MANUAL FOR SMALL ETERNITIES

Raquel Angel-Nagler

I was never cautious.
I never took my rain-coat. I didn't take pills that kill the suffering.
One day they'll enter my room
And they'll find a body wet from the rain of the years
And frozen from pain.
Maybe I hoped for the mercy of pain, or at least for an umbrella of mercy
***
We come into the world
Without a manual for life, without a manual for suffering,
Without even a passport that knows who we are,
But it is the only offer we have. We have no choice. We take it.
***
Maybe it is we who write the manuals for life,
The manuals for suffering, because there are no manuals in the shops.
But life doesn't know that manuals exist,
And pain forgets how to read, because of too much pain.
***
The secret card game we play with life,
In which we always lose.
I don't know if we don't play well,
Or if life is not an honest player,
And I don't know what will happen if we win.
***
We are still a child for whom everything is familiar,
Everything is unknown.
We need a magician, or at least a father, who'll explain to us
Why the familiar is familiar, which is not simple at all,
And why the unknown sits with us each evening for supper.
***
We grow old.
Our door is open for years, also the windows. In vain.
Maybe the silence comes from the house into the night.
We don't know why we are alone.
Maybe it is the Feng-Shui of the house,
Or maybe because we remind people their past.
Sometimes, the past is a wild animal which we don't know how to tame.
***
Maybe one day in a dream, or in a deserted street,
I'll see the grandchild of my grandchild,
And I wouldn't understand how I had so much future in me ,
Even though I was most of the time in the past,
Even though I was burned in the past night after night.
***
Maybe we are judged all the time, and we don't know
Why we are judged, by whom we are judged.
Maybe by ourselves.
Maybe that's why we never tell the truth, even to ourselves.
It is safer.
***
Maybe one day I will be too old to write,
Or maybe I wouldn't be able to write clearly what I want to write.
I'll die of hunger.
***
We have to be careful.
Whatever we say today can be used against us tomorrow.
We don't know who could hear us, we don't know if there is a Big brother.
Maybe our thoughts are the Big Brother
And they wait for tomorrow, in order to accuse us for yesterday.
We are guilty.
***
Lately I am often alone. And when I walk in the street
I feel the fear of the crowd, and I shout even though no one hears me.
Somewhere inside me I know
That my fear remembers other crowds:
The crowds of people in war. The crowd of the dead.
Maybe fear is a Molotov that was left in my old suitcase.
***
We cry when we are sad.
We cry when we see something beautiful.
Maybe we cry, when words are not enough.
***
I love the poetry of the small room in the small hotel at night,
That remained undiscovered, like most beautiful poems.
As long as there is poetry, at least somewhere,
There is hope.
***
At times we sit on the lap of our childhood.
We like it.
We feel as if we are the child of the child that we were,
And maybe it is not far from the truth.
We are the child of the child that we were.
***
Dreams are a must. Also poems, magicians.
They are the only ones that know why we exist,
And where we are when we are somewhere else, even when we are here.
They find us, always, on maps that don't exist.
***
We die, and we still don't know who we are.
Maybe it is not our death,
Maybe someone else died who didn't know who he is,
And it is not simple.
We are sad because someone died and we don't know who died,
And maybe because we are also someone who doesn't know who he is.
***
It is good to feel that there is still time for some things.
We always need time to regret things we did, because it is important.
It may not purify us,
But it makes us feel we are better than what we thought.
***
As long as it is a matter of belief, we can choose.
We can believe there is something that is real life,
And something that is not.
But when we live, we have no choice,
We are always in our real life, even though we have many real lives
In the same life, in the same moment.
***
There is always something dark inside us,
Something which is unclear.
That's why, some evenings we don't turn on the light.
In the darkness we see always better what's dark.
We cry, and we know why we cry.
***
There is always something dark inside us.
Something between sad and thrilling.
Usually we prefer to see the thriller,
To watch again and again whom we killed with so much pleasure,
Yesterday evening, when we sat on our sofa at home.
We kill each evening the ones who kill us at day time.
***
At times we cry, not because we are sad,
But because we feel we have still time.
Our death is postponed .But we are not happy for long.
It is not easy to live with a postponed execution.
It is not easy to think that our life, our beautiful life,
Is a postponed execution.
That's why dreams are a must.
***
Maybe we'll never really know the others.
Maybe we have a choice.
Either to believe in compassion, or to believe in nothing,
Yet, we have to choose.
***
When we have some time
We look in the corner of the house for first things.
For the first time we saw our parents love,
The first time that we loved our body.
Maybe we'll remember them even when we are old,
When we'll forget everything else, even our name.
***
When I look at the tree that the world breathes,
I believe there is a reason for everything,
Even for autumn. For the leaf on my bed.
***
I don't know whose fault it is that we are not eternal.
I don't know whose fault it is the flies burned in the lamp
Were not eternal.
Maybe the gods became invisible
Not because they wanted to be more mysterious.
Because there are too many questions that may be embarrassing.
Prayers are safer.
***
The dead leaves on the street.
As if we read the sad poetry of the world.
Poems are often sad because we are often sad,
Even when we don't know it.
***
At times, our best dreams go to hell,
For reasons we usually know.
We have a choice. We can follow them or not follow them,
But once we choose to follow, we are already there.
***
We grow old.
The hour of truth visits us always more often.
We don't like these visits, we think they are useless.
Death has enough truth to kill us.
***
We are unconscious, practically dead,
And no one knows that we feel everything.
The pain, the loneliness.
No one knows that feelings go farther than life.
***
I love the old barber shop.
I can still see in the seats the men, clean shaved,
With white tight collars, a blue striped suit,
And the habit of living that made them eternal.
***
Maybe a truce is the only peace possible
Between light and shadows,
Between the light and shadows that live in the same body, in the same life.
A twilight inside us. A truce.
***
Her body in my body. Maybe she was all the women in the world.
Maybe that night I loved them all.
Maybe, when the night ends, we realize how little we love the rest of the time.
***
Some mornings, when the air is clear, we see an old man
Who weeps alone, yet, he weeps in our eyes.
We carry this old man home, for years, for ages.
Maybe because he reminds us how little we weep for some things.
***
We die with open eyes,
We see how alone we are,
And we die again, forever.
***
The train leaves. We are on the train, but we are also in the station.
We salute ourselves forever.
We'll never meet the same man who leaves,
And for sure, not the years that leave with him.
***
We turn the corner of the street, and when we return,
The room is too small, it is the room of a child, and the bed is too small.
We have no choice. We leave again. Maybe when we'll come back
There will be no room. Only an old man on a huge, soft mattress.
Time is the true magician. It knows where the no room is. It makes it old.
***
Maybe when the time comes they'll tell me:
You are a lost case. Even when pain came you repented nothing.
And I'll say: yes, I am guilty,
But you cannot send me to hell, because I am already there,
And perhaps, I may not get used to Paradise.
***
I cry always inside me
Because I don't want to lose the tears
And what they remember .Because I want to cry invisible.
Yet, maybe the memories are too much .Maybe one day I'll cry out of my eyes,
Anyway, we rarely see the tears of others.
***
Often I collect tears from the street.
The tears of an old man whose life has rained,
The tears of a stranger when it rains over his life.
I collect them, because there are tears that shouldn't be lost.
***
We grow old. Our memories are not so clear.
All the women we loved become one woman,
All the nights become one night.
And it is not simple at all.
We live the greatest love ever. The purest.
***
I love the whistle of the trains.
It takes me far away.
At times I return, and I don't know why I returned.
***
At times we see naked flesh:
The flesh where pain carved itself,
Like the flesh in the tears of the body,
Like the flesh in the eyes of a stranger that began faraway,
And it is still here, in the same eyes.
And we never forget it.
***
Maybe we forget that earth is a child of rage,
Of volcanoes, of earthquakes.
We call it the good earth and mother earth
Because to have to believe in something,
At least in the floor of our life.
***
My poems proselytize no one,
Because I believe in many mysteries.
I believe in the mystery of a small hotel at night,
In the mercy of sin, which is another mystery.
It is not a religion, but at least it is a poem.
***
Names don't really matter,
Because we are all strangers. But some are more strangers,
We cannot even pronounce their name.
Even when we give them another name, a name we can pronounce,
They'll be still more strangers.
The name they brought all the way with them
Is something important. Names are not lost easily.
***
We long always for things that don't exist.
Maybe this is what our life is made of.
Yet, we never know what really exists and what doesn't.
Dreams don't exist, yet, they exist.
Some dreams shouldn't be lost. We should long.
***
When the train left, we don't know why we left, and if we really left too.
We don't know who will remember that we went once on a big journey,
Who will notice that we returned only with questions,
Who will know that it is the only answer possible.
