them from holes in their existence.
They forget that time is moth ball proof.

***

The old man went out.
He wanted to feel the river of the wind
Under the street, under the houses,
How the wind changes time, the hours pushed wider, more dangerous.
The old man wanted to feel how unsafe everything is,
To be alone in the winds of time.

***

Like a tree,
Most of you is under earth,
And only the rest is above.
Like an old tree,
Your roots are up, in the air,
Their motion is exquisite,
Their motion is still,
Like a statue of dying.
Like a tree,
You are face to face with god,
But there should be two looking.

***

They shoot you.
One day, they'll make you a statue,
A naked hero, lascivious,
The genitals red as blood.
Desires frozen in time, in the middle of the market.
So, they punish you twice,
The bullet that shot you,
The market where they sold your body of marble, the red genitals,
The holes in the eyes.
And you don't know which death betrayed you deeper.

***

After the rain
Everything seems scattered:
The face, the fields, the house,
And yet, nothing seemed lonely,
They continued to belong..
The rain drops fall, each in another equation of time,
As if the rain, like everything else,
Ended unfinished.
It has its sequences, it knows where to go,
And you look, like the rain, with unfinished eyes,
Your motions of life,
Smugglers of borders. Limited.

***

You repair the old clock,
The tiny gears are visible, they are still.
For a while, time doesn't exist,
And yet, the motions you use
To repair, to restore, use time,
And like time they are unfinished.
Your small motions give time to time, like life.

***

Temporary measures..
Time is everywhere,
In the pain-killers, in the debts, in the delays, in the semen of a leaf, and inside you.
You never get used to the temporary.
You break the mirror, the spy of time,
Before it breaks you.
You keep your dreams in moth balls.
They are almost eternal, because you don't use them.

***

Your eyes learn how to make love with the light,
Or with a hole in the wall: to love in the love of others.
Your eyes should learn to love, no matter, what, when,
To learn how to make time wider, close as a breath
One day, they'll learn how to love the twilight,
The unfinished sun that continues in the eyes,
The unfinished sun that know the way to an unfinished eternity.

***

You have to choose, always.
You are not sure if you saw by the wall
A dog, or a wolf.
You are not sure what is it that you choose.
But, in your eyes: the stamp of bars.
Maybe the stamp chose you,
Maybe the leash chose you.
It chose to choke your cry.

***

We are superstitious creatures.
The black cat. The black cry of the black crows.
They are an omen. They are not safe.
And the black house in the black neighborhood of the poor.
They spit, utterly vulgar, the black smoke.
We don't know how right we are,
How, on a black Friday,
A fire will begin in the smoke.
The fire will be immense,
It will be hungry, as hungry as the people in the houses of smoke.
It will be a huge omen.

***

The people left.
The house was finding its space again, it was wider.
Only the old man remembered.
He listened to the creaking of the wood worms in the furniture,
In his roots.
There were too many roots in his life.
They bound him. They were ropes in his motions.
The worms will take care of them,
The minute fighters of freedom.

***

Houses are an endless mystery.
Even when you think you know them better than yourself.
They may grow wide, tall, as if they were alive,
As if they were the house of a giant or a child.
One night they may bite your blood,
Like a children story.
Maybe they are the beginning of fear, of the fury of fear.
Houses repeat us, and we repeat them.

***
The times are harsh.
You have no choice, you get used to everything,
Even for not getting sunrises.
You are not surprised
At your roaming the blind corridors, cris-crossing the building.
The hours outside ,unsheltered, lonely.
Are not safe.
There is no traffic light in the corridors,
And yet you stay in, still.
Surprises tire you.

***

A picture hanging on the wall with a rope.
A shot man.
The bullet hanged the death, close as breath, far as a cry.
The lines of the picture continue into the air,
They choke you.
And you don't know how to take the body,
From the picture
Release it from the rope,
Release his breath, your breath.
You are no sure what your memory saw.

***

The small, patient repetitions of the hours,
Of our motions of living,
Change us. They make us different.
They add eyes to our eyes. We see.
They add hands to our hands. We make.
They add time to our time, so when we die, we die for the last time,
We never repeated the act.
So, they lead us, quiet, polite, to another journey, always further, always deeper.
The prayers are repetitions too, but we are dead, we cannot repeat them.

***

Slowly, people get less and less.
They don't see the soldier with the missing leg in his arms.
They celebrate the lines on a map, they dance along these lines.
There are too many lines on the maps,
And too few men with two legs.
There are too many mine fields in what they feel.
They don't dance.

***

You tidy the house,
But you omitted something.
So, the room is not square,
The table is not round.
Omissions are like delays,
The moment passes, everything changes.
You want to undress but you find the feathers
In the button hole, you find the rope in the button hole,
The button that keeps you proper, dressed, your nudity non existent.
Another omission.
No one can cross the night dressed and remain the same.

***

There are flags everywhere,
But the people don't sense their motion climbing high.
They are used to bend, to be patient,
And they don't trust tall things:
The flags, the sky,
They are not safe.
They look down at the ground,
They are not prepared for the pool of blood,
The ducks swimming in it, glowing.
They are not prepared for the price of a flag.

***

They store everything in moth balls:
The flags, the mirrors, forgetting the dead, the memories,
The uncertainties.
They try to postpone something,
But time flows also in postponements.
There are moth holes in the flags, in the forgetting, in the memories, in the uncertainties.
There are no moth balls for time.

***

The repair men come to save you from your home.
Their hands: the ancient tools of a human, the big companions
The fingers; black to pitch red. The colors they paint, paint them.
The wall, brown, the sun on the scaffoldings.
The hands repeat the motions,
The motions repeat the hands.
Their hands know where they are, where to go.
You trust your hands.

***

The things we did, the things we didn't do,
Wait for us in a corner of silence.
They look for us in unexpected hours, in the right hour.
They become memories.
They remember what we remember, they remember what we forgot:
The wide feet of a question, the answer that is a question.
No one is ready for his memories, no one is ready for a question he didn't ask,
No one is ready for the answer inside a question.

***

The blind violinist in his room.
The music slowly melts on the walls,
It is beautiful.
He doesn't see it,
But suddenly he shouts: speak, finally speak.
Maybe, more than anything else, even the music,
He needs words.
We invented the music, it invented feelings:
The eyes closed outside, open inside.
We invented words. It is the words that invented the loneliness, the absence.

***

The times are hard.
Even the fear of small things is big.
You are an artist.
You hold the mud and it holds you.
A fear without a name trembles in your hands, in your absences.
It paralyzes you.
And the mud slowly covers you.
You suffocate. You are thirsty. You cannot speak.
People look at you, they love your shape. A piece of art.
You don't understand how your body became fear, who you are became fear,
How visible you are, and the mud- so secret.

***

The whole house was filled with secret moth balls:
The lives of the dead, of the dying, in the cloth lines, in the naked rug,
But they protect nothing.
The smell of rot is everywhere,
Even in the words.
The silence is chewed in the foreign teeth.
It tastes of "sorry' of 'please.
No one is ready for the tiny moths,
How they plunge their teeth, small, vibrating, in our secret body,
How they look for our deep wound: time.

***

Sealing a letter is never easy.
You left unfinished things.
After all everything is unfinished; life, love, a cigarette smoking in the ashtray.
And something finished has nowhere to go.
You feel your letter is better that way,
As if the whole letter was in the unfinished.

***

There are cross roads everywhere, and they are always lonely.
Solitudes cris cross them, so the cross roads are different and the same.
But, deep in the center, where all the cross roads, all the solitudes begin and end,
There is a neighborhood. It is round, spherical as the shadow of the infinite,
And the people who inhabit it are hunter of the infinite, hunted by the infinite:
Poets, painters, thinkers.
They are inconsolable. They almost touch the infinite,
But the almost is never enough.
Maybe they know that the small infinites that becomes hours, days,
Are the only infinite available.
They don't realize that all the thoughts they think are the thinkable.
The unthinkable comes later, much later.
Artists are sad people.

***

The dead in wars, in rebellions, don't have coats.
So, silently, softly, they enter the coats of the living, and with each motion of their missing hands in the sleeves, we hear them sigh, we hear the past sigh.
The past has so many ways to remind us it exists, so many ways to remember,
So why does it have to choose our coats, our second hand coats, and why does it sigh
In our sleeves.
Maybe we need new coats, first hand, in order to forget more. In order not to carry
The past to the now.

***

The lamp lighter lighted the bulbs,
As if he brought moons, stars down,
To the street, our windows.
The big spies.
They know our skin, the small trembles the inner skin is made of.
They know how to see, they forget nothing, they forgive nothing
In the light, we are utterly visible, utterly vulnerable,
And all the futile crimes, the sin of miserly feelings are visible.
In the light, we don't know how to forgive ourselves.

***

The five fingers of the senses weave the magic cloth.
And the sense of beauty is interwoven with the sense of change,
Like the small delays, the postponements
That change the familiar, that make it something else.
The mystery of the something else could be beauty, could be pain.
When you weave beauty, you don't know what the threads know,
What they remember, where they want to go.
You don't know that beauty could be a cry..

***

The unsaid words are our feelings.
They deepen us. We deepen.
We may arrive to the deepest past,
Before words were invented.
The usual words are pictures on the caves:
The beast at the door of the cave.
And the bodies of love, the dreams, are another unsaid:
Silently, they slow time, silently they prolong what they feel.

***

You paint a room and a bull in it. Immense silece.
You believe that art can change our eyes, how we see.
You don't know that more than change,
People need to be consoled, to be forgiven,
For futile crimes, for what they didn't see.
The bull could be a dream, it could be a threat, it could be death.
It consoles nothing. It forgives nothing.

***

The house could be the inside of a tree.
The secret roots hanging,
The staircase to the terrace: the canopy.
You can hear the motion of the wood worms in the belly of the tree.
It will break them to pieces.
You can hear the tools of good times, somewhere near.
You feel everything is where it should be.
You feel everything is visible, as visible as the beauty of things nesting in their place.
Everything is invisible, like the beauty of the useful.

***

You have the power to see.
The colors of silence in an old letter.
The tender artist of a sheet that gives shape to the body of a child.
The sunset that leaves the dimensions of a fire, the height, the depth,
As if it was measured by a tool, fire-proof.
You have the power to see the newspapers, the pain on a paper,
To change.
To change small things can become big, bigger than what they are.
And you have the power to be changed, at least the beginning of a dream, the beginning of a gaze,
To be you in a different way.

***

You are a wood cutter, deep among the trees.
The food arrives always after the hunger,
The water- after the thirst.
The shadows of the tree mingle with the shadows of the hands.
The guilty and the innocent.
A sound comes from somewhere near,
As if it was Pan,
Singing a love song to the forest, to men,
A farewell to whatever will be, sooner or later, changed.
Unrecognizable in its nakedness, in the same thirst,
Invisible in its reality.

***


You concentrate in whatever you are, you inhabit whatever you are.
You count the moon in the waves,
The repose that keeps the water in the well.
You multiply your hands with the hands of others.
You add the whistle of a bird to what your ears know.
You don't know when change will come,
Decay comes always silent.
You don't know if you'll be able to remember,
To lose nothing, even the decay: the change of the silence.

***

A shadow leaves the house,
A stranger, silent, almost invisible.
You remember him from the pauses in his touch,
The pauses cut as if by a knife.
He left the knife in his pauses,
His silence was quiet. It was ready.
He left the shadow on the chair.
Maybe he wanted to be remembered.
Maybe he knew that shadows forget nothing.

***

There are cross-roads everywhere,
Even in the way to the cemetery.
You cannot choose the road to life or to death,
You cannot choose the impossible.
But you can choose the way to the possible.
You can choose to see the past, slowly, quietly, among the stones,
Feel the faces that became stone, the dew on their face glitters,
Or you can choose to hurry.
You are busy, you don't have time to think of death,
You don't have time to remember,
And you don't realize that whatever you don't remember,
Opens spaces within you, slowly the spaces become bigger, deeper.
You drown inside yourself.
You don't know that we die from inside out.

***

Everything is a number, also a Monday.
You count the hours of a Monday, the hours that are work,
The hours that add hands to your hands, which is another equation.
You try to white wash your thoughts, the image of Monday in what you think,
To measure the invisible beauty of the useful
You realize you need the Monday to fill up the equation of your hands, the equation of the useful,
To solve it if you can, to live it,
You can live it up to the last digit,
Which is the only way to solve it.

***

He said: they told lies, the lies repeated us.
The answers were questions, and they repeated us.
He didn't feel the mine field beneath the wide feet of a question,
He didn't realize that his feet
Repeated exact, measured, the questions. They repeated the broken fences inside a small question.
The question marks played Russian Roulette with the mine field,
They played the best things they had: life, on the roulette.

***

There are no masks.
We simply need many faces in order to live, in order to die.
Among all these faces, often we are not sure, which face we need today;
Serious, audacious, romantic: the golden soft skin. It is warm. It glows.
It is the wisdom of daily life that tells us
Which face to use, when, why.
And beneath the skin, another face, patient, silent, white as clay,
The holes for the eyes.
A good face to die.

***

Poetry is few words and long silences,
Like the separations that exist in everything.
The long silence waits for a word,
For the word to come, and to separate.
There is no poetry without the separation of a word, of a comma,
And the long silences are the poetry of separation,
Like the love poetry of a 'yes', and then the waiting, the silence.

***

There were staircases, corridors. They lead nowhere.
They were more closed doors than rooms.
And some who were invited to a nights meeting, enter the room.
They gather all the papers, written or not,
All the declarations, silent or not.
They burned them,
The way one burns a belief that burned him,
Like the fury of a line on the map when it burns,
When there is no border left to burn, to be buried.

***

Your hands full of words,
A rainbow of colors.
But when the time comes to reveal them,
Your motionless motions leave no words in your hands.
Maybe you wrote the poetry of separation,
And maybe the poetry of things that exist and don't exist at the same time:
The poetry of a horizon, of a dream, of the sky.
Life is the art of loss, and so is poetry.

***

Our eyes are the artists of the world.
The draw what we see, what we feel, and they change them
So, a pocket may be a dead end for a hand hiding there, silent, alone.
It could be a child of love when the hand finds your manhood,
Or it could be a magic piggy bank of coins.
So, the eyes create so easily, a pocket-theatre.

***

They load you with heavy words.
Words have gravity.
You cannot endure the gravity,
You cannot ignore it.
And when you look around,
You find gravity everywhere:
In a moment that was postponed, in the beginning of a smile, in what you don't remember.
After all, gravity ties you to the world.
It was a welcome to the world, from the first cry.
Cries have gravity, even the cry of a small child, of a bird.

***

At times, you tell lies,
Because the person in your head plays with fantasy,
Because it is easier to believe,
Because it is easier to be believed.
After all, also life plays with fantasy;
A rainbow, the horizon, aurora borealis,
The star that is here and yet it is at the beginning of the world.
Maybe we believe in life because it is so incredible.

***

In the city,
The theatre of the night is unclear.
There is too much light, so the stars are invisible, the dimensions of beauty.
There is too much noise, so their voice is invisible, the cosmic choir.
There are too many cries, so the pain is invisible.
There is too many ceilings, floors, so the thoughts are invisible.
We sit in the theatre deaf, blind.
We are ready to play.

***

THE GERMANS
The shadows of the vulture were sharp,
Immense flying teeth.
They devoured
Whatever was spread on earth:
The tiny shoes of a child, the tiny bones.
The only grave available.

***

They sat under a tree.
Somewhere close, a marble slab.
The air wrote nothing, except the quiet.
The quiet was written in the marble, in the tree, in time.
They could hardly hear the moments pass,
And maybe, they didn't pass.
They sat under the tree.
Wherever we go, we walk over the dead.

***

You walk over the bodies of the dead.
You look up, at the sky,
The bodies damaged your eyes.
You don't realize it is you,
The cold face in your feet
That betrayed you,
That it is too late for the gods.

***

Autumn. Twilight.
The big noise of stone, of people, leave inside the hours.
You are alone.
You don't know how to be quiet in such a big quiet.
You don't know where to lean your life.
You are simply human. You lean your life on words,
They translate for you the quiet, they translate for you your life.

***

It's night. A sliver of moon.
The distances between you and the gods are visible: the holes in the roof.
The distances between you and the people are visible:
In the old shoes, each foot alone, on the road to crime,
Small thieves of hunger, utterly vulgar, utterly banal.

***
You hit your head at the world.
You remembered what rage is.
You hit your head at the world.
You remember what pain is.
You wash off your blood.
Blood can cry. It cries for you.
You should forget the rage.
Rage puts bars in your eyes.
You should struggle, your eyes open out, open in.
And you shouldn't forget the pain.
Pain is a big reminder.. The biggest.
It remembers why you struggle, how deep.

***

You follow your foot prints,
The way one follows his shadow.
It is not easy to go on following yourself,
The foot prints always deeper.
It rains, there is world in the rain, there is time in the rain, the past, the future.
It is not easy to stand under the rain,
To let it seep into your life,
And to follow the mud, like the first clay, in your shoes.

***

The woman is bent, like a prayer.
She kneads the good bread,
And you don't know to whom she prays.
Maybe she prays to the ants,
The black parade on the floor.
Maybe you think women are immense ants:
They know how to work with each other,
They know how to make the work home.
You bend like the woman, like a prayer,
You don't step on the road of the ants.

***

You climb too high, too far from the people.
A stone falls, and then, the silence.
Who will hear you when night comes,
Unexpected, natural.
Who will hear your silence.

***

The Shylocks at the glass table.
They were not only Jews, but it doesn't matter.
Crime has only one religion: money.
It is strange how a piece of paper can begins huge wars.
It kills the human inside you,
It kills humans, millions wrapped in a small paper,
The only shroud available.

***

The runner is as fast as time.
You can hardly see him among the colors of the hours.
You don't know why he runs, from what, towards what.
You see him, he runs, secret, inexplicable,
He runs towards the past, he runs against time.
You recognize him. He is memory.
The big rebel of time, the biggest.

***

At night, the statues are shadows in the shadows,
The big heroes of the past.
They search, the tired marble in their eyes
For things who betrayed the past, who escaped, in the middle of the past,
By death, by fatigue,
In order to be less alone.
It is not easy to be faithful to the past, to be a hero forever, to bleed forever,
Even though your blood is marble.
It is not easy to betray the past you are made of.
There are so many road crosses on the way.
You have to choose, each step, from the beginning.

***

In the middle of the morning
The farmers lie to rest among the pebbles of warmth, smooth skin.
They sleep, simple and secret.
They don't know their shape is a poem of a human,
The same poem like the one of homes, of doors,
Of a woman, the forest between her thighs,
Visible as the unknown, invisible as the naked.

***

You want to learn the manual of simplicity,
To walk among the eyes of people,
Simple, secret, naked face, second hand shoes.
Maybe it is not simple to be simple.
Maybe simplicity is a feeling,
There is no manual for feeling.
And you don't know who will guard you naked face,
Who will guard your feelings , a drop of dawn, a single drop, the moment it is utterly visible.Utterly alone.

***

The deserted village.
The evening is full of gravities like a cosmic black hole.
It pulls down the houses, the silences, the birds.
You speak.
You are too heavy to let what you say go to someone,
To save you..
You don't know who will find the words,
You don't know who will you find in the words.

***

They asked him his last wish.
He said: the shoes of a child.
He needed to hold it in his hands. Hands remember,
In order to know where to return, how to return less barefoot.

***

Nature has never clean lines. It is wrinkled.
It has thorns that make the light bleed.
It has seasons that kill the harmony of the leaves
It has people: wild stones, that no one could smoothen them.

***

October.
The wind is bent like an old man,
Like a sky that kneels.
There are too many gods.
Its knees hurt.

***

You speak like a door half-open.
You let in half of the world, half of the truth.
You don't know how expensive can a half truth be.
You don't know that there are men who sell your gods,
Whatever you believe,
For the price of a half truth.

***

Dawn comes weightless.
The hand of a child rises,
It is not long enough to open the day,
The time in the hand is big, bigger than the hand, bigger than his life.
He opens the day.

***

Behind the sky: the gods.
Behind the wall: another wall, the wall where they shoot pain, men.
Behind the man: a woman. Home.
There are too many walls left, and too few men.
There are too few homes, and too many women.
There are no gods left.
They all died with the first bullet of the first war.
The last war is always the first.

***

Nothing has changed.
The evening is dark inside the shed, as dark as a cave, as full of time.
Nothing has changed.
People fear the dark.
Then, the ancient magician of light:
Hand made moons.
The ancient magician of a song; wine.
The light and the dark inside them melt in the song, in the wine.

***

You age.
You grow used to be alone, to feel alone.
You are busy.
You learn the alpha bet of walls, of locked doors.
The pen you use is small, very small.
You don't know that a pen is a key, that a small key is enough to open even an iron gate,
It can open a door, in a language that you invent.

***

The saints told you that you have to sin,
In order to repent, in order to be saved.
They didn't know that hunger is a sin.
They shot you at the wall, for a sins that were untold.
There was not time enough to repent, to be saved.

***

You fall from trap to trap.
The four walls may be a trap.
You hang from your voice, in the middle of the room, in the middle of the void.
Your voice: a whisper, a cry.
Maybe cries can break walls,
But they cannot break the void, it is too solid.
Remember: time flows in everything, also in the void:
The immense river where everything hardens. The rain that falls over everybody.
Remember: you don't rain in the void alone.
Remember: this rain is tall, deep. It can melt the void, if you are ready.

***

You think you can fool the others,
And you don't realize, that most of all, you fool yourself.
This fooling is deep.
You fare never sure who you were, where you came from, who you are.
This fooling is lethal.
You hang people on all the trees of the world,
And you don't know who was the hangman.
Yet, some evenings you remember.
You hang yourself on the last branch of autumn.
You know who is dying.

***

You are alone, so there is enough space to sense things.
You hear the silence speaking to the table,
You hear the water in the still jug.
Inside you, alone, the faces of the dead.
They are pictures on the wall,
They are the wall that made you alone,
Each day from the beginning.

***

Autumn used to be different.
The rain was thoughless, weightless. It playyed.
In the porticoes: the small talk of women was light.
Now, the autumn comes alone.
It rains, your whole life in a raindrop, the whole weight in a raindrop.
You forget that raindrops are never alone,
That there is a small sun in a raindrop, the sun is light in the raindrop.

***

You are in prison.
Whatever enters your cell is in prison.
The walls woven with shadows,
The voice woven with silence, like a cry.
You forget that no one can make you a prisoner,
I you don't have the bars in your eyes.
No one can make the light a prisoner.

***

So many dead. So many lost flags.
All that's left is the arena of death.
In a poster with huge gladiators,
The muscles of their souls in their eyes.
You are a gladiator too,
In another arena, the arena of the hungry, of the last bread in the plate.
Your life bled. They showed you the thumb down.
They killed you, but they cannot kill the hunger;
The biggest gladiator of the centuries.

***

At times, at night,
The limits between the living and the dead are hazy.
You bring flowers to a secret grave,
And you see your hand: white pure marble.
The flowers are withering in the marble,
Your name withers on the marble.
You don't realize that the marble withers also inside you,
That the slow dying, each night from the beginning,
May wither the hard stone in you.

***

The old man at the beach.
He is too alone to love the sea.
He is too alone to love the sky.
He is too tired to love, to belong.
Loneliness is a big slave trader.
It sells want you need most: to remember how to love.

***

You didn't choose well the time of your death.
It was may, the most beautiful May ever.
When you died, your eyes were open. You saw it. You missed the May.
You saw the way the dead see, their eyes clear, the shadows clear their eyes.
You died the way a dreamer dies.
The dream walking towards you, on legs you no longer had,
Always closer, always deeper.

***

One day, you'll come back,
Little mother of rebellion, child of sadness.
Inside you, like a child, like a rebel, eternity: the beginning, the end.
Inside you: secret knocks on the door,
Inside you: secret knocks in your pulse.
The door was open.

***

Fear is a lonely place.
No matter where you are, you are in your fear..
Somewhere, you'll walk towards the door.
Opening a door is an act of faith.
You'll read the alpha bet of living in the faces, in trust, in mistrust.
Maybe you'll plunge your hand, trembling, vibrating,
Into your secret body,
You'll find the deep wound; the fear.
You'll see it, pain to pain.
You'll pull it out, slowly, tenderly, like a bleeding child.

***

The picture is perfect:
The sea, the sky,
But there is no child, there is no mud.
Children bear the mud, like a god, playing.

***

There is sea in the air,
There is salt in the wind.
It covers our faces like a theatre mask.
The theatre of the city is made of the beautiful crystals of salt, the rough crystals
That make rough the skin of your silence .

***

At night, we burned our shadows,
Because everything else was already burned:
The home, the wooden hand, the crutches,
Because the things we thought fire proof, burned too:
What we remembered because we couldn't forget it.
What we forgot because we could never remember it.

***

The war.
You know what victory you need,
A victory that wouldn't defeat you,
A victory that will be the last war,
You forget that each war is the first one,
That the last war was long, long ago.

***

You fall asleep, in a corner of the arena, in a corner of killing.
You see visions: riders on golden horses, the golden dust rises.
They disappear the way they came, in the nowhere.
But you are here. In your plate: the dust of hunger,
Men ride on iron horses in order to kill more.
The dust is black, so you see less,
So it blinds what you know:
You died not in the war of iron, you died in the last war that was also the first:
The war of the bread.

***

Someone cries out of the walls of the arena, the walls of killing.
Strangely, the cry was heard everywhere:
Inside, in the seats of people, in the bleeding bodies, in the blood.
As if killing has no walls, as if blood has no walls,
As if a times, cries have no walls.

***

Your motion against the clear air,
Like someone whose muscles tremble
Before the big leap.
You cannot see your motion, you cannot see its depth,
The depth of a tremble.
The big leap needs the magnifying glass in the eyes,
Fragile. Powerful, in order to see itself.
You don't know that no eye can see itself. No leap can see itself.

***

There is poetry in the night.
A young man, beautiful as sin, magic as sin.
He walks through the mine fields of virtue,
The smell of moons in his thighs.
They'll shoot him with a holy bullet,
They'll shoot the beauty of sin, the smell of the moons.

***

In the middle of the big circus. The circus of time.
The magician takes out of his infinite sleeve,
The unsaid in the lips of a child.
The unsaid has a strange beauty. The unsaid is pain.
The leaves you have lost in a distant autumn,
When life was a leaf of seasons.
The springs that disappeared in a corner of time.
No one is ready for the magic sleeve, for the invisible hand .
No one is ready for the past walking towards him, precise, decisive.
Always more, always deeper.

***

It is not easy to get used to the small, daily things.
They are a threat because they are too small, almost invisible, because you have to see Them, because they are daily,
They begin each day from the beginning.
The sound of the sand repeats itself.
The sound of the clock. It repeats the hours where the sea ends.
The music of the blind violinist from the street,
It repeats, uncertain, fragile, all that you cannot see.
The table of your breakfast,
On the table; the runner's shoes. They are big, bigger than your feet,
You are not sure if they are not bigger than your life.
The marathon of living begins.

***

The wall is finished.
The paint is still damp.
You push you open palm on it.
You sign the only signature of a human,
Tomorrow, the wall will be the wall of death.
You sign for those who'll die, hands tied.
They will sign nothing anymore.

***

Fear is everywhere:
The fear of loving, the fear of living, the fear of dying.
In the darkness: the eternal sound of time walking in your open eyes
You undress, and yet, your cloths are on,
As if ready to escape.
You forget that fear, the big fear,
Is simply the handle of the door, the naked handle.
And you don't know who will guard the handle, who will guard your hand,
Who will guard the nakedness.

***

Autumn.
The branches are deserted.
All that's left are the body prints on the sand,
The finger prints on the sand.
You wait, like the bodies, like the fingers,
For the big wave,
Where water and time mingle.
The water, the sand, the bodies
Will be the shape of time:
Invisible. Naked.
And time will continue walking, the way it usually does,
Invisible in everything, naked in everything.

***

Someone turns on the street lights.
They magnify the shadows.

You don't see the street signs,
You don't see the address.
There is something unique in the night,
In the truths of shadows.
The only address left is inside you,
If there is any truth left, if there is any address left in the truth.

***

Prisons are mirrors.
Mirror of who we are when we are alone,
Who knows if there are bars in our eyes.
Mirrors of dreams. We are free in our dreams.
And the women, they are naked beneath their cloths, beneath what we remember.
We try to grasp them, the way one tries to grasp the lost time,
And all we grasp is ourselves, crouching, naked,, fragile.
We give shape to the lost time, we give shape to time,
We let time give shape to us.
And we don't know who will guard time, who will guard our only reality..

***

You live between arrivals and departures.
You don't know that each arrival is also a departure,
That the journey is endless,
So you part without ever arriving.
It is the last station, the last midnight before dawn.
You are in the station.
You are in the train.
Who will guard the arrivals that don't exist.
Who will guard the departures that don't exist.
Who will guard your face in the window, your face in the station.

***

You want to begin again,
But from where, towards what.
You don't realize you begin, each moment, from the beginning,
That you walk towards time, each day, from the beginning.
You don't realize that each step is a cross road, that you have to choose the where the why.
You don't realize that each step is an old journey, full of past.
You are a strange traveler.
You are on the train, you see yourself in the station, you see yourself in the window.
You hand waves, uncertain, young and old, alone.

***


In the station:
An old suitcase tied with a rope.
Your diaries, you didn't want to carry them along.
They were heavy, they had a strange twilight in each page more.
You wanted a big light: a leaf , a drop of dawn on a leaf.
Diaries have leaves that became paper. They have gravity inside them,
The biggest gravity: time.

***

Autumn turns inside us, and inside whatever we own.
It leaves your key: a rusted leaf, fallen, lost.
There is a red leaf on the traffic light towards home.
Yet, there is enough home left, if you know how to see:
The table that was a tree, naked as beauty, invisible as the useful, open as the beginning of a smile.
The door without a handle: a huge leaf, maimed, exquisite.

***

Twilight.
Men return to their smallest core.
The core : a sphere, like the world, like the infinite.
Some return to the smallest core and the infinite inside them.
Some realize that in the infinite,
Small and big are the same thing,
They simply return to their core.
There are not numbers big enough to count the infinite,
There are not numbers small enough to count the infinite.

***

Your hands, each one alone in its own pocket.
You hear the small crackles: they look for the shapes of the alone.
At night, you undress, your hands in the pockets.
You make the hands, the immense hands of a human,
The hands that know the motions of living, the motions of the useful, the motions of loving,
A statue, the ten fingers of the void, of the alone.
One day, your hands will judge you, in the big court, the court of hands.
You'll be guilty.

***

There are unique nights, that are only night,
When the moon, the stars are memories.
You are human, you cannot see in the dark,
But you can see the dark, the dark inside the dark,
When seeing is pain.
Suddenly, a drop from a distant dawn, a single drop,
The semen of light.
You see the light inside the dark.
A truce.

***

You return from the war,
You find an old shoe on the tracks.
You are careful, it is easy to lose yourself on the tracks,
Maybe because it is the closest thing to the infinite you know,
This, and the war.
Yet, you continue,, you find a picture you remember. A child.
What you remember is a place to return to.
Children gather memories without knowing why.

***

By the train tracks, a bag.
The shirt and the ticket of someone who was killed.
Maybe he wanted to travel far, and he did.
Maybe he wanted to travel handsome, and he did.
His blood at the wall was a waterfall of time,
The sunset has small sunrises in it.