***
Some evenings the memories are not hazy as usual.
We don't remember, we see.
We see the child that we were, the hours of loneliness,
The sudden silence, as if we remembered something that hurts.
And the night, when the body loves us, that purifies everything.
Childhood is pure.
***
The things we couldn't confess
Because they hurt too much, or for too long.
Maybe we confess them with a hand-shake.
Maybe men cry with their hands.
***
So many things happen within us.
Things we remember that we cannot forget, even when we forget them.
Things we forgot even though it was crucial to remember,
Maybe tickets for a theatre
And to think that outside, it is only morning.
***
Our evenings, the hour of a glass of wine and friends, are lonely.
The people we loved were all mortal.
Maybe by chance, also the people we didn't love were mortal.
***
We leave our childhood with a huge package.
We don't for who it is. We don't know what is in it.
One day, after years, we open it and we find nothing.
Maybe there were dream inside.
Maybe dreams evaporate when we don't dream them for too long.
***
We grow old. The only friends left are dead men.
Some evenings we drink with them a glass of wine. We talk.
Anyway, we always spoke to a friend who was really close,
The way we speak to ourselves.
***
We grew old. We still remember the small hotel, at night,
Where we died so many times,
And we wish, often, we could have died for love, in the same hotel,
Once more.
***
We grow old.
We don't prepare anything anymore
Because things happen always before we are prepared,
Even the best dreams happen before we are prepared.
Maybe that's why they seem different,
Maybe that's why we lose them.
***
We always prepare ourselves for something,
Even for a dream.
But usually things happen different, smaller, insignificant,
As if someone else dreamt them.
Maybe we need the wise men of the tribe.
Maybe they know how to prepare us for the everything,
For something, and for the nothing.
***
There are mysterious crimes happening in each home.
Things that fall as if someone tied suddenly our hands,
The chair that breaks under us as if someone crashed its legs,
The sadness in the eyes of our mother which is the worst crime of all.
We don't know if all crimes can be solved,
Especially the crime of things that make us sad.
***
We are not killers by nature, but one day they'll arrest us
Even though they'll find no dead body.
The truth is that we kill each evening, at home,
Those who killed us during the day,
But we leave them alive, in order to kill them again.
Maybe we are guilty. Maybe they should arrest us for what we feel.
***
We live, we do what we do, we hurt whom we hurt.
We are indebted for many tears, some that we don't even know,
And for sure, we don't know how to pay the debt.
***
Lately we feel we are watched more than ever.
Maybe there are more Big Brothers than what we imagine,
Otherwise, why do they build all these buildings of glass.
We cannot even hide in the corridor for a smoke,
Or to speak to the stranger who slept there at night when it rained.
Maybe we are guilty and we don't know it.
***
We don't know it, but when the time comes
Only our ancestors will be able to defend us.
After all sins are hereditary.
The sin of leaving our room in a mess, our life in a mess.
The sin of being poor.
Maybe the poor have a second hand Paradise, which is a good bargain,
And they are used to second hand things.
***
Maybe, after all the crimes, after we have killed ourselves,
After we have died at least once, we know who we are.
***
Often, when I am with the other strangers, they come to ask for our name.
They don't know that a stranger loses his name
A moment before he becomes a stranger,
That if we would have a name we wouldn't live here,
On the side walk of life.
They don't know that being nameless is a sentence for life.
***
We forget for years, and suddenly we remember.
We remember why we don't know our selves.
We live in someone else's life.
But we let everything be as it was. Maybe we are too busy, or maybe we are fatalists.
We'll continue to live there.
***
We are alone, and we don't know it.
We need the others, and we don't know it.
Maybe we need the wise men of the tribe.
Maybe they'll say nothing.
Maybe they'll just show us the way to the tribe,
Which seems simple, but is not simple at all,
It may be enough.
***
DEDICATED TO ATHANASIA TERTIPI
Maybe truth is a path
That we can only walk alone,
But we feel the others behind us.
We are alone,
Yet, we are many.
***
We cover the rope that will hang us.
We put on it flowers, like a wreath, like a beautiful halo.
Maybe the truth that one day we'll all die
Makes us beautiful.
***
Children like to play with false coins, buttons, bottle covers.
The strange thing is that their play, or maybe their dreams,
Turn them into true silver.
The pity is that later they forget how to do it,
That even the tears remain tears,
Yet, at times, tears are beautiful just as they are.
***
I love the cafe of the old people. They play.
They share the world among them, but they don't always play fair.
Someone has an empire, and the other only a small island.
Maybe we need the wise men of the tribe.
Maybe they'll say nothing,
They'll simply give the world back to the world,
Which is not simple at all.
***
Not all windows can save us.
There are windows that see our life passing.
There are windows near our bed that look into the long night.
And there are the windows where the others can see us,
Even when we don't know it.
When we wear nothing except our pain.
***
Usually we are talkative, so when we are suddenly silent
It is suspicious. Maybe we plan the crime of the century,
But we are not decided yet.
After all, it is not easy to discover a crime which wasn't committed yet.
Maybe we'll never be famous, because there are no crimes of the century left.
***
The silence of things is never innocent.
Yesterday our bed broke under us and crashed us, after years of silence.
No one can prove whether it was an accident or the perfect crime.
Maybe we have to begin speaking to everyday things,
After all, they are not slaves, and it is safer.
***
If Icould, I would have been a cook in a cheap suburb of life,
In a cheap room.
The smells would spread mysteriously, the way dreams sometimes do,
To the other side of the wall.
Some people will eat my food, and some, the dream of food,
Which is not simple at all.
***
I wanted always to be a dream salesman,
To understand why some dreams are priceless,
Is it because they are dear, or because no one wants them,
Like the dreams of a stranger, or the dream of someone wounded by life,
Because I always wanted to know who buys the dreams that no one wanted.
***
The dreams we dream about our life are always bigger than our life.
We have to choose:
To make our dreams smaller,
Or to make our life bigger.
***
Sometimes we dig the floor, we hide there our dearest dreams.
But we forget them, maybe because we hid them too deep.
Some dreams are not easy to live with,
Hiding them is safe, and forgetting them is the safest hiding place.
***
What we bury under the floor, even our childhood,
Doesn't stay there.
The aura of what we buried evaporates outside,
And it is not easy to bury the aura.
It is more stubborn than the floor.
***
We knock our hand on the table,
In order to say we are angry . In order to be heard.
And it is important, we should do it more often.
It could even save us from some wars.
***
As long as the birds fly, there will be poems.
It is the first flight we've ever seen, and we never forget it.
I think also airplanes never forgot it.
***
I was a child. I didn't have a room for myself.
But in the evenings when my parents went out
The whole house was my own.
I could dream alone, barefoot on the floor, in winter.
I was free for the first time,
And I never forgot it.
***
Whatever is too much
Tires our life,
Even too much truth.
***
We live monotonously. Monotony is safe, maybe too safe.
That's why at times we want to shout in the middle of the street,
We want to dream, we want to write poems,
Which is not safe at all.
***
They say that the eye is the window of the soul,
That's why we need a glass eye, always.
It is not safe to go around with the soul outside.
We are not children anymore, and anyway even children
Learn how to hide their soul behind tears.
After all, who likes the test of truth.
***
Thrillers are really suspending,
Like the serial killer who writes in his free time letters to God,
And we don't know, up to the last moment, who will kill him,
And what will the answer be.
***
When they kill us, they don't know they kill so little of our life,
That most of it remains in the walls, in the bed soaked with love and dreams,
In the floors.
They should bury us like a Pharaoh,
With our whole house and what it contains,
In order to bury us.
***
Often we ring the bell of houses, where no one answers,
Not because we want to steal,
But we believe that in each house there is someone who is afraid of the ringing.
Maybe we like thrillers. Maybe the opening of a door is the true thriller.
***
Maybe the best things are the things that don't exist.
But it is not simple.
For example dreams don't exist, yet they exist.
They are unreal as a children story. They are real enough to kill us.
Some dreams are not safe.
***
I don't know what will happen when the time comes.
How many truths we'll know that we don't know now,
And if dreams will still be necessary.
***
We put on a hat with colored feathers, like a bird,
Because it is in fashion.
Maybe fashions don't happen just like that,
Maybe they want to say something.
Maybe we wear the feathers,
The way birds wear their call of love.
***
Some evenings, when we are alone, we pray,
But we don't know if someone up there
Will open a door, or at least a window, to hear us.
Maybe it is better to dream. Dreams can go everywhere.
***
Often we say things that are not true
Because we need compassion,
Because compassion has enough truth in it.
***
The corridor where we go to ask for something, is long.
We forget why we went and what we wanted to ask.
Maybe it was an umbrella because it rains.
But corridors go farther than the rain,
Especially when we want to ask for an umbrella, or at least a rain coat.
***
We write prologues to everything, even to death.
We explain how we lived, and if possible, why we lived.
That's why prologues are so interesting.
They are the true story.
***
Prologues are the true thriller.
They show the scene of the crime, a face that could be a killer,
A face that could be a victim.
We don't need anything else.
We have learned how to imagine
Even before we learned how to think.
***
If we think about it, everything is a prologue to something else,
And it may be more interesting than the something else,
Like the dream of love.
***
I was only a child,
But I already knew about my slaughtered past.
I thought I would be a serial killer who will kill the serial killers,
I would save the world, which is not simple at all.
There are too many serial killers and too few children.
***
We don't know how we could live without fear.
Maybe we would fall from the staircase
Because we didn't bother turning on the light,
Or maybe we would turn on the light
When we open our door, even though it's night,
In order to give an umbrella to someone whose life is wet.
***
I saw the stranger in the coffin.
His hands seemed in pain as if it was too much
To hold the past: the first life, and the second life.
Maybe the dead weep from the hands.
***
DIOGENES
Doing nothing is useful, if we can do it,
If we can even not think of the things we have to do,
If we can just sit and think alone, and anyway, there is no other way to think,
Maybe we could even find the 'Man' without a torch.
Maybe we should proclaim one day a week, or at least a month,
For doing nothing, the way we proclaim national events.
We'll all sit in our homes, in our gardens, and we'll think.
Maybe the 'Man' will do nothing, like us, and think.
***
Daylight is useful for many reasons.
It is safer. We don't crash on other people, we don't fall down the stairs.
We can see where we want to go, if we know where we want to go,
Which is not always so simple.
We may see the blind, and if we can, think how blind we are.
***
We live in the life of someone else. It is safer.
No one knows where to find us, where to leave sad messages
Like someone who is sick, or who died. No one knows where to hurt us.
No one can tell us he misses us, not even ourselves,
So, we are quiet.
***
In the morning, the first thing we do is to gather the pieces of dreams,
To leave them under our clothes.
Yet, some dreams remain out of our clothes, in our motion, in the way we look.
They may remain there for the rest of the day, or even for the rest of our life,
And brushing the clothes is usually useless. We are different.
***
Maybe it is the humble who return in our dreams,
Maybe they were silent even when they spoke,
Maybe we need someone to hear us, only hear.
And for sure, it is easier to betray ourselves with the ones who are silent.
***
Each morning we betray, like a modern Judah, the dream we love most.
Maybe it is not easy to dream the dream we love most,
Maybe it is not easy to live the dream we love most,
And at times, it is not safe.
***
Maybe when we walk just like that, looking for nothing, we find things.
We find a bird with a broken wing, we find an torn toy of a child,
And then, with both our hands full of life, we find, at times, our life.
***
Compassion is not a simple thing.
We need someone who is compassionate, who'll tell us how to be compassionate
With ourselves, and then, we'll tell it to someone else,
Like the stories that people narrated to each other, for ages, maybe by a fire.
That's how things usually begin.
***
Maybe we are too old to learn new things.
Fortunately, some things remained old,
Like opening the door
To someone whose life is wet, and it rains.
Doors are an old thing, and opening them is even older.
***
We are old. We stand in the street with our old pajamas.
People pity us. They don't know how little time we have,
That we have to think what we didn't think for a whole life,
That when we die, or preferably a moment before,
We want to know who dies.
And changing the pajamas is slow, especially when you are old.
***
At times, we are lost.
We walk on the street with steps so lost,
That they enter the dreams of people.
Maybe dreams are the first door and the first open door that existed,
And they shouldn't be lost easily.
***
The mystery of wearing the same clothes in the same way.
Maybe clothes are a kind of uniform
That doesn't let us move differently,
Walk differently, or perhaps, even think differently.
We should change our clothes more often,
Or at least, wear them in a different way.
***
We get drunk for many reasons.
In order to forget. In order to remember.
In order to see the world in a different way.
Maybe, the best poems are drunk.
***
We hold a leaf of autumn
Because the world is sad,
Because we are sad,
Because we have such a narrow window of time in our home.
***
We grow old.
Maybe our true home is the sadness. The autumn.
Maybe we spread its leaves everywhere, on our bed, on our pictures,
Because we pity them,
Because we pity ourselves.
We all need pity, but we don't like the pity of others,
So, alone in our souls, we give ourselves a leaf of mercy.
***
We never understood why are there special days to cry for the dead.
After all, the dead are dead each day.
We don't need also special days to cry for ourselves.
We die more each day, and we know it.
Thankfully, we don't have a free moment to think of it.
That's why death surprises us, always.
***
Death is the only serial killer who'll never be hanged.
He is so successful that they made him even an angel, the angel of death.
And I don't know why we feel that death remained the same death,
Not at all purer, and why the killer remained a killer.
***
Our dead are dead and we can do nothing about it.
Maybe remembering makes it worse because we feel how dead they are,
How much they are not here.
As long as we are awake, we defend ourselves,
But sometime we have also to sleep,
And then there is nothing to defend us from our dreams,
Or maybe we are too dead from defending ourselves.
We need to mourn in order to die less.
***
Our dead are dead. It is sad because it is final.
Of course whatever we do, whatever we say is final.
We cannot un-say it, we cannot undo it,
But it is final in a different way.
As strange as it seems, there are many ways to be final,
And some finals kill us less.
***
Maybe the folk stories are true.
They say also that mirrors are a black secret,
If we dare looking at their other side.
The other side of things is always thrilling.
They believe that the other side keeps all the eyes that saw themselves in the mirror.
It could be the first camera that ever existed,
And for sure, the only camera of eternity.
***
Usually we dream, and we are someone else, in a somewhere else, even when we are here,
And we don't know who we are, and where we are.
We don't know to whom we speak when we dream.
And it is not simple.
We are modern, but we need a medium, always.
***
Things begin always when something else finishes,
But we have many unfinished things in our life,
That's why we never know what began, what continues,
What finished.
And maybe we know that we all die with an unfinished life, unfinished loves,
So, it doesn't matter.
***
There are many unfinished things in our life,
The unfinished journey to dream, the unfinished poems.
That's why our age is always unfinished even when a new age begins,
Which is normal. The past is never really finished. It continues what it began.
***
I always wanted to be someone in a fairy-tale,
But, with a few conditions.
I had to be the bad one. Maybe I needed the thrill of being bad,
Maybe I was tired of being good.
And I had to know the end.
Maybe I believed in an umbrella of mercy when it rains,
Even before I knew what an umbrella is.
***
We have to overcome ourselves each day, in order to be ourselves,
Which is not easy at all.
We need the magician of the tribe. He'll say nothing,
But he'll give us a mirror. The mirror will work for us.
It is enough to look and to want to look.
We'll see all the 'ourselves' that we are,
And it is thrilling to know we can be many and be ourselves.
We need the thrills in our life.
Of course there will be faces who are actors,
But after looking for so long we feel it.
And anyway, also life loves to play theatre at times.
Mirrors are a must, even though we use them usually only to comb our hair.
***
We grow old, like the blind,
Without seeing it,
But we know it,
Because our tears are not blind.
***
The sudden pleasure of finding an answer on the street.
Maybe it is an answer we didn't really need,
Or maybe it is an answer to something that doesn't exist.
But the pleasure exists.
And it is really simple. All we have to do is let answers surprise us.
***
Maybe children cry
Because it is the only thing that is their own,
This, and the dreams.
***
Mothers know that the child is their own. They bore it.
That's why their love is different.
It is the love of the body.
The purest love.
***
At times, in the evening,
I look at the lamp and at the trembling flies,
As if they didn't know what to choose.
They are different. They don't know that we have to choose the light or the nothing.
***
Maybe when we sell something to someone
We sell solidified time,
Even if it is a juice that we drink some mornings before breakfast.
Because we sell the time of the fruit to ripen,
And we sell the time of the man who lets the fruit pour
From a somewhere into our glass.
***
I wear clothes that I bought in a shop where they sell the anonymous.
Maybe we always buy the anonymous.
We don't know the name of the people who made the things,
We don't know the name of the people who sell the things.
There are too many people, and too few names.
***
ACHILLES
Adventures happen also to everyday people,
But they seem small, and we don't notice them.
We forget that adventures are never really small, and for sure, not safe.
We forget that the biggest heroes died from something small.
A pain in the ankle was enough.
***
Poets die, like a modern Byron,
In the middle of a dream.