***

Autumn is always deep, deep inside us,
But you are not here, in the autumn,
You left to a season that has no name,
So, it has all names.
Who will guard your place at the table,
Who will guard the wild grass in your empty plate,
Who will guard your fifth season, which fifth sun.

***

He died.
He left the key to his home, to the woman,
In the usual place, under the rug.
But he took with him the key to his silence.
Prisoners build a home in their silence,
The windows, closed out, open inside.

***

Your breasts: a net. Exquisite fish full of milk.
Your nipples: two wings of a bird, two small infinites.
They make dreams possible.
The fish, the bird, dream between your thighs, they tremble.

***

You return from war.
You killed.
Each time you killed you lost something: who you were, who you are.
You lost the way home, your Ithaca.
You are empty, you bled whatever you remembered.
You are heavy. Oblivion is a center of gravity.
There is no need to bury you.
Oblivion is the biggest grave.

***

Women kill no one in war,
So they don't lose who they are, what they are.
They remember the motions of living, of loving,
They remember the way home: the repetitions of hours, the repetition of small shoes in the path .
The home is exquisite,
Bees come for the nectar, the farmers of earth,
And birds can lay their eggs in the warmth, the farmers of the sky.
Maybe the women won the war because they didn't kill.

***

The ticket of departure, of return
Are worth nothing.
After the war, you don't know if you left, if you returned,
And it doesn't matter.
The tickets take you to the same nowhere.
When you kill, there is no return to who you were. No escape.

***

After the war
There is nowhere to begin again,
Not even home.
The ancient parents, almost blind: a dam, opaque, in the eyes,
Push the air with their fingers, in order to see.
Their motions are full of past.
You are Cain, and the Cain mark
Doesn't let you forget.
The past is a glass wall,
You see the motions that bore you,
But you cannot enter. Returns don't exist.

***

Someone is in prison, someone in exile, someone is abroad.
The ones who remained, sit in an old cafe, together,
And each one alone in his body, alone in what he remembers.
The motions of the eyes are restless.
Maybe they look for their name: a living grave,
Maybe they look for an address, empty enough to be lost.

***

You hold you missing legs: the crutches.
You touch the window:
The world shrinks in the window,
The world is immense in the widow.
It is the Easter of the Jews.
You are a Jew, and you are not.
You hear the sound of the fire in the tavern, a lamb, a person.
The pole in the window is tall, you don't remember it.
Maybe a tree that died.
You don't know how trees die.
You jump down, the ground is deep,
Maybe that's how trees die.
Maybe that's how people die, if there is a window.

***

Maybe the mine is the cave of the first men.
People come out of it. The shadows are solid on their skin.
The cave gave them the eyes to see the dark, to see the dark inside the dark.
They drew on the walls of the cave, like the first men, beasts.
Another kind of beast, and yet, the same.
No one dared enter the cave, see the drawings.
The drawings were illegal, seeing was illegal.
Maybe, one day, someone will dig in the cave,
Maybe he wouldn't understand, maybe he'll believe that the beasts were a myth.
He wouldn't know that myths were the only truth that wasn't censured.
And it is sad,
Maybe he'll understand.

***

People live their daily life, the iron tracks of life,
Invisible as the useful, invisible as daily pain.
In the evening, the men return to a somewhere that is home,
To a someone who is home.
They don't know that behind the shadows,
The immense iron insects wait.
They don't know how fragile is the daily iron,
It is glass.
They don't know how immense they'll keep the glass at their chest:
A monument to the heart beat of the glass.
A monument to the rage of the glass.

***

You hide in silent cellars.
In your ten fingers: your beliefs.
You don't bother with old gods.
Time does always what it should do: it leaves them in the past.
You sit by the candle light, you feel that courage is a candle:
To consume yourself in order to give light. even a drop of dawn, a single drop, is enough.
You tremble, lit.
The ten fingers guard your hands, guard the candle .

***

Maybe you try to use the kite of a child,
In order to find the limits of heights, the colorful limits.
You cannot find them.
Maybe you don't realize that you've lost the kite, you' lost the child,
That roads are the art of loss, the art of the inevitable, like time, like life.
And it is sad, whatever you lose, you lose it inside you,
You can plunge your hand ,tumultuous vibrating, in your secret body,
To find it, to pull out the secret wound; time. To see it. To know it.
You may find the limits of your height, they may be beautiful.

***

Some survived the war.

You don't understand how could they forget death,
How could they forget the dead.
How could they sell their hands, the person in their head, the ones that knew who they were, how could they sell what they forgot because they couldn't remember,
In all the markets of the world.
Markets are big slave traders. They are big gangsters, the biggest.
You don't understand how could someone lose a war he won.

***

You say you don't think about death,
You don't know death thinks about you.
And yet, at night, you sit in front of the mirror,
In order to see for the last time
The face that will be stolen.
You don't realize that you'll see nothing,
That time is a fast thief, the fastest.
That anyway, you die from inside out.

***

You don't imagine how much quiet the wall brings.
The white washed wall, the white washed dead blood seems silent beneath the paint.
In the balcony: the big noise. The motions of living:
The owings, the delaying, the debts to a person, the debts to life,
The motions of the soldiers, the iron in their boots, the irons in the world.
You don't imagine how calm are the dead.
They paid their debt to life, they paid their debts to each person.
They are quiet.

***

Someone open a door in a mute wall.
Opening a door is an act of faith.
But they come and take away the door. And the hole in the wall.
Their motion studied as a crime.
They are mute, the way the wall used to be,
They are mute as the wall when they shot people.
They are the real wall,
Visible in its white washed silence, the white washed weight of the silence,
Visible as death.
No one can paint the weight of the silence, no one can paint death,
And remain the same.

***

In the village they grow hunger, the rusted wheat.
The young leave. The faraway is a promise.
The faraway needs young flesh to consume.
And death remains in all the markets,
It has the shape of old meat. An old animal that didn't want to die,
And the grass the animal grazed.
The old men cannot chew with the void in their gums,
It has the shape of a skinny black cat. The last survivor in the market of cats.
A monument to hunger. A monument to survival.

***

The village is almost deserted..
The old women: dry shells.
Maybe they forgot what thirst is.
And it is sad,
These women, the small talk in the long afternoons,
Were a hand that gave them water.
It is sad,
The village was a hand in your hand,
It was a word in your word,
A word that let you understand the dictionary of the said, of the unsaid,
Of the pause inside a comma,

***

Time flowed like blood from the cut throat of a child,
Like an iron fist that shatters the past, the 'now'.
Everywhere broken glasses,
They could be a window, a mirror, the indispensable eyeglasses,
They could be tears.
The train passes through the town.
It travelled nowhere.
In the last wagon: a gas chamber.
In the last wagon: a heap of children shoes.
They are chocking.

***

They shake the pajamas of the sick,
The dust of pain, of insomnia.
Bodies that melt in the sweat,
That dream, behind the pajamas, in the sweat.
The pajamas were light, almost transparent,
They weighed no more than the dust of pain, of sweat, of dying.
They weighed no more than a moment in an hour that doesn't exist.

***

You carve on an olive tree a jug of water..
The olive tree is full of time,
So, you carve the jug on time,
The way you carve yourself on time,
The way the finger prints remain in the time of the jug.
Time flows into you , time from the endless jug of water,
And yet, you are thirsty. Always.

***

Time flows
Like a water fall of hours,
Like a rivulet with the small fish of time,
And yet it is iron, the train tracks to the infinite, to the nowhere,
Invisible, inevitable, absolute.
You carry the train tracks on your shoulders, for years, for ages,
And you don't realize time could be water, the purest water.
You are thirsty.

***

The summer was too bright,
The salt crystals,
The thorns of sun in the fields,
The white washed sea,
The pain carved on the wall, it bleeds still sparks of bullets,
And the wall is white washed,
But the paint in is not eternal enough to protect the shadows,
They have the shape of a cave,
Of the beast drawn on the walls of the cave, on the white washed walls:
Who will guard the shadows from the cave, who will guard the wall from the ancient pain.

***

The smaller the village, the bigger the god.
So, when the body of girl discovers her,
She has to become invisible: the eyes of the people, the eyes of god.
She finds a giant leaf,
It covers her skin: warm marble, the motions of love in her hands.
Leaves come from very far, maybe from Eve.
The smell of love enchants them, the smell of spring, the scent of something eternal.
Beneath the leaf, the girl is safe, the body is safe, the love is sage, it is safe from remorse.
It is pure as a drop of dawn, a single drop, semen of light.

***

The football field is never empty.
At night, the mad ones play with the moon, the shining ball,
The shadows of their motions are beautiful,
Their laughter is wide, white as the laughter of a child.
Maybe the mad ones know how to play with whatever exists:
The small sounds of the grass, the holes in the moon, the shadows that mimic everything; a clown, the colors of the joy of a child.
Maybe they know how to be free, like the silence of a child, the child is free in his silence. Like the laughter of a child, bigger than his face, bigger than his life
Maybe they are the big child of the world.

***

Maybe the mad ones play in the circus of the world.
They are the clown. They mimic us, the mimic themselves.
They hang from a shadow, like a sinner, like remorse.
They lift a whole tear in their hand, the way people often do.
They laugh and cry in the same time,
Because inside the body of a clown they are free,
Because they have to feel in order to understand.
Maybe they remember something we don't.

***

Maybe you are a child.
You believe in the power of nature:
The thunders, the draughts, the thirst,
And you fear it.
You are human. You fear storms. You fear power.
And you fear the nature inside you, you close it in your fear.
You don't realize that the finger of the sun knocking on your window,
Like a magician's wand,
Is tender, inevitablle, exquisite. The wand is lit.
You open the window.

***

The tree in the forest.
Your shadow remains in the tree,
Your shadow hands embrace it,
Like the moment when they shot you.
The bullet died in your death.
The bullet hole carved its name in your name, your deepest name.
The hole sees you.
Maybe the last name is the deepest name.

***
You look at the table.
The masks over the faces.
The masks over the lives.
The masks over the dreams.
The masks over the small daily crimes.
You could use the same mask for everything.
On the table, a jug of water,
As naked as water, as naked as thirst.
It doesn't need a mask in order to survive.
And you don't know who will guard the water, the simple water,
Who will guard the thirst.

***

You make a statue.
You don't mind about the shape of the body,
You want to give it the shape of motions.
The complicated mechanism of stretching a hand,
The marble gaze leaving the eye,
The separations of the fingers,
To measure the distances inside a touch.
It could be a statue of love.
The motions of love: a teacher, a pupil, of something simple,
So simple that it is close to the truth.

***

You want to write motion with motion,
You want to write water with water.
But, Monday comes. It brings along the office.
You have to write people with words, with numbers.
You use numbers to measure the distances inside a word, iinside the small pause of a comma.
But there are not enough numbers to count the distances inside a silence.
People are free in their silences

***

Autumn comes, like life, from all directions.
The rain, the drenched voices, the drenched life.
The closed door that closes you. The key in your pocket, alone, like your hand in the pocket.
The leaves on the window, they see you, you see them,
Maybe you understand because you feel.
In the closet:. The moth balls that slow time, the holes where time chews quietly the last moth balls, small fighters of eternity.

***

A fly falls on your glass of clear water.
Its eyes, bigger than its face, bigger than its life,
Like the eyes of a child,
Like the eyes of those who drank their thirst in the desert of the humble.
You look at the glass, there is water in your eyes, you see the clarity,
You see the complicated motions of dying.
Sadness is never simple.
You are sad for a world that allows flies with the eyes of a child, the eyes of those who drank their thirst,
To drown in the glass of clear water.
The fly chokes you,
As if you drank in one gulp
The water , the fly, the eyes of a child, the eyes of those who drank their thirst.
The pieces of glass in your mouth could be eyes, could be tears.

***

You are a prisoner. You are in the deep past.
They turn on a torch, the light is like needles, long lit needles.
You know what they are looking for:
The secret circle, the circle with everything that made you who you are.
If they'll find the circle, they'll find you, and you will lose yourself.
You wouldn't know who are 'they',
You wouldn't know who is ' I '.
You stand in the secret circle, in order not to lose yourself.
Maybe they'll shoot you.
You will stand in the middle of the circle.
You'll know who is dying.

***

Strangers come from the places where the world died.
They come, illegal as crime, illegal as pity.
They come, hidden in the big noise of the wheels, in the big noise of time.
They bleed.
When a world dies, it dies like a giant, it fights like a giant.
They bleed their illegal blood..
Maybe they'll shoot them, the way they shoot the birds: smugglers of borders.
They'll leave a handful of feathers, nothing more.

***

The train cuts the crowd of the mourners
Into two layers of time.
The before: the road closed by bars, and you are closed inside yourself,
In what you saw, in what you remember. You hurt.
The after: the bar rises, the road opens.
In this moment, daily life returns,
Daily life is a big power, the biggest.
It can win easily the mourning, it can win even dreams.
There is no life without daily life,
There is no dream without daily life,
there is no daily life without a dream.

***The statue in the plaza was immense,
As immense as a symbol.
People are ready to die for symbols,
People are ready to kill for symbols.
Some rebels broke the statue.
It was a civil war between pieces of marble and people,
Between the desert of symbols,, the exquisite Fata Morgana, and people.
The dead were real.

***

You are a scavenger.
You gather old newspapers, cigarette butts, treasures.
The newspapers may be important, but unfortunately, they're all written in a language with tight lips you don't know.
So, the person in your head can read the world the way he sees it, the way he thinks.
Cigarette butts smell of strange lips, maybe the lips of a woman.
You smoke them and they smoke you, like a kiss,
And the smoke takes you far, like the smoke of a train.
You travel in the smoke, in the train, illegal as a child.
You are happy.

***

There are too many thieves, and too many reasons to steal.
Yesterday, on the cloth line, a colorful sheet, flowery is missing. It is not there.
And you don't know the story:
A toy from some childhood
Needed a childish sheet in order to wrap it, in order to protect its age,
In order to protect a sadness that is not a child anymore.
It is easy to hide big things behind small ones.

***

The one who worked deep in the marble of the rock,
Knows that statues are stone, not gods.
And yet, they have the time of stone inside them, the whole past.
And he knows that the past is full of future.
He doesn't break the statues, he listens to the time inside them.
The one who worked deep, needs to know who he was, where he was,
In order to understand better the future,
In order to know who will guard the statues , the memories of stone,
Who will guard him from the statues.

***

Your home was always a home of seasons,
Seasons are not a safe place.
A balcony of suns.
It rained in the terrace of the winter,
The rain showers are a killer,
And there is no umbrella available.
A leaf of autumn on your bed,
All the hues of autumn in a leaf,
The most exquisite shroud.

***

Maybe they were possessive.
They carved their name on the door.
Time grew old in the door, in the name.
The door is immobile, it doesn't close
Doors are a power. This door is a monument for the power to open,
And the names are a monument to small men with big deaths.
There is no small death, simply because there is no small life.

***

The ones who traveled,
The ones who didn't return.
They were too young to gather things.
They left their room naked in a daily way, too daily to remember,
Dusty in an eternal way.
Maybe the childhood photo in a corner sees them, recalls.
But everything is layer beneath layer,
It is not easy to see, to remember ,
Beneath time.

***

The world has now five seasons.
The four ones are as usual,
You know their names, you know their habits,
But you don't know
With which steps,
With which winds, with which dead wells,
With which black holes in earth,
With which cosmic hole in the sky,
Will the fifth season come. Mute, invisible, absolute.

***

Mules work too much, they are too tired to think, to see.
They accept, humble, patient, fate.
And yet, they love life, infinitely stubborn,
And you ride this mule for years, for ages.
One day, the sun walks with you and the mule,
For a fraction of a second, you both see the beauty, you feel.
You cry. Maybe for a moment, you see yourself, the patient mule.
Maybe for this moment of beauty, you are not too tired to feel.
Maybe you can see how time begins and ends in the same moment, in the same beauty.

***

Someone hanged himself.
They use the rope of the hanged one.
They tie the shade to his mule.
Life uses whatever is available.
It chews the rope until it becomes a shade.
The shade ties the mule to its shadow.
Maybe mules have tears,
Maybe the shadow let the mule cry.
When we cry, we never cry for one thing, for ourselves, for the others.
We don't know why the mule cried, maybe it cried, like an old man, for a thousand things in a tear.
We don't know why it cried like an old man: tears so concentrated, so final.


***

You see the face of a woman in the mirror.
It is enough to love it,
To love also the unfinished
The wrinkles behind the mirror .
They are like two trees around her smile.
They wait for her face.
They repeat her beauty always further , always deeper.

***

In the village
People live with the animals in the same home.
They know each other; the moods, the needs, the sadness, the laughter.
They are neighbors in life.
Animals know how to cry, how to laugh, how to love.
And yet, when time is hungry,,
The people kill the neighbor, with a knife in its cry.
At time, pity is too dear to offer.

***

You drink something in a cafe.
You forget that your pocket has exhausted all the paper bills it had.
You forget that, the way life goes,
Paper is immense, paper is sacred.
That they sell lives for the less, much less, than the price of paper.
You are guilty.

***

The poet sits in front of his window,
One eyes open, one eye closed.
When you close your eyes, you don't resist the journey to what you remember, to what you feel, inside your eye,
The images that grow, like wild grass, in your eye lashes.
So you never know which eye will write which poem.
You have no choice,
You let your eyes do what they know best: to see.
To see the possible, the impossible, and even the invisible beneath the daily, the beauty
Beneath the invisible.
There are too few eyes, and too many poems.


***

In fron of us:
The shadow that we were.
Who will guard the shadow? Who will guard what we were?
Who will guard what we forgot because we never remembered them?
Who will guard the secret wound: time?
Does time have habits?
Can time end, and continue out of habit?

***

You make a truce with others,
But there is no truce inside you,
So, you don' know how truce feels.
It may feel like a moment in an hour that doesn't exist,
It may be a phantom of time.
And you don't know how to make truce with your phantoms,
You don't know if you can make truce with the phantoms of others.
You don't know if you can meet the others, yourself, in an hour that exists.

***

You grow old, the age of twilight.
The shadows and the light mingle. A truce.
You feel the truce inside you,
You feel the truce with others.
The twilight is for everybody.

***

The women dance in the forest glade.
You lie behind a tree.
You see the equation of colors, of motion, of thighs.
You know the dance came from very far, the deep past,
And yet, it doesn't feel ancient.
You don't know how the thighs, the motions, the colors,
Arrived, so young from the past.
Your feelings dance with them, like passion.
You don't know there are not number enough to count the age of passion,
Or even of a simple dance, of beauty.

***

Thoughts become feelings, even though they remain thoughts.
We think, we feel: a small engine of the motions of living.
We sow them in a drop of dawn, a single drop: a seed, the semen,
The shadow of a bird, the end of a star, a poem.
We sow them and we don't realize how we pay our debt to life.

***

You look for reasons to live.
You look in all the windows available,
You look in your home, in the big shops, the markets
But your reason to live is buried.
Your woman.
They don't sell reasons to live anywhere,
And what you remember is a shadow in your bed.
It's not the reason you need.

***

Holes are useful. You need them.
Holes can measure the immeasurable:
The depth of a gaze that sees you.
There are holes in a gaze,
Some are closed. They have exhausted their seeing,
The mechanism of tears,
And some open each day from the beginning. They see.
They measure the depth of the well inside you, the well that came from very far.
There are whirlpools in the well: holes in time.
You measure what time it is in your time, how deep is your time.
You see where you were, where you go.
Seeing is a power, and it needs holes.
The holes are indispensable.

***

You don't know if the dead
Really resuscitate.
But, in case you should repair the coffin,
It's better to close eternity inside it.
You feel that the dead have the immense gift of resting,
They were tired, too exhausted to pay their debt to life again and again.
Eternity is a tender mother.

***

There are people who are a monument to war.
Wherever they go they carry their missing leg in their arms, like a dead child,
Their missing eye in their palm, the only coin left.
This monument is alive, it sees us because the war sees us,
And it is sad,
Because we don't see it.
After the war, there are too many monuments,
Invisible as any thing we saw one time too many.
We stand in our dead end. It is blind.
And the war walks towards us, always more, always deeper.

***

They burn books all over the world,
They punish dreams.
In a corner, a poet writes the hues of a burning phrase,
The colors of an Auto Da Fe.
He uses the language of signs, of the mute.
There are no other words. They were burned,
And maybe, now, no word is enough.

***

You think that the journey to human, the biggest train, has stations,
That it stops for a moment, for years.
You feel you could need some rest.
But when you rest, you realize that motions rest too,
The motions that should be Moto Perpetuo:
The motions of light, the motions of living in the body,
The motions of a semen at night.
You realize there are no stations in life.

***

Wars kill the condemned to death:
Us, the horizon, the homes, the poets.
The bullets pierce the death which was, from the beginning, inside us,
They kill death, they kill us.

***

The forecasts of the weather in the radio
Are king.
They tell you when you need an umbrella, a parasol,
But radios grow old, the voice almost inaudible.
You feel lost.
You remember how long it is you didn't see the sky, the clouds,
That you didn't hold a raindrop between two fingers.
You open the door, you are without an umbrella,
The world rains into your life, natural as magic.
Raios are dead.


***

Nature is not human. It has the laws of the infinite.
There are no big infinite and small infinites, no matter what the poet say.
All of them are infinite, all of them are nature,
All of them crowded in your body, in the stars, in the void.
You don't know how immense you are when you give nature the human laws:
The words, the silences in a motion, love, poems.

***

The motions of the useful, are invisible as the useful.
The motions of the useless are invisible as the useless,
And maybe, nothing is really useless,
Life uses whatever is available.
Even the small talk of the old women
In a corner of the evening, in a yard,
Is important.
It keep the world doing what it should: living.
It keeps life doing what it should: the closeness, the companion of loving.

***

Night.
A star shines suddenly, like a quiet cry, like a dying eternity.
It is beautiful.
You can sense your death in its death.
You didn't know that one death is enough to light the world.
You think that maybe humans die like a star.
Lit. Quiet.
They paid their debt to time.

***

You look at the nocturnal sky. It is exquisite.
You feel your pulse in the pulse of distant stars,
The pulse of the world.
At the wall: the shout of a man with the pulse of the world in his pulse.
They shot the shout, they shot the world.
On his dead wrist: a watch.
It shows a time that doesn't exist.

***

They don't shoot you naked. You are dressed.
Maybe the motions of death will be too free in their nakedness,
Too free in the spaces of dying.
The frozen finger, naked, will point towards them.
They have the power to kill, but not the power to see, to understand what they see.
They are superstitious, suspicious as fear.
They are afraid of your nakedness.


***

There are strangers in all the corridors of life.
They come from very far , they came towards hope,
And they found the corridors.
There is no traffic light at the end of the corridors,
But they don't know if there is world at the end of the corridors .
They sit together, they try to chew what they remember, the only bread available.
Memories give a person somewhere to return,
But their memories have no maps, the maps were burned.
The burned maps continue to burn in the corridor.
The smoke is solid in the corridors.
The traffic light that doesn't exist is a big dead end. The biggest.

***

You feel you've exhausted all the words, a long time ago.
But you are old, you have the patience of the old.
You wait, you watch.
You realize that each motion, each step, each repetition,
Is new.
They moved once. They stepped once. They repeated themselves once. They hesitated once,
And the moment passed, they are a different.
They are new.

***

Maybe you'll write a new dictionary, more eternal.
New words need new dictionaries..
You'll use the river of time to write it,
The words will see themselves in the water, for a moment,
The moment in which they change.
You realize you grasp words, the fish of time, between change and change,
The only eternity available.

***

She said:
Before you leave,
Paint for me what I feel,
Paint it on paper, on my child, on my body.
Use all the colors of feeling.
Before you leave,
Look at the picture of my companion,
They'll shoot him tomorrow at the wall.
Paint what I feel.
I cannot feel alone.

***

The soup boiling in the pot,
Is the only response left.
You need more.
You need a response to all your dead,
A response to the scars in your shadows, in your light,
A response to the scars in the eyes that used to be open outside, inside.
You need the impossible:
A hand made time: a hand made water jug that came from very far,
To drink the deep water, to feel it. To understand.
To hear the past: the scavenger of answers,
It speaks.

***

Vines came from the vineyard
They filled ancient glasses with grapes,
They filled naked banquets with grapes.
It is strange,
How much madness can a grape contain, how much beauty, how much time,
How much nakedness.

***
It's summer everywhere.
The small infinites;
The thorns of light, the cicada's cries tears the silence of time.
In a corner of everything,
A man sits. He writes a letter to god.
He tells him these small infinites are enough.
Enough for the world, enough for himself.

***

Soldiers have three homelands. A holy trinity.
The first one: the iron bed beneath his dreams. It is harsh.
The second one: the helmet over what he thinks.
The helmet over the immense oblivion.
In order to kill, he needs, more than anything else, a helmet.
The bullet comes third. The third home land.

***

People are silent.
Their silence has enough fear to kneel.
Yet, there are men who refuse the silence.
Beneath the visible dark, they brought dynamite to the port.
The refusal of refusal.
They don't need matches.
There is enough fire in refusal,
There is enough fire in a silence that lasted a moment too long.

***

You packaged whatever you have in boxes.
You left.
Whatever you had was not fragile.
It had power: the effort to live, the strength in a motion of living.
And yet, when you break the roots of things,
They become fragile, they break like a branch, invisible in its thirst.
You are afraid.
The fear of leaving goes far, much further than the departure.

***

The dark enlarges the silence.
There are those who feel free in their silence,
But you feel alone, paralyzed.
Yet, you are human, you have words to walk towards you..
At times, words are crutches,
At times words are close, as close as a breath, invisible in their simplicity, like a breath,
Invisible in their inevitable, like a breath.
At times, a tremble of light among the shadows. A truce.

***

It is a suspicious time.
Suspicion is power, it is fear.
You camouflage everything: your eyes, the windows.
But the camouflage is more, much more fragille than what you imagine.
At times, a window breaks, at times, your gaze.
Without the camouflage you are visible, you are naked.
Yesterday, they shot naked men in the plaza , their genitals, a red flower, open like a cry.

***

There are more answers than questions.
Everything is an answer to something. Something to live and die for.
The religion of the sun, the ones who live and die for the sun.
The man who plants a tree. He lives and dies for life.
And we need the questions of dying.
At times we hear them in the silence of a child.
The silence of a child is big, much bigger than his life.
The child is free in his silence. The child is free in his cry.
And we don't know who will guard the child, who will guard the silence,
Who will guard the cry, who will guard the freedom, who will guard the answers ,
Who will guard the reasons to live, to die.

***

People grow distant,
Because time flows not only inside them,
But also in the canals between them.
They stand on the bridge:
The bridge measures the distances between them,
It measures the drown words, the drown gazes, drown gestures.
It measures the fear of closeness, the fear of the alone.
They part, each one with a metal in his chest: the rib of a bridge.

***

You stay out of sleep, you don't get in.
You feel that sleep leaves you vulnerable, blind, deaf, ready for nothing.
You don't realize you cannot change even a comma in the laws of nature,
And for sure not the sleep of a night.
You sleep, your eyes open in, closed out, you watch things:
Your hair growing,
Your death growing inside your hair.
You don't open your eyes.

***

Nights are the land of drug dealers, of the smugglers:
Illegal moons, illegal dreams.
Maybe we are addicted.
The moon. The dreams are big drugs dealers. The biggest.

***

The times are harsh.
Seeing is a big crime, the biggest.
So when they hunt you, they hunt your eyes.
You hide in a deserted house, deserted windows.
The bullets become holes in the glass.
It is strange,
The holes are glass.
You find your eyes in the holes. You see.

***

Star light enters the room,
Like a candle they bring to the saints.
You hear the steps climbing on the light,
Too far to see, too far to follow,
Towards messiah, towards the gods.
The candle hesitates, the way candles do, between light and shadow.
The room burns,
As if the saint left behind him burned earth,
Like war.
A war that is holy.

***

The moon is always less,
The night is always more. It becomes solid.
It is war,
So it is the perfect ambush.
You see the dark, you see the dark inside the dark,
You see the dark inside you.
So, in such nights, nothing is safe.
You ambush yourself, you lose yourself, you lose the way home,
The way wars do.

***

Night.
Everywhere refusals. The refusals of the refusal.
The men refuse to obey.
The bullets were innocent. The claws in the hands refused the living.
On the ground: the torn bodies among torn clothes.
The earth couldn't refuse them,
And the songs of men will be the refusal.
They'll sing them,
And the songs will accept them, it will accept their refusal.
The songs will sing how much they loved life, enough to refuse the law of the bullets,
Enough to die and refuse.

***

Suddenly, everything is smooth,
As if things kept their sharp corners, their rough skins, inside them.
The smooth faces of the people is suspicious.
There is no face without corners, without bullet holes.
They are invisible in their smoothness,
They are invisible in your touch.
When you lose the touch, you lose yourself,
When you cannot trust your touch, it cannot trust you.

***

The stars, the immense fishers of light.
Carry everything, the net of the night ,the black fish of the void,,
The only address available.
They need somewhere to return.
They are utterly human,
We carry a net with a huge incredible fish
That remembers.
We gather memories from the moment we began,
In order to know where to return.

***

In the room: a dove,
A compass in its claws. It shines,
And you: a human, wingless, no compass inside you.
All you write is the corridor of living,
And you don't know if there is a traffic light at the end of the corridor,
If there is world at the end of the corridor.
Corridors are strange,
They may be an ancient labyrinth inside you, no traffic light,
And an ancient beast: it shines red
You need a compass in order to discover the secret beast: fear
You need a compass in order to find the way out of the corridor of the beast,
The needle showing north.

***

Corridors should leave us somewhere, like a half lit hope
But, there are too many doors, and only one life.
We try the doors, we lose, we try.
We count the doors, the losses, the times we tried.
Trying is power. Loosing is power,
And the corridor is an ambush of doors, of small Ithacas.

***

They fill the void with void.
The blind dogs, eyeless,
The blind men, with eyes.
It is invisible, like pain, but they may sense it's near, like pain.
And the void is always hungry,
The more void in their hunger,
The more it chews the bullets.
They shoot people, people with eyes,
At the wall.
The wall is hungry.

***

You move the weight somewhere else,
The way you move the window towards dawn,
And you don't realize that no window ever saved you from time, the deep stone.
You don't realize how dawn is,
Invisible in its lightness, invisible in its weight,
Like love, like hope, like life, like the beginning of a smile.

***

What the strangers remember, comes from very far.
They brought it along, they need somewhere to return,
And they brought a dream.
They don't know that at the end of the dream,
There are no traffic lights,
You may arrive to the end of the world : the line on the map.
In their dream they killed it.
But the line on the map is a carnivorous: it will chew their life and the entrails of the dream in one plate,
One iron plate.

***

The soldiers shoot the rage, the shoot homes, they shoot the cries.
No one is innocent,
There are too many sinners.
The rage offends the gods, and the cries. They are sins.
In a corner: a church. It is empty.
Maybe the only saints left are the statues,
They say nothing, they forgot how to cry.

***

You are a city boy.
You are a stranger in this earth.
You look at the farmers, relearning the wheat, once more.
You put an ear of a grain in your smile, in your mouth:
The unknown, immense as the unknown always is.
It is strange,
It feels as if the ear of the grain remembers you. You trust the grain .
Seeds are big in remembering, big reminders, the biggest.
Inside you, the inexplicable trust of a boy, serious, childish.
It is not easy to forget the inexplicable.