But they are anonymous,
Their dream, the last poem, remain anonymous,
And people don't know whose poem they sing some evenings,
And why the dream and the poem
Feel infinitely familiar, infinitely close.
***
Usually we use our shoes to walk in the world,
But some shoes make us walk out of it,
When they are too old, too tight,
When they make us walk in a different way, out of the world of the others,
And we didn't know that an old shoe could exile us.
***
We are never on time for the important things.
We wear old shoes, too tight,
Because there were no big shoes left from the sales of the century.
We were not on time for the shoes,
And maybe not even for life, we are always older than our age.
All that's left is the dream of the century. We were on time.
***
There are shadows everywhere, and some have even our shape.
But we are not a modern Plato,
We don't believe that shadows are the only life that exists here, where we are.
After all, who wants to know he is a shadow,
Who wants to see his life, lying naked on the street.
I don't believe we are shadows,
But for sure, what we say are shadows
Because words are only translations, and also shadows.
***
Bridges are all about choice. To cross or not to cross.
We don't know what is on the other side,
Maybe another world, another life.
But once we choose to cross, we have no choice.
We are already there.
***
Bridges are all about choice. To cross or not to cross.
But there is a third choice.
At times, when our life is too hurt to live,
We jump from the bridge, we jump from our life.
The third choice.
***
At times, we believe, like a modern Gandhi,
In not protecting ourselves. In staying naked under our clothes,
And probably it takes more strength than we can imagine.
But if we are silent, everything changes.
Silence is another way of protecting ourselves. A shield.
***
Our useless days end too soon, and they may be the only days we have.
Maybe the useless can have many meanings,
Maybe we don't know for whom it is useless.
We don't know if a poem or even a dream are useless,
We don't know if the day in which they happened was useless.
***
We pretend to be indifferent,
Even though the floor beneath us shakes out of fear.
The floor is not indifferent. It is sincere. It is real.
Maybe, we should live barefoot,
Maybe we'll feel better the floor, and what we feel.
***
The gods are too high. That's why they don't see us,
That's why they don't know if we cry, when we cry,
And for sure not why we cry.
We need gods at the height of our life.
***
Usually we live only half of our day.
We halve our loneliness, our sadness.
Maybe that's why we know only half of who we are.
Maybe that's why we don't dream anymore the dream of the century.
Some dreams don't know how to be half.
***
The drawer near our bed,
The forgotten pictures, the forgotten diaries, thee forgotten keys,
Is not just another drawer.
It is a poem, if we can call our life a poem,
That we read some evenings, when we are alone.
***
Maybe I owe my poems to my wall.
It is always here, it goes nowhere,
And I need someone to hear my poems, I need an echo,
Because I am always here, like the wall.
Sometimes, maybe when I am dreaming, I feel vapor in the air, like tears,
And I don't know who cries, if there is someone who cries, and why he cries.
***
They say that the poor will earn paradise,
But for sure, they have to work hard for it,
They have to work even on the holy Sunday.
It is not easy to live waiting for Paradise,
It is not easy to be sure if it is worth it, and if Paradise exists at all.
***
Maybe, if hell exists,
Also paradise exists.
Life is not always a holy fire.
***
At times I iron my childhood things.
The large ribbon for the hair, the dreams, the tears,
In order to tidy my past.
But the past is more stubborn than the iron.
Maybe we cannot tidy anything, the past, the 'now'
And for sure not the dreams.
And dying is always a mess.
***
At times, we stand on the street and we wait for the rain,
So that no one will see that we cry.
Maybe that's why there are many people out when it rains,
Without an umbrella.
Maybe we are always a little sad and we know it.
***
The candle in the room is the only witness
Of the giant shadows on the wall.
The shadows that may fall any moment and crash us .
There are too few candles, and too many shadows.
**
Getting up is not easy.
We know that we dress each morning
In order to hurt.
Maybe it is the dressing that is to blame,
And not the daily marathon on the street of the day.
Maybe we should wear pajamas, always.
***
Maybe I am a modern Job.
There was more pain in my life than life,
But I was silent.
Only my Pajamas were never buttoned up, as if ready,
As if the someone who dressed me knew why.
***
We have to write at twilight
If we want to say a lot in few words.
The light inside the shadows.
The deepest poem.
***
We are always guilty of something, and we know it,
And the evenings, the little sins of the night
Make everything even worse.
But a few hours of sleep are enough to purify us.
We wake up pure.
***
Often we sad when we are vanquished,
When we lose the war with the world, or with ourselves,
Like when we pray, when we mourn, when it is autumn.
Sadness is important. When we are sad we realize how much we love ourselves.
We should be sad more often.
***
I never lose the sounds of the world,
The sounds that bring me back to the world when I am far.
That's where I write my best poems. Inside the world.
Some sounds are important,
Even when they wake us up from our afternoon sleep.
***
I think there are people who are never far from the world.
The hungry, the thirsty, the ones whose life is hurt.
Maybe they are always in the world
Because they are too exhausted to go anywhere else.
Even dreaming can be tiring.
***
Maybe we write because we are a little mad,
Because we don't know that shouting our naked self
Is forbidden, nudity is always forbidden,
Or maybe we know it but we think no one will do anything,
Because we are mad.
***
It rains in the distant places of the past,
That's why we need an umbrella always, also at home.
The past is everywhere.
***
The mediums may be old fashioned,
But also my dreams are old, they are older than myself,
They come from a past that was burned
And they know nothing about fashion,
So mediums are O.K.
***
At times, the twilight comes like music,
The most beautiful duet of light and shadows,
And we continue to hear it, long after it ends,
Even for the rest of our life.
***
The dead resuscitate in our dreams for many reasons.
So that we wouldn't forget them.
So that they wouldn't forget us.
So that no one will pity them.
Maybe even after we die we don't want the pity of others.
***
We always use one hand when we do things,
Even when we love in a small hotel at night.
The other hand is clenched around a dream,
Because some dreams are a secret music, a secret poem,
And they shouldn't be lost.
***
We explain ourselves all the time.
When we speak. When we are silent.
At times we explain what we never explained.
We jump from a bridge in the middle of the day.
The last explanation.
***
We grow rich from doing nothing.
We see, we think, we write poems.
Of course we consume little,
The call of a distant ship at night is enough.
***
Some days we get up blind to ourselves, blind to the others.
We go out, a blind man,
We throw a coin in the plate of a beggar,
And even our fingers on his face don't feel what he begs for, why he begs.
We don't know if also the coin we threw was blind.
***
Each morning, when we go down the stairs,
We go further, much further than what we imagine,
Because time goes further.
Maybe wherever we go we go further than what we imagine,
As if we were the path finder of life.
***
Each morning, when we go down stairs,
We go deeper, much deeper than what we imagine.
Maybe the staircase is the worst abyss because it's daily,
And we don't notice too much daily things.
Probably, there are many daily things which are an abyss,
And our small innocent days are not innocent at all.
We should avoid daily staircases if possible, and even the ground floor.
It may be a trap, a camouflaged abyss.
***
Little by little, the stair case becomes a true Everest,
And we are too old and too tired to climb it,
We have to stay on the ground floor.
Yet, some mornings when the air is clear,
We stretch our neck, if we can still stretch it,
We see the birds on the white peaks.
And we cry for the staircase, and for the Everest, and for the old age,
And for the birds.
***
Too many dreams fell asleep in my childhood.
And we don't wake them up,
Because we are too tired to dream,
And therefore, too tired to live,
So we let the dreams sleep, and we let our life sleep.
Maybe one day we'll die and we wouldn't know it.
***
Often the street turns abruptly, like luck,
We don't know it, we turn the street,
And we always lose, at times our money,
At times the keys to our house, or even our house.
As strange as it seems, everything plays these games of luck,
Even our small innocent days.
***
We grow old and rigid.
We can turn our head only in one direction,
Towards the past,
And it is a good disease. It saves us,
Because the future may make us even sicker.
***
I was saved, because I was alone,
And no one told me how dangerous is living.
I did the dangerous thing, I lived, I loved,
Simply because I didn't know it was dangerous.
But when I think of it, I was always strong-headed,
Maybe I would have done it anyway.
***
Maybe we exist, because we are hungry for something that doesn't exist,
Maybe some hungers feed us for longer than we can imagine,
Because the hunger for what doesn't exist, exists.
It is as real as pizza and bread.
***
Maybe we are hungry for something that doesn't exist.
Maybe some hungers are contagious, like dreams,
And we didn't know it.
All we knew is that we had a hungry dream.
We didn't know that dreams spread through dreams, always.
***
There are crimes that happen simply because it is autumn,
Because autumn is a killer,
Because it is always easier to kill when we are in a gang of killers.
***
Maybe autumn is a truth detector.
It detects if our sadness is really sad.
If we can get used to all these deaths, the tortured leaves,
Or if we cannot.
***
At times, sadness goes further than tears.
At times, it is a secret truce with life.
***
We try to bring light to the shadows of twilight. A lamp.
It seems too lonely, too frail to change the world,
Yet, it changes it.
There is at least one room lit in the dark continents.
***
Usually, crowds weigh more than themselves,
The way some dreams weigh more than themselves,
And we don't know if the crowd makes the dreams bigger,
Or if the dreams make the crowd bigger.
***
Maybe I am a little bit of an outcast,
That's why I collect outcasts from the street.
It is easy to be an outcast. Torn clothes, forgotten letters, old toys.
I'll make a collection of outcasts,
But they will be anonymous.
There are too few names, and too many outcasts.
***
It is easy to find things that can be seen once in a life time,
If we know how to see,
Like a raindrop in the middle of the rain,
Or a shadow, the moment it becomes light.
After all, we see everything only once in a life time,
A moment before it changes.
***
We stand at the edge of the street for many reasons.
Because there are too many accidents.
Because we are extravagant and we need to be different.
Because we are a stranger with a suspicious name
Who cannot walk in the middle of the street . The edge is enough.
***
We think that all the biblical prophets were killed,
But it is not so.
The ones who were invisible saved themselves.
That's why the dreams that cannot forgive us
Still exist.
***
We meet our fate all the time.
At times it is a killer who rests between one killing and the other,
Which is important,
Because the feeling of being saved purifies us.
***
You stand in a corner of the street.
You bring up slowly your skirt.
You show me the way to your night.
The beautiful sin
That purifies us.
***
The twilight that touches your body fits you.
Your silence fits you.
The rain fits you. It wets your eyes.
It makes your sadness even more beautiful.
***
I love to touch the glass of the rain.
It is closed, but I feel my eyes wet,
Which is normal, because life rains on both sides of the glass.
We can close the window,
But we cannot close what we saw, what we felt.
We need an rain-coat always, even when we are home.
***
The morning.
The small room of the small hotel,
The bodies that discovered themselves for the first time.
Everything was ours,
Because some things, when they happen,
They make everything our own.
***
We live with someone beloved.
The world grows big, dreams make the world always bigger.
Also the small house is big
Because it contains the days, the nights
Where we learn how to be big.
***
The small room in the small hotel, at night.
When I was cold, you covered me with your eyes,
There was summer in your eyes.
And when our bodies discovered each other,
There were too many suns in the bodies.
That's why we close our eyes when we love,
This, and because we see better with closed eyes.
***
Maybe nothing has the same size always.
Maybe that's why
When we are in the small room of the small hotel
We don't understand how our body can contain
More bodies, more hands, much more than what we imagine.
***
The rain doesn't erase our footprints from the street of time,
Because our steps are deep, much deeper than what we think.
They bring the future into the past, they bring the past into the future.
Because this is where we live.
***
We embrace,
And yet we look each one over the shoulder of the other.
We don't know why we look,
We don't know if we want to see the future or the past.
We should always close our eyes when we love.
It is safer.
***
I love the postman of the street.
He opens the windows with his voice.
I know it is old fashioned, but I love letters.
I can read the words, and I can read what the words feel.
Maybe that is where the letter really is.
***
The wall has no longer you shadow on it.
I need this shadow.
It was the witness of the nights
Where our bodies discovered their bodies of love,
Where they purified us.
***
We become old. The world is always more distant,
But when it grows dark the world grows even further,
Further than imagination,
As if it didn't exist, as if we never existed.
And we forget to turn on the light,
We forget that one light is enough
To make the world possible, to make us possible.
***
I love the rain.
I write your name in the rain-drops. The rain is eternal.
I love to hear the murmur
To know there is always a sky in our room,
Even when it rains over our nights.
***
They say that the heart beats betray us,
But everything can betray us, even the gestures, the lips when we speak.
Maybe we need to betray ourselves,
So that also the others will betray themselves.
And maybe this betrayal of our gestures, of the lips when we speak,
Is the true innocence.
***
At times, we love more than what we imagine.
We give all of ourselves,
And even then we feel that it's not enough,
That maybe something remained un-given.
***
In the small hotel, at night,
We are naked, our life is naked,
And we know it.
We need the small hotel
Because we can be there more naked than anywhere else.
That's why loving in the small hotel is pure.
***
You sit by me.
Someone, far away, sings a song,
Yet, we make the song our own.
When we love, we own more things,
Because love gives us a treasure of life and of sadness.
***
There are moments in which we are all poets,
Or maybe children.
We say things in a different way,
Because we see them in a different way.
So, everything can be a poem,
Even a silent roof and the sadness of the birds.
***
The children never stop fearing the dark,
Because they grow old too soon,
And they are afraid of another dark,
Or maybe it is the same dark, and we don't know it.
***
Some mornings,
The children make packages of light.
Children love packages, because they remind them of presents.
And they love the light, because they love playing with the shadows.
Maybe they think that the light and the shadows play only in children's play.
***
It may seem strange,
But maybe our things remember us more than people,
Because our things take the shape of our life,
And this is not lost easily.
***
The play of children. Somewhere it ends,
But it leaves behind dead Pharaohs.
Buried destinies that were holy.
***
I don't know all the things that make us bigger or smaller.
I don't know even if it is a long list.
But for sure, sadness makes us equal.
***
It may seem strange,
But at time, days that seemed meaningless
Become, somewhere, sometime, full of meanings.
Fate is not blind. Meanings are.
***
Little by little, we become addicted to our watches,
We need our doses of time,
But it is not enough, because we grow old,
And the terrible abstinence kills us.
***
There are songs, where dreams and the dreamers
Tremble within them.
They don't become a national anthem, they are not loud enough,
But they comfort us, because they feel we need it.
***
Poems may disappear, like us,
When they turn the corner of the street,
That's why we keep copies .Always.
Maybe someone will find them in the future,
But we don't know if they will be old fashioned,
If dreams, pain, lonely strangers will be old fashioned.
***
It doesn't matter what happened,
What matters is how it happened within us,
Because this is the only life we'll ever have.
***
The unknown besieges our homes, our small innocent days.
That's why we don't feel safe when we see in the street
A stranger with a suspicious beard,
And for sure, not in places where fate passes by,
Unfortunately, fate passes by everywhere.
And we are too suspicious to believe that the unknown
May be something really nice. Maybe a poem.
***
We grow old. We lose too many things.
The childhood, the youth, the dreams.
Only the spider-webs in the corners of the room
Know where they continued.
That's why we never clean the corners of the room.
We need witnesses ,always. Even for the things were lost,
Because they can testify that they never left the room.
***
I was a lonely child.
But the loneliness gave me distant places, dreams.
Maybe it gave me also my poems.
***
We wear such a big hair-ribbon
For such a small childhood,
And for sure, such a big loneliness.
Fortunately, we have an imaginary friend
Who has also a ribbon bigger than her life,
And a loneliness bigger than her life.
Maybe the ribbons make our loneliness bigger.
We should forbid them, always.
***
We wear a hair-ribbon bigger that our life.
It feels like wings,
It makes us dream, dreams bigger than our life.
And once we learn how to dream dreams bigger than our life,
We never forget it.
***
There are many dreams that begin in our childhood.
What we know for sure is when we dream how to fly,
We already fly.
And we never know why we came back.
***
There are many reasons why we dream when we are a child.
Probably, they are the same reasons why we dream later,
Maybe, the only difference is that a child has more unknown.
The unknown loves dreams.
***
Often we love things that fate doesn't let us have,
Or maybe it is fear.
We like to call the fear of some things- fate,
Because it sounds more exotic,
And because it forgives us.
***
We don't know what will happen tomorrow,
And for sure we don't remember what happened yesterday.
Maybe we need the magician of the tribe.
He can read the yesterday, and read the tomorrow from the yesterday,
Because the past is everywhere, even in the tomorrow.
***
At times, it is nice to lose ourselves
Because we may lose ourselves in a small hotel, at night,
In the window of a train, in a poem.
And we don't know who found us, and why we were found.
***
Some evenings, when it is autumn,
It seems like a goodbye to an age that has finished.
A leaf of autumn on our bed.
Yet, we are not a leaf.
We have many kinds of autumn.
***
The night in the small hotel.
No one asks our age.
Yet, the night seems like a good-bye to an age that has finished.
Thankfully, only two bodies know it.
The body knows our age long before we know it.
***
We have a lunar calendar. We miss many days each year,
And we don't know who will give them back to us,
And when he will give them back.
Maybe it will be in the after-life, if there is an after-life.