***

Time judges us again and again.
Jesus nailed to the cross.
A child, its wings cut.
A dream, crucified in the mud, like a fallen leaf.
Time forgets nothing,
But it forgives,
It brings spring into the autumn, each year from the beginning.

***

You were a tall tree.
Now, you lie on the ground. They cut you.
You don't know that beneath your body, the roots are big,
That beneath your death they remember, they dream.
Your dreams were a root. The roots, deep in the dream.

***

The statue is exquisite.
White pure marble from faraway lands.
Around it: the market, they sell there everything, even dreams.
They sell the beauty of the statue in photos, in paintings, in post cards,
In the plastic of imitations.
They are the true alchemists. They turn beauty to paper, yellow paper bills.

***

The naked man in the sea.
The cloths on the sand keep the warmth of the body,
The touch of a mother, of a woman.
He is naked,
But when he'll drown, he'll wear again the mother, the woman.
It is strange,
How many we can carry in our cloths,
The breath of a sleeve is enough.

***

The changers of the unchangeable.
The night is sea, the stars, white pebbles, the moon, the glitter of sand.
The day is land, it has endless paths.
Everything is a place to lose yourself, to find it, to lose it again.
And everywhere: action, reaction.
Your motion at the mirror: action, the reaction of the mirror returns to you.

***

Fires come at night,
As if the night had more power, to burn, to become smoke, to solidify the smoke.
The scavengers sit on some chains that survived. Chains survive everything, they are made in the factories of hell.
The women look with empty eyes, after all, women are home. A burned home.
The men read a newspaper, another survivor. They are afraid to cry.

***

You paint a picture,
And you leave many invisibles among the viisibles.
The scarred breath of a body,
The whisper of a small fiist in the delicate fingers of a woman,
The warm knife deep beneath the wrinkles.
Maybe it is the invisible that makes art what it is.
Beneath what you see, to sense the invisible, to feel it, always more, always deeper.
The picture is exquisite.

***

Whatever you give is a seed.
Child and mother of life, of small infinites.
You should love life so much,
Enough to sow the seed in earth, in people,
With ancient hands, time burned.
To know that the bread will grow inside the seed, that hands will grow in the seed,
To know your death grows in the same earth,
And yet, to go on sowing, to trust the seed.

***

The blind violinist
Knows the coins that people throw,
Not by touch,
But by the breath of the hand, the sound of the breath.
At times, the sad man from the corner comes,
The blind violinist is the only theatre available.
It is exquisite,
As if there were not numbers enough to count it.
Coins are numbers like everything else.
As if all he could give was the breath of his hand,
As if he didn't know his hand, his breath, rained over the music.
The violin is thirsty.

***

There are bees in your violin,
They buzz the song.
You don't realize how exquisite is that music,
Flowers grow in the violin,
The delicate pollen: a passion bigger than itself,
A song that came from very far, the smooth skin of the voice so ancient, so young.

***

You are tired of the inexplicable.
The shouts on the street, the flags, the tall smoke,
Birds crushing always on the same window..
You dream.
Your dream is beautiful.
You don't realize that your dream walked on the street among everything,
That it died again and again, like a bird, like a man, with a knife in their cry.

***

Your roof is a cloud. A heavy metal cloud.
It rains.
Your walls peel off the rain,
And your days sweat in the rain.
It is strange,
You are still thirsty

***

The place is deserted.
There are dead but no coffins.
They bury them, the way the Jews do,
The Jew are ancient people, the ancient habits of living and dying,
In a shroud.
The shroud is light over the dead, the deep wound in dead body,
It lets him travel almost weightless, a thread, a single thread, of the shroud
Into the world, always more, always deeper.
After all, also death is a journey.

***

The tree gives shape to the wind,
And yet, the dust fingers of the wind
Move free, shapeless, through the leaves,
They give them all the shapes of motion.
There are not numbers enough to measure the distances inside a leaf, inside the motion of a rustle, there are not shapes enough to lock them in.

***

Leave your spear in a corner, a good place to hang the muddy coat.
Leave your helmet upside down: a big jug of water.
Things are innocent, they don't have the soul of a killer.
Beneath the iron, they may be calm as the useful,
They may love life, as the useful.
Like you, they don't want to die.

***

Saturday.
The sun is a sunflower. It flourishes. It will wither like all flowers, but it doesn't matter,
Now it is exquisite, that's enough.
Time slows down.
You have time enough to see the world, the soft hard Viking,
And the world can see you.
You cry. You are not afraid to cry.
Beauty is a power, and seeing is a power,
They give you the courage to cry.

***

Everything knows its place
In the world, the deep wide closet.
And only you, a human,
You don't know where is your place, if you have a place.
Maybe you've burned all the places
In the wild-forest fire inside you.
Maybe there are too many places.
Choosing is hard work.

***

In the picture:
The consumed apron of a woman. It is the color of a gaze.
The absence in the room.
From the kitchen: the heavy breath of food,
The light breath of her body.
You look at the picture
As if you saw it for the first time:
The color of the gaze, the absence, the breath of her food.
Maybe death made your mother more visible, more real.

***

You look at the woman. Your gaze loves her.
Yet, you postponed something, and the moment passed.
Everything changed.
Time postpones nothing,
And inside you, the loving,
Is one moment older, one moment more alone

***

Doors cannot keep out the night.
The night exists on both sides of the door,
And you exist on both side of the door,
But, you need eyes enough to see it, you need eyes that know what they see.
Understanding is hard work.

***

The star dust inside us
Comes from the first star,
From the beginning of everything.
Maybe, that's why we love the stars,
Maybe we feel our breath
In the trembling lungs of the light.

***

Everything may be useful,
It may be useful in a surprising way,
Like the old door, almost too old to count,
It may gather enough time in it,
Enough to announce exactly at mid night
A train that comes from very far, from the deep past,
A train in the twelfth station of the journey to human.
It reminds us, like a cosmic clock, like a rooster, to be ready.

***

You speak.
Inside the singular, there is always the plural,
Even in things you don't notice,
Even things you don't know that people seep into them
What you say, what you think, what you love, whatever is yours,
The plural sees into you, the people.
And inside the people, there is always the singular.
Being in the singular may be the number of the lonely.
Being plural is hard work.

***

Our furniture: the table, the chairs, the bed,
Know us, they know all our motions of living,
And they remember the ten fingers of our touch.
It is strange,
Furniture wither when the touch withers,
As if feelings were contagious, as if autumn is contagious, a massive withering.
And they grow old like us, cracked, bad tempered, irritable,
Sad.

***

The times are harsh,
Each moment is another monster of fear.
Each moment is the machine of the alone ., speaking, seeing is not safe.
This time can close us,
It can close us in
Like a scream that never left our mouth,
Like a mute silence,
Like bars in our eyes.
And these things grow inside us, they harden,
They are metal, as sharp as a cry.
We always die from inside out.

***

He said:
There are empty spaces in your words,
And the understatements have no power,
No power to bite the words, to make them cry,
To understand why they want to cry.
Maybe he destroyed your poem,
He burned it, the way time burns a forest
Trees may grow in the burned forests, tall, no empty pauses between the leaves l,
No understatements in the roots. They are silent like someone who understood.

***

He said;
I want to die with open eyes.
He saw the wall,, he saw the snake on the wall,
He saw someone day, with a snake bite in his cry.
There were no cries left.
He wanted the impossible: to know why he dies.
The biggest question.
There are not answers eternal enough.

***

Death is too tired, too dark.
Slowly, you take your head out of death,
Your eyes are visible.
You cry for the first time, you are not afraid to cry anymore.
You realize you are not afraid of anything anymore.
After all, you die only once, no matter what the poets say.

***

Death is hard work.
Slowly you take your head out of death,
You have time enough to do what you didn't do before.
You cry, you are not afraid to cry anymore,
You smuggle borders, you smuggle dreams,
And you love, the first and last time are the same.

***

The synagogue was dark.
It was strange,
Because all the prayers were prayers for light.
And the saints; the holy corner with the holy bible was dark,
As if holiness was darkened by time.
And you don't know who will guard what's holy,
Who will guard the gas chambers, the terrible holiness.
Who will forgive.


***

Words are not enough.
Despair, the wish to die, is bigger than words.
You are alone,
You cut your veins, the way one cuts the most beautiful flower,
The way one cuts the love of pollen.
The last love is also the first.

***

The years of silence.
Then, his woman died.
He burned whatever he buried:
Words, gestures, the glass in the gazes.
He saw only his woman, he spoke only to her.
Grief is deeper when there is too much unsaid left,
When it is too late .
Maybe he had to speak before it was too late inside him, before words were too far, further than the hours, further than the nights.
Maybe he spoke because he was too afraid to cry.

***

The forests are gone, burned.
The wild beasts refuge to the city,
Immense, invisible in their silence.
They have no choice.
The proud beautiful dear become scavengers.
They eat whatever was left, the useless,
They sleep in any empty shadow they find.
You don't understand what happened,
You never thought that the forest was the last home available.
You are afraid of violence: the beasts.
You kill the animals, the way you killed so many refugees,
With a knife in their cry.

***

We are modern.
We have cameras everywhere.
There is always someone, his gaze is studied as a crime,
Who sees you, who knows where you were, where you go,.
It reminds you something, something you don't want to remember,
And you don't know if they still shoot people at the wall,
Because the motion of their lips was visible,
Because the smile was inexplicable.
Maybe there was a camera and a man.
Maybe theysaw the inexplicable,
Maybe they didn't know how to shoot it.

***

We are modern.
We have cameras, always,
And yet, we don't know how to see, how to understand what we see,
How to remember.
Maybe being modern is a disease:
We are the big blind,
We are the ones who forget whatever we cannot remember.
Remembering is hard work.

***

They say that the moon light is a witch.
Maybe it's true.
The bodies are different, as if they left the motions they knew, what they remembered.
The shadows grow hard, stone between the thighs,
The shadows grow soft marble in the hands.
They sell their bodies, naked, clear as water,
To the moon.
The witch knows all the secrets of love,
The ten fingers that travel towards the body, over it, beneath it.

***

She said:
The twilight, the colors are no longer a shelter,
They carry too much too much past, too many shadows.
She said: no one can resist his past.
She said: at twilight, the shadows and light mingle, they die entwined.
She said: I cannot be a twilight.
I am not eternal enough to know how to die.

***
There is no room for the motions of living in our home.
There are too many suitcases,
Worn off, ancient skin, awake.
We came from very far,
And we had to move, always.
The herd in our depth dreams us,
It grazes the legendary grass lands in our back yard,
And the water holes of time, deep, visible in the street.

***

It is noon time in the village.
The woman holds seeds in her palm,
Tomorrow they'll sow more tomorrows.
She is a farmer of life,,
So, when hunters pass, big, handsome,
Open veins in their sweat, dead feathers in their hands,
She wants to cry, like an animal in pain,
But she cries like a woman,
Somewhere deep, somewhere invisible, somewhere wounded.
This cry came from very far,
And the woman carried the cry inside her, till here:
Death in a small village.

***

We have inside us sun dust, light dust,
And this dust paints us.
We are, each moment, another circus of colors.
The acrobats on the tight rope of fog
It is white, it is illegible.
The juggler juggles with balls of burning suns in invisible hands.
And the clown, the red painted tear, drowns in the tear.
Maybe he was eternal enough to know how to drown.

***

Beneath the cracked silver of the moon,
A silver train.
The seed between the thighs of a woman
Thinks alone, it thinks for itself. It doesn't know others think in it.
Everything is urgent: the moon, the thighs of a woman, the thoughts, the seed.
The next stop is in the infinite.

***

The moon in the water.
The fish return to the place where they were born.
The sea is dark: the endless fish. The sea is white: the moons multiply in the water.
They erase each other, there is no color left.
You feel you can be saved again,
As if everything was clear, a picture without color.
The time inside the fish had no color,
The longing to return had no color.
As if everything was the way home.

***

You learn hoow to speak, and later, much later, how to hear,
Slowly, each day more, each day better.
Somewhere you learn how to sing,
Somewhere you realize
That when you sing alone in your voice, and with others,
The song becomes more, much more than a song.
Inside your song people sing themselves,
The voices in the voice: hands in a hand, the ten fingers of a touch in a touch,
You trust them. You know where to go. The song continues.

***

Madness helps you feel more, deeper, fearless.
Everything has something inexplicable, something unthinkable.
You have the courage to feel the inexplicable: pain.
To feel the unthinkable: death.
You are not afraid to cry.

***

The garden. The big sunflowers, they wear the costumes of the sun.
Behind: the cemetery.
Often, at night, the dead come out,
They sit, invisible in their silence, invisible in their quiet,
Under the sunflowers,
In order to remember the colors of the light.
They are happy.

***

The place: ancient marbles.
There are mysterious numbers on the marbles,
They are the colors of time.
But time is a lizard, the colors change.
It camouflages itself, an immense ambush.
The lizards of time come from very far: an eternal Dinosaur.
Maybe that's why the place is deserted.
The marbles and the numbers have no choice.
They are busy surviving, the last dinosaur.
The numbers are busy reading the future.

***

The paper boat of the child is still here, in the small port.
Space enough to be lost, to find who you are, to be lost again.
This paper boat may be a journey, the journey to the last port. To human.
Your journey.

***

Somewhere deep in you: time, the past
The thighs that bore you naked.
For time you are always naked.
It bears you, each day again,
Each day different, even the sameness is different.

***


You come from very far.
You carved immense beasts on the walls of the cave.
You carried with you the carving: the beasts.
They could become war, violent claws,
They could become insomnia, the battle with what you remember,
They could become a legend for children,
They could become a legend for grown up: history.
They could become your poem. It will be exquisite.

***

The bus is modern. It has an exact route.
You get in.
You are a small man, silent, patient, absolute
Who goes to his own Ithaca:
A woman.
Inside the woman: the Ithaca,
There is another Ithaca:
A drop of dawn, a single drop, in the deep recesses of a woman:
Sperm of light, semen of infinite.

***

To think the duration of a silence, of a word.
To let time be what it is:
A comma in your poem.
Time is not a smooth story.
It is phrases that have to continue each other, uncertain, new, trembling as a comma.
The infinite of time is made of countless continuations, and the comma between them.
Time becomes infinite in a comma.

***

The artist shapes the clay,
And the clay shapes him.
They create, together, and alone,
A clay dream.
The body of a woman,
Each body is the body of the first woman.
It is the Ithaca of an artist:
The warm clay in the body of the first woman,,
In the ten fingers of his touch.
To walk towards her, to know there are no arrivals.

***

It is a world of builders.
We build dams in the river of time,
We divide the infinite.
We build a home in still water,
The ceiling divides the rain.
Home is important.
It is the place where we can keep at least one of our dreams, intact.

***

Time, the immense time, is the big toy of life.
You accelerate time: you dream.
You inverse it: you remember.
You slow time: you wait for yourself, for life, for love.
Slowly you drink time, up to the end of love.

***

The flight of a bird is beauty.
Flying is power, and you need power to fly,
And yet, it makes you lighter..
Birds' cry weighs no more than a feather,
The way your cry weighs like stone.
Their cry falls, infinitely soft, infinitely light, like the scent of pain.
It rains over your stone, it soothes the stone.

***

Noon.
The light is black, sun burned.
The deserted village black, time burned.
An ancient hole in the ground, the invisible smell of water.
You remember the well, it came from very far, from the deepest past.
The past cannot desert it, it cannot desert you.
You remember. You are the past.

***

You grow old.
You don't trust what you see, what you remember.
You don't know where to go, and if you forget, you'll have nowhere to return.
Only the absence remains. It is faithful.
The eternal dog.

***

Humble days.
The woman seems older than time,
More scarred than time.
Her hands, the long fingers of a woman,
Are nailed, like a saint,
To the infinitely small motions of living.
The crumbs of life in her toothless gums,
She can chew nothing, not even the beginning of a smile.

***

Inn nature, everything repeats itself,
Like the ants on the path of the day.
Their soldiers are ferocious, poisonous,
They forgive nothing.
They protect the mother-land: the nest.
You remember your holy wars, the holy mine fields.
Maybe you arre more innocent than what you think.
You remember how to cry.

***

Maybe the beach dreams, and the dream is contagious.
You stand on the beach, salty, secret, clear, alone.
You dream of a journey to the continent of spices.
You dream of a journey to a woman, between her arms, a continent of scents.
You stand, the wind comes low, it blows into your two big pockets.
Each pocket: one continent.
You have to choose.
Choosing is, like life, hard work.

***

You are not a cat, you cannot see in the dark.
Yet, you are human, you can see the dark, the dark inside the dark.
Seeing is power, like living,
Only when you know how to use it,
When you know how to guard it
Like a drop of dawn, a single drop,
Mother and semen of light.

***

In the circus
Magic rules.
The magicians, the woman rubber, the infinite acrobat,
Their airy, almost invisible motions are a dance.
Their dance touches the edge of the explainable,
Their dance touches the edge of the unexplainable.
Maybe they dance poetry, maybe they dance life.
This dance, of poetry, of life is exquisite, the edges mingle, the unexplainable in the explainable,
The impossible in the possible.


***

You open a jar of spices. The scent is exquisite.
You touch it,
And your motion is the prolongation of the scent, of the spice.
It is the prolongation of the ancient spice route,
Travelling towards your finger.
Your motion went far, further than what you imagine,
It crossed the time inside the spice.

***

You are a small man. You live beneath your shadow.
You don't realize it, bit your motions of living, invisible as the useful,
Are important,
And the repetitions make them sacred, like the repetition of a prayer.
You stand in a corner of the day, shy, small, , hardly visible, thirsty,
You long for a hand to give you water.
You look at your hand, your human hand: a patient well, it waited for you to see it for so long, it waited for you to know how deep you are.
It drinks your thirst, it drinks the thirst of someone passing by.

***

The sound of the wind is sharp, metal, like a weapon, like a crime.
The beach is deserted.
The only victims are two crutches, and a missing leg on the sand.
Beneath them; the faint print of a body of a woman.
On the beach: a crime of war, a dead dream of love.

***

You never have the same size.
You don't know how small you are, how big.
You cannot measure the inexplicable:
Life, the pain that is life, the hope that is life, the death somewhere inside you.
Slowly, little by little you find your height, you lose it, you find it again,
Maybe you realize too late that life is the height of the eyes of a human,
That death looks you in the eyes.
You see all the inexplicable at once,. you understand.

***

There are days that begin difficult..
They smell of something sticky.
They bring you the saliva dripping, the slippery mud, the strange dark taste of blood.
Everything is humid.
Everything sticks to your motions, to what you remember, to what you know.
The days didn't bring these humidity to you alone. There were others.
The sticky things glue them, skin to skin, tongue to tongue.
When people are stuck to each other, no motion left free, no word,
They are dangerous.
They are guilty before and after court.

***

You carry the dead man on a boat,
An outlaw, a fugitive from the law of the bullets.
You carry a stone body, dead bodies are what you remember.
The sea has no graves,
And the dead need somewhere to return . What you remember may be enough.
And you cry
For someone who cried for you.

***

The scaffolding is narrow.
Barely room enough for the rope,
Your body on the rope,
For a sliver of the mmon,,
For a woman with a picture in her hand.
She looked for you for too long, fugitives stay deep beneath the picture.
She found you.

***

Colors are a bridge. The bridge is small. The bridge is infinite.
Everything living, everything dying changes slowly its color.
The bridge is a surreal pictures of colors. Only colors.
And our steps continue to paint the bridge.
And we don't know who will guard the bridge that is just colors
Who will guard the colors that walk towards the infinite, so together, so alone,
We don't know if the infinite is color, if colors can reach the infinite, on a bridge, in a painting, in the beginning of a smile.

***

The magician of the tribe
Needs blood for his magic,
Small and big animals,
And if the magic is big, much bigger,
The blood of a man.
There are many magicians among us, more than what we imagine.
They pump the blood, the golden blood of the living.
The blood is precious, for wars, for bullets , for sacrifices at the wall.
They sell the gold in all the market of the world.
They are magicians, they make the blood paper.

***

In the small cafe,
The smell of coffee, inebriating,
And the sticky smell that doesn't come off,
May be the smell of age.
Men, faces, gestures, come and go,
But the cafe is faithful, it's here,
Only the sticky smell is more eternal, more stubborn.

***

You don't know that the sticky smell is life,
That life sticks to you, stubborn, patient, steady,
Even though time flows like blood from the slit throat of a child.
Smells are inexplicable, because they flow deep, much deeper than thought. be
And we don't know if time has a smell, smells may be contagious, and time sniffs everything on it its way.
We don't know if the time is smell, if we can feel it, a moment before eternity.

***

Mythic bodies dance
Through the meanders of a labyrinth, past dragons,,
And they dance love.
The smell of the skin guides them to the tenderness.
In and out of the tenderness,, the thighs find themselves,
They lose it, and they find themselves again.
There are no mythic heroes, but the dance exists. It continues.
And when people dance it, it becomes more, much more than a dance.
They dance their daily labyrinth, the big labyrinth, the biggest.
They dance themselves up to the end of love.

***

The woman you loved died.
And yet, you feel her here.
The ten fingers of a touch, of a woman, are home.
The stove she lit was home, the plate of soup was home.
And her body, the warm soft marble
Your body remembers her body, the forest between her thighs
Was home.

***

You are leaving.
In the house, the absence walks already from room to room.
In the window: everything seems the same.
You can see no longer the differences inside the sameness.
Whatever your suitcase couldn't contain, you carry in your silence.
Gravities gather in your silence.
You are restless. You want to leave here, now.
But parting has always a small knife between two delicate fingers.
You bleed.

***

You should learn how to see, the way the wind does.
When it folds it invisible arms around a tree, around a train station.
There are many trees in a tree,
There are many stations in a station,
And the light carves even more the corners in each one.
There is infinite corners inside a corner,
Infinite colors inside the white.
You should know how many eyes are in two eyes, how many cries inside a cry.

***

Women have the wisdom of daily life.
They know how to find, among the endless motions of living,,
Small corners, invisible in their quiet, invisible as the simple.
Room enough to look at the window of the day,
Enough to repeat their name, who they were, who they are,
Until they hear it, until they understand.

***

The women of the past were too busy with the motions of living,
Too busy to ask who they were, who they are,
To look out of the window of the day.
They didn't know they were the farmers of life,
That whatever they did, was a seed of something.
They didn't know they made life possible,
They didn't know they made the infinite possible, like a seed.
They didn't know they made love possible.

***

There are bullets everywhere, and other weapons, new, old.
Even in a calm village.
Often they are small,
Like the bone of a shadow that pierced you. Shadows may solidify, a sharp spear, and they follow your body like a dog with his bone.
Like a small stone that smashed your feet. Small stones are ancient bullets . They contain too much time. They are dangerous.
It is easy to hide big things: rage, hate, violence,
Behind small things.
These big things may kill you.

***

The little girl is in the garden,
She waters it.
She sings the water, and the water sings her.
She sings the thorns that pierce the rose, her song slowly pulls them out.
She is young, a small animal,
She can smell death so close to the rose,
She can smell pain, the pain of a thorn.

***

Inside your fist you chew your moments, whatever you think,
You chew the impossible..
In your fist: whatever you have lost: the coins, the treasures
Inside your fist,
Your lips are hard. They kissed the dead once too much.
Inside your fist: the morning air is too thick with rain.
You drown in your fist.
Open it.
A fist is rage. A fist is fear.
The big prisons, The biggest.
Open it.

***

The bug is magic.
The round eyes, bigger than its face, bigger than its life.
It looks at you from inside out,
From the deep circle of seeing.
Remember, the night in your depth is not blind.
It is one bug.
It seats itself on the broken branches pain is made of.
It sees you from inside out

***

There are too many suns,
They blind us, so we don't see the light, we don't see the shadows.
There is wisdom in the eyes of an owl.
It sees at least in the dark, it sees the dark inside the dark.
It makes the invisible, visible.
The sliver of moon in its beak is exquisite.

***

You sell your feet, because you have nothing else left to sell.
You step over the grapes for hours, for days.
Your nostrils are drunk, your pain is drunk.
You don't notice it wasn't must,
It was your life, red, pressed, utterly naked,
That flew into the wine, like an open vein,
Like a drop of dawn ,
Without a glass of mercy.

***

Turtles sleep among stones.
The sand, humid, warm, soft,
Covers their sleep.
Some nights, when the moon is a perfect circle, a perfect cycle,
The stones break, the way silences break, suddenly, unprepared, a cry,
The turtles crawl out,
Blind, deaf, ready for nothing, like a child.
And yet, turtles are different,
Their body is a compass,
The past inside it, the sea inside it, the life inside it,
Real as magic.
It remembers the way home.
Also turtles have their Ithaca.

***

At times we do the impossible,
Like the journey to human, the endless journey, the harsh journey,
Simply, invisible, absolute,
When the possible is not enough.
When it bleeds.

***

At times, the possible is too much:
The white washed light, the white washed sea, the white washed light,
Tire us.
We want less white, we want the surrender of colors to earth, to silence, we want the sadness of colors.
No one is ready for his possible,
No one is ready for his sadness.

***

They say owls are a bad omen,
But owls are innocent.
Maybe they see too much: all the shapes of the dark.
And their only guilt is seeing.
Seeing is a power. And seeing the dark is a second power.
Seeing is dangerous.
Who will guard the owls, who will guard their eyes,
Who will guard their dark innocence.

***

Often, the moon enters the window.
You are calm.
You sit. You look at the moon. It shivers.
You realize it comes from cold places.
You see yourself, you are cold, you don't shiver. You are still.
The smoke of the last cigarette rose high, invisible ice.
Heaven is a cold place.

***

Your cloths come from far,
A child of an ancient father.
They are dark, exact, austere.
But cloths don't change us as much as you think.
You wear austere cloths,
And you play like a child with fire:
You find the last cigarette of someone by the wall,
The fire still burning inside the smoke,
And you wouldn't forget it: it burned you,
The child, in sober cloths.
Was shot.

***

The island has everything an island should have.
The white washed houses, the white washed light, the white washed sea.
In a cave; a dark myth:
In the darkness, the ancient beast, drunk, asleep. Eternity tires it.
At noon time, the sky has more, much more than one sun.
The sky, the sea in the island came from very far.
So, somewhere close, visible, the sky returns to the sea it came from.
People return to the sea they came from.
They don't know how immense they are,
When they come out of the sea again.

***



In the house the air is dark. The silence is dark.
Suddenly, a candle lit.
The tender light gives color to the air, to the silence,
To the secret field of bread on the table.
It paints time, and time paints it
The light is too tender to be sad, too tender to be happy,
Like the hand of a woman, the deep candle in the ten fingers , delicate, absolute.

***

Trees have a thousand roots, more, much more than leaves.
Somewhere there will be only one leaf left, like a sudden war.
A lonely survivor.
It will carry the seasons of the sun, the seasons of the wind,
It will swing between the tender palms of autumn's rain.
It needs power to be the last leaf.
It needs power to feel the tenderness of autumn's rain.

***

You send a letter
Sealed in a bottle, in the sea, in a balloon full of wind,
You send it with a dove,
As if you wanted the letter to find you.
After all, even when we speak, we send letters to ourselves.
They read us.


***

Gravity is everywhere.
The light flows down, the water flows down,
And the freshness from somewhere hifg, the cypress trees, flows down,
This freshness is strange, it is bitter, the smell of cemeteries, the smell of the dead.
After all, life has its own gravities.
It flows into the ten long fingers of earth ,
And we don't know if time has gravity,
We don't know who will guard the future from falling.

***

Gravity is everywhere:
The air, the water, the earth.
And time goes with everything.
It walks quiet, meticulous, efficient,
Towards eternity.
We fear time when it passes through us,
But it lets us touch a moment of eternity,
It makes us a moment more eternal.

***

Simplicity is never really simple,
Like a swing between the possible and the impossible.
To love the white washed walls,
To let the words be small, clear as water,
To let the smell of bread fill, naked, quiet, the room.
But walls are not simple, and words,
And for sure, bread was never something simple.
But, we are human. We know that within each possible, the impossible curls, secret, clear.

***

Women, matured by love, by tenderness, by pain,
All the seasons of time in their face,
In their delicate palms, like a basket of fruits.
Holding all the seasons of time, is power.
Leaving the basket of seasons on earth, is power,
As if they were eternal enough to know how to die.

***

Things touch each other all the time,
Everything is woven in a touch.
The shadow of a bird touches your shadow.
Your hand touches, inevitable as a breath, the life of someone,
And the star light, the long fingers of light,
Touches the star dust you are made of.
Touching is power.
Your hand in the hand of someone else is power,
And the star dust in your entrails, the whole past, in the star dust of someone else.

***

There are many circles in time:
The circles in the smell of the leaves,
The circles in the smell of light,
The circles of blood in a woman.
It is strange.
You thought time is straight, a line, absolute,
Pushing you into the future,
And you find out it's made of circles,
Like a circular dance.
And you have no choice,
You dance with the light, with the leaves, with the smells, with the blood of a woman.
The biggest dance of the world.

***

The small beach. Lines of color, like the picture of a child.
The balconies, a line of view, hang over the boats.
A paper moon, a line of night, hangs over the sun.
Nothing is yesterday, nothing is tomorrow,
And everything is yesterday, everything is tomorrow.
Children paint their feelings,
And we don't know if they paint in the yesterday, in the tomorrow,
We don't know if they feel time, if they paint what they feel.
Maybe time is a feeling, and we don't know if we can paint feelings.

***

You know so few colors.
You don't know the color of a dream,
The color of longing between the thighs of a woman,
The color of the infinite inside a seed,
The color of the sky in the grasses of dawn.
The colors of a touch.

***

He said:
The world is a crystal ball.
Inside it, the infinite moves precisely, meticulously, in circles,
Invisible in the clarity.
Whatever you do leaves traces, cracks in the glass.
Whatever you do has piecesof the infinite within it.

***

The wide wind from the south trembles like a river.
Rivers give shape to time.
You may not realize it,
But everything gives shape to time,
And your motions of living of loving, give shape to time,
Each day from the beginning.

***

The butterfly carries the garden
Between its thighs, the warm thighs,
The pollen in its belly of love, another garden.
Maybe women are butterflies , light and heavy as a butterfly,
The exquisite garden between their thighs,
The belly of pollen.

***

You escape home, but you don't know how to escape,
How to take all of yourself with you:
The dreams, the memories, your gaze in the window,
Your face print on a pillow.
How to leave nothing behind..
You are still here even though some of you is there, you are divided.
Your escape escaped nothing.
Escaping is an art, and it is hard work.

***

You leave home, you leave your woman,
For countless reasons.
But something of you is left behind:
Some hair from your beard, your gaze in the mirror,
The prints of your silence in the bed.
And all these things:
The hair, the gaze, the prints, the silence,
Are soft and hard as the days that were, the nights that were, as the longing.

***

The butterfly in the garden.
The two wings open, exquisite shatters,
The thighs of the flower, naked, warm,
And the tiny butterfly sowing infinites, pollen.
Butterflies are small, but they big lovers, obssesive, unstoppable.

***

When you see a tree,
You see whatever the tree will let you see.
You don't know that half of its life is invisiblr, too deep.
The roots.
You don't know that a simple root can go far, much further than what you imagine.
You don't know there are no simple roots.
You don't know that a root, a single root, is a farmer of eternities,
You don't know that a root is a magician of living: It drinks suns from the dark.

***

The day shines, it doesn't mind your disbelief.
You don't trust days that are bright as a promise, you don't trust promises anymore.
The light is a whirlpool of colors,
It paints in a crystal globe
All the colors that exist, the colors that don't exist,
The colors that could exist, the colors that should have existed,
And the light is always young,
It begins its painting each moment again,
It begins itself, each moment again.
You are in the crystal globe, it is not a promise, it exists,
But seeing is an art, and when you see, when you believe in your two eyes, in the two Centers of seeing that you own,
It is an act of faith.

***

Quiet days. The warm fatigue of the hour.
Nothing big happens,
So, you have no reason to believe
That something big, huge,
Can hide easily behind small things,
Like the immense silence behind a word.
The silence happened already, tall, invisible,
Behind the small voices of a day,
So, you have no new.

***

The summer forgot to put a full stop,
It continues in the sea, in the hours,
In the two bodies behind the rock, one body in the other, moving towards eternity.
The summer is beautiful,
And the longing for something eternal is exquisite.
Maybe the longing is the most eternal thing we have.

***

The summer forgot to put a full stop,
It continues in the waves, in the waves inside words,
In the waves inside the two bodies, the waves inside the longing for something eternal.
You forget
That time is a season in eternity, but the season is not.
That the time in your motions of loving: the fruits of your season, is eternal,
But your motions: the fruit of your season, are not.
Time is an endless phrase. It has no full stops, or even a comma.

***

The home is transparent. It lets the world in.
The doors are glass, they pass through each other,
And they open crystal galaxies, the long fingers of star light in your circles of seeing,
In your motions of living.
You feel the fragile infinites inside your motions,
You trust them.
You are human therefore fragile .
You know that each power is also fragile.
You trust them.

***

Everything happens at noon, when the grown up sleep.
The children explore the unexplored:
The second cellar.
They find lost chairs, a glass that left and never returned,
They find lost time, hours, years.
And they explore more: they discover their body and it discovers them as never before.
It like a secret island, a sense of dragons, a sense of adventure, a strange sense of passion.
The children don't know what they discovered, they don't know they discovered
The immense past for the first time,
They discovered the longing a body can feel, for the first time.

***

In the picture of eternity,
A house made of sand, like the castle of a child.
The sand is eternal, the child is not.
The window opens into the blue, like a boat,
They breath the sea. The sea is eternal, the window, the boat are not.
The house, the window the boat, the child are only a toy of eternity.
They leave the picture.

***

In the yard,
A crystal sphere.
The smell of all the continents of fruit inside it.
The sphere is transparent,
And yet, you cannot see the hands inside the fruits,
The sound of rain in the fingers.
The hands, the fingers, the sound of rain:
The exquisite fruit, inside the fruit.

***
The shatters are closed.
The woman is tender, she covers the man with layers of blue,
And at once, she feels the whole sky lying over him,
Light and heavy as love.
And the closed shatters: light and heavy as the night in her body.

***

The rooster is not a singer.
It is a working bird.
Roosters are the clock of the world,
They know which is the moment before dawn.
It is a sad,
Because we don't hear that moment, we are not ready.

***

Humiliation
1. he said:
I'll be high, you'll be low.
That is the law of man.
He said: you'll be generous.
You'll plow the stones in my fields,
You'll plow the air when your breath is not enough, when there is no air left.
He said: I'll be generous.
I'll throw down, somewhere low, my cry, I'll cry for you.

2. He said; I'll accept everything from you, even your sadness.
I'll keep everything you gave me, even the smell of your sweat,
But the smell was like a scent from a bottle, invisible in its tenderness.
If you can, give me bottle, I need tenderness, no matter how invisible it is.

***

He was missing for years. He returned.
The woman was sad,
Because she was happy for so long.
When he was here, her hands, her mouth were strangers, they were not her own,
But her eyes were her own, she saw.
He was an animal of pray on a holiday.
She was safe from him for a while,
But she wasn't safe from herself,
The delicate knife between the two fingers:
The beginning of a tremble.

***

You feel light, dissolving in the air, dissolving in the shape of a leaf.
You think you are free.
You don't know that freedom is never light,
You don't know that freedom has a price:
Your freedom in the freedom of others,
The freedom of others in your freedom,
And you don't know if you can afford it.

***
Living motions

1.At the table
A child reading again and again his book.
His fingers repeat the words,
The eyes repeat the fingers.
Maybe the world is a child reading his book.
Its fingers repeat the seasons,
Its eyes repeat the fingers,
Its eyes repeat all the eternities that become a moment.
Everywhere the repetitions that make us the different,
Everywhere the small motions, sanctified by repetition.

***

2.The bird in the room.
The air: a bundle of colors, of feathers
And two red beads.
It is beautiful, it sees.
It looks at the child realizing a quiet miracle:
The words that became meaning,
The meanings that become a song.
Birds have other books:
The book of seasons, the book of dimensions: the height, the depth,
And they are miracle makers too:
The seasons, the dimensions that becomes a song.

***

3. The children go to school. The home is silent.
Everything writes itself in itself.
The calendar writes the time in its time.
The glasses conceal themselves in their glass-self.
The windows concentrate the whole world in a square of silence.
Homes may be a sad child.
Children know how to write themselves in themselves,
Long before they know how to write.

***

The moon rises. The moon is very small, smaller than the silence. It seems indefinite.
It falls slowly. The moon is a leaf. It crosses, like you,
All the seasons in one night.
The tree entered the window, the way trees do.
It wouldn't stay. Tomorrow morning it will walk towards the sun,
The way trees do.
And you want to be a tree, to know, beyond the night, beyond the indefinite,
Where to go.

***

The bird is lost in its song. Suddenly it flies away,
It leaves its song in the tree, a gift.
And you, with the leaf of a song in your wide palm,
How many gifts did you give,
How many gifts did you take.

***

It is a world of glass.
Beyond the crystal doors:
The crystal walls, the crystal hours, the crystal eyes.
In their depth: the bottom of the sea, translucent, green- blue.
In the bottom of the sea, a man, a stranger,
He is drowning in the glass. He is visible.
His lips moves like a mute cry.
But there is too much glass: the glass walls, the glass of time, the glass eyes,
To save him.

***

We don't know where to find each other,
And not knowing, changes our eyes, changes the colors of time, the night.
The moon is black, it paints our eyes.
The only sparks left are the fireflies, small moons.
Fireflies are important:
A procession of candles to something infinite: to love.
At times, the candles are enough,
At times we find each other in the holy procession.

***

The morning is a chaos. Maybe it is the first morning.
Toys lost in their noise, cloths lost in their color.
The empty flower pot. The flowers went out. They are curious
The curtain is undecided: to fly, not to fly.
But the calendar on the wall is another kind of god.
It brings order into the chaos of the first morning.
Everything returns to where it should be.
A woman appears.

***

Children can do that:
Carve with two fingers,
The beginning of a smile on the face of a man.
Children are small animals;
The smile smells like the beginning of the night,
Like the smell of a sun setting, unprepared, unready.

***

Being pregnant is strange. You have whims,
And the whims rule you with a passion you felt only in the hours of love.
Maybe the whims are not yours, they are the child's,
And you are not ready.
You are not wise enough, you are not courageous enough.
And the less ready you are, the more the whims.
You don't know how to be a mother,
And the child doesn't know how to be a child.

***

You enter the room.
The smell of old wood, the smell of smoke in the breath of a man.,
On a shelf: a bullet.
It came from very far, from the past
On a shelf: a statue. An ancient hero.
And I have no choice, I go on,
With the smoke in my breath, with the bullet in my body,
With the statue of the ancient hero.
After all, mothers carry the child inside them
Long after it was born,
Or maybe it never left her.

***

You enter his room.
His shoes: big. A good home for the road.
On the table: a jug of water,
His gaze in the depth of the water, his gaze deep as a well.
You put on his shoes,
You sit at the table, you see the water in the jug, deep as a well, in his eyes.
You gather the water in your palm, you throw the water, deep as a well, into your eyes.
You want to cry, with his eyes, the deep water, in your eyes.

***

The night, the emptiness, the smell of something free.
You can go wherever you want. You can go nowhere.
You can cry. This cry grew old in your mouth.
You see the train pass. You remain in the station.
You may feel the freedom in the emptiness, in the lonely deserted station,
And you don't know if you are strong enough.

***

You plow the earth, you sow it.
You sow it with seeds, small infinites, you sow it with your hands.
The handful of seeds: a wide motion, heavy and light as a wing.
The hand: a handful of small infinites, heavy and light as the infinites of suns in your Deepest skin.
You are not god fearing,
But you feel that these hands, the hands that are wings, that are a handful of small infinites,. the hands that are heavy and light,
Are holy.

***

The breasts of a woman are home.
A table, a jug of deep water,
A soft white sofa for the light to lie on.
The nipples: candles. They give the deepest light, the light of their body.
And the breasts of a woman,
The tender white trail that comes from very far,
From the childhood of the past,
They are the way home.

***

The doors closed.
The vacationers left,
But they didn't take along their traces:
The noise they sowed in the tavern, in the salty armchairs,
The seed of leisure, the seed of well being.
The seed is beautiful. It is happy.
It is the repose of a warrior.
Even eternity rests, at times,
In a balcony over the twilight,
In the deep recesses of a woman, waiting.

***

It's autumn evening.
The shadows are everywhere. The light is momentary:
A fallen leaf of the moon.
The wet clothe, her knitting pins shine.
A child on his new bicycle, the bell glitters its ring.
The wet clothes on the cloth line, they follow the wind, white, clear.
The old woman on a bench, her knitting pins shine.
You feel that the light comes from the motions of living.
They are momentary, they walk towards the infinite, because they are real.

***

We are still fruit gatherers.
We gather the fruit of the past, the fruit of a child, a secret apple on a secret tree,
And you come, like the first woman, to bite it.
This apple painted your teeth, white, clear teeth, young innocence.
This apple aged you, forever.

***

Zero is not round.
It is a line, like your eyes when you don't want to see, when you fear to see.
The zero blinds you.
And the zero is not round
When you leave the unsaid, unsaid, your mouth is a line.
This unsaid grows old in your mouth, old and salty.
Behind the round glass you see the motions of the lips, but you don't know the shape of the words.
This round glass remains inside you.
Inside you the zero is round, inexplicable, absolute.
You cry like an old man, round tears, final.

***

The evening breathes quietly over the sea.
For a moment memory is light, a blue oblivion.
But the next moment, time begins again from the beginning,
And it carries with it whatever was forgotten.
Memory is never really light,
It has to carry the whole past,
It has to carry whatever you remember, whatever you forgot.
Forgetting is another kind of memory,
Inside you, everything leaves immense foot prints, indelible.
Everything leaves finger prints on the walls of your cave. The cave bleeds..
No one is ready for his memories,
No one is ready for what he forgot.

***

At times, the world is a drawing of a child.
The sea is green, the earth is yellow.
There is a child, his eyes are bigger than his face, bigger than his life. They see.
In the depth: the horizon. It is dark blue. It is not infinite. It ends.
In the middle of everything: a road.
The way home.

***

Out of the house: the road.
You don't know that the road begins inside the house,
That even the smallest motion of living: a step towards the window,
Is a road.
Maybe all the roads are the road of a tree.
Beneath its shade, it walks, invisible in its depth: roots, invisible as the layer beneath layer,
Towards the sun.

***

The small picture nailed to the wall, on a small rope,
Lets a small sky in, and the sky walks out of the picture, it goes everywhere,
In the rooms, in the voices.
This sky seems light, lighter than the beginning of a smile.
But nothing is really light, gravity is everywhere,
Even the sky may fall in a rain drop,
And the picture may fall from the rope, the hanging rope,
And breath at long last.

***

The ruins are from another place of time,
And yet, they are here, eternal as the lizard in their cracked face.
They seem like the Agora, the ancient plaza of people,
Where men spoke about the world inside them,
The world in the world, the world in their dreams.
The exquisite plaza of the world.
Voices leave echoes: the shadows of a voice,
And these shadow paint, persistent, slow, meticulous, patient,
What you say, what you think, who you are.

***

The woman on the bed. She look at the men's hands, the big nakedness in their hand.
Two men.
Their muscular hair, the big waves in their manhood.
She feels the waves, they flood her deep recesses.
She feels that monogamy is a sin against the big Goddess,
The goddess of love.
She loves the big nakedness, the big waves that drown her.

***

At times, you lose yourself, because you need to be lost.
Losing your self is power.
You look at the path, the directions you broke.
The long fingers of the star light are close. You continue alone.
You don't know that there are more journeys than people, more paths than shoes,
That you'll find yourself, you'll lose it, you'll find it again, alone,
Even though you walk with a big caravan of people. The biggest.

***

The journey knows you.
It knows what time it is in the death of a man,
What time it was in a child,
It remembers what time it is in the world.
It sees the past, the past understands you, it knows who you were, where you were,
But the yesterday is not enough,
It doesn't know what time it is in the red tear of dawn.

***

The ship sinks. It is indifferent. It doesn't mind what time it was in its death,
What death is.
All around; white napkins, drown, with the cries of the dying in their white.
These cries know what time it is in their death.
Humans are not ships, no matter what the poets say, they die in a different way.
And the man who drowned and brought to shore, his red immense lips, his red gaze.
Clowns come from very far, the red painted tear, his red lips that are a tear too.
They are old men.
They know what time it is in their sadness.

***

Tears began from very far in order to come here.
But maybe there were times when people cried more easily ,
Like when they saw beauty:
A delicate vase: a statue of water,
A woman, soft white marble in her silence, in her thighs.
They covered their face with their hands,
In order to keep the feeling protected, their own,
In order to save the beauty from the black sun burned light.
Beauty is a fragile power.

***

Someone returns.
He left the struggle for long, very long,
And he comes back, without remorse, without humility.
His words are jewels, they shine,
But in mid air, they halt, they become diaphanous as a shard.
They scrape you. You bleed.
Maybe you'll shoot him, your eyes will be clear.
You cannot cry for someone who didn't cry for you.

***

Your supper came from very far, from the deep past.
The clay basin to wash the hands, they hands that could bleed earth, roots.
The fork: a metal to grasp the meat, like the shadow of a weapon.
The dead animal on the plate. It is appeased. It was blessed by the biggest magicians: the gods.
There are leaves on your plate, you don't know if animals have a soul, if the soul sheds leaves in its own autumn.
The little child is silent. He is looking, examining everything. His eyes are ancient.
Children have to gather memories in order to have somewhere to return.
Your supper came from very far, and it will follow you, the way roots follow a tree,
Always.

***

Some habits come from very far.
The women's quarters,
The silence of the women is visible, behind the glass.
Their bodies, white soft marble, is adorned. It shines.
But no one can adorn the forest between the thighs.
The wild animal bleeds.
No one can adorn the blood.

***

It is Sunday.
You get up like a king, slowly, leisurly.
You put on your best suit,
It was your father's.
On Sundays he was a king too.
You go out to meet the other kings of the street.
You shake hands, proud, kingly.
You speak about the world in your home, the world in the street, the world in the world.
It is the best noble court that ever existed.
It is sad,
There are too many kings,
And too few Sundays.

***

There are strange moments.
Shadows coming out of the walls, out of the mirrors.
They seem familiar in a strange way.
They seem foreign in a strange way.
And then, everything stops,
Only the clock delays its sound,
As if it let more time for time,
As if it let time enough for the return of the past,
As if we can remember because time remembers.

***

They say that the poor are thieves. It's true.
In the bakery, they steal the smell of bread,
In the flower shops: the scent of a flower.
They steal the chaos of feeling in the street:
Envy, pain, a sense of revenge.
Their shoes have measured the roads, their hours, the days, the years,
Are consumed.
But, they have to run for their life.
They are guilty.

***

In the circus,
The plastic suns shine their plastic light,
But our insignificant, repeated motions are worn out.
We need something new, something incredible, exiting.
The magician, his magic: miraculous.
The acrobat repeats his 'Salto mortale' infinitely precise,
Tomorrow he'll repeat it once too much.
And only the clown, his painted red heart on his shirt, beats, it tears the shirt,
Understands everything.

***

A whole life time inside you. You feel you can add nothing,
And yet, whatever you do may be an addition,
Even serving, carefully, meticulously, almost lithourgicaly,
A plate of soup.
The exquisite scent of the soup, the warm smell of seeds you sacrificed in the soup,
The airy smells can add themselves easily to your life.
Smell remembers. It adds time to your time.

***

The sea comes from very far, from the deep past.
At times we see ancient boats sink,
Because they are heavy, they have too much time within them.
Inside them: slabs of marble, a head, a broken nose,
A spear that was left handless.
The ancient gods of the sea.
The sea sparks, nostalgic,
After all, these gods believed in the sea, the infinite beauty,
They knew what the beauty of a storm is.
Maybe we have to be ancient enough to believe in beauty,
To remember its madness.

***

The island.
The white washed sea, the white washed homes, the white washed sand.
The pure white is too perfect.
Perfection is a threat.
We feel that life is never perfect, only death is.
So, we write our name on the pure perfection: the indispensable shadows.

***

It's summer in your life.
You need a shade to cool your eyes, not to hide them in a corner of the dark, to blind them.
You need the sun to warm your life,
To teach you all the hues of warmth.
And you need the night,
To see with cool eyes the dark. Remember, rage burns your eyes.

***

The shadows roll down, because of their weight.
The blind man can see the sunset. He feels its weight, falling.
A door, sealed for years, is hanging in the void, full of void, , as if out of the weighing scale.
It doesn't realize it leaves dreams in the rain. It falls.
Maybe doors fall because the void is the heaviest thing that exists.

***

It is a world of the young.
The young man caresses his young thighs. The night is young.
The sunrise shines like a child.
A sapling throws, mischievous, its shadow on a wall. Indelible. Momentary..
And each thing happens for the first time,
Even if it has happened countless times before.

***

There is too much silence.
You hear your voice in the silence:
Water, water.
There is no answer.
Maybe you are alone,
Maybe no one understands what you really want.
Maybe also you don't understand what you really want:
To hear your voice, the faithful companion, even animal have a voice in order to feel less alone.
To feel your thirst, to know you are alive as thirst, strong as your thirst.
Thirst is a power. Life is thirst.

***

The mirror in your home is camouflaged.
It sees your days, your nights, it says nothing.
It is tuned with your small motions of living,
The motions consecrated by repetitions. It is not bored. It is silent.
It is as beautiful as you, and as vain.
It grows old with you.
It is a big bliss not to grow old alone.

***

There are countless mirrors;
The sea in the eyes of someone,
The rivulet between the two fingers of a touch.
The window in a small motion of living,
The broken glasses of a cry.
You should treat them carefully, respectfully.
You should never forget
That you can break a mirror,
But a mirror can break you.

***

There are darks that are innocent:
The necropolis, the dark silence, the dark loneliness..
The sunset, shadows turn into shadows.
And in a corner: a woman of love.
She sells her body, because no one wants her soul, she sells herself, because there is nothing else left to sell..
Her rage is white, white as a fist that grew old.
Men drink from the river between her thighs,
Their lips are dark, ancient black, hardened.
These lips are not innocent. This dark is not innocent.

***

We don't see our brooms clearly.
They are invisible as the simple, as something useful.
We don't know how just they are.
They swept ancient palaces from the dust of power.
They swept the foot prints of mud, they purified the old shoes.
We don't know how democratic is the dust when it blows,
How immense is its justice.

***

Ants know the earth deeply,
How to plow it, ant by ant, little by little
How to open a crack for each rain drop.
You are not an ant. You think. You plant.
Ants cannot do it.
But, you don't know how to work with others, precise, meticulous.
Ants can do it.

***

At times, you find in earth
Ancient marbles,
Amputated gods.
And you don't know you are the hands that are missing,
Your hands, your invisible hands,
Invisible in their silence,
Invisible in their power,
Are gods.

***

Sparta and Athens- Athina the Goddess.
Ancient cities die, yet, they are mothers.
They taught you the crime of defeat.
They taught you the walls of arrows, that became walls of bullets.
But something is missing.
They didn't teach you how to die for beauty: the goddess.
They didn't tell you how to die for another beauty,
The beauty of wisdom. How to live for it.

***

In the Agora
Dusty words: flatterers and flattened.
Lies carved in the white marble of truth.
The athletes are somewhere else:
In the agora of the body.
Their bodies shine: the sweat. It smells like something clean, something pure.
They wrestle,
They touch each other, the touch feels like something infinite, the hands feel like something infinite.
The touch is invisible inside its weight, it is packed with truths.
There is no dust in the touch.

***

You leave particles of yourself everywhere,
In all the places of time.
In the book you read: particles of your eyes,
The fingers, salivating in the pages, stick. The pages taste you.
The face of a child behind a glass, in a corner of silence,
Like a picture from a family album.
Maybe the person in your head makes whatever you read
A family album.
And the particles are invisible in their weight, invisible in their inevitable.

***

In is noon in distant place of time: Delos.
The pure light in the heliotropes, in the spades.
The pure light in all the shapes of passion.
The big phallic stones on all the shores,
Like thighs in the night of the gods,
Like thighs in the night of men.
Thighs are suns, thighs are gods,
They are the warriors of the infinite.

***

You walk out of the sea, shining marble like a statue, alone as a statue.
The waves crawl to your feet, warm, pure, like the thighs of a woman,
You feel the arms at the stone of your body.
Thighs are arms, the most infinite arms,
They are delicate, they are smooth diamonds, stronger than stone.

***

It's Sunday afternoon.
People go out, the Sunday walk.
It is happy: the salutes, the gazes full of lunch,
The hand shakes that touch your trust.
The furniture, all the old things, almost ancient, were left bbehind,
As lonely as a face in the window, as a secret.
They don't know they are an address, somewhere to return.
They don't know that the past is a great address. The greatest.

***

Moons are big thieves, the thieves of reality.
Beneath their stolen light,
Things disappear , they don't exist, they are a dream we dreamed.
All that's left are the bodies that love each other in a corner of silence,
They are visible in their nakedness,
They are the deepest reality, the closest to the infinite.
No one can steal them.

***

They say that old people are patient,
But patience grows old too,
It is a candle that consumed itself..
They fashion slowly their death mask, the only patience lefy.
They watch in the candle light
Its terrible beauty.

***

You grow old.
Everything tires you,
Even walking in the sands of the beach.
The sand is tender, warm, naked as the memory of a woman, naked as her body when she loved.
You stand.
You feel a wave drowning between your feet, slowly, soft.
You understand.
You lie on the sand.
Death is beautiful on the warm sand of a woman.

***

From above,
You see everything clearer,
You see everything smaller, there are no details, details are the big absence.
You see the earth,
The freedom of the hands in the soil, of the wheat, of the trees,
Is heavy, it is bound to the earth, to the seasons of time, the sun of time, to the rain of time .
You cannot see the pulse in the veins of the infinite, you don't know where the endless ends.
You cannot see the pulse in the veins of people:
A secret river, the liquid clarities, the liquid shadows
You don't know how deep rivers go.
From above you cannot see the delicate Bas-relief of living, of dying.

***

The topography of a place, the topography of people, of animals, of roots, of leaves.
Stones polished by ancient backs leaning on them.
The smell of moons that maddens the wine.
In the middle of the silence: a mule.
It is still like an ancient statue, his skin: brown marble.
Mules are patient, maybe it is the patience that makes them almost eternal.
The wild goats stir winds in the rocks.
Somewhere, a bullet: a man, a wall that bled once too many, an animal of pain.
Everything is the topography of details. Even the infinite is the topography of moments.

***

In the church,
A boy like an ancient statue, the white marble in his skin.
Maybe he came from very far,
A pilgrim to a church he doesn't know.
The bells are foreign language.
He doesn't know he is in another place of time, his future,
A future that doesn't seem his own.
Often, the future is a big traitor. The biggest.

***

Lithography
The moon was a heavy rock, a thief with pockets full of stolen light.
The light fell, like a hundred gravities, in the fruits.
Fruits are a scavenger of light.
A wild man with wild hair, beneath the fruits.
Wilderness is heavy.
The girl in the corner: the gaze was heavy, her gaze : a net full of moons.
The man left,
And all that remained was the longing of the fruits. The heaviness of longing.

***

Pain is never new. Cries are an ancient call.
You leave out of the window,
In your eyes, inside you,
A white washed sea over the sea of the of the night.
You don't know if pleasure is more ancient than pain.
A secret world ascends from the sea:
Diaphanous, the purple of an ancient god: the sun.
But the sun is too eternal to be ancient.
Maybe also pain and pleasure
Are too eternal to be ancient.

***

You had your share of merciless summers, the sun: a white stone that blinds you.
And yet you resist the leaves falling in your eyes, the smooth motion,
Like a magician of seeing.
You may seem ready,
But you need symbols in order to go on, you have to believe in something
Leaves are not enough, eyes are not enough, motion is a danger.
A statue, a hero of marble , lit in the middle of your night, beautiful as a god.
You need the promise of the unchangeable.
It is sad,
One day, the statue will fall over you, it will be different, it will be changed.
Your symbol will kill you. Symbols are not alive. They don't know what pain is.
They are changeable.

***

Olive trees bear time.
They spread it softly over the shadows:
A shall, a woman's bush between the thighs: mother of time
The thighs covered, secret.
She gives birth, under the shadows of time.
She doesn't know how immense she is,
Lying on the ground,
The blood in her thighs,
Becoming slowly more eternal.
Maybe, everything is a mother of time,
We live with the blood in the thighs, with the pain in the thighs.
With the joy in the thighs, natural as magic.

***

In front of the wall: a statue. The statue is exquisite.
A young man running.
The ancient marble shivering in his arms.
The marble warm in his infinite thighs.
The marble cold in his legs: the chains.
Behind him: bullets. In front of him: the wall.
Maybe he arrived from the past
To die in the same place, an ancient wall,
For the same longing.

***

Maybe people sing inside themselves,
Because no one listens to the other.
Maybe, in the evening, they sit on benches
To share at least their silence.
They don't know that the benches are poets:
Trains come slowly towards them,
The whistle is for everybody.

***

The statue
Sealed in its shine, sealed in white stone.
It was looking at something,
Something invisible in it beauty, invisible in its closeness.
Maybe it came from the deepest past
To see again, eternal things, unchangeable:
The useful, invisible in its beauty,
The useful, invisible in its closeness.

***

People disappear.
They leave their cloths
Climbing on a tree.
The cloths fill slowly with time,
They fill slowly with the power to climb always more, with the power to part.
They leave behind tiny shoes,
The ones that were the biggest journey.
It is strange,
You can find their foot prints, barefoot or with shoes,
On roads, on trains, on ships,
As if the only thing they took along
Was the distances, the thirsty distances.

***

The beach was magic..
Everything repeated its life, the small motionss sanctified by repetition.
The waves from the past are here.
The bodies, still. Swimming.
Statues are the big refugees from time,
They came deep, deeper than the past.
Maybe they'll go forward.
Also the tomorrow may need its gods.

***

The rocks are vertical.
The vultures tear the air, vertical.
And you stand, as long as you can, vertical.
Maybe you don't appreciate enough the vertical.
Maybe it is a bridge between everything,
The up and the down create the bridge, and the bridge creates them.
Maybe you walk on the bridge that you are,
And you don't realize that the most distant star walks in your old shoes.

***

Dusk.
In the cafes they tidy the artificial marble on the table,
They tidy the artificial flowers. They are eternal.
The pollen floats in the air, like a gaze from the magician of seeing: time.
It is invisible in its nakedness, in its fluffiness, in its natural motion.
A small ball of pollen floating out of a secret, ancient fruit.
Eternity confesses inside the tiny ball.

***

Nights spread like something mad, like a hallucinations.
A ship stands at our door step.
It is lit. It is absolute.
We have no choice,
We close the sea onside the house,
We throw all the anchors.
Fear has no anchors, it floats in the sea of your eyes.
Maybe it is the thirst for an anchor.

***

All nights are a caravan to something: precious spices, silk, scents.
Even the nights in the small hotel,
The nights where a woman sells her thighs, because there is nothing else left to sell.
Maybe she doesn't know it,
But between her thighs travel the most exquisite spices,
The scent of something eternal.
The caravan passes, and it continues passing,
It goes far, to the continents where the thighs and their spice are a gift.

***

The night, the bars, don't leave us the same.
They make us different,
The way homes make us different,
And nights need a home, more than anything else.
It is sad,
The nights of those who sleep, drunk on the benches of a bar,
Don't bring them closer.
They sleep, each one in his own corner of silence,
In his own corner of a dream,
The only home available.

***

There are nets everywhere, invisible in their nakedness,
Between the roofs, the windows.
When someone falls,
He loses always something:
A passport that knows who he is,
The keys with the door in them,
A letter to god.
And the scavengers, gatherers of treasures,
Pick everything from the nets.
Scavengers are also gatherers of souls. After all, souls resist for long,
Even though at time they get consumed before eternity.

***

The house, the low windows,
The father, the mother, the baby.
Another holy family.
On the table: the hunger.
And their only sin is the silence.
They should cry, the way one cries: thief! Crime!
After all, hunger is a big thief, the biggest.
Hunger is an ancient crime, so ancient, that it is written in our genes.

***

The day after.
The smoke comes from yesterday. Its delicate veins pulse in the air.
It was early morning. Men don't die in the morning,
But people gather the dead, the smell of death, the burned scent of love letters.
The dead are not hungry, but the moment of death is.
It eats the closed doors, the bars in the eyes.
This hunger is free.

***

When you look at both sides
Time falls into a center of balance.
The maimed travelling vendor, his missing leg in his arms, like a child.
The leg came from very far.
And the nude pictures the woman selling her the body left..
How can the naked be anonymous,
How can a missing leg from the past hurt.
On the other side of the balance,
The small nocturnal hotel, the two bodies entering each other, coming out, entering.
The journey of the seed to somewhere in the future.
How can love be anonymous,
How can a seed from the future hurt.

***

There are things that don't ask for a receipt.
You stand at the door,
You expect no visitors, but you know they'll come.
The moon, a stray dog,
A dark face like someone who comes from a dream.
Dreams are smoke, light and heavy as smoke. You breathe them and they breathe you.
They paint your breath.
The visitors don't see you, and you don't see yourself in the moon, in the stray dog, in the dark face.
You are somewhere else.
After all, you need an alibi for your life,
And you give a receipt for nothing.
Receipts are traces, they are a confession. They are not safe.

***

Everything is layer beneath layer, like earth, like life.
Deep down,
The hunters: they hunt animals, they hunt men.
The arrows hunt the soul of a bullet, the poetry a bullet.
And above: another poetry.
The painted lips in a word, the words embroidered with the lace of plastic petals,
And the fingers nest in a false jewel.
And you don't know which layer will come next,
Which poetry, which truth.

***


In order to speak to people,
You should be here, inside your lips, inside your life.
Maybe the people hear you, but you are missing,
You are somewhere else.
The same jacket tight on your pulse,
The same gaze, tight in your eyes.
And the same words, they were old even before they were said.
They are anonymous. Names are a confession. They are not safe.
And anyway, you are missing.

***

You are tired of doors that are open and closed at the same time.
You are tired of walls that are white and dark at the same time.
You want clear things.
You forget that all those walls where they shot men are inside you,
Dead and alive at the same time.
You forget that opening a door is power.
That power is a fragile place.

***

Your body accepts your motions, as it should.
Time is here, as it should, so nothing is too late.
The door is open and closed, as it should.
And only your dead, invisible inside their death
Were too early. It is too late.