And for sure we don't know if it is worth it.
We don't know if in the after-life there are small nocturnal hotels,
We don't know if the bodies of love purify us there.
We don't know if in the after-life poems exist.
***
I am addicted to loneliness, and also pain is almost a drug.
Maybe, when I'll arrive to paradise, if there is Paradise,
I'll die, eternity after eternity, simply because of the terrible abstinence.
Earth is safer for some addicts because we need our dose of pain.
***
We never really know each other,
We hardly know even ourselves.
Maybe that's why we can be mad with love,
Or not love at all.
***
There are people who own only one world,
The ones who are in pain. The poets.
And some who don't own even one world,
Like the dreamers whose dreams died.
And afterwards, we speak about justice.
***
Everything is a thriller
Even when they bury us with all the clocks of our life,
And we don't know who was the killer.
We don't know if somewhere inside us we were a Buddhist who kills the clocks,
Or if they killed us.
***
We forget that the body is a beautiful Swiss clock.
That's why, when we die, one of the clocks of the world dies,
And time remains unreliable, forever.
***
Maybe some are spared, in the moment between life and death.
Of course, they have nowhere to go.
Maybe they could become ghosts,
They could live in someone else's life.
After all we do it often,
And no one thinks we are exotic.
***
Maybe all that remains of us
Will be a pebble at the edge of the street
Where we ran our daily marathon in order to live.
I know that the Jews put pebbles on the graves,
Maybe someone left a pebble
In the place where we died for the last time.
***
At times we stop suddenly in front of an old deserted house.
Maybe we are looking for something, for a witness of something.
Of course, we are not archeologists,
But we know that stones can tell us when someone carved them, why he carved them,
And whose hands loved them, because stones are also a witness of love.
***
At times we sit in the train station. We are not travelling.
We wait for a dream.
Maybe some dreams are the most important journey
Because they don't go to places, they go to people.
Maybe some dreams go further, much further than the train tracks.
***
We can dream about travelling,
Or we can avoid dreaming.
But once we dream
We are already travelling.
***
The birds leave in autumn, when life is too cold to live.
Maybe they leave also because of love,
Because it is easier to love in a warm place,
To sing love in a warm place.
Maybe that's why the people of the south love more, sing more.
***
The rain drops write something on the glass.
Something in a strange language.
Maybe the glass is the modern wall of Daniel.
Maybe it is the prophecy of the end of a mythical city,
Maybe cities end also in autumn.
And it is sad, because myths know where we came from, who we were,
And when they end, they leave us in the nowhere.
We don't know who we really are and why we are what we are.
We are lost, and we don't know it.
***
It is not easy to be young.
We feel we lose our life in small things. The yesterday, the tomorrow.
It is easier to be old. We know life likes small things,
And for sure, nothing is really lost. Life is not lost so easily.
***
Maybe we write love poems because we don't know how to love,
Because we don't know how to be naked, even under our clothes,
And words can be a coat for all seasons.
***
The night has a salty smell. The smell of the sea.
Memories smell often of sea because it is the place where we began.
The first memory.
Maybe that's why we love the sea, even though we don't know it.
***
Last years, spring was not a happy season.
I felt that everything is in blossom,
And in my body, only pains bloomed. Les fleurs du mal.
Some evenings, I found on my bed a leaf of autumn.
***
The voices of the children in the street
Seems like a fairy-tale that no one finished telling us,
Because we grew old too soon.
***
Often, beautiful things make me sad
Because I think they will end.
Thankfully I remember, just in time, the Buddhist MANDALA,
And I realize that things may be beautiful
Because they will end.
***
The older we grow, the stranger we become.
Maybe because our thoughts are not clear,
Or maybe because they are clear and we know we are dying.
Maybe we are angry. We have an account to settle with God.
***
Maybe some accounts, we'll settle one day with our soul,
But the body, maybe because it doesn't trust us,
Settles its accounts each day, up to the last coin of pain.
And it reminds me
How the ones who love us most, can hurt us most.
***
Maybe the most important question is not
To be or not to be,
But how to be, how not to be.
How to live. How to die.
***
We grow old.
We would like to read in the evenings a bible,
To learn how to live less eternal,
But when we have to believe in after-life, it is not simple,
Because the only after-life we know
Is a leaf that becomes earth that becomes a leaf,
And no bible mentions leaves.
***
Some dreams don't die easily,
Because they continue to dream in our dreams,
Because some things are not spread from mouth to mouth.
They spread from dream to dream.
***
The only after-life we know is the dead in our dreams.
It is soothing to speak to our dead
Because they forgive us, and we forgive ourselves,
That's why we get up in the morning happier, purified.
Maybe this is the only after-life we really need
And we don't know it.
***
Maybe the world is a dream
And life is a dream within a dream,
But the autumns continue.
***
When I was a child, we didn't have furniture from the past,
Because the past was burned, furniture and people.
Everything was new. Nothing had history,
As if we came from the nowhere, and we lived in the nowhere.
I didn't know history was so important, even when it was the history of a chair.
***
I love your laughter. It is light.
It is not a bird. No.
Maybe it is a balloon that a child holds,
And he flies with it.
***
There are dreams that are not easy,
And we have to choose.
Not to dream,
Or to dream and never die, but die each day.
***
Our dreams never saved us,
They only showed us the way to the unknown,
But maybe that is what dreams always do.
Maybe dreams are not safe , because the unknown is not safe.
***
The years behind the window.
That's where I've learned the irreversible.
The irreversible of what I saw, of the gaze that saw it.
Maybe it is the irreversible that makes us suddenly old,
At times, the irreversible of what we saw is enough.
***
In the small hotel, at night,
We feel all the infinites that exist, because our eyes are closed,
And closed eyes contain many infinites.
Yet, we feel also that some infinites are room enough
Only for two bodies that absolve each other.
***
Maybe everything happens because of something mysterious.
Maybe it is the mystery of bread and water.
We think they are simple, but there is nothing simple about them,
There is nothing simple about a mouth full of life.
There is nothing simple about hunger.
***
Maybe the saddest thing is not the truth that we die,
But that we die without having known each other.
Maybe that's why we die alone.
***
Some evenings, the earth has a beautiful smell,
And we remember that earth smells not only of death
But also of life,
And it feels like the twilight around us.
The truce of shadows and light.
***
Some evenings, the earth has a beautiful smell.
Maybe that's why our dead are quiet,
Maybe that's why, in this twilight, they absolve us,
And we absolve ourselves.
***
At times we dial a number and someone tells us: you are wrong.
And it is surprising to realize that someone knows how wrong we are
When we dial a wrong number.
It is surprising to realize suddenly, after the wrong call,
How many things are wrong with us.
***
The hurried life. We lose ourselves hour after hour.
We don't know that one day, when it will be autumn
And it will rain,
We'll die from the nostalgia for ourselves.
***
So many autumns,
And we don't recognize yet
The leaves that fall into our life.
***
The summers and the white sands
Where our bodies absolved each other,
Where they absolved us.
We grow old, and our bodies don't absolve us anymore,
But the memories do.
***
We grow old.
We are not poor because we don't feel poor,
Because we've spent a fortune in our youth.
***
Dreams are not MOTO PERPETUO.
They need someone who will dream them
And then spread them to others,
Who will become dreamers too,
Because some dreams are enough for countless dreamers.
***
At times, after asking forgiveness of someone for something,
We stand in front of the mirror
Not in order to see if we are beautiful,
But in order to see if we forgave ourselves.
***
I write about my loneliness
And I don't know if anybody understands me.
There are many kinds of loneliness, as many as the lonely.
At times, I am not sure if I understand it myself
Because loneliness feels, and feeling is always mysterious.
***
At times, we hear the ones that we'll never hear again
In our voice.
And we surprise ourselves,
Because we say things that we thought were our own,
And now we hear where they began.
Nothing begins from the nothing,
And for sure not thoughts.
***
We keep in our cellar
Old clothes, torn books, broken beds, and we forget them.
We don't realize these things are important historical findings,
And that's why they usually know who we were,
And why we are what we are and how we are.
Cellars are not safe.
***
We forget that everything is history.
That we are made of history,
And history is made of us.
And yet, it is a real thriller to know that we are world changers
Because we live the way we live, because we die the way we die.
***
I am a city gardener. I draw on my wall an eternal spring.
But lately, leaves fall from my wall.
Maybe eternity changes too, in order to be eternal.
Maybe we change too, in order to be eternal.
***
Maybe when we don't believe anymore in the mystery of life,
We don't believe in any mystery,
And it is sad, because mysteries are beautiful,
And because they let us love the mystery that we are.
***
The alchemist in your fingers
Gives my body the secret substance of pleasure.