***

The bullets were deep, as deep as the body
The day came, white as the wall, deep as the wall.
Someone, maybe a scavenger gathers souls from the ground,
He doesn't know the demand for souls in the market is zero, it doesn't exist.

***

There is no earth here.
If the dead have no territory,
You have no territory to stand on.
Inside you: who you were, who you are, where you'll go,
The deepest past, the deepest future.
If the dead have no territory,
The infinite has no territory.

***

A fake moon from window to window.
The ones whose eyes were closed, were saved.
The men with the open eyes were shot,
In their twitched hands:
The key to a door that was open,
They entered, endless, for days, for years,
Door-less, keyless, home.
They entered endless as a dream .
You cannot kill a dream so easily.

***

The money changer's counter.
People leave the strangest things"
A golden clock that has stopped ages ago,
The bracelet of a hand left in war.
The human nature is desperate for safety, for the eternity of habit,
But the big nature is weaved of change, a billion threads of change.
Maybe the gods are a good insurance.
People left their deepest gold in all the temples of the world.
They didn't know that even the gods may change, they may be bankrupt,
That by black magic or by the demon of money, the gold will become paper.

***

When you sit on the benches of the cemetery,
You feel there is no quiet death.
You feel how the stone statues squabble with death, squabble with the silence.
They are sad, and the black shadow of the black cypress tree,
Depress them even more.
Above: the cries of the vultures are fear.
After all, stones are layer beneath layer of time.
Time is remembering. Remembering may be pain.
And there is nothing really dead to put on the grave, to feel for the dead.
Even the plaques of iron bleed living rust , and the withering flowers cough pollen.

***

Receive the absent ones in their absence,
The distant ones in their distance,
They are safe.
It is the 'here' that is dangerous,
That slice of time
Where you have to cry and laugh at the same time,
In order to survive one night more, one silence more.
In the circus of the world,
Maybe you are a clown.
Your red painted tears are beautiful, visible,
Like your red painted laughter.
And you don't know if the death of a clown is painted.

***

There is nothing that can survive
Without borrowing, without obligations.
You borrow a bird in a corner of seeing, you borrow its beauty,
You borrow the fragility of the foam in the sea, pieces of pure glass in the water,
And you have to pay the debt to the bird, to beauty, to the foam, to the shining glass,
And the debt to life.
Only the motions of living repeating, repeating, can pay that debt.
Death can't afford it.

***

Maybe the sunflowers are a painting of Van Goch.
Beneath the paint, they are real,
Above the paint, their reality is closer to the truth,
Above the paint, their reality is bigger than themselves, the way truth is.
Beneath the beauty, they are mad.
There are beauties that madden you, they are soft in a hard way,
They change you.
The classical harmony is too infinite, that's why it is not enough.
You feel beauty needs something mad in it, something exaggerated
In its color, in its dimension, in its hallucination, in order to be beauty,
In order to be more real.
And love is a another kind of sunflower: a big moonflower, utterly mad.

***

Summer may be a harsh season, burning time,
An Auto Da Fe of lives.
The sun melts stones, they sweat stone lizards.
But one summer is not enough to melt all the stones of pain,
It resists.
It gives shape to our motions of living, to the small repetitions of everything.
Around the pain: the inexplicable,
Like the cypress by the grave.
It cannot explain the inexplicable,
But it covers it with its shadows.
The shadows are opaque, they are airy.
It is easier to remember the shadows
Than the exact immobile motions of death beneath them.
It is easier to believe in the shadows,
The big Trojan Horse of the gods. The biggest.

***

It's summer.
The light melts. It is water.
Everywhere people drown in it.
In a corner of unused light:
An old man sits.
He tries to measure the time table of time and its edges.
But the measuring walks always further, always closer. It tires him.
He falls asleep in the tide of light. Slowly, he drowns.
The timetable of light is precise,
After all, time is the journey of everything,
It has to be on time.

***

SUMMER SHOOL
The infinite is infinite, because it starts again and again,
In each motion of living, the five fingers of senses, the ten fingers of a touch,
In each motion of loving, of sowing the sperm of everything
Each motion walks towards the infinite, because it is real.
When the star light touches us with its long fingers,
When the fingers repeat themselves again and again,
The touch walks towards the infinite, because the touch is real.

***

The light leaves like a ship,
Invisible in the shadows,
Visible as the shadows,
An immense shadow of light on a burning ship.

It's twilight.
Someone sits on the sand,
How can he lean on the quiet,
And you, your words lean on the quiet.
You are happy.

You are alone.
You open and close your eyes,
They are as light, as heavy,
As what they see.
You cannot perceive what you see:
The echoes of pollen
Thickens in your eyes, slowly, infinitely slowly,
Like the sperm in the whisper of a woman.
The lightness, the heaviness of pollen.

Summer is the voice of the cicadas .
The voice has teeth, it bites.
Between the shouts somewhere close and the cicadas' teeth,
A stripe of silence.
The hues of the sea walks on the table,
On the faces of the old.
They look like a mythic boat
That arrived from somewhere in the past.
They don't know how beautiful they were.
Maybe the past has better, much better, eyes.

On the beach
We study the roundness of a woman's belly,
We draw on the sand the face of a child.
We are young, romantic,
We believe children are born from the sea, from the sand,
And maybe we are not wrong,
After all, we had to crawl out of the sea, to crawl on the soft sand, slowly, patiently, in order to be born.

Half the evening is a candle,
And half: an orchard in spring, the red fruit, invisible in its beauty.
And the people are half candle, the quiet light of of looking, of thinking,
And half: the fruit in the thighs of loving. Their hands: branches, fragile as power.
And the fruit bleeds slow, endless, its beauty.

***

August.
The light is black, sun burned,
And the shadows are fire.
In this light, in this fire, everything is naked: the hands, the palms of the trees, the fruis.
And the eyes of the children are naked,
They are big, bigger than their life.
Their eyes are fruit gatherers.
Their eyes are an exquisite fruit.

***

You do small works.
Maybe you are a scavenger,
You gather, seriously, meticulously,
Treasures thrown in the trash.
Somewhere inside you, you smile.
You believe this work is too small, it will change nothing.
You don't know that the way you work, the motions of living,
The motions of making something, invisible as trash, invisible as the useful,
Changes everything.

***

The sun closes, and the doors.
There are shadows in your voice, the cry tears them. They hear.
There are shadows in the water,
They wash their face. They see you.
The evening is a siege of shadows, shadow spies.
You cannot hide your voice, you cannot hide your face,
And you don't know how to make the impossible-possible, to hide your life, a whole life.

***

Young bodies have an impatient beauty.
In the deep thigh of love, in the skin of living:
An impatient tremble,
Like a poem that didn't find yet its words.

***

Summer is here, the black sun-it burned itself.
And the sea is here, crawling to your feet, fragile foam inn your toes.
The salt trembles between your thighs.
Everything is urgent:
Living, loving.
You can postpone nothing.

***

The cicadas are the big violinists.
They play on a broken violin.
They don't play for us, they don't mind if we applause or not.
They play because they don't have another choice except playing.
Maybe they are the true artists, the deepest violin.

***

The old women in the backyard of life.
Their small talk weighs no more than a child, no less.
Maybe their small talk keeps the world going.
They don't know it.
They don't know that their small talk is another way to love. It is the courage of closeness.
It is strange
How sometime the power to love doesn't grow old,
Sometimes the small talk is pollen inside deep wrinkled lips.

***

You sit somewhere,
You don't want to see, you don't want to feel,
Your eyes impermeable, like solid foam.
Maybe you want to paralyze what you see, what you feel,
In order to paralyze the fear.
But matter rolls in all the abysses. You can paralyze nothing.
In a fraction of a second, your eyes pour out, permeable as water,
And your feelings are motions, they move in all direction, the way feelings do,
In a fraction of a second, life walks,
It walks towards you, if you dare

***

Noon time.
The tree sleeps in its shade.
The seed sleeps inside the infinite,
And your head sleeps in the sun,
And yet, everything works, even when it sleeps.
Even you, you sleep and your thoughts work.
Life is the biggest market.
We sell what we think, what we dream, the motions of living, to life,
And life sells its eternities, the dance it is made of, to us.
So, as long as we live, we work,
We sell and buy the dance of living.
Dancing is hard work.

***

When you bring things closer to your eyes, closer to your touch,
They are different.
After all, you change what you see, what you touch and it changes you.
How can you believe in the great stars,
When you hold the long fingers of star light between two fingers.
How can you believe in the eternity of the moon, when you drink it from all the rivers, all the puddles.

***

The holiday in the small town.
The table cloth, the napkins
Repeat other holy days.
And the people at the table repeat themselves, only more ceremonial.
The women repeat the same shy silence.
After all, the small talks are too daily.
And the motions of living repeat themselves all the time.
So, the holiday may be happy,
It is enough to remember how to be happy,
How to repeat the motions of happiness.

***

The nights repeat themselves.
The moon is always in the middle of the night.
The body of love is always in the middle of the night.
In the middle of the night:
The circle of the infinite, the infinite in a circle.

***

You live behind closed doors, like fear, like loneliness, which is another kind of fear.
One day, you open a sliver of the door,
The sun, the wild thighs of the sun,
Rape you, they leave their naked sperm inside you.
You stand at the door,
Your skirts torn, your eyes torn, your thighs full of sun,
You stand at the open door, and you don't understand what you feel .

***

You make love:
Two bodies, each alone in itself,
All the doors are closed,
And the balcony becomes a hotel of love:
The pollen: delicate arms in delicate arms.
The turtles: the soft tongue of pleasure in a tongue.
The birds: the song of love, beak to beak.
A hotel of love, at the edge of human loneliness.
Maybe love may rape your loneliness, maybe you'll bleed.

***

The evening nets, inexplicable
In all their hues of dark.
There are the shadows of people, of passion, of quiet, of rage, of absolution.
In the dark, the shadow slowly dissolve,
Annd maybe this dissolving is uniting.

***

You are a simple farmer,
But farming is never simple.
The earth is harsh, you plow stones.
The earth is too little, you plow hunger.
And all the songs about earth
Are beautiful, they are orphans.
They think the soil grows brittle, soft, by itself, simple as magic.
They sing the soft earth, the tender arms of a mother.

***

Even the wild birds are not lawless.
They follow the laws of nature, precisely, meticulously.
And the wild grass does the same.
But you want your own laws.
You don't understand why you are a deserted village, a deserted home.
You don't know that you cannot sow even one seed, without the laws of nature,
You cannot sow your own seed, the warm sperm, without the laws of nature.
You don't know that beyond the laws of nature, there are only the laws of nature.

**

You wait at the station.
At times, waiting is light,
When you trust that something will come, something will be seen.
You wait,
Confident as a tree, that spring will come.
You wait, confident as the girl passing, that someone will come,
That someone will wait in her address.
But you are not a tree, or a pretty girl
Maybe you should wait for something simple, for the possible.
You should know that waiting is hard work.

***

You are carnivorous.
You eat dead animals,
You don't ask their forgiveness, you don't thank them.
You came from very far,
And you carried the animal in your teeth, the unforgiving teeth of a man.
The unforgiven.

***

There are old anchors, useless, thrown away.
They anchor nothing, not even themselves.
Strangely,
The scavengers love them,
They love the sea written on them, salty letters.
They love the past written in the hieroglyphs of rust.
They take them home.
They become their anchors, a safe shore.
We need the scavengers.
It is not easy to be an anchor forever.
You need someone who'll be your anchor,
Someone who'll be the way home.

***

In the middle of summer, the sudden rain.
The thought that should protect you,
Remain fear,
Most of all, the fear of loss,
Because there is always something that can be lost.
In the rain, the table was lost, and the bread, they became water,
And only the thirst persists. It is still thirsty.

***

The twilight is strange,
Like the inexplicable postponement of something beautiful.
The moment passed. Everything changed,
But inside you, nothing is postponed. You remember.
The longing for beauty is beauty too.

***

You are young. You wait for something.
You wait with an inexplicable certainty.
You wait for something that was postponed:
A song, a gaze, the moon in the gaze.
Your waiting is beauty, longing is beauty.
Their beauty is strange, it is secret, it is clear.

***

The small hotel of love.
The rusted bed, the rusted sheets.
Your body moves in her body,
Your seed moves in her seed.
You don't know which secret sequence
Could raise this grey air to impossible heights,
As if it was the smoke of feeling , the fire beneath, still alive.

***

You like to imagine things.
The person in your head likes to play.
Like the mule in your farm. It is nonexistent. It is in another place of time.
And you ride this mule that doesn't exist, that is somewhere else, you forgot for how long.
And you don't remember when the mule began riding you,
When you didn't exist, when you were somewhere else.
Mules are dangerous.

***

The hues crossed each other.
The trees were substituted by cicadas.
The sea was in the air, and there was no shore.
Only the windows: the waves of the white flags,
Interrupted the silence.
They could be innocent curtains,
It could be the surrender of a human to a summer noon.

***

Everything had its own posture.
The clouds were oblique in the middle of the void.
The cypresses were old men, the shadows bent over the graves,
They remembered, they were tired of remembering.
The dynasty of the sun spread its crowns.
It was beautiful. It was generous. It was harsh.
And everything had a reason, nothing was useless.
Even the void, the beauty, the memories,
Were indispensable. They made reality real.

***

You are careful.
You measure the heights, you calculate the distances,
In order to let your life land, in order to let your dreams land.
Birds do it.
Their body tells them how to measure the immense heights, how to land.
And you do it. The person in your head
Calculates everything:
The dimensions inside you, the absences inside you,
The distances of a gaze that left your eyes.

***

You stand out of your arms, out of your eyes,
As if you were defeated from the start.
And yet, inside your arms, inside your eyes,
There is room for yourself, for who you are.
There is room for people, a whole village.
People are the farmers of life, of the silent roots.
The root is deep. It is not defeated so easily.

***

The light is a victory,
It doesn't allow evasion,
It leaves you nowhere to hide.
But, like each victory,
It may be cruel.
It doesn't let you see the shadow of pain,
The truce of shadows and light at twilight,
The immense truce.

***

You are afraid of height,
And you don't trust tall things,
Like tall words, taller than life.
You throw your shadow on the earth. You trust the earth.
There is earth in your life, you trust your life.
Even the birds, throw their shadows, from the vertiginous height, on earth.
They trust the earth. There is earth in the magnetic circle, the magic cycle, of their journey.
They trust the journey.

***

The bow in your hands.
You define the direction of the still arrow,
You define the direction of the stillness,
And you don't realize,
That the aim of an arrows is flight,
That they have the whole flight inside them,
And a direction has a bow in its hand. Its quiver. Its stillness.
And the only still thing is the definition,
Definition are a statue of words, a beautiful stone, it feels safe,
And an indefinite tires you.

***

An indefinite certainty tires you,
Like the waiting for something that could happen.
It's true, waiting is hard work, and the indefinite makes it even harder.
Maybe you are not eternal enough to learn how to wait,
Maybe the waiting goes too far, always further,
And you are not eternal enough to learn how to die.

***

You don't vanish utterly. You leave traces.
If you were a beautiful woman,
You may leave the color of your eyes, your immense eyes: the green lake
In the gaze of a child. there is a lake in the eyes of a child.
You could leave your smile in a waving curtain. It gives shape to the wind.
It could touch, lightly, almost imperceptible, your last motion of living.
The lightest tombstone ever.

***

The sea has no graves,
So the dead sailors return in the empty boat,
Silent as the dark, invisible as the dark.
They return to the shore. They bury themselves.
The shroud of salt hurts them, the way it hurt also their life,
But it was the only shroud they could afford.

***

The moon is a deserted beach.
The small resistance in the sand,
The imperceptible foot prints ,
Like a question that doesn't matter anymore.
A child with his sand castle: a momentary answer.

***

In one end of the street, the sea winds left,
Annd they left the stillness in the other end.
There were no people,
They tilled the street and it tilled them each day.
Today, it's Sunday, it is not the day of the god, it is the day of the people,
They let time rest.
When you till and are tilled each day,
Time goes far, much further than what you imagine,
The small repetitions of the small pauses are a bliss.

***

High above: the sky.
Down: earth. An abyss.
In the middle: a man,
The only bridge available.
People used their bridges for centuries.
People measured, the way bridges do,
The separations, the distances in a hand.
People measured, the way bridges do, the closeness.

***

The sea gives, and the sea takes, like life.
In the morning it may give you an exquisite fish for your Saturday table.
Your home is beautiful on Saturday.
And in the evening, when the water is tall, it may take the fish, the table, the home,
The beauty, the Saturday.

***

Between the tight lips
There was no passage, not even for the silence.
But time flows in everything, also in the lips.
Maybe they were too tired to stay clenched, maybe they dug slowly, patiently, a passage.
The silence was beautiful, whiter than the teeth of a child.
The silence was inexplicable. unforgettable. Forgotten.
The passage was open. Empty.

***

You close your lips.
You let words grow old in your mouth. You age in these words.
You close your lips.
You protect your silence. You are free in your silence.
You close your lips.
You live alone in your lips.
The kiss of your mother: the only kiss available.

***

You drown inside yourself in order to save yourself.
Outside: the words shout, cry,
The light burned by the sun,
The resistance of shadows.
Inside: the tears of a fish. They are silent.
The history of a fish. It swims inside you, it bleeds.

***

The place is a pastel picture.
Tender colors, delicate shapes.
A garden. A woman lying on the grass. She is beautiful in a quiet way.
A home, open and closed at the same time.
You look. You feel a clandestine happiness,
And you feel homelessYou know you'll carry this homelessness
In all the homes you'll ever have.
Some pastel pictures, the tender beauty, have power.
They exile you from paradise once more.

***

It is easier to begin a poem than to end it.
You look at the paper leaves, they are lovely,
Like the leaves of a tree.
But you don't have the power of autumn to finish,
And you don't have yet the last line,
The one that will be a fist in the chest .unforgettable.
Like autumn , a fist in the chest of the leaves.
And you don't know who will guard the leaves, the chest, the pain, the forgetting,
Who will guard their fall.

***

They say your poems are too long,
They are on the way to the endless,
Few will follow them so far.
But you can never end your words easily,
After all, they are an extension of your hands, of what you think, of who you are.
You don't amputate your hands easily.

***

Autumn
Is in the circle of the infinite,
Like a sun storm, like the death of a star.
It is the small motions of time,
Sanctified by repetitions.
The leaves repeat themselves. They fall.
Lives repeat themselves. They fall.
And all you can do is be careful
Not to step on fallen leaves, on fallen lives,
And an umbrella is indispensable,
Autumn is playful, it rains into your deepest cloths,
It becomes the puddle of a child, beneath the skin.

***

Homes are often a theatre of tragedies:
The burned food.
An actor holds in his palm the smoke, the smell.
The broken water jug, a family treasure.
Another actor kneels, in his hands the water, the thirst of ages.
There is no audience except the actors, the mirror in their eyes.
The actors have to see themselves, their broken motions,
Which is another tragedy.

***

Some youth are beautiful, a living statue.
Their motions of living: warm, soft, hard stone.
Their motion give shape to the sea: the clear-dark motion.
Their motions give shape to the wind in their arms,
The tremble in their shoulders,
The last feathers.

***

The balconies in the poor neighborhood
Are stages of the theatre of life, written by life, played by life.
Invisible in their simplicity, they are the stage of big tragedies, the biggest.
An old man, deserted, in his underwear, shouting his silence.
A girl, her fragile body. her fragile motions, gives shape to longing, gives shape to the a young loneliness that doesn't know yet how to be alone.
Life is hard work, even when you play it.

***

The sunflowers are in the glass.
The breeze is in their glass
A whole field held by tiny bones, in the glass.
The honey pours over the glass: the sun.

***

The moon is the magician of change.
The silver in the light may change your hair into stone,
It may change you into white soft marble.
The lips- a halo. A halo of silence
In the silver of the light, you are a statue.
And it may leave you, in the middle of everything:
Shadows mingling with light. A truce, the immense truce.
It changes you.

***

Humans try to protect themselves, like a small animal, from everything,
Even from the moods of nature.
When autumn comes they open their umbrella, green as a huge leaf,
But it is not enough. It rains autumns into their lives.
And there is this other leaf, utterly yellow, utterly fragile, that autumn leaves , secret, visible, on their bed.

***

The inexplicable happens everywhere, also in your village.
There is this man, riding a mule. Its knees are strong, the knees are stone.
The mule is too tired to think, to know where it goes, why it goes,
And yet, the man rides this mule for a whole life time,
And the mule rides the man.

***

The way you work in the chain priduction,
The motions repeat your hands,
Your hands repeat the motions,
They repeat you, they are you.
You forget you had thoughts, longings.
It is sad,
On Sundays, your motions feel empty, handless,
And this emptiness leaves you again
Without thoughts, without longings.

***

The candle doesn't mind its smoke, it doesn't mind its tremble.
It is a fragile gentleness
That dissolves the hard shadows
The power of the fragile.
Maybe that's why we love candles so much.
They say we light them to remember the dead,
But maybe we light them to remember ourselves,
The light in our ten fingers, the power.

***

In the candle light, everything is surreal,
Everything exists and doesn't exist at the same time.
Maybe that's why, when we light a candle,
Our silence bends its shoulders.
The uncertainties tire us.

***

The sunset delays. It is too beautiful, too young to die.
The shadows that substitute everything: time, faces, things, are ready.
At home,
The motions of living are a repetition,
The motions of living go where time goes,
As if each motion was a truce between the new and the old.
We live in this motion. We die in it.

***

We stop, with a wide gesture,
What was already stopped:
The sunset, the tide.
We feel enormous,
But we have to continue what continues,
And we don't have the courage to stop
What we could really stop:
The low tide in the life of people.
They are thirsty.
The sunset in the eyes of a child.

***

Teen-ager
The cloths thrown on a chair.
Your cloths know what your body knows,
After all, under your cloths you are naked.
The cloths are still warm from your body,
They are still warm from the longing that only your body understands.
You lose, and find, and lose yourself in this longing.
After all, life is the biggest artist of longing.
It will find you.

***

You close your eyes for a moment. You see nothing.
In this fraction of a moment,
You are more visible than ever.
For a fraction of a moment
Your gaze doesn't shield itself,
It doesn't shield the motions of what you feel, what you fee, in your eyes.
The motions rain over you, and you don't know if motions cry.

***

The man and the woman are silent, distant.
Maybe they are tired, too tired to speak,
Maybe they are too tired to touch.
It is sad not to know how to make her your own, or to feel it doesn't matter.
It is sad not to dare to feel.

***

Women are practical, trained, hard workers.
Their small motions are an artisan of living.
And when the dust of light falls in their large palms,
They sow it everywhere.
They sow suns in the soup, in the bread, in the two trees around their smile.
The big farmers of light.

***

A sudden wind blows everywhere,
It blows in all the clocks of the world.
For a while, indefinite, mysterious, time is dead.
But you don't know how to be eternal.
Your motions of living continue to hurry,
Like someone who has to use all the unused time.
You don't know how to look slowly, how to touch deep,
Hoe to live slowly, always more, always better.
One day, you'll die, and you wouldn't know how to be eternal,
Not even at that moment, that immense moment.

***

It's summer noon. The light is boiling,
And the fluff of the sea is too far.
You have no choice, you dream.
Dreams can be cool water, a rivulet.
People can drink from this rivulet, they make it bigger.
Some dreams are the longest river.

***

The gun: shining metal..
If you would dare you could see your eyes, the bullet trembling in your eyes.
If you would dare you could see your eyes, the terrible fear crying in your eyes.
You don't know how deserted you are, how defeated,
When you load your gun with your fear.

***

The sea is wild, molten mercury,
The temple is salty wax, the ancient incense, pilgrim to ancient gods.
The trees walk bent towards the void, pilgrims to all the winds of the world.
And the people sow their ten fingers: seeds, real as magic, in the field.
They don't know it, but they are like a seed, pilgrims to life.

***

Here, by the sea,
Autumn is a route oof escape.
Everything is escaping: the people, the beach, the blind balconies,
The salty houses.
All that remains is a space, free, deserted, quiet,
Ready for another route of time:
Winter.
Time is punctual.
After all it is the only ticket for the journey of everything.

***

Some warm evenings lie in your lap,
The inexplicable fatigue,
It weighs like something that was postponed,
But the moment passed, everything changed.
The night will be different, and you will be different in the night.
And you don't know that no one can cross the night and remain the same.

***

You feel the sun: sparrows , a handful of feathers, in your room,
The glitter of birds in the lamp you dusted.
They sooth your eyes.
And you feel the repetition of the motions of living, as if they repeated something eternal.
They sooth your life.
You brought the sun home,
You brought something that repeats something eternal home.
You are happy.

***

There are calm hours. Their sounds are calm, their silence is calm.
They are like a comma :
A truce
Between one phrase and the next,
Between one moment and the next.
The best poem can be in a comma.
The best poem can be inside a moment .

***

We are born alone,
But we are human,
So we adopt our family,
And we adopt the family of people, and they adopt us.
We shape the family, and it shapes us.
We carry the family in each motion, and it carries us.
We are bound in the family, and we are free in the family.
After all, whatever lives is free and bound at the same time,
The only freedom available.

***

The rain: trained, resistant.
It washes the wet cloths on the cloth lines, each grain of sand, each drop of sea.
The tourists left.
There is something eternal in the empty chairs, in the empty hours.
There is the lightness of the empty.
An old man sits in an unused corner of the emptiness.
He feels it. He felt it many times, this something eternal in the emptiness.
Maybe he feels it once too much. He trembles.


***

From the upper floor: the steps of a lonely woman.
There is something eternal in these steps, like a postponement that continues to postpone something.
In the yard: the small talk of old women.
There is something eternal in these talks, like continuing something that came from very far, something ancient.
We live, we continue each day, from the beginning, something, even ourselves,
The way eternity does.
Maybe we are eternal enough to continue, each day from the beginning, to live, to die.

***

The tourists left.
Time is a deserted village, the sun is a deserted village.
Some people walk.
Maybe they are fearless. Maybe they walk towards the silence.
Maybe they escape the silence inside them.
The motions are the same.

***

Autumn is a secret silence.
The mornings fall like leaves, worthless.
There is always a deep pause in the roots,
There is always a deep pause in the words of the old,
They weigh their silences.
And the women seep the silence with their big brooms.
There is something eternal in the silence,
But the women are practical, trained.
They deal with each thing as it comes.
They are home makers, they may make the silence closer, less inexplicable.
They may make it home.

***

The mirror in your room
Copies the visible: your slender neck, the face it carries.
Maybe it tries to protect you from its depth,
But there are other mirrors, don't forget the river of time.
You can find your face in time, your eyes in time, you find your depth.
You try to grasp the fish of time: the moments.
You want to know where you are, where you go,
But the fish become water in your hands. Another mirror.

***

It's sunset.
The plaza, inexplicable. A round absence.
There are people there.
They don't look, they don't see, they don't know where they are, where they go,
So they are absent too.
It is easy for the night to take them, to make them invisible.
They are absent.
It is easy for the killers of the century
To make them vanish.
They are absent.

***

Amidst the big noise of the 'now',

You fear at times small sounds coming from the past.
The sound of hands, the infinite hands of a woman
Drawing ,silently, anonymous, water from a well.
You don't know it,
But you drank this silent sound, this water, for years.
Your life was thirsty.

***

Everything leaves traces.
Even your bare feet on the asphalt, your slow walking over the night,
Or your small motions of living, moving over time.
You don't realize you, but the traces find you,
In a moment forgotten,
In a moment you want to forget.
You don't realize that forgetting is another kind of memory, deeper, stubborn.

***

These people have a simplicity
In their voice, in their motions of living.
You are not used to such simplicity,
So it seems mysterious.
And it is even more mysterious when you see them working.
The body becomes one with the hands,
The hands become one with what they do,
Simply, quietly, secret..
These people are as simple, as natural as magic, because they are real.

***

The beach.
Everything surrenders to the wilderness of the sun,
Everything is a piece of the infinite time:
The sun, the sea, the eternal journey of a bird, the stones.
In a corner of the beach,
Unused time, invisible in its beauty, invisible in its quiet,
And an old man,
He feels the pauses between everything.
He uses the unused time. He is happy.

***

The steps pass, opaque, in the humidity.
A leaf hesitates and falls.
A man closes all his doors.
He doesn't know whom he left out.
He doesn't know he lives on both sides of the door, he dies on both sides.
And he doesn't know where to find himself,
Or maybe he is too tired to look.
Maybe he senses that you have to find yourself, each day from the beginning.
It tires him.

***

You speak for a million reasons:
Because the silence is a chastity bellt. It is too tight to love.
Because it is easier to be silent when you speak.
Because it is easier to be alone when you speak.
Because you are alone.
Because there is a window between everything.
The small motions of the lips say everything and nothing
Because you gather the everything and the nothing falling from the window.

***

Maybe death doesn't exist .
Maybe, all that exists is a leaf of autumn on your bed,
A road sign, fragile, absolute,
And you carry the leaf and the road sign on your back,
For ages, maybe forever.
The leaf and the road sign are innocent.

***

They shoot people at the wall.
They give us their glass eyes to see what the tip of a gun sees.
No one was shot,
And anyway, there was no wall.
It is a world of glass eyes.
If tears still exist, maybe they see, these, and the rain.

***

Everything is made of motion.
Nothing is still, everything moves towards each other, even when it leaves.
Streets penetrate streets. Lives penetrate lives.
The noiseless motions meet the big noise of the stone.
The stray dogs seem aimless, but their nostrils are not,
They follow the smells
Maybe they smell the motions of the dead.
Death is a journey too. It travels into the world, always more, always deeper.
It travels into what you remember, who you are.

***

In the cafe
The light rains ash.
At a table, someone maimed,
He holds in arms his missing legs, tender as a child.
He is raw, rough, the age on his face is written in red,
And no one knows where he will go.

***

You give your hand, an honest hand with its small motions of living, to someone.
You don't realize you gave him your small infinites,
You are not sure what he gave you.
You don't realize you visit the most exquisite market:
On a shelf: a herd of eternities : a head, hands, eyes, a fruit.
They transform them, like black magic, they become paper.

***

The night was noisy:
The drums, the shouts, the big noise of the wine.
You were in another night, other wines:
The moon drunk in the wine of a puddle,
The leaves drunk with the green wine of the world.
Maybe life is the art of passion,
Maybe you make love with life each day from the beginning, if you remember how to love.
And your small motions , the repetitions,
Invisible in their nakedness, invisible in their beauty, are drunk
With the best wine you'll ever have; life.

***

You learn, so soon, the art of hiding.
You hide from the touch of a hand, from love, from the sun,
From life, from death, and for sure from the man with the scaffold in his eyes.
Maybe you know it is persecution mania,
But you have no choice. It is a disease. It is fear.
Beneath the bushes of the hours you see men hiding, like you. Big crowds.
Maybe the disease is contagious,
And you don't know that the more you hide, the more visible you are.
Fear is visible, and you are visible in the fear.
You don't know that the more you hide, the more you forget when the hiding began, the why.

***

Statues are strange.
Beneath the hard skin of stillness,
They may be tender, they may have dreams: escape.
After all, the stone, the time in the stone, are big slave traders.
They don't know that the sculpturor was sold many times,
In the same corner of eternity, in the same market of stone.
They sold his fifth wall.

***

Wars love young men,
Maybe because they are innocent,
Maybe because they are beautiful.
Even the skulls, the holes of the bullets: a red abyss,
Smile with perfect teeth, the poetry of white things.
They smile like a child , the mouth bigger than his face,
The eyes bigger than his life.
But they cannot see the child.

***

You are never distant enough to be invulnerable.
You stand on a faraway mountain,
You are too close to time, to the world, to yourself, the blood in your veins
Red black like fear.
Nothing is distant enough to be invulnerable,
Even the pulse of the most distant star beats in your pulse.
Stars erupt.

***

The depth: dark without dimensions.
Someone lights a fire by the sea: a private day break.
Whatever is visible is naked.
Whatever is invisible is naked in its invisibility.
The scars are visible, immobile roads.
There are old journeys in the scars.
And you don't know where they went, where they wanted to go. Who travelled.

***

The neighborhood of the poor.
Nothing is futile, nothing useless.
Everything is a necessity, all the small motions of living are indispensable.
The remnants of the soup will be the soup of tomorrow.
The resting body is the repose of the warrior.
Tomorrow they'll sow their hands, hands are a seed, the biggest warrior. The biggest war.
In the corner of the street, the blind violinist,
The small motions in his fingers repeat themselves,
They repeat the beauty inside tiny things, the repetitions that makes them even tinier:
A beauty that can enter even in the smallest house, that can make it home.

***

Night. No sound except the roar of space, the invisible matter.
Maybe that's how worlds began, not in a word of god,
But in the roar of matter, the belly of everything.
The night is opalescent,
The milk of mothers drip from the moon,
The light is a newborn, it doesn't see.
Maybe tomorrow or in a billion years,
It will bear us.
Matter is a patient mother.

***

There are many compasses, even in the wilderness:
The breath of nomads. hunger gatherers. shepherds,
The breasts of a journey from the past, the smell of human milk.
They are the way home: your Ithaca.
The needle is north.

***

The forests, the birds, the sheep.
Amidst them: the ancient temple.
People walk there like marble ruins.
The fountains: the thick neck of coolness.
Somewhere the women carry the washing:
A procession carrying baskets of colors to a rivulet of time.
You hear their song, they brought it here
From an age where legends were reality,
Where reality was a legend.
Legends have deep roots in the forests, deep roots in the human forest.
They are an exquisite leaf of the world.

***

There are hours
Among the big noise of the morning
That you hear, fugitives from the past.
The sound of hands, big hands, heavy, pulsating with the waves, pulsating with the salt.
We don't know it, but we draw their sea
To water enough rage.
We are thirsty.

***

The half moon, a shining shadow, the shadow of light.
It sows voids, the immense absence in the bodies, in the deep recesses of a woman,
And yet, the most smooth persons
Wrote about this moon,
It is strange,
You try to take the best of what the night gives,
The whole poetry of half a moon,
And you find the shadows mingling with light.
A truce. The biggest poem,

***

The past stabs you always from the back.
You can feel it deep, in the warm dark of your body.
Maybe that's why it is not easy to forgive the past.
It is not easy to forgive something that stabs you from the back,
Even when the knife bleeds in your hand.

***

Your hands, still young,
Yet, they know what pain is.
The pain of absences,
The pain of waiting when it grows old.
It's evening.
You look at the world, vanishing, appearing,,
You feel your smile, vanishing, appearing,
As if it was something unfinished,
As if everything was unfinished, a journey,
Invisible in its beauty,
Invisible in the terrible transparence of fatigue.

***

It's autumn everywhere.
The road signs fade yellow, they fall like leaves.
And the road signs inside you are illegible, they are drenched.
The rain is harsh, it blinds all the directions.
You don't know where you are, where to go.
Autumn erases your maps,
Ans maybe there was never a map to erase.
There is no manual for living.

***

You plant in your house
Shining birds, like a silver forest.
It's almost summer,
But you know that time flows in everything, also in time.
You know winter is inevitable. It is visible in the cold transparency.
You are human. You try to protect yourself from everything,
Even from time,
Because you feel weak. Because you feel strong.

***

Things know, without knowing,
That time flows in everything.
In the trees, in the smell of the grapes, in the hard-soft slin of animals.
They know that the seasons are inevitable.
They are ready: the pipes, the silver forest, in the furs, in the trees,
The chimneys in their deepest breath, the fluffy smoke.
But we are humans. No one is ready for his seasons. No one is ready for what he remembers, no one is ready for what he'll have to forget.

***

You sit to paint. You feel you look for nothing,
But the person in your head looks,
And the sudden color on the canvass, illegible, anarchic, absolute,
Is a pass word. It looks for you.

***

Everything measures something.
The earth measures the dead,
The dead measure the graves,
And the warmth from the bodies, the secret, almost invisible smoke,
Measures who you were, who you are, the smallest motions of your life.

***

The death of Isac.
Esau, he called,
But your voice was the voice of Jacob,
And your hands, hairy as a glove, were Esau.
In his gaze, the center of seeing was a dead planet.
He blessed the voice, he blessed the hands.
His blessing saw.

***

You cry because the world is fearful,
You cry because of something you forgot, yet you remember.
You cry here, in hospital. The window is cruel, it lets you see,
It doesn't let you touch the beauty, and the something you remember,
Because here, windows are the promised land, and they promise nothing,
Because here, there is something strong in your weakness, in the last station of hope.
You are not afraid to cry.

***

You are old.
You are beyond acting, beyond words,
But you are not beyond counting: the days, the years.
Counting is pain.
And the small successes, the big failures.
You are not beyond remembering.
Remembering is pain.
In the circle of seeing in your gaze
You see the circle of time.
The woman.
The deep recesses of a woman, a well. Pure water.
She moves, like time, always closer, always further.
You are thirsty.

***

The day is confused. There are too many motions,
Too little clarity, too few directions.
You are lost.
But in the evening,
There is a path of rustles in the trees.
There is a ladder that climbs somewhere, a metal ivy,
They are a pass word to what you feel.
They give you the feeling you knew all along where to go.
You feel you went your own way, in your invisible rhythm.
You are quiet.
We need always a pass word to ourselves.

***

You are tired. You feel lost.
You want to lie on the warm sand,
To define your place in space and time,
And you don't know how to do it.
You don't realize that your body knows its place in space and time,
That your body knows there are no definitions, everything is sand,
That space and time roll down all the abysses, like sand,
Untamed, thirsty, utterly anonymous, the road signs are illegible.

***

You are a moon lover.
You touch the distances perfectly, imperfectly,
The lit circle in your body, in what you feel, in what you are.
Some nights, you lie on the warm sand,
You make love with the moon.
You forget that the moon was inside you from the first moment of the first hour.
Your body, beautiful, deserted, full,
Makes love with itself.
The exquisite narcissist.

***

The window breaks.
All the faces that were in it, all the past, the time it saw,
Breaks.
There are pieces of glass on the floor.
You don't know in which shard is your face, in which past.
Maybe you live on both sides of the window,
Maybe there is no other way to live and even to die,
So, you have to look for your face also on the street.
There are scavengers on the street, the secret guardians.
They know the pass word to your shard..
You hold the shard in your hand, you find your past, you find your face.
Pass words are precious, it is enough that you,or at least someone, remember them.

***

The crime of the century is today, yesterday, and maybe tomorrow.
Time, the dove, the news, the rumors,
And you don't know who committed it.
You lost all the compasses, you don't know where your motions went,
So, maybe you were the killer.
You know people can cross a man because he doesn't believe in crosses.
You know people can kill a man with their silence.
The silence can be a bullet that tears the air, soundless, invisible, absolute
And your silence can betray you. It is a crimee.
You have no alibi
You don't know if you were there, if your silence was there.
You are guilty.

***

There are many compasses:
The circle of seeing in the eyes of a star,
The circle of seeing in the eyes of a man.
You need a compass in order to know where is your north,
In order to know where you are, where you go.
To touch the north in the needle.

***

You know that spring is not forever.
But when you sit bare foot in the bare foot grass,
You forget what time it is in the world,
What time it is in your life.
Time sits bare foot in the bare foot grass,
It is beautiful in its invisibility.
It is peaceful. It feels like going nowhere.
You know what eternity knows.

***

You draw a picture of dead nature:
A vase of flowers, a bird.
Maybe it is a cemetery, dead.
Maybe all the pictures, all the statues
Are dead nature, and maybe they are not.
After all, you grasped time for a fraction of a second,
You grasped eternity for a fraction of a second,
And you don't know how can a fraction of a second last.

***

Some nights your motions are suddenly wide, hardened,
As if you need to throw away something unsolved,
Something walking inside your motion without a map.
You don't realize that when you throw something, something else will get in.
There is no void.
This something could be an answer,
But you already know that each answer is a question.
You are tired.
The indefinite tires you. The knot of questions and answers.
The immense Gordian knot.

***

The times are strange, and the faces,
Like a face chained to its smile.
You don't know if it can change the face,
After all, we need a hundred faces, or more, in order to live.
You don't know what expression it has, until it uses it .
Faces are the bible of feeling.
You cannot read the smile.
The smile could be professional: a cool killer, a politician, a woman of love,
It could be divine: a saint. A hero.
And then you remember the chain in the smile :it was a cry.
You realize there are many clowns in the circus of a smile,
The terrible, exquisite circus.

***

The place is exquisite.
The roar of the ravines, the hills spread over the roar.
Life and death mingle, knowledge and ignorance mingle.
There are no limits.
You are infinite, you are free.
In this place you forget that freedom is never really free,
The laws of nature are everywhere, they are immobile:
A root in the void, improbable. Real.

***

The mountain is not proud.
It is your pride that walks on the mountain.
You feel that kneeling down here
Will find no forgiveness,
And you are too proud to forgive yourself.
You don't know how immense you are
When you kneel to yourself, to your life,
The whole mountain in your knees.

***

You wake up lucid, ready.
You feel the precision of everything.
The precision of the wind in a bird,
The precision of a bird in the wind.
The women wake up, they wake up the home.
You feel the precision in their small motions of the useful,
The beauty of the useful, the inevitable of the precision.
You feel beautiful in a strange way: precise, imprecise.

***

Some nights leave behind a cosmic black hole: forgetting.
Some nights leave the fear of the death of a child: the memories, the whole past in one death:
The black monster inside the black hole.

***

The day bgan uncertain, and yet, it was certain.
It was a date fallen on a calendar.
The calendar was a wall. Time was a wall.
And the body at the wall was a shattered wall.
The only sound was the sound of broken stone, the bones : white broken silences,
The blood shouted its silence.
There are too many walls. There is too much silence.

***

The house is full of indefinite waiting. Waiting for what.
You leave.
You measured nothing.
The squares of daily weather houses are made of
You didn't know the weight of departure,
You didn't know the distances between departure and arrival.
You didn't know that all the journeys are unfinished,
You didn't know there are no arrivals.

***

Night.
The young man: a chep consumed wedding ring.
The poor in the bar.
They are too tired to go home. Fatigue is an exit.
They drink the cheap wine, the whole sun of grapes in their mouth.
They laugh the way people laugh when they are close,
When the closeness is the only way home.

***

Silent faces.
The eyes: lit , round: The circle of seeing .
They see you, they see the deep, almost invisible motions of time in your eye lashes.
The pupils dilated: they see the night.
They are beautiful in a strange way, they are a night, invisible in its beauty.
Maybe they are the eyes of a dreamer,
Maybe the eyes are too big for their face,
Maybe the dream is too big for life,
But this is all the luggage they have,
This, and the eyes of those who see them.

***

Owls are mysterious birds.
The phosphorescent eyes, the wise circles of seeing.
They see the night, they see in the night.
They say they see time.
We fear them
The way we fear a human who sees our dark,
Someone who sees what time it is in our night,
What time it is in our eternity.

***

We are, like everything else, layer beneath layer.
The fear to be seen,
The need to be seen, to be visible.
Maybe the best binoculars are the circles of seeing in our eyes:
Layer beneath layer :
The visible beneath the invisible,
The invisible beneath the visible.
The history of a gaze, or maybe the poetry of a gaze,
Mysterious, clear, deep, secret.

***

You are ill.
Inside your body: a dead animal, dessicated, tame as death
But its pain is alive.
The moment of death is unforgettable.
The pain remembers.
So, you may be cured,
But the dead animal of pain is alive. It goes nowhere.
Maybe, one day, in the jungle of twilight,
The animal of pain will die with a knife in your cry.

***

You are a young hero.
You don't need a mirror to know how beautiful you are.
The gazes tell you, they admire without dimensions.
So, you don't understand what's wrong
When the bridge between you and them
Suddenly measures the distances between you and their memories, the distances between what was and what should have been.
It measures the hesitation of walking the bridge, alone,
Too close to the eyes , so visible, so vulnerable.

***

In the lonely cell, you still resist.
You invent the infinite, you count it, there is always one more number to add.
When you sit to write, you feel the secret river in your feet.
It is long. It made the circumference of the world.
You feel it's strange: being bound to earth by water.
It is strange.
Your words have no boat of mercy.
They travel dangerous, rebellious, quiet,
And there is no one to save them from themselves,
They want no one to save them.

***

At night, things are invisible,
But it is not a proof that they don't exist.
You know where the room should be, where it is.
After all, your motions of living, small patient, almost invisible,
They built a home.
They were home.
They are the big engine of reality. The biggest.

***

Your hands are knotted, and you don't know how to unknot them.
Maybe it is far, the hands protect each other,
There are hand shakes, studied as a crime.
At times, the hand of someone is magic.
It multiplies the fingers.
After all, everything is a number, even adding hands to hands,
Multiplying hands by hands,
And each time we add power to power, we multiply power by power.
We should begin our arithmetic's , each day from the beginning.

***

You arm moves, even though it doesn't know where it will continue.
You cannot imagine how immense can a small motion be.
It can seep the silence from the floor,
It can clean the spidery shadows from the window, your face in the window.
It can patch your poem with threads of the past, a magic cloth.
You are your motions.
You are the engine of living .
And you don't know who will guard the beauty of the useful,
The small pains of the indispensable.
***

It's night.
You are a maimed man,
And your maimed shadows cover the endless corridor.
You hide because people, the shadows of what they see, what they say,
Hurt you.
You hide because corridors walk under our skin, under the skin of the house.
They are safe.
Because also the stray dogs come, they bring their deserted shadows, their rootless eyes.
They console you.

***

Trees are miraculous.
They give the sun their shape, and the sun gives them its shape.
The green suns of the world.
They give shape to thhe wind, and the wind gives them its shape.
The green winds of the world.
And they shape us somewhere deep,, we breath the green and it breathes us. Our green sisters.

***

The stranger out of the window seems tame,
Like someone who has nowhere to go.
He was homeless, hungry,
But it doesn't matter.
The homelessness, the hunger are so ancient,
They were written in his genes.
A stray dog curls by him, strangely tame,
Hungry, homeless.

***

The sky is immense.
Simplicity siys in the shade of people.
It is strange how small words, as small as a touch
Let us think more simple, let us be more simple, more clear.
After all, words are the photo of what we are, who we are.
We need clear photos.

***

The evening: red as a fruit.
You bite it,
And the red juice from the sun, from the sky,
Pours from your lips, a river of color and taste,
Like a child. The most exquisite fruit.

***

A girl passes, a woman, a queen.
Tame, innocent in her beauty,
A wild wave in her beauty.
In the myths they went to war for such women,
They built eternal statues.
And you: a gaze,
At most her scent plays in your nostrils.
Maybe you are not romantic enough,
And maybe you are too alone, too alone to love.

***

The morning is a transparent dove over the sun in your hair.
The best place to let your small, useful motions of living
Move, airy quiet.
As if everything was a passage to life.

***

You don't know which part of the painter
Dreams in the painting,
And which one sleeps home.
After all, painters have, like everybody else,
At least a double life, or even more,
And their only guilt is that they make everything visible.

***

You are a soldier. You take a leave..
Maybe you are too conscious, maybe you feel too indispensable.
You feel that the walls of Rome will fall,
That the Cartagena's and the elephants are here.
And when you return, you meet your fears:
The walls, the elephants.
Life works non stop, it repeats itself endlessly, in order to be different in the same way.
It didn't take a leave for an eternity or more.

***

There are thinngs that paralyze you,
That leave an emptiness that is full, a fullness that is empty:
The dead bodies, the missing limbs, the missing eyes.
And suddenly you find a secret circle.
The circles in the gaze of a soldier, like the circles of an abandoned child.
You embrace him, and you embrace also the child in the circle of your gaze.
The circles are warm, white coal.
Time rains in the circles,
And yet, you don't forget, even when you don't remember.
Children remember even when they forget.

***

Summer.
A naked body touches a naked stone,
But the picture is suspicious and suspect.
Stones have deep eyes, too deep to be safe.
They are never really naked.
They are layer beneath layer of the ages.
They are layer beneath layer of what is naked, of what is touching.
Even love is not safe.

***

In nature,
Everything is in a perfect, precarious balance.
Everything walks on a tight rope, without a safety net, infinite acrobats:
The stars, the planets, the orbits.
The cosmic storms: immense jugglers. They play ball with the void.
And the sad clown gazes through a hole in a sky that doesn't exist.
He understands everything.
It is the big circle of the world. The biggest.

***

The blind violinist in the corner of the street.
His eyes: two black holes,
But the eyelashes, the humble eyelashes,
They pulse, trembling, in the pulse of the song.
Maybe they are the song inside the songs,
Maybe they are the last song of something lost.
And you don't know who will guard the beauty of last things,
Who will guard the beauty of what was lost.

***

You invent the definite power to see, the power that gives you the world.
You invent the indefinite, the anonymous power that lets you not to see,
That protects you from the inconvenience of seeing.
And you invent the power to be blind, to cover your eyes with black glass,
In order to be less visible.
Maybe you remember.
You sat in closed cars, utterly invisible behind the dark glasses.
You pointed a finger that wasn't blind,
It wrote the name of men, good men,
On the wall.
It wrote the names of death on the wall.

***

You feel lost.
You walk along a row of shops, a row of mirrors.
You see your face: tame, susceptible, suspect.
You go on, you know your face remained in the mirror,
You think you know where to find yourself.
You forget that time is a window washer, tomorrow your face will be lost in another face.
You forget that you came from very far, the longest journey, that all the faces you own and that own you are there, they never left.
You forget that this journey, the longest journey ever, is the absolute mirror.

***

You are a stranger.
Whatever you own is a parcel, one single parcel:
What you saw, what you touched, what you remember, what you loved.
The parcel is warm from the remnants of warmth inside you
It is cold from all you lost.
It is blunt from the blunt pain,
You don't know that this parcel is power,
That it is not you who carries the parcel,
The parcel carries you.

***

You make paper boats, like a child.
The paper boat of a child goes far, much further than what you imagine,
But they don't protect you from the whirlpools of time.
They drown.
You close your eyes. You don't see, but time sees you.
You have no choice,
You have to learn what time it is in your life.
Time is the absolute sailor.
It may tell you that all the human boats are paper,
That the journey, the longest journey ever, began at station one: the paper boat of a child.

***

You are a hunter.
You left behind a whole forest of fire works; bullets..
The leaves are dead birds,
The leaves are feathers.
But, you are human,
You never shot a man at the wall,
Yet, you shot the birds at the wall.
You smell like an executioner,
You smell like the bird you killed with a bullet in its cry.
Some nights, alone in bed,
The bird that never left, flies over you, the bullet, the eternal bullet,
Finds you, again and again, in your cry.

***

The train left together with its light.
The big noise remains alone in the air.
You feel that you have exhausted all the itineraries,
That you wait for yourself, and that nothing waits for you.
You feel the deep sadness of leaving, always leaving.
You don't realize that the long journey from the past
Has endless departures, endless arrivals.
There is always sadness in a departure: the tiny shoes, roots, in your hands.
You don't wear them in order not to consume them.
There is always sadness in an arrival, meeting a time that doesn't know you.

***

You travel, the way you live,
Between the too soon and the too late.
You part. You grow used to the distances,
And the distances exite you. The distances tire you.
You return.
You bow like a deserted street light, like a deserted body,
To your sadness.
You get used to bowing, you get used to your sadness.
Your sadness is strange.
After all, there are no departures, no arrivals,
Because also these are a journey.
***

It is a world of thorns.
The thorns in a hand shake studied as a crime.
The thorns in the thighs of a woman of love. Love hurts her.
In war, the bullets are burning thorns, they leave a black hole in your life.
And the thorns of the noon sun in our eyes, like the thorns of a rose,
They hurt us, they let us see. They guard the delicate petals of light..

***

In the open fields,
The wind beats the wind.
You say something, you look back to find your voice,
But voices leave our mouth too soon, before we are ready.
You cannot find your voice.
Then, far away, the voice of people,
The wide voice, wide as an open palm.
The voice adding voice to voice, it can add your voice to the voices.
You find your voice.

***

You are tired. Life is hard work.
You escape, even though you don't know from what.
You arrive to a river, a mirror of waves, a broken mirror.
You see yourself in the mirror..
The mirror accepts everything, the way mirrors do,
Even the small miracles of living, the mysteries in each motion, are images in the water,
And your face: a face in the water, always further, always more distant.
You know why you wanted to escape. You know why escape is always too late.

***

The guards, the guns like the nostrils of a wild animal on your face,
Two hot nostrils.
They ask you the pass word. You remember it. You say : I am a friend.
You should remember also the pass word to people.
You should remember with whom you are, with whom you travel.
Your two wild nostrils should smell with whom you are.

***

In the street: the crime of the century.
The shot came from all directions, like pain, like death,
They shot the heads of statues, they shot the hands of the handless man, the small wounds of war
They need the fear. Fear is a violent prison.
They think tomorrow they'll shoot your head,
But you know the art of escaping, of disappearing in front of an open gun.
You are ready.

***

There are too many basements,
The black shoulders squeeze each other.
The windows of shadows,
And the naked lamp magnifies the dark.
These people forget that the sun exists, that it rises,
That the street may walk lit, beautiful.
They may forget that there are happy shadows:
The shadow of a bird fallen on the ground.
Maybe tomorrow noon, or even tomorrow morning,
Natural as magic,
The sun will be for everybody.
There is no choice: there is only one sun, the first, the last.

***

You are human. A wingless bird.
You write your poems, you draw paper wings,
Maybe you feel they are not enough,
But these are the only wings available.
You'll never sing the song of the birds,
Maybe even the angels have paper wings,
The dream of flight, like a human, like a child,

***

The times are hard.
Words are dangerous. You cannot finish them,
You postpone them. They become something else.
You look through the window: a tree of birds.
They postpone nothing, each feather is on time.
You delay again something, the moment passes, everything changes.
Delays are not safe, because change is not safe.
You don't know what will change, who will you be, and where..
You don't know that no one can postpone time, the avalanche of eternities inside time.

***

You touch yourself in the old dress in your closet.
It is beautiful, the valley between the breasts, the valley between the hips.
Only you can touch it. It knows you,
It added each moment, time to its time.
The gazes of others brought time to its time. The secret touch of someone brought time to its time.
There are no train tickets for time,
So time can take everything:
The dress, the tender valleys, the gazes, the touch, to a distant journey,
Without a ticket of return.

***

Everything is diaphanous: the endless journey, the sacred bible, holiness is heavy,
The beasts of the desert, the desert ,, the scarred faces, the silence, a joyous child.
And entering to the holy land: another adventure.
There are no answers, the answers are questions
There is no denial. Denial is affirmation
And the god who stands at the holy gate,
The diaphaneity is too deep, it is opaque.
In order to see face to face,
You need two looking.

***

Trumpets mimic the voice of a villain, of fear.
Like the head of a man who is afraid and even his fear is silence; a statue.
The heads of statues are slaves to fear, they broke them once too many.
The trumpets play for them.
Maybe that's why they use trumpets in all the wars,
They add fear to our fear, the soldiers arm their guns with fear.
They kill people .
But no one knows how to kill the fear, the terrible enemy, the terrible comrade.

***

The old cart-man with his horse is punctual.
He sells ice. His voice is warm.
His motions move in the rhythm of time.
The ice is indispensable.
He says;
I am glad I can still call.
There are small people who adjust their motions to time, to the motions of the day,
To be able to call.

***

The men were speaking, listening, looking at the sea.
Humans can do many things at the same time.
But one of the men was distant,
His motions mimicked the wind, his motions were wind.
He looked at the others, the way one looks at someone who was born, or became slowly, very slowly, wingless.
He looked the way one looks at a stone rolling into the abyss..
He looked sad. He knew each one carries his own abyss, and the abyss carries him.
Maybe he knew there is only one abyss,
It has no name, so it has all the names:
The gravity in the fear of depth, the gravity in the pain of a stone,
The gravity of hope. Hope is never weightless.

***

Sometimes, words come to us willingly.
After all, we invented them, and they invented us.
Sometimes they come like a window to the dark, unlit, deserted,
Maybe we forgot to add the word light.
We can change words, one word may be enough to change a picture, and they can change us, one word may be enough.

***

We love words,
And we don't realize it is the words that separate us,
And not the silence.
And we don't know what a word feels.

***

We stand under the rain,
We speak softly.
Some words are water, diaphanous,.
We don't want to dissolve them.

***

The garden after the rain.
The water of the garden pours out.
A child in the garden asks:
Are turtles happy.
The question was heavier than his lips.
It crawled to the ball of water in a corner.
It was thirsty.

***

They prepared the feast for today,
But it rains.
They postponed the table, the delicacies, the joy.
The moment passed, everything changed.
The table, the delicacies, the joy
Were packaged in a suitcase.
They had no choice,
They had to eat the suitcase too,
And they ate time: the postponement.

***

You are old, you are too tired to want things,
But this doesn't make you free.
You don't dare opening the window of your house,
It was closed in a distant autumn,
And you don't dare opening all the other windows:
In your head, the window between the ten fingers of a palm,
The window in a pause between the words,
You don't dare seeing your face in the window,
The small motions of your lips,
You don't know what they say,
Maybe: I am afraid to love. Maybe: I am afraid to see.
But you don't open the window.

***

So many invisibles.
We live with insects under our cloths. They crawl, they sting.
Only some nights,
A hand airy, almost invisible,
Picks the insects one by one, like a mother.
Some nights we feel innocent, clean.
We feel too naked.

***

It is strange,
Someone takes out of his body a vulture,
And we are not surprised,
The same vultures devour our entrails ,
They devour our motions of living, of loving.
Maybe we are all a Prometheus,
The same vulture in our hours.
But there is no fire, there is no alibi.


***
We sing the song of the world,
A huge cycle of songs.
And your song:
Burning woods, a fire,
And people singing around it.
Your song is the fire, your song is the cycle,
Your song is an orbit of humans, of old legends, almost eternal.
The exquisite planet.

***

You don't sing.
Between your lips; the silence grew old.
In your eyes: the habits of the alone:
A cloud, a huge cave of vapors.
Only the blind violinist in the street
Reminds you how blind you are.
It reminds you that songs are vagrant vendors,
They sell you the world, the visible and the invisible, in a song.
The vagrant vendors sell you something priceless.
No one can put a price tag on the priceless.

***

You live, you are always somewhere else.
You were not here when things happened: riots, the big sales.
You have an alibi for everything.
These alibis: a piece of paper: a torn proclaim , a new hat,
Leave you nothing to lean on,
Not even yourself,
Nothing except the alibi.

***

In the street: the big noise of small things.
The vagrant artisans, the fruit salesmen, a trumpet of sound announces the treasures they sell. The shouts of the children, the song of the school books.
The women in the temple of the kitchen. They pray to the soup.
And whatever you do, the whole day, is trying to compete the void
In the empty hands. The motions of living pile up the hands with the sounds of what they make. The big choir. The biggest.

***

Statues are stone.
Stones are alive. Time rolls down all their abysses. They ffel it.
They remember. They are free in their stillness.
You hhave to be at least as alive as a stone, as free,
To feel as deep as an abyss,
In order to sculpt a statue.
You have to remember statues are not a cemetery, nor a prison.
True statues are free in their silence. They are alive in their silence.
They move beneath the silence somewhere, the future, the past.

***

It's summer. Suddenly it rains.
The people feel betrayed,
It upsets the human order, the human habits.
Only in the fields, the smell of wet earth, like deep wine,
Is inebriating.
Slowly, they forget their anger, the frustration.
Maybe they know they cannot change even a drop of rain
From the laws of nature.

***

The glade in the forest, among the big muscular trees.
The shadows and light mingle, truce sits under the tress, quiet, appeased..
The sky is a giant. People sit under the sky,
They don't realize the size of the shadows copying their motions of living.
They don't know how immense they are when these motions,
Free and bound as everything else, move in their hands,
The sky, the shadows, the light in their hands,
The seed of something, something precious, in their hands: life.

***

Suddenly, you clap your hands.
Maybe you are happy, maybe the silence deafens you.
You clap your hands, as natural as a child,
As natural as a girl's dance.
And you don't know that joy is something so easy: a hand clap,
It you remember how to do it, how to let your hands feel.

***

The night, lost in its own darkness.
The moon sliver; a small golden knife.
It enters your room.
You fight the moon, you don't know if you've died,
You don't know whose knife bleeds on your body.
Maybe you remember that human's blood can be deepest gold, it can be the violent iron.

***

It rained.
The girls go out to gather flowers,
But the rain returned.
The girls go on and the flowers go on,
Without umbrella.
Beauty is a power, a petal of the world.

***

A man cut into two halves by the shadow of a tree.
He shouts: death is as strong as the knife of a shadow.
He shouts: there are leaves in my blood.
He shouts: green sister, I bleed you.

***

The shaking train.
The watch on the pulse of a man.
The gaze that cuts, again and again, silently, invisible, the window of the train.
And you don't recognize the small motions,
The shard in a motion, the calm in a motion.
You don't know they are the longest journey.

***

You sit alone in the darkness.
Only your hand with the silver ring on your fingers
Moves, silent, regular, precise,
As if you were feeding the clock of your hours,
As if you were feeding the clock of the world.

***

Often, hands are your face.
After all, these hands, these long restless faces,
Are, like a face, the bible of what the small motions mean , of what you feel.
You can recognize the face at day light,
The indelible finger prints on the face,
The finger prints of what you are, of what you feel.
And you can recognize them in the dark:
Two naked runners in the marathon of the night, in the marathon to life.

***

The days, like everything else are layer beneath layer.
You have to dif deep to find the time that was yours.
You may find a month that was a locked hour,
The bars of cold on the clock.
You may find moments when god sat in your lap.
He wrote poems.
And you may find the month that left a leaf of autumn on your knees.
You didn't know how much can a leaf weigh. You were not reay.

***

The night is a body of love.
Inside you the round seed, a small zero. It travels towards the infinite.
You don't know how many journeys to the infinite can a body contain.
You don't know that the journey break into two:
Two naked runners in the marathon to life.

***

Night.
Nature has its own maps.
The wind knows where to go,
The infinite, how to travel to the cold.
But you are human.
You don't know how to find the way among the infinite powers.
You need a light house:
The circles of light betweeen the thighs of a woman.
The old lamp. Homes hang from such lamps.
The candles on the knees of stone.

***

We are curious creatures.
We want to know always more, to understand more:
The depth in our feet, layer beneath layer of earth, layer beneath layer of life.
The depth of our homes, layer beneath layer of hands, doing, always doing.
Maybe nothing is strange,
Except the creatures who need to dig deep, to find the depth of themselves.
Except being human.