And it is sad that the alchemists looked for ages, for the wrong things
In the wrong places.
***
There are no forgotten cities, because there are dead beneath them.
There are no deserted towns, because the dead never left them.
Maybe we should be the magician of the tribe.
We should lie on earth and listen,
Because the dead are never really silent.
Maybe we'll know better who we were,
Who we are, and why we are what we are.
***
A whole morning was not enough
To be a child,
Yet, we grow old in one small evening.
***
Maybe we are prisoners of something we don't know,
Maybe it is the mystery of being ourselves.
That's why some prisoners write poems.
***
We grow old.
Often we dose on the chair where we sit,
Because dying tires us,
Even more than living.
***
Maybe even eternity is not MOTO PERPETUO.
Maybe it needs something to wind it,
Something to make it worth while to go on.
Maybe a dreams is enough.
***
There are many reasons for fever.
When we are sick.
When we are young and one body is not enough for life.
When we are old and we want to finish a poem before the night comes.
***
I love the twilight.
The humble hour when everything, even the most simple things,
Have a meaning
Because the night comes.
***
Maybe adulthood comes like a shipwreck.
Maybe there is no other way to become suddenly mortal,
And to know it.
***
Regret makes us old for many reasons.
Because it tires us.
Because it steals our years, and we don't have too many of them.
Because it is cureless as age.
And because it doesn't forgive us, no matter how much we regret.
***
Maybe prison is not the key,
But the thought of the key,
And the truth is that we think too much,
And we have too many keys.
***
We are prisoners of what was lost forever,
And of hope, of what might be.
And it is nice to think that some prisons
Are the key of each other.
***
We are not born free
Because we don't know what freedom is,
And because our only freedom we have is to cry and to dream.
That's why it is not easy to become free later.
It is easier to make a world revolution
Than to rebel against ourselves.
***
Often we are the prisoners, the prison,
And at times we have also the key.
But prisons are comfortable, they love habit,
And for sure, they are safe.
***
It is not easy to be free,
Because we have many prisons
And there is no PASS-PARTOUT.
We have to make a key for each prison,
Even for the prison of some feelings , some thoughts.
***
Even the birds, our dream of freedom, are not free.
They need the right wind, the right weather in order to fly.
They need the other birds, so that they wouldn't be lost alone.
***
We grow old.
We pray to the gods of the distant stations,
The last gods left.
But they are too far for prayers.
Maybe it is better to dream.
Often dreams forgive us, so that we can forgive ourselves.
***
I remember the stranger on the side-walk of life.
His sad gaze seemed as if it delayed the twilight
For a long moment,
Because the sun comforts everybody,
But mostly those whose life is cold.
Maybe the sun is more humble than what we imagine,
And maybe the sad ones, the ones whose life is cold
Will inherit a place under the sun.
***
Nothing is safe.
We die also in the beautiful suburbs of life.
We cry for the life that betrayed us.
And I am not sure if we cry also for the life that we betrayed for so long.
***
We grow old
And yet, many things are still unfinished.
Even our days are a book that we'll never end.
And we are angry.
We feel we have an open account with life,
We are going to resist. We think of David and Goliath,
But life is an eternal Goliath, and we are an old David.
Yet, we are not going to close quietly the unfinished book,
We'll tear the pages one by one. The last rebellion.
***
I got lost in difficult roads, in suspicious hotels,
But even there I kept some habits.
I lit the Sabbath candles, I dried meticulously the dishes.
I didn't think about it,
But maybe some things contain too much past to be only past.
They become also the future.
And anyway, the future is everywhere.
***
We live always at the borders of our age.
At times we are younger, at times-older,
So when we die no one knows,
And of course we don't know,
How old was our death.
***
We committed all our sins when we were very young,
When we were not sure what sins are,
And later, when a body absolved our body,
And we could absolve ourselves,
Our sins were still pure.
***
The deserted home.
The past is everywhere, because the dust is everywhere,
On the table, on the windows.
Even the name we write over them is the past,
Because we don't know if we'll have a name tomorrow,
And if the future dust wouldn't cover it,
Because the future is everywhere,
It waits in the dust of yesterday.
***
We grow old behind a window.
We see people looking for a road, but a road to where,
And what will they do in the cross-roads,
Will they go on looking, and for what.
We feel that the cross-roads are the cross of our life,
Because we have to choose all the time.
And maybe the last moment soothes us,
Because it is the last cross-road.
***
Some nights we speak, or better confess,
To a face in the shadows.
It is easier to confess to someone we don't know,
And he doesn't know us.
Often we do it also in other places,
Like when we travel to distant stations with faces who don't know us.
Because it makes it easier for us to absolve ourselves.
***
It is difficult to believe that our life
Begins with little things here are there.
It is difficult to believe that a storm begins
With a drizzle here and there.
That's why we realize that this is our life, our only life,
In the middle of the storm.
***
Some people die for distant things,
Especially dreamers.
Maybe their death, because it hurts ,
Brings the distant things close.
Maybe it brings also their dreams closer.
As close as life.
***
Maybe childhood is a phrase in the enigma of existence.
We play, we sing, we don't feel secret at all,
And only some nights, between sleep and non-sleep,
We don't know who we are.
***
We fall in love because we need love,
But we grow old by a person we don't know
And it is sad,
Because, when we are old we need love, more than ever.
***
Somewhere, sometime,
We choose to longer the corner of the street
Where we'll turn and will return after ages.
We are too tired to choose, and the street chooses us.
Maybe we call this fatigue fate.
***
I always carry with me
The starry night of a children book,
Because it is the first infinite I knew and I loved.
Maybe we need the children books in order to recognize
Other infinites,
Like the immense twilight when the light turn on.
Maybe we'll become poets.
***
The clock shows us the lost hours,
But we don't trust it.
It's not that we think we are eternal,
But we feel there is time enough for everything.
Maybe it is the only way to live more, or to die less.
***
The strangers on the side-walk of life
Never sound the alarm,
Even when the hard side-walk kills them,
Because there is no alarm on the side-walk of life,
And because no one really knows them,
They seem to us all the same,
And we don't know who was killed on the side walk,
And why he was killed.
***
We sound the alarm
Because the loneliness kills us, and also the meaningless hours.
But no one answers,
Because there are too many alarms, and too much killing.
***
Everything happens quickly.
We turn, each one, another corner of another street.
We return after years, and we fall apart,
Because we resemble each other.
The same lost roads, the same derailed trains.
After all how many times can we hear a thriller that is just like our own,
How many nights that killed us.
***
When we are strangers, we are nomads.
We cannot carry with us our gardens,
And not even our flower pots,
And yet, autumn continues,
And the leaves still fall into our life.
***
Someone wants to photograph a moment of our face,
Why, what is he looking for.
Maybe he looks for the past within the moment,
Because there is past everywhere.
And the smile that ends in this picture, in this moment,
Is a photo of something that died. A necropsy of a moment.
***
The big mysteries never saved us.
As long as they remain mysterious, it is O.K.,
But once we decipher them
They may be another wall Of Daniel, an angry prophet.
The best we can do is leave some mysteries mysterious,
We may even love them.
***
We have to remember that mysteries
Don't remain mysterious without a reason,
Because there are many mysteries,
Some that let us love a beautiful twilight,
And some that let us die in the beautiful twilight.
So, mysteries are not safe.
***
When I am sad, I sit by the sea
And I throw pebbles into the infinite of water.
I know that the Jews leave pebbles on the graves,
And maybe I leave pebbles on the shipwrecks of my life.
But there are too many shipwrecks, and too few pebbles.
***
The sunrise reminds us
That we are no longer young,
That somewhere we've lost the first time of things,
And it is sad,
Because we lost something beautiful,
And because there are too many lost things,
And too little life to find them.
***
We grow old.
Autumn becomes familiar.
We recognize the leaves that fall from our life,
We recognize the old urgency to halt it,
Because there are too many leaves and too little life.
***
Some evenings we watch the stars,
We may be melancholic, we may need beauty,
But they don't sooth us.
Maybe we are too old for so much sky,
Maybe we are too alone for so much sky,
Maybe it leaves us more mortal.
***
Some evenings we remember the pain
That became almost a habit,
The loneliness that became a way of life.
We remember
Because we are too old to want to forget,
Because there are too few things left to lose.
***
We grow old.
We send letters and we don't know why and to whom,
Because we are alone.
Maybe the letters write only our name,
Maybe they are a bottle we send in the water,
So that we will remembered, so that we wouldn't die alone.
***
Maybe there were many journeys in the journey.
The journey of a child to the impossible.
The journey to the unfulfilled.
The journey to the suspicious hotel at night
Where we bought absolution for our body.