***

We are restless creatures. We leave, even when we are here.
And we leave for a million reasons:
We need to find the map of the sky, to know why we believe, whom we believe.
We need to find the map of the future the lost gold.
And we need to find the way home. The most tangled map, the most intricate.

***

The dog barked at the moon, as if it was a cat.
The moon stroke the cat, as if it was a dog.
Maybe moons laugh in order to protect themselves from what they see,
Maybe we need clowns in order to protect ourselves from what we see.

***

There are those people, in front of our home,
Their motions mute, illegible, improbable.,
They cover their windows, masked for years with black cloth, a grave.
These people know that whatever they do, there will be someone to watch them.
It is a suspicious world, a world of spies, of cameras in each road cross.
They are suspicious too,
So they are guilty, they are innocent.

***

When we give the moon a human face. It is lonely.
When we give the nothing of the night, deep, endless,
A silent room.
The night walks inside us the way days do,
And we have no choice,
We carry the loneliness of the moon, the night, deep, endless, the silence and the room inside us for months, for ages.
We are sad people.

***

In this circus we don't understand simple things:
A man gets lost in the corner of the street and never returns.
The island where someone lives, and yet, it is enough.
The man who is happy, and yet, he dreams of the rope,
And the rope finds him.
And the clown in the circus,
Someone who lost all rules, and maybe he never had them,
Understands everything.

***

Someone tries to sell his merchandise: beliefs
He'll pay you with the biggest magic: nature.
But you don't buy. Nature is for everybody,
Except the salesman.
His nature is a dead fish in the water.

***

It's night. The forest is deep.
You are in the forest, the trees have no map,
But you have the compass of the sky.
People sliced all the seas like exquisite fish, like a compass.
The secret is the small repetitions in your eyes, you repeat star after star .
The needle is north.

***

You repeat finished words, a mouthful of still gestures,
And you don't know how to find the way to the unfinished:
The small motions of living,
The smell of pollen, it smells of infinites,
The rivulet in the belly of a woman,
The tremble in the eye of a child.
Somewhere inside you, you are afraid.
The indefinite, the uncertain, the unfinished
Are too naked, too visible.

***

You die, and you travel deep into the world,
But, you cannot go by yourself.
The shining worm on your skin
Stands in the center of a small volcano: your body.
It cleans the fire, it chews it, it gives the fire to earth,
The earth is a belly, soft, hard, full of chewed fire.
When your fire meets the fire of earth,
Your journey into the world begins,
The endless journey.
You are eternal.

***

In order to live
You have to climb the uphill's of life,
The exquisite uphill.
And whatever goes up, must go down.
You are tired, the sweat in your hand is a dead flower.
You can carry nothing except what you remember, except who you are.
Maybe you remember.
Maybe you won. You know where to go, why.

***

You don't see the ancient gods within people,
You don't know that people have a sea inside them,
Their bodies shining with sea, with the sun,
The bodies sprout the waves, the sparks of suns,
That in this sea, the gods began, and from this sea they will continue.
You don't know that your small motions of living, invisible as the useful,
Make the gods possible.

***

Statues are used to be trapped in their body, in their blind open eyes,
To the rain that tattoos the eyes in all the images of tears.
But, statues are a trap.
They trap our eyes, they trap what we feel, what we remember,
They give them shape,
So, we are trapped in their shapes.
Maybe everything is like that: a dance of trapping and the trapped,
A dance over the mine field of who we are, what we are.

***

You feel you fall apart.
You need something soft to fall on.
You remember the child, the distant child,
The cradle, the box of toys where all your parts could enter.
You fall on soft ground, soft as a sudden memory,
But you don't find the child.
Maybe he is in another box. Small, nice coffin.
Maybe children die , like us, when they are forgotten.

***

The holiday is here.
The steam is everywhere:
The evaporation of the night in the sun.
The cloth dolls play with colors, with you, with the laughter of a child.
The holiday was long ago.
The dolls are in moth balls, and the joy, and the colors, and the laughter of a child.
There are no moth balls for sadness.

***


In the radio:
Words tall, taller than life,
Indifferent to our disbelief, anyway, they don't believe in themselves.
The words are still. They are an alley of statues.
Children believe in the invisible because they see it.
Children find beneath the tall words, the tall statues,
A hero they miss for so long.
It gives a face to their dreams.

***

There are circles everywhere.
You change your cloths again, you tighten them with a rope from a nightmare.
You travel again, you buy again a ticket to dream, it is also a ticket of return.
Only time is a line, unchangeable:
You grew old because you are sad, because you think too much, or maybe too little.
And yet, you try to find the circles of a child:
The beginning of a smile that rounds the lips.
The surprise in a gaze that rounds the visible.

***

Habit is everywhere:
In the colors of the seasons,
In the colors of the rain: liquid, viscose.
In looking in the mirror,
You want to look face to face,
There should be two that are looking, like trust.
In wearing your ring like a habit of love.
Maybe love is a habit that learns you, that you learn slowly, patient as time.


***

A poor woman gets married.
The man, wide as indifference,
Fills up all the space by himself. She is alone.
She is silent obedient, like someone who bows.
But , there are knives in her eye lashes, like someone who bowed once too much.
One day, she feels in her belly the bones of a small bird.
As long as they'll be there, she'll be less alone.

***

It is a circus for one clown and one child.
The rest of the audience shouts too much, understands too little.
So, the clown waves with transparent hands, rings,
Like colorful zeroes,
And the child sees in these colorful zeroes
The seasons, the moon, the stars.
He knows, in an almost mysterious way,
That everything exists, because the zero exists,
He applauds alone in his hands, alone in the rounded eyes,
The exquisite zeroes.

***

You are a scavenger.
You gather treasures that were thrown in a somewhere, in a sometime.
And old letter of love, the torn toy of a child.
Maybe you are a scavenger of souls. There are souls in these treasures.
Your home is full of them, but you cannot throw nothing.
You love the souls.
You realize that the things you love make it harder for you.
Life is a scavenger of souls.

***

It is not easy to kill yourself,
No matter how decided you are, how consumed you are,
How much the dust beneath your wrinkles hurts you.
Maybe you'll try to drown, to go beneath the air, beneath life.
But there is this thirst, the thirst is alive,
Invisible and absolute as air.
And something incredible happens.
Life repeats itself,
It drags you, like the first fish,
From water to air.

***

Maybe he felt he was a temple.
His motions slow, ceremonial.
His words had the sound of something important, something saintly.
It was not easy to ignore these motions,
To speak to such words, and you don't want to pray.
Even life you love so much, is not a temple,
It is a room of people, or even a tavern
Where you speak, open as a breath, where you laugh, the lips, two naked leaves,
Where you drink to something nice: a dream, a friend.
You feel you cannot close life in a temple,
You feel something infinite in a room of people,
You feel something infinite in a breath: a leaf of the world.

***

There are people like quiet water,
Their motions seem to be weaving themselves in everything,
As if they try to avoid nothing.
There are people who look far,
And you don't realize they are looking near.
You don't know they are big dreamers,
You don't realize they know the far, because they know the near,
And they try to avoid nothing.
They love the unavoidable: the journey to human.
Their motions, their airy motions,
Weigh no more than the breath of men,
The breath of the biggest forest.
At times, breath is heavy.

***

You fall in love with your woman,
Visible in your nakedness, beautiful in your nakedness.
But you don't know how passion can be lost, silent, imperceptible.
You're locked, each one in his own dream, dreams may be a lonely place.
You are locked in the feeling of something you miss,
And you don't remember what you miss.

***

The person in your head, is always in your head,
And yet, he is never really alone.
There are the thoughts.
There are the thoughts that are a friend,
There are thoughts that are a hand that gives you all its five fingers, its five lives.
There are thoughts that are a hand shake studied is a crime.
You choose.

***

At night,
The silence is an ambush of the past:
The wars, the thirsts, the blood lost: the precious well.
The sun is another kind of ambush.
It waits till you are utterly visible, naked as someone whose night deserted him,
Or maybe as someone whose life deserted him.
The light finds you, visible, vulnerable, and you don't know that the light is not always merciful. There is light in prisons, there was light in all concentrations camps of the world.
The light, the immense light, was a spy. It was guilty.

***

We are all seeds, the whole past, the whole future crawling in a dot.
But some seed are special. You are special, you are beautiful, the way the useful is., the insispensable.
People need you , all ten fingers of hunger in their mouth, the dream of bread salivates in their mouth.
And you don't know how can someone be a seed, how can he give his past, give his future.
But you do.

***

You are young.
You don't thank your body for living, for being beautiful.
You don't thank the blood, the precious water,
For quenching your thirst. The thirst for life is a giant.
It is sad,
One day, when you need it most,
Your body wouldn't thank you.
After all, the body is not a slave,
It doesn't like the slave traders,
The ones who sell it, each day, invisible in their arrogance,
Invisible in their silence.


***

You have to close your eyes,
In order to hear better:
The small motions of living, beautiful as the indispensable.
With open eyes, you take these motions for granted,
With open eyes you don't hear
How these motions slash the rain, slash time.
With open eyes you don't see how naked they are in their beauty,
How invisible they are in their beauty.

***

You are always late for something, as if time was too little.
You never know when the show begins.
Everybody applauds, so you applaud too,
Without knowing why, who is the hero,
The way you applauded yesterday in the parade ,the canons in the street.
The canons were thirsty.
It is sad,
Life waits for no one, nor the canons.

***

We were tired.
We were too young to know that fatigue is power. It is a struggle.
Our gazes: scattered,
So we wouldn't see the visible.
Our words: scattered.
We couldn't pretend we speak, we hear.
But in the evening,
Maybe the leaves of shadow were personal,
But the leaves of shadows dissolved like water, the green water of the world.
And maybe dissolving is uniting.

***

You make something. It is yours.
It has your smallest motions, your precision.
It has your time, time can be fatigue.
You give it to someone,
But the motions, the precision, the time are yours.
There are no complete gifts.

***
In the past, women were hard.
The work, the fatigue harden you.
The fields, the kitchen, the child, the man.
But when they grew old, too old to work,
They were not too old to be tender,
Like something that waited inside them for years, for ages.
The wrinkles around the smile were two young trees, light branches,
And their motions were like a soft pulse, regular, slow.
They die.
Maybe they were happy.
They were hard workers when it was time to be hard.
They were old enough to be tender. Old enough to love,
Absolute, in a quiet why.

***

It is not easy for women to be soft.
Their back is rigid from so much bending,
Their life is rigid from so much bending.
Bending to the soup, bending to the child,
Bending at night to a love that bent once too many.
Bending at night to the terrible absence.

***

TRIPTUCH
1, You held her body,
You heard in her body, or maybe inside you,
The whole night, the pulse of the most distant star.
You heard the silence. It confesses nothing.
And it is sad,
You don't know that everything happens between the too soon and the too late.
You don't know
Who will guard you from the too late,
Who will guard you from the morning.
The two bodies frozen in a posture they don't understand.
Who will guard the bodies. Who will understand.

***
2.In a corner of the street, the woman of love,
Small, delicate.
She forgot how to love, no one wants to buy her love,
Only the motion..
She doesn't know how immense she is
When someone comes, someone who needs her love,
And for an hour, for a night,
She loves him.

***

3. There are seeds, delicate seeds, under your tongue, in your hands,
In your belly, the secret belly of a woman.
I sow you like a warm country,
But you cannot leave. You are bound.
Seeds have to stay where they were sown.
But I am free in my freedom, I am captive in my freedom.
I have to go.
I have to know what 'far' is.

***

In the poor neighborhood, everything is poor.
The Saturdays, the moon, the sunlight.
Maybe there is little to celebrate:
The mud that seeps in everything, the street light that magnifies the shadows,
The moon: the slow cold.
It is sad, you are human,
Even the first man in the first cave,
Celebrated the warm seeds of a small plant,.
The big family of people in the cave.
Maybe you forgot. Maybe you have to remember
How to celebrate the soup, no matter how watery it is, the family of people at the table,
The hour, invisible in its beauty.
And you can celebrate the power to change,
After all, life is change, life is power,
And the tomorrow is power.
You can celebrate the best thing you'll ever have: life.

***

The woman of love returns from her night.
You see her room: a cracked mirror. Her body: a cracked mirror.
Her whole courage in a cracked mirror.
You see her. She looks at her eye: a monument to defeat.
Her gaze : clear. her victory.
You ask her nothing. You know the mine field beneath the wide feet of a question.
She doesn't answer.

***

Exotic fruits are foreign.
Slaves from distant lands. They are behind metal bars.
The fruits that grow in hot houses: foreign in the season, slaves in a glass cage.
And the gems from far away caves: slaves in velvet boxes.
The market is a big slave trader, the biggest.
The market speaks in the language of quantities. Quantities are slaves of the market,
And everything local, foreign, is quantity, everything is a slave.
On its shelves, heaps of human hands,. Slaves of everything.
They are beneath the fruits, beneath the gems, beneath all the quantities.
The hands are cheap, they become paper, small bills.

***

Some nights,
You are on a journey, lost, without where, without why.
All around, shapes without calm, calm without shape.
Only the moon in the water is real.
There are sounds, blind, heavy, like the big noise of war.
Then, it is morning.
The voice of the fruit vendor, the small motions of living,
Find you,
They are the way home. The longest journey.

***

In the hospital, everything is white.
The light, the sheets, the faces of the ill.
Everything is white like a wall, the holes invisible in their dark,
Like the sound of a bullet that finds the man,
And the shot man is white,
Only the blood flows dark, red, shining,
Natural as magic. Natural as pain.

***

You lose your way.
The night invades the tomorrow.
All you have is what you remember,
It leads you to the past, to the child,
To the secret corridors of a child.
Morning comes, you lie at your door.
Maybe this time you won.
But who will guard you from the corridors,
Who will guard you from the monster
In the corridor of a child.
Who will guard you from what you remember,
Who will guard you from what you cannot forget.

***

Some postured confuse you,
You don't know if they are a confession, and what they confess.
You look at a person. He is as close as far as the mountain you see,
And you don't know if the body speaks owe or recklessness,
If there is an answer, if there is a question of what height is.

***

The people, at the edge of the storm, at the edge of the mountain.
Mountains are a tall storm.
The fields are at the edge of the storm. They are cautious. They go nowhere.
Maybe someone will come out of the door,
He'll go to the edge of the storm. He'll sow seeds. Seeds are an endless storm.
And the human at the edge of the storm, is a storm. He is immense.

***


Some people began the journey to human.
They didn't know they were their path,
Their footprints: the finger prints of a journey, the finger prints of a man, of his life.
They didn't know that each foot print makes the path wider.
They didn't know that others will use their life: the path, to go on.
They didn't know that each uphill was a question,
They didn't know if there were answers.

***

However old you are, however tired,
You cannot die
If you didn't pay your debt to life.
You look at your hands: wild, disciplined, alive in each motion.
You don't realize that it is your small motions of living, invisible as the useful,
That pay the debt to life.
Death cannot afford it.

***

You were in the journey to human.
You could feel the net of people, places, time, itineraries.
You saw miracles until they became stars
And you continued to walk, cautious, endless,
As if you were walking on the side walk of the horizon.
The horizon was always far, always close.

***

We build houses, always.
We carry the child of the big forests here.
We invent space, like the first man in the first cave.
The nights still fall heavy, the white cold. The rain of molten skies.
And we build inside the house a factory of life.
We make wells of glass, we drink from the glass the deepest well.
We measure the distance inside a dream.
And we draw, like a child, a square of light on the wall.

***

We came from very far, we arrived high.
We invented the factories of life, we measure the depth in the water,
The height in a wave.
But there is not yet a factory that can measure the most simple things:
The shirt over the heart of a man.

***

You are tired. Time has a dry skin,
The sun is an unshaved face, it is thorny.
You are thirsty.
Your steps raise thirsty dust.
Near you; the jag, the jag of water that didn't change for ages, is empty.
In the yard, the well: rusted water.
Somewhere inside you know you are thirsty for something else.
For the deepest well: people,
Wells melting with a thousand thirsts.
Somewhere inside you sense the brotherhood of wells.
You feel the well will come.

***

They hanged the moon on the soft floor of the night.
A party.
The shadows of men, of women,
Magnify the moon light.
You pass by. You feel you are permeable, the night seeps , like everything else, into your toes:
The shadows, the moon, the men, the women, in the party and out.
You feel as if the skin sees, hears,
As if it was an open vein where everything bleeds.

***

You say; nothing is poetry,
And I say that poetry exists,
If you know how to smell time, still for a moment,
To see, through the big lucidity, the small, almost invisible motions of living,
Weaving the poem.
The exquisite cloth.

***

Usually, gardeners are not poets.
They count the seeds. They don't know seed are a poem.
They calculate the seasons, they don't know that the seasons are a poem of time.
They measure the deep water.
They don't know water is a poem of plenty, of life.
But, for sure, poets should be gardeners,
They are not an architect.
They cannot build four walls , a ceiling around a poem.
The words should grow on soft earth, slowly, when they are ready,
When the season is here.

***

A letter further than loneliness.
You have nowhere to go, as if you had no past,
You want to feel time; a round clock full of warm moments.
You want to feel the family that people could be.
You should look better.
In order to find something you should be ready,
You have to look for it.
You don't know that the past is a door,
That warm time is everywhere, even in a pot of soup,
And the family of people,
At the table of a cheap cafe, where they eat tapas from the same plate.
And you'll own whatever you find, it will be yours.
You won.

***

The blind violinist in the corner of the street.
His eyes: two naked nights, two mute nights.
But the chords see, thhey are his eyes,
And they are not mute, they sing.
They walk over the song like an acrobat on a tight rope,
Fearless, exquisite, the night, light, heavy, in the song.

***

Everything has a reason,
Even the small, almost invisible motions of your eye lashes.
They can protect your eyes from cheap light, plastic,
They can shut your eyes, protect you from the pain of seeing,
They can open the eye, you see the pain.
You can see your veins in the veins of a leaf, the green sister.
You choose.

***

Things are destroyed all the time.
Only the big tremble of the ruins remains.
And we build over the tremble, over the ruins,
Temples, houses,, cities, our life.
We grow over them, natural as a tree.
We don't realize that the ruins, the tremble, are the artists of the world.
They shape us, and inside us, we shape them,
After all, we shape the past whenever it needs some shaping.

***

Life is the best thing you'll ever have.
So, it is beautiful to see it in all the corners of your hours,
It is beautiful to believe in it,
To know it is the only temple of living .
And let death find its own gods.

***

In the room: the liquid silence.
You see the fish of time, like the bottom of the silece.
Greens like leaves of sea.
The fish are immobile, yet, their motion is exquisite.
Their eyes are closed, and they see you.

***

People quarrel.
The road in their voice is a care-few.
You don't know who is guilty, who is innocent, what the hate.
But,, you have many faces.
You may find, even in the middle of a quarrel,
Another face,
So, you know how regret feels,
You know it may be more eternal than sin.

***

You fall from a sky scraper,
And in order to make the fall slower, softer,
You delay at each floor for the fraction of a second.
You say: up to here, everything is fine.
And you feel, somewhere deep,
That at this fraction of a second, at this fraction of eternity,
You are happy.

***

The city.
The shoulders of the homes push each other.
The windows blind.
The street lamp, bent, dull, magnifies the shadows.
There is no passage.
You enter home,
You feel that the buildings have no reason,
That the road has no reason.
You need to believe in something,
At least that everything has a reason,
That there is a map for everything
You feel that you wouldn't be lost in the wilderness of the city, of your life,
If there would have been a map.
Maybe you need a god.
And maybe you need to see your small motions of living, repeating, repeating,
Drawing the only map available.

***

The days are longer than what they are,
But, beyond the fatigue, beyond the heap of hours,
You begin feeling that everything, even the smallest motion of living.
Has a reason.
It feels like a truce,
And the truce is for everyone, if he knows how to feel.

***

Winter.
The city is a white statuue, almost pure.
He said:
I want to fight the ice with ice.
He won.
He became ice, he fought ice with ice.
And it is sad,
The children know better,
They play with the snow, they make snow balls,
The big innocence of snow .

***

Homes are like people,
Lives inside lives.
So, when they open a window in the next apartment, it opens also inside you.
The big noise of stone., the sun, the phantom moon waiting. in the window.
You know
That now you'll have something to hang in the room at night.

***

You waited for too long.
You stopped waiting. Waiting is hard work.
And then, a glimpse. You missed this glimpse.
The silence inside a word. You missed this silence.
You realize that the waiting was useless,
That these things waited, somewhere inside, for you.
You realize that big things can hide easily behind small ones,
That the silence, a whole ship wreck, can float beneath a word,, a whisper.

***

In the circus of the night
The false suns shine, maddened, and the sound falls like a false autum, a plastic leaf.
The magician sells the belief in magic.
It is easy to believe when you don't know whom to believe.
Only the animals are real. As natural as pain. As natural as rage.
And the shadows are real. False suns spread real shadows.
The clown uses false dentures for his smile.
False smiles are dangerous. They rot the teeth.
Maybe he had no choice. Real smiles don't know hoe to sell themselves.
Maybe he didn't choose,
He just let the circus, the big slave trader, to sell his smile. The deep smile of a human.

***

There are morning like a deserted village.
There are no windows, the broken walls of the day are enough.
There is no road. The road is consumed by all that parted.
On the missing road: all the things you missed,
Maybe they missed you too, but it is too late.
The hours are killers, always.
But, in such a morning, in such a deserted village,
They kill in a different way: they shoot you at a wall full of sun,
Under a sky of birds. They shoot you in a way that hurts most.
And you don't know if you are guilty, why are you guilty.

***

The village is another kind of teacher.
The quiet teaches you how to hear. Hearing is power.
The houses push each other's shoulders. The 'you' is 'we',
And the closeness is an addiction, it is a power:
The 'you' in the 'we'. The 'we' in the 'you'.
And you don't know that you are the shoulders of a house,
That you are in the shoulders of the houses, that you go where the houses go.

***

Everything has its right time to happen,
Everything has the too soon, or the too late.
So, you have to hear the clock in your pulse,
To hear the clock of the world; the sun.
So, you should postpone nothing, the motions of living of loving.
You should recognize, like a seed, like a root, the right time.
And you don't know who will guard the seed, the root, the motions of living.
Who will guard the sowing.

***

Your daily cloths fall; a warm darkness on the bed.
In your body, a naked night, invisible in its silence.
And your eyes; two big Saturdays.
But the times are hard
You should be suspicious,
You need an alibi for everything, even for your silence,
And especially the silence of a night.
They know you are free in your silence,
They know you can remember in your silence,
You can rage in your silence.
You need an alibi for your silence.

***

You expect something.
You are home,
But you are out of your door.
In your hands: the small motions of absence,
The small motions of fate.
There is no door for absence, no door for fate,
And the handles of the doors: the whole loneliness.

***

Children kill birds with a sling,
They nail the transparence of a butterfly on paper.
The silence looks at their hands,
The silence reads these hands, as if it was a fortune teller,
As if it knew that in their silence they are free to kill, to live and let live,
That one day they'll have to choose their silence.

***

The war leaves behind, among the flowers, among the wild grass,
Rusted tanks, armored cars black, sun backed.
They are cemeteries.
They are the play ground of children.
After all, everything is built over cemeteries,
Even our life.

***

Beneath the night,
The black feet of the alchemists:
The metal that sweats metal, becomes earth,
Layer beneath layer of earth, metal earth, sweating earth.
The earth becomes fluid, liquid mercury,
The fluid becomes fire,
And fire is the big alchemist of life. The biggest.

***

You dream you are a mule, and maybe, you really are.
You ride this mule for years,
And you don't recognize the faith in its immense eyes, the stubborn hoofs.
You don't realize
Life is an act of faith, an act of stubbornness.
There are too many people, and too few mules.

***

Fear has many names.
The fear of the madman inside you,
The fear of time inside you,
The fear of dark that came from very far
Fear is power.
Like any power, fear may be a gangster.
It may kill you, alone in a corner of silence.
Its big hairy hands are innocent. They are your hands.

***

He said;
Birds fly against the wind, with the wind,
As if they knew deeply, almost mysteriously,
That they have to choose.
He said: the freedom to choose is a big freedom. The biggest.
He said: choice is hard work. You choose each day from the beginning.
Remember: you can sell freedom in all the markets of the world, they'll pay you exquisite shadows, a handful of feathers.
It cannot buy you a home, but it is the way home.
Remember; birds fly against the wind, choosing wing by wing.

***

At night,
The fire defeated the village.
The burned bones of houses, the black cry: all that was left of a human.
The roof of rain, raining,
And the silence deepens time.
Maybe the only winners were the deep roots of a tree, they will grow,
And the roots of someone who met the fire inside him, outside. They will grow

***

He said: you choose, and you let things choose for you, time, the rain,
Which is another kind of choice.
He said; mirrors are important.
You can find an exquisite memory in your wrinkles,
You can see the black bones beneath your hands, like a past that was burned.
You can see the small motions of dust in your smile, the dust is tender, the dust is hard.
You can see the palm of a human, the fingers raining over you,
You can let them drench your life, without umbrella.
You choose.

***

There were the big shadows of clouds above.
There were the shadows of clouds in the sea.
They erased the shadows of men. They were tyrants.
All that was left
Were a few silent rays:
A palm that opened in the hands of a man, like a choice.
A palm that closed in the hands of a man, the way threats do.
Maybe a choice, maybe fear. Fear leaves you no choice.

***

Loneliness may be harsh:
A night holed as a wall, no eye in the hole.
Loneliness may be as harsh as a shot at the wall.
It absolves no one,
And you don't see who is the killer.

***

You participate in everything.
The pulse of the most distant star in your pulse.
The pulse of the sea, of the fisherman, his hunger in your pulse, of the fish,
The tears of a fish in your pulse.
You don't know you are responsible for everything.
Maybe one day you'll realize it.
You'll know that this weight: the sum of pulses,
The sum of the needs of life in each pulse,
Is innocence. The whole innocence.

***

In a corner of the street
Someone stood, maybe a beggar.
He was small, bent beneath his gaze. Beneath his gaze he sees.
Bent beneath his silence.
No silence is small. No gaze is small when it sees.

***

When you raise your hand, your hand stands by itself,
Certain of your acceptance.
But, your hand should be certain,
Also when you raise it further,
Up to the hands of others, fingers entwine.
And your eyes should be certain when you raise them,
When they are at the height of a human,,
The exquisite height.

***

It's summer.
The night, the cool summer night,
Drinks softly, with slow lips, your eyes and what they see,
Like the mouth of a woman
Drinking, delicate, deep, her face in the water,
Drinking her beauty. Drinking her thirst.

***

The deep palm of love can hide the whole world, and it can hide itself, what it feels, what it doesn't feel.
But, time flows in everything, and when it flows in the palm,
When the fingers are cut,
Everything is visible.

***

The day passed in front of the door.
You stood behind the door.
You don't know that the day passes on both side of the door,
You live and die on both sides of the door,
And the handle is the whole loneliness.
It is on both sides of the door.

***

The way home is a mother.
It bears the home and it bears you.
And the journey to human is a mother.
It bears the way, it bears you.
There are many mothers,
And there are too many orphans.

***

Evening.
Everything walks slowly, deeply, almost invisible towards something:
The sounds, the silence, the tree, the homeless.
As if the only home is the way home,
As if we arrive home little by little,
Each evening more. Each evening better

***

Evening.
The colors become the big absence.
Only the shadows are left:
Beneath your shoes, like a path , like a furrow.
Beneath your wrinkles, like the shadows of time,
And they are the big parting in your eyes.
And you don't know who will guard the parting,
Who will guard you, parting each moment,
Who will guard the moments.

***

There where the sea ends, the sky begins.
And where the sky begins,
The stars begin, the exquisite dust of the night,
The journey to the infinite,
If you can see it.
But, there are too many stars,
And too few eyes.

***

You hide your daily hours behind daily things.
I look for your small motions of living, the daily motions,
Behind your hours.
I forget that daily things are invisible, they evade our eyes.
Maybe I'll find you in your words,
After all, we invented words, and they invented us.
Maybe, a word is true when it waits for you at the train station, for years,
When it waits, even when it is not sure you'll come.

***

You are thirsty.
Your mouth full of speechless thirst,
Maybe your thirst is different, maybe you are thirsty for
The deep wells, the rivers, the journey to distant seas.
It is sad,
You don't trust your thirst,
You don't know it can find the wells, the rivers, the sea journey.
You don't know it can find where the thirst began, in which secret desert, where it goes.

***

In the mirror: a gaze: a drop of dawn, a single drop.
The gaze: a drop of dawn, deepened by time,
The gaze: a drop of dawn that deepens time,
And you don't know you are both .
In different moments, and even in the same one.
And you don't know who will guard the drop of dawn,
Who will guard the moments.

***

It is twelve o'clock.
In the room: quadrangles of light,
And you don't realize that as long as there are suns,
There will be shadows.
Nature leaves you no choice. It chooses, always.
You are not defeated. You win when you recognize you are nature too.

.***

We are alone in our eyes,
The others don't see what we see. The eyes bent by time, bent by thoughts, look at the same thing, and see something else.
After all, only two small eyes are not enough for everything.
We may see small things:
A few people, a sliver of a moon, a tiny sliver,
Hardly enough for our silence.
But in reality, we meet in small things,
And when our eyes meet, when the others see what we see,
It is a big truce. The biggest.

***

There are mornings when you carry time on your back.
You carry last night, love and the fear of love,
The strange pain inside you.
And you carry the morning, the leaves of the sun, the green sun, the tallest tree,
And time within you, beginning, beginning.

***

The wind blows,
Tree barks, sun baked, roll,
It was war.
The sun baked the hunger,
The people devour the sun baked bark,
The only bread available.
The bark: a mouthful of big hard teeth.
The people are toothless.

***

You feel the void in your deepest cells.
You don't remember, you forgot how to love.
You don't realize you have a debt to life, the best thing you'll ever have.
You don't realize the void is the debt unpaid.

***

The rebellion opened the wide roads.
There was the big thirst.
It let people recognize the gentle roundness of a god of water,
After or even before they drown.
The jug didn't change its shape for ages.
The water didn't change its shape for ages,
So, the people knew they were on the right road:
Words were useless,
The words were water,
The words were what the water remembers, what the water loves.

***

When someone holds a speech,
You should look:
The small motions is his hands, the heaviness, the silence,
The shape of what he doesn't know how to say, the stumbling words.
Maybe he is not used to speak.
Maybe his hands are not silent.
Maybe you should trust what he doesn't know how to say,
The most difficult thing is to say simple words,
Maybe because they are so close to the truth.
And the motion of the hands is another confession.

***

Everything should be in its right place.
The hands should be in what they make, or in the deep recesses of a woman.
The eyes should be in the faces of the world, in a silence beneath a motion,
And beneath your face.
And the person who thinks, who remembers, should be in your head.
He is free in your head. His wings are free in your head, smugglers of borders, smuggler of dreams.

***

Spring is hard work.
The trees walk, always more, towards the sun.
The roots are muscles. They have to break stones,
They have to bring the green sun into the leaves,
And the unused beauty becomes flowers.
Pollen is a tough journey.
But you look, and all you see are the butterflies of nature.
You don't know the weight of a butterfly.

***

Things change their place, and so, they change memory.
The women brought the fields home,
They plow the earth of the hours,
They plow the earth beneath the wrinkles, beneath the fatigue.
They protect the seed in the belly, the infinite journey of a seed,
So, they are the absolute farmer,
They change what we remember, what we forgot.

***

In this place,
The feathers of a song rain over you,
The brief shadows of a branch rain over you,
The small motions of the silence of a woman, rain over you.
You let them rain into your life,
Without umbrella.
You are happy.

***

Saturday evening.
The days in which you sold your hands hurt you,
They are heavier than time.
At home:
The small motions of something simple.
The stove is hungry. It consumed itself.
The small motions of your woman in the soup,
The soup is watery, the soup is warmth.
And you don't see the two big Saturdays in the eyes of the child.

***
,
Nothing comes by itself.
You have to prepare yourself for the next hour, the next day.
You have to listen to the person in your head,
He sees, he thinks, he remembers, he is free.
You have to feel the shoulders of houses at the shoulders of your house,
Warmth to warmth, silence to silence.
And you have to guard the well inside you: water for the rainless years.

***

You knew people with desert winds inside htem,
With soft sand in their eyes.
You saw them:
The sand changed colors with the seasons of the hours.
It was exquisite.
You knew they were alone.
Maybe the only infinite was the loneliness, this, and the desert.
You knew one day
They'll sink in the sand of their eyes.
The soft sand, the killer sand.
And you don't know who will guard the loneliness,
The soft killer.

***

There are towns that are another kind of marsh: everything sinks
Humans, trust, doors, roads, nights.
At times, in these towns, there is an old cafe,, secret,
Chairs on the floors of the night.
People come there to remember and forget,
To shape their silence.
They keep their blood stable, quiet in their veins.
They come in order not to sink alone.

***

You held my hand without holding,
There was sand in your body, a secret desert.
The separations before uniting, after uniting.
I found you, and I lost you, and I found you again.
I saw you.
The sand in your body was diaphanous,
You didn't cover your deep thighs.
You protected nothing .

***

Holiday
The closed stage.
The immense theatre.
On the stage you were the audience, you and life:
The sun, the trees, soft shadows of pleasure :they dissolved the faces,
And naked bodies who rehearsed love. They didn't know love is never utterly naked,
That no one knows how to love so visible.
You want another theatre. You want to be an actor again.
The stage will be small. It will be the return to all the motions, almost invisible,
The daily motions, life is made of.
You feel what you feel after each holiday,
That life is the big actor and the biggest act,
Even when the motions repeat themselves,, when they repeat you.
You are happy.

***

In the middle of the wilderness:
The houses, the leaves, the shadows, are tidy.
They are tidy in a casual way, yet, they are absolute.
You come ther with your words.
Your words are a raft, your words are a safety belt:
The river of the moon is wild tonight. The moon will collapse.
But no one hears the moon waves.
You know words are the shadow of what you are.
Maybe the moon storm is your shadow too:
Your pain, your fear.
Maybe you can save no one
From shadows that are not his own.

***

Someone dies of age.
His dog cries with the big tears dogs have.
The people in the house felt nothing.
Maybe the fear of pain, the fear of death
Tamed them too much,
Maybe they didn't have the courage to cry.
The dog died.

***

In the middle of the wilderness,
The houses, the leaves, the light, are tidy.
The tidiness is almost invisible. It is absolute, like fear.
And the roofs are tidy, they have no choice.
There will be waterfalls of moons, moon waves are everywhere.
There is so much fear in tidiness,
There is so little tidiness in fear.

***

It's winter.
The houses travel in distant waters.
In the wind: small volcanoes: dust.
You cannot speak, you cannot hear even your thoughts,
There are cold steppes inside you.
You forget that time draws its own dimensions.
That there are small springs in winter,
That there are small winters in spring.
There is a sun in the next street.
It is exquisite.


***

Life changes you.
At times, it put everything, calmly in its place,
And yet, you can change the placement, you can change the habits.
You are a small man, and yet, you can change the face in which you live.
You can become a rebel.
You can sell your hands in the market, but hand are cheap.
You can die the little death, You can live them.. They are big. They are useless.
You can salute people in an old cafe, you can love them in a small nocturnal hotel.
You could use the unused time inside you.
It could be the way home.
You choose.

***

We need man-made suns,
For those who never saw summer,
For homes when it rains night, always.
These lamps are precious.
They are as natural as the hand of a man, a hand with a match,
As natural as fire.
Maybe, one day, the sun will hold the match box and the match,
It will smoke its cigarette,
The cigarette will be for everybody.

***

He spoke quietly, slowly, very slowly,
He spoke like someone who trusts himself,
Maybe because he trusts the others.
Beneath his wrinkles, warm shadows.
He said:
I can cover you with my shadows,
My shadows are a sun that grew old in my skin, my shadows are warm.
He said: I can remove the shadows, leave you naked,
As naked as the time in your face, time, beautiful in its nakedness,
Painful in its nakedness.
You choose.
In his hand: a shadow, airy, diaphanous, heavy.

***

It's midnight.
The train passes: the journey to human..
Its coal in the coal of the ancient caves, in the bones of animals.
Its coal in the coal of men: they have to get up on two feet, on two legs,
Their hands have to get up, to be as tall as a human.
Maybe they don't know that the coal of the hands, of whatever they make,
Is the coal of the train. The smoke: endless.

***

Everything was established from before.
At the table, everything was identical:
The people, the plates, the knives.
Maybe the identical exists, because there is the different,
Maybe nothing is really identical, it is too scary,
And the different may be a threat.
Someone said they used too much world, they breathed it like the deepest drug.
Someone said that songs are the history of people, rise, and fall, he said they forgot nothing.. He said they were not afraid to cry.
He said; people sing alone in their voice, and together, when they trust the others,
When they trust enough themselves.

***

Some grow old and their wrinkles, their hands soften by the raining time,
And some men become dry, right or righteous, They were judges, they were jailors.
Maybe there were soft once, maybe they hear the shot ones, crying like a child in their night, maybe sleep is a threat, maybe the cry dried them, always more, always deeper.
The cry is a witness, it is the accused, it is the accuser, it is the whole tribunal, it is death.

***

In the big circus of life,
Builders are the immense acrobats,
They walk on the tight rope,
Between fear and the will of the stone.
Life has no safety nets.

***

Someone reads the story of a war.
He forgets himself among the pages,
And before he ends,
The soldiers leave beneath the camouflage of the book.
They were decided.
They were not heroes.
They were only the dying, the dead, and the ones who didn't want to die.
It was a story of heroes,
But history loves another kind of heroes, the ones with the flag, with the big anthem,
maybe because they write it themselves.

***

Poets begin writing eternal poems, poems as long as eternity.
But, they grow old and bent, always closer to earth, and so do the poems.
Their vertebra melt little by little,
They have no vertebral column to hold them, to lift their head.
They write now differently.
They learn how to write much in little, a few vertebra are enough.
The poems know everything about the pain of living, and nothing about eternity,
They are alive.
It is strange, to be so close to death, and to arrive so close to life.

***

There are women who wait for their men for years.
The waiting, to age by the rectangle of light, looking, searching,
Is a killer.
When the men return, they don't realize it is a picture of dead nature:
The withered flowers in the vase, the withered flowers between the thighs.
They don't realize that something was postponed, something precious.
They don't see the dead nature in their hands, the hands that should have loved:
Silent thorns.

***

The children play.
Their ball makes the world rounder.
But one child sits at the blind window.
His eyes were lost on the road of a nameless night.
His fingers are the only eyes left.
He touches a globe of the world,
He straightens it, he makes it a road, maybe a road to his eyes.
Children believe in the invisible because they see it.

***

You grow old.
You write poems as if they were your will.
You write like someone who has nothing left to excuse, to measure:
Time, the silence, the absence: the fourth wall of loneliness.
But the world is the greatest mathematician,
It measures everything.
It knows the big innocence of someone who tries to excuse nothing, and his poems excuse everything,
It measures the distances of the fourth wall.

***

People leave all the time,
On shining cars, on marble horses, on moon chariots.
At times they return,
Returning changes them,
As if it was a confession of who they are,
Of where they belong, of whether they belong.
Returning makes them simple, clearer.
Returning is an act of faith.

***

We recognize our hands
In the things they make: a door, a garden, a home.
And we recognize our home, the address,
Where we can keep at least one dream.
The simplest address. The biggest.

***

You ambush your own gaze beyond the absence,
You ambush your sins: the drugs in your veins.
You capture them, they are your captives, they are your prison.
You don't know there is truce,
There is the twilight, the shadows mingling with light: a truce.
You should sit at the window of twilight,
Feel what a truce feels.

***

Poems, like everything else, begin somewhere, in something.
You change this something, you may multiply the something,
You may add gestures to its gestures.
You may give shadows to this something, shadows love depth.
This something is not you, it is an illusion,
But, in each of its motions, the illusion is you.

***
Feeling write poems, it may be soft, it may be rage.
It may have your face, your face quiet like the daily.
It may be a face unforgiving, un-absolved.
It may be both:
Your face, and not your face,
The black or maybe white magic that happens to everyone, all the time.
And you don't know who will guard your quiet,
Who will guard your rage,
Which truce will guard all your faces, all the magic.

***

You paint pictures.
You take lawns from the past, maybe you'll never pay it back.
You draw smiles that complete the abbsence,
You draw absence that completes the smiles.
But do you know how to paint happiness?
Can you draw the moment when happiness becomes a face,
Can you draw the invisible:
Motions where happiness becomes something else:
All the five fingers of the senses, all the ten fingers inside a touch, inside a moment.
All the fingers, natural as magic.

***

The man enters the room.
He returned from some yesterday.
Yesterdays are distant even when they are close.
The hands of the woman, the tiny immense hands of a woman, look for him.
They find time in his face, he finds time, tender, absolute, in her hands.
Two strangers.
Time is a big factory of strangers. The biggest.
It makes you even stranger to yourself.

***

There are exchanges in everything.
The picture of a storm, the fraction of a second on the canvass,
Gives you your whole history.
You don't know how long can a fraction of a second last.
And the invisible motions of living, of loving:
The deep quiet beneath the gaze of a woman,
The transparency of warmth around her breasts,
Give you a home. You give them a home.

***

Homes are four walls, a roof.
They are so simple, so difficult.
The small motions of living in a home
Confesses its map.
We lose ourselves in our home and we find it, and we lose it again.
Maybe life has no walls, no roofs.
Maybe living is infinite, even when it is small.

***

Your bodies of love are warm,
The vapours rises from your bodies,
Like a small chimney of a small train.
The bodies of love are a station in the journey to the infinite.
A station in Ithaca.

***

You have to live in the center of seeing in your eyes,
To see the almost invisible sequences of living,
To see the sequences in the small deaths.
The small sequences in a belly of a woman:
It travels, slowly, softly, like the soft bones of magic, like a child,
Towards the infinite.
You have to see time: the magician of motion,
In the biggest circus of the world: a moment.

***

Again and again,
The bodies, alone, on a bench of the morning, each past, each future alone..
Again, the wet lips in wet lips: a man, a woman, a wave of light in their lips.
Again, the smoothness, time washed, looks for a face.
Again, the infinite begins from the beginning.
Again its wet immense lips drink the deepest nipples: time.

***

Truth is a difficult thing.
It reminds you what you cannot forget.
You are alone .
All that's left are the lies,
The magic treasures,
To protect you from yourself.
At times, when the loneliness is particularly quiet,
You forget that you are alone.
You iron the trousers of a man, and you don't feel the thighs.
The trousers are empty.
Strangely, emptiness is a confession:
Your truth is empty, you are absent in your truth.
Maybe whatever you do is a confession : You miss the truth, and you don't know how to miss it enough, how to be closer.


It's noon time.
The table is humble.
At the table: the sun, a humble sun at a humble table.
At the table: people. Their words are invisible in the beauty of the simple.
At the table: The sweat of the salt in the salt shaker, in the fingers.
The touch is not salty.
At the table: the shadows of hands in the glasses.
The shadows are black, sun burned, the shadows are transparent in the water.
At the table: a quiet happiness.
They want to live this hour, this sun.
They feel this hour needs no past, no future. It is enough for a whole life time.

***

You wake up between bed and branches. Trees grow in the window.
You wake up out of time,
You don't know what time it is in your life and you don't care.
You try to sing, but your voice is surrounded by the big voice of the birds.
You have no choice. You listen.
You listen, maybe for the first time in your life.
You listen carefully, meticulously, silent.
Maybe it is the first day of the world.
They say that the world began with a word, with sound.

***

There was someone, someone strange, as if he came from another address of time.
When he spoke, the young smiled.
He learned how to be silent, how to say everything with a gestureof a hand.
He learned the corridor to the blind doors of old friends,
They didn't know they were visible, that their debt to life was visible inside the empty hours, inside the empty years. They paid nothing.
They don't know that someone wrote the story of a day in the life of a merchant of money, how people became paper.
They don't know that this story will be his will, that wills have power, the last weapon.

***

You were silent, alone,like the hands of a man in his pockets.
Time blows, it looks for something,
And an empty dock stays at your door.
Then, the night came, it brought strange ships,
Beneath the ship you recognize the sea.
Beneath the sea you recognized a drenched hand:
The immense hand of patience. Your mother.
And beneath the moon dust,
You recognized yourself, you recognized other faces,
And in your words you recognized the image of the world inside you.
You spoke.

***

THREE SCALES
1. inside you, the sadness surrenders to thoughts,
And the regret is more eternal than sin.
You sit at the table, the fragile table, the strong bread,
And the shadows are bent but proud.
Shadows fall from the light, like tears. They know the sadness of the light.
2. You said:
Everything does what it should do.
The fishermen with the pieces of glass in their eyes,
Invent more suns. The fish sea them, they love the light.
And the bodies embrace, naked on the sand,
Preparing the remorse,
The salty light in their lips.
3.You run among lit grasses,
The river, the sound of water in the song of a bird.
In the depth: a cloud,
Ready to rain in the song of the bird.
Ready to rain into your life.

***

There is only one journey,
No matter how many journeys there are in one journey,
And at the end, you find nothing, not even yourself.
You feel the great nostalgia, the nostalgia for yourself:
The big disease, the big mystery of a human.
You don't know that the nostalgia for yourself is a map,
Legible, illegible.

***

They throw atom bombs everywhere.
The bomb is a machine. It is innocent,
But the person who pushed 'go' is not.
He killed Hiroshima, and hope, and a field of people.
He cannot kill pain, death.
And it is sad
That a man can steal the soul of a machine,
That he can feel innocent, as innocent as the bomb.
There are too many atom bombs, and only one world.
We'll have to emigrate,
Like the stranger that came from the places where the world died.
We'll be strangers on a strange star.
My beloved,
I don't know if we would carry with us the atom bombs,
If everything wouldn't be ready for the great night.

***

I love to see the reflections of myself
In the water, in the sparks of the sun,
And I can guess who will part first: I, the water, the sun.
But I have a talent for happiness,
I feel that departures are a journey to something you don't know, so they have their own beauty, the beauty of something mysterious,
No matter who parts.

***

In our world,
The sweetest fruit is the light,
So, the ones in the shadows: the prisoners, the strangers who carry their shadows from far, the dead child with a shadow bigger than himself,
Are hungry.
Maybe the lovers taste another fruit: the fruit of the night,
Maybe, when we love, the star dust we are made of is stronger, we're lit.
Maybe love is the fruit of the stars that poets wrote about for ages.
Love is a strange fruit.

***

Old winds invaded our place in the planes.
Here, everything is old:
The blind windows, the seasons of the cloths, the bed where someone died.
Here, you don't know what you look for, and maybe you know,
But, what's the use of knowing when you don't know how to look.
Remember: the big seasons walking on the street, the shadows on the hands,
Are full of past, and the past is full of future.
Remember: when you look for the future, look in the things of the past.
Remember: the past gathers old things. It gathers the toys of the future.
Remember: the past is a big scavenger of the future.

***

We shook our body. It bled.
It was the time when whatever we saw made us bleed.
It was the time we were waiting for something that didn't come:
A ship, a shore, the way home.
Then, the sun, the clock of the world, exploded in all our clocks.
We knew what we were waiting for:
A drop of dawn, a single drop, mother and seed of light.

***

Be careful,
This place is not enough for the sky,
And the fences they built will leave deep cracks in your faces.
Faces are strong and fragile.
And it is too late to write, to say what was left unsaid:
The pain, the cold that doesn't thaw in the eyes of a child.
But the day is not enough. You are not prepared for the twilight,
The shadows and light leave holes in your hands, like another earth quake.
And your small expenses are not enough for the day,
To buy new hands, new motions of living.
It is not enough, so you have to count everything:
The ten debts in your fingers, the bills of life, the price of a twilight.
Maybe, one day, it will be dawn, the bills paid, nothing left to count,
And everything will be still unfinished:
The debt to life is endless. The journey to human is endless.

***

The foot prints of time: the iron shoes, the soft toes ,
Are everywhere. They bind us.
And yet, we cannot exist without time.
But time can exists without us.
One day, when living will end,
Time will continue to roll down all the abysses of the world,
And the huge clock of the world will ring, each hour, out of habit.
Time is change and it is habit. It is a strange number that counts us,
That tells us what number it is in our life.

***

The twilight comes from the next street.
All the houses travel at twilight towards the shadows and light when they mingle,
Towards a truce.
And we have always a choice:
To walk where time walks,
Or to find another street of time.
Time is the biggest city.
Yet, we have too little time,
And there are too many streets.

***

The day hesitates at the windows.
In the room you observe, you measure, you try your eyes. You are alone in your eyes.
Outside, the steps go always further. You are alone in what you hear.
The trains stops where trains always do:
At a station with a faded name, illegible.. You don't know if the train will continue, if you will continue.
But the city continues.
They build houses from the muddy light,
Maybe they wouldn't put doors,
Maybe they'll realize we live and die on both sides of the door.
Maybe they wouldn't put doors.

***

You come home.
You untie your tie, like the rope of the hanged,
Like the finger prints of the hanged on the damp wall:
He had his back to the sun.
You look always for something that was postponed, the moment that passed.
You remember how you were utterly naked beneath your cloths, and the night was naked beneath the shadows.
How you kept the light close: the fireflies, the moon, the star dust, a candle under your cloths.
That light was big and minute,
Like a tear in the eyes of the blind.

***

It was the white face of the country side.
There was a magician. He pulled the pigeons of peace from his mouth,
A sad woman painted the twilight on the face of the sun.
You couldn't remember what really happened, you were too young,
And you postponed everything, even the remembering.
All that's left is the pigeon of peace dissolving in the shadows,
The dissolving that was also uniting.
Now, you postpone nothing.
You measure the road, you measure the day.
You don't use tools. You use feet, eyes,
You use the clocks of a tree.

***

The noise is always more, out of your sleep.
Someone old stands on the street with a lamp.
He says something you cannot hear, you don't understand.
But time changes. The old man stands. His lamp bleeds.
The noise out of your sleep is more, it is a shout.
The clock of pain stopped at midnight,
But you wait for the clock of the world: the sun.
You wait up to the last eye.

***

TWO STORIES
1. The old servants.
Slowly they learned how to not to own their lips,
Slowly they learned how to be owned.
Slowly they learned the freedon inside the sillence.
And they keep all the keys in their belt:
The key to the cellar, the key to the honey, to the rough salt,
The key to the old age of a chair, of a bed,
The key to memories, the key to the ringing of the clock, the key to time.
They are never tired. Feeling tired needs time.
They never sit at the window. Seeing needs time.
They have strange superstitions: they throw the nuts of olives, of fruits out of the window,
The only orchard available.
When they grow old, they give the keys to a younger servant.
They still don't own their life, but they have enough time to see, to feel,
To touch the waterfall of light in the window, to be drenched, utterly drenched.

2. Some nights, each one of us returns home tired, infinitely tired,
A tiredness that paralyzes all the limbs of your life.
In your feet: the big ocean, the moon pulls the water up, the cruel tide.
You are beyond speaking, beyond the ceremonies of speaking,
And suddenly, you tell your woman, the rough salt in her lips:
Let's leave.
And she leaves, she carries along nothing, not memories, nor the habits that gave shape to her life.
She holds your arm, absolute, alone in her hand, and together in your arm.
You climb together the uphill of silence, you learned the wilderness and the trust in a touch, you learned the power in a touch.
You walk infinite, familiar,
You walk beyond memories, beyond regret,
The way a man walk with a woman,
The way a man finds the way to a woman.

***

It iis a world of beds:
At home, the sick, the old people's home, the small nocturnal hotel.
And these beds, these simple rectangles
Give all the shapes of our night, and we give them our shape.
We give them the almost invisible fingers of sleep,
The heavy hands of a nightmare, we give them the shape of our pain,
And the thousand shapes of love.

***

You die.
Your eyes contract beyond measure, the last sharpness.
A piece in the undivided darkness; a hole.
You throw into it whatever you own:
All your cloths, washed, unwashed, all the faces you remember, the eyes of a child, bigger than its face, bigger than its life.
Maybe that's why you die naked , suddenly old, utterly alone.

***

We think we carry inside us dead loves,
And we don't realize
That whatever happened, happened forever,
Whatever we felt, was felt forever.
We are not a cemetery of love,
We are a play ground where the past, the loves play,
No matter how much we kill them.

***

There are songs: a spider web,
Delicate, beautiful, strong, carnivorous.
But when we sing, the spider web is a touch,
Carnivorous of distances.
It weaves our voice in voices,
It brings the song always closer, always deeper in the web.

***

Maybe your dreams know how to love better than yourself.
The opaque night, the stars falling, ceaseless,
And the midnight: a woman, like a song lost and found and lost again.
And it is sad
That your days don't know how to love.
There is so much time in your hours. It is a reminder. It remembers.

***

MIDNIGHT
The long fingers of the star light, and the silence,
Reveal how naked is the night,
The ones who lay the pyramids of time:
The dead Pharaohs, the slaves that die when a Pharaoh dies,
Death travels naked, no matter what you wear.
The ones who dug the graves with naked hands,
Were killed like an animal,
With a knife in their cry. The knife was naked. It was silent.
It is midnight, the 12th station in the journey to human.
The journey is endless,
But all the five roads are closed by graves,

***

WATER COLORS
The slow motion of the air.
The sea gulls hang from the sun in the water, their talons of light.
A girl passes, the rough skin of toil in her hands, two small Saturdays in her eyes.
In a corner of autumn: children.
They smell of summer, of sun flower seeds,
They confuse the seasons.
On the road: time walks deaf.
It doesn't hear, it doesn't turn back, it doesn't know that we remember.
You don't know whose is the painting,
Who let you grasp time on the canvass,
Who knew how soft time walks towards us, even when it goes always further.

***

There are places deserted by history.
Even the deep names, as deep as the throat of someone who dies,
And the sunset that have more earth than fire, are silent.
Only the big time on the shoulders of the old
Says something.
And the broken shields on the faces of men.

***

I look at your eyes, your eyes that are absent.
I didn't desert your eyes.
There was the bullet at the wall. The bullet found me.
I didn't desert you eyes.
Maybe one day there will be a song about you,
Remember, when people will sing a song,
It becomes more, much more than a song,
It becomes their story.

***

I lost you and I found you so many times.
Suddenly I found you again.
I saw your body floating in the river of time,
The smell of the past was exquisite.
I saw the moon floating by you.
I saw your eyes, but I didn't know what they see.
Your eyes were open to another somewhere.
You were a piece of art, utterly beautiful.
But your body, loved, lover, drowned in the painting,
And I don't know how to find you,
I don't know how to breathe water.

***

What can you say that is not silence, that is not the dust of the unsaid, of the unsay-able.
You remember the silence that solidified the distances, the distant voices.
You remember the silence that congealed in the eyes of the soldiers.
Silence has many shapes.
What will you do with your missing hands, the hands that used to be a river,
The hands that used to be thirsty.
You are not thirsty. You are tired.
It is evening.
In the river of twilight all the colors drowned,
And the sea gulls drowned inside the horizon,
But there is no horizon anymore. It drowned.
And you know that the horizon was a road, it was hope.
What can you say that is not silence.

***

CALMNESS
On the staircase of the evening big and small things climb.
The cross road: the right road that has always something wrong,
The wrong road: the beauty of losing yourself, the pain of something lost.
On the staircase you have to choose. Always.
Today, the evening is calm,
Today the smells are calm.
The great fisherman of souls: the sadness, is calm.
In the river of time the fish start the journey to where they began.
You remember.

***

EVENING
The moon dust whitens the shadows,
But the houses of the fishermen are sad,
Like the whistle of a ship that leaves you,
A child, alone, with an empty dock inside you.
The fishermen will return, they'll bring blue fish,
The death of a fish is blue, it has the sea inside it.
And you, a child, alone, with the blue death inside you.
You don't know who will guard the empty dock,
Who will guard the blue death ,
Who will guard the child.

POSTPONEMENTS
It seemed that it will rain.
You gather your hands, you bend your head under the roof of the day,
You postpone your life. You wait for the rain.
There are people who shout: it will rain, it will rain,
They paralyze what you do, what you want, where you go.
You don't know that living is a rain that drenches you,
Without a roof, without a raincoat.

***

The train passed through our door.
In the depth the words were ensnared, and the silence.
In the plaza the flags rot like old ,capsized roots.
Winter is a siege, everything is closed, the steamroller of time closed the roads.
And we don't see
how nature is alive in our room:
The wild silk of the spiders,
The moon in the wings of a fly,
And we are each, a man for all seasons,
And the only siege is the sadness,
The immense sadness of a human.

***

You said: twilight is not an hour. It is a truce.
The shadows and light dissolving, separating, uniting.
You said: there is also twilight inside us.
You said: what is the meaning of a wave following a wave,
The fish of time following each other, and the drowning following each other.
Maybe the only meaning is following, coming always closer, no matter how far you are.
You said; what is the meaning of a question inside an answer.
You said; water disperses in rain drops when it rains,
And maybe dispersion is uniting.
You said: at night, things have color.
You paint them with what you remember, with what you know.
What is the meaning of painting, of giving shape to the shapeless, to the invisible.
You said; You hear a cry. There is no answer. Maybe there was no question.
There are answers that have no question.
You said: you feel the neighborhood's nostrils. They smell like smoke.
The only explanation is the cold, or the memory of the cold.
What is the memory of the cold, what is the memory of ice in a dead body.
You said: What is a man. Funny, serious.
Who gives what was given, who shares what he doesn't have.
What is a human.
You said: the wind is still,
But there is motion: the hands, the words, the thoughts, the silence.
There is the dust of motion on the motion.
There is a man on a mattress: the motions of a dream.
You said: look at the turned back of a man in order to see his face.
Backs know how to cry.
You said; you cry, a cry that falls at your feet, like a voice inside a stone.
What is the meaning of a cry when it is buried under stone.
It may be defeated. It may be secret power, it may be a deep memory.
You said: who stands beyond the mine field of the road, who shows the others where to continue, where to go.
Who knows what is the shortest way, before the journey began.

***


VERSES FROM TORN POEMS

1. It's evening in our life,
It's evening in our struggle.
It's evening but we have still many tears.
Tears are candles, or maybe foreflies.
They burn themselves for the light.

2. Loneliness is not an empty room,
But there are not rooms enough, not rooms empty enough,
For the loneliness.

3. You feel a stranger in life.
The road doesn't recognize your feet,
The road doesn't recognize the way home.
You don't realize that your shoes, old, consumed, tilled the road, tilled your life.
They recognize your foot prints,
That your steps walk slowly, inevitable, towards you, always more.

4. You know the rough skin of the rust.
You forget the beauty of the rust:
The boat that brought you here,
The rust in the green beauty of the depth.
You don't realize you are still on the boat, the rust is strange, the rust is familiar.
You are on the boat dreaming, dreaming.

You see a face in the water: it drowns.
It is your face: it drowns.
And you'll never forget
How that face saved you from drowning.

5. The girls jump, naked as water, into the sun.
Their motions: pollen of the body,
The pollen, invisible in it beauty.
Beyond thought, beyond regret,
These motions , invent the infinite.

6. There are nights that go nowhere.
The moon in a cloud, like the dead lamp of a boat.
Over the heap of coal, the silence lies. It is black, it is salty.
Beneath it there is no room for skies, no room for wind,
And the boat is far and close, like the silence.
No one can measure the distances inside a silence.

7. Tonight I want to hear the waves of music,
Tonight I want to hear how the sea plays with the fingers of the waves.
The symphony of your fingers,
The flute in your motions,
The silence that plays in all the tunes.

8. There is too much violence inside us.
The past is written in our genes.
The ancient temple lies, face up,
It raises its marble claws, sharpened by the years,
To a sky that was once its own.

9. The ring on your fingers shines.
The ring chains your finger, silent, absolute, to its will.
The ring is a golden fist. Gold comes from violent places.
The ring is an appease to the dark.

10. You left.
The sadness tires me, and the closed doors.
Loneliness fears the closed doors and the open ones.
Fear tires me.

11. I try to separate the song of the world
From my song.
I try to sing my song,
And I hear the sea, the fish, the leaves,
Sing in my song.

12. I try to bring my lips to the posture of a song.
I try to hear my song.
My song is, like everything else, layer beneath layer.
The voice makes the deep layer more visible.
The deep ruins where songs begin.

13. Tonight,
The stars spit on the ground, like old men.
Tonight, I am old,
And waiting is hard work.
Tonight, I wait for nothing anymore,
And waiting for nothing is hard work.

14. Height begins from down, from the depth.
And you have many heights, because you have many depths.
You don't know how to measure where height begins.
You don't know what is your height today.

15. My hand search the star dust
In order to find your shape,
Your shape that shapes the star dust.
We are the artist of star dust, the big sculpture-res.
We are omnivorous: we are star eaters.

16. It is a world of paper.
We write on it our eyes. We see.
We write on it our hands. We touch.
We write on it a bridge: it brings us close, it measures our distances.
Even money becomes paper. It sells our paper eyes, our paper hands.

17. Someone parts. Someone beloved,
And he leaves the void.
Slowly, infinitely slowly, you get used to the void,
You find where you are, who inside you goes on, who died.
The void may be clarity.

18. Ships leave all the time, they are made of journeys,
And you, your body made of journeys,
You stay.
You don't realize you are a ship that left.
The port is empty.
Your body made for journeys travels. Your body is a journey.
Time travels in it, the sea, the world.
The biggest journey.

19. The horizon is everywhere and nowhere,
Like a treasure hunt.
When you look for yourself, hope looks for itself.
It promises everything and nothing.
The horizon is honest.

20. The world innside us. We- inside the world.
We are artists by nature,
We shape each other.
Our hands: mud, stone, bronze.
We shape tools.
And we don't know who will guard the hands, the tools,
Who will guard us: tools and users of life.

21. You came,
With all the windows of the world, open in your hands,
You came like someone who trusts the light, and the light trusts him.
You came as if you knew there are too few windows,
And so much light..
There are too many eyes.

22. You don't know where you are going. You move without moving.
You are a body in the magnetic cycle of the infinite.
You are not a star. You don't know the laws of the infinite.
You don't know that these laws are inside everything. A ruler harsh, generous.
You are not defeated. You are home.

23. Your body is true,
As true as pain. A truth invisible. Absolute.
Your body is truth when its motions are open windows, wide open.
Your body is a window, the window is your body.
Truth loves glass, the clearest glass.

24. Our bodies, when they love, become a sea.
We are the most exquisite fish, between our thighs: a secret sea forest .
Our bodies tremble
As if they feel a storm coming.
They don't know that the minute seeds are a storm
That the delicate pollen is a storm.

***