The journey our age, where even the unthinkable becomes a thought.
***
Years made of travelling.
Only some dreams were not a journey to somewhere else.
They were the return. They brought us here.
Because the 'here' is where everything happens,
Life, the dreams, the dreamers.
***
Journeys can become a habit,
Like the daily journey on the street of the hours,
But some dreams don't.
And for sure not the dream of the stranger from the side-walk of life
To walk in the middle of the street.
***
Some autumns are different.
They don't rain leaves,
They rain old wings.
Dreams die in this rain, birds die, the childhood dies,
And there is no umbrella of mercy.
***
The wings of our childhood
Become a rain of old feathers,
And it is sad,
Because they were the only wings that took us to the impossible.
Maybe that's why some wear feathers on their hats.
A trophy.
***
We grow old.
Our faces are faded like an old picture.
The mouth is frozen, it is not a smile, it is not sad.
Yet, at times, the eyes grow soft with the years
And they can soften everything, what they see,
What they feel when they see.
***
Some things remind us of ancient debts.
The bibles, the bells of the churches,
But we don't know what debts and why we should pay them.
Maybe we have an open account with the God,
And we want Him to pay first His old debts which are He left unpaid.
***
Dreams can spread from one dreamer to the other,
Because the dreamer is naked under his pajamas,
And because dreams don't have pajamas at all.
So it is easier for one dreamer to know the other,
It is easier to know what he dreams, and why the dream continues.
***
When we love
Our days are a beautiful enigma
And we don't want really to solve it
Because they are a poem
Written on the white sands of a white summer.
***
We grow old behind a window.
We look out, but what are we looking for.
Maybe we look at the life outside in order to feel that life exists,
Or maybe we don't look , we only close our eyes too feel the warmth,
The way we did ages ago when we loved,
Even if we don't know it.
***
There are enigmas in our life
Which we cannot solve,
And it is beautiful,
Because some enigmas exist not in order to be solved,
But to be lived.
***
At times we speak, and yet, the unsay-able becomes deeper,
And it is nice, because the unsay-able deepens what we say.
For sure we need it when we love, or when we write poems.
***
Maybe the humble voice, even when it is a whisper,
Is stronger than all the other sounds,
When it says the truth.
***
Maybe one language is not enough
Because we don't understand each other.
Maybe we need to know many foreign languages,
One for each person.
But it is not simple. There are too few dictionaries
And too many people.
All that's left are the languages without words.
The cry, if we want to hear it.
The trust, if we remember how to feel it.
We'll understand at least some things, which is really nice.
***
Often the silence of a child
Is the beginning of an abyss.
We say he is simply quiet.
We forget how the abyss began inside us,
How all the things that were lost, the loves, the years,
Fell into its depth, stone by stone.
***
When the body of a child discovers him,
It is the most perfect love,
It doesn't absolve him, because it doesn't need to.
The love is pure.
***
We change houses all the time.
What are we trying to avoid.
We forget that the yesterday is everywhere,
Even in a home that wasn't built yet,
Even the garden that didn't begin yet in the yard,
And for sure, there is infinite yesterday inside us.
***
We knock on the doors of people
Not in order to hear them, but in order to speak.
Yet, we speak all the time, we speak even when we are silent.
Maybe one day we'll hear ourselves,
We may know what we say, why we say,
And among all the sounds we may hear, for the first time, the others.
For sure, the first time will surprises us.
***
The key that we lost
And we found one day in our pocket.
And it is nice
Because keys can make doors friendly,
And because doors can be important friends
***
Our lips grow old sooner than our face,
But they grow old in a soft way, like a gentle tremble.
Maybe because we tell our stories all day long, and at times, even longer,
Maybe we don't remember that we repeat ourselves, or maybe we do,
But it is nice to live again and again some things.
Like an umbrella of mercy over the raining years
***
At times, we grow old in a soft way, tenderly.
We wander in streets that don't remember us,
And probably we don't remember them,
But we don't get lost,
Because the angel of the children follows us.
***
When we grow old, the nights are darker,
Maybe because they want to try the human limits,
Because they want to learn
How much loneliness we can resist.
***
We drink in order to dream better,
And we forget the dreams of others,
We forget the time when the eyes of a stranger and what they saw
Were enough to dream his dreams.
***
Maybe we could understand God
When we love, because it absolves us.
But we are alone, and when we call for it
No one answers. So it is hopeless.
***
We like to be left in our dreams
Because we feel it is safe, because we think no one ever died there.
We forget that everything lasts up to the middle of a dream.
The journey. Us. The dream.
***
Mirrors are always a witness,
And it is strange how much we look at them,
Because there are many things for which we don't want witnesses,
For the lost youth, for becoming less eternal.
Maybe we play with pain, each one of us,
Or maybe we love the truth more than what we know.
***
Maybe the children stories are true, because they explain many things.
Maybe we are a child of the nocturnal sky,
A fallen star that crossed the clouds, the rain.
We are born with the star and with the whole autumn inside us.
We are a story which is beautiful and sad at the same time.
***
We grow old and everything grows little. The money, life.
Yet, some mornings, when the air is particularly soft,
We smile as if we realized suddenly
That even though nothing is ours, everything is ours.
Maybe some smiles are an act of love,
Maybe these smiles explain everything.
***
Fate is fate
Because it has so much past in it that it becomes future,
And so much future, that it becomes past.
That's why fate know always where to find us,
Somewhere between the past and the future,
That's why fate is so fatal.
***
I was a quiet child. I used to close myself in a corner of my silence
And I would take all the infinites with me.
The infinites of a child love him because he loves them
And because he doesn't fear them yet,
And they follow him as long as the love exists.
***
We see the stranger on the side-walk of life.
He is tired,
So tired that we don't know if he walks,
Or if the rest of his life walks in his feet.
Many things may tire us,
But living on the side-walk of life can tire us
More than dying.
***
We leave, like a good Jew, pebbles on the grave of a dreamer,
The pebbles that our dreams gave us.
Because dreams are not immune. They know the pain of loss.
They know how to mourn a dreamer.
***
I know the mystery of crying silently, and of crying without tears,
But if we think about it, it is not a mystery at all,
Because when we really cry,
We cry alone and invisible,
And the best place is deep inside us.
***
Behind the sounds of the clock we hear other sounds,
The same hour but years before,
As if they were the hours of our nostalgia.
Because our nostalgia is for the past,
And the clocks are full of past, like everything else,
Even though they are the symbol of the future.
***
The small hotel that absolved our bodies.
The twilight that loved our shadows.
Some thoughts that happened ages ago and still rule us:
Who we are, why we are what we are.
And it is not strange at all, because the past is everywhere,
And it is always strong, much stronger than what we imagine.
***
Maybe we write poems
Because we feel that there is no somewhere where the world ended,
Because death doesn't write poems,
Because as long as there are poems, there is hope.
***
I write the poems of a stranger, because I am a stranger,
Because I know there are places where the world ended,
Because poetry knows how to mourn the dead,
And the ones who didn't die yet,
There where the world ended.
***
We try to scare death, we use holy symbols, holy curses,
As if death were not inside us even before we were born,
And we'll continue to die, long after we die.
I wear too a holy symbol, The Star of David,
Because it is nice to feel something that wouldn't die, on my body.
***
It seems strange,
But at times we are shipwrecked in a sea in which we've never travelled,
And there may be many reasons.
It may be the fear of the journey, because fear can drawn us, even on TERRA FERMA.
It may be the dream of the journey,
Because dreams are strong, much stronger than what we imagine.
It may be a future journey, because the future has enough past to drown us.
***
We walk from wall to wall, like a traveler who's lost his way,
And we don't know how to save ourselves.
We are modern, we need maps, GPS.
After all, we are not ancient barbarians who knew the stars,
Who loved them, and we don't know if they sang them
When the nights were particularly calm.
***
We look for ourselves everywhere
And we cannot find ourselves.
It feels like the first death, and we don't know how many deaths we can resist.
Maybe we can resist death more than what we imagine.
Maybe, at times, we can find ourselves when we still know whom we found
And why we wanted to find him.
***
Our words make the unsaid more mute.
Maybe, the unsaid is feeling, it feels what we want to say,
Which is important, maybe even more important than what we say.
That's why we speak and we don't understand each other.
That's why poetry is not an easy work.
***
Often we remember what wasn't, what didn't happen,
Because too many nice things didn't happen,
And it is nice to remember nice things.
For sure, the ways to feel nice
Are TERRA INCOGNITA. The sixth continent of life.
***
The only perfect thing we can say
Is that the perfect doesn't exist,
And even if it did
We don't know if we could recognize it,
We don't know if we could love it.
For sure it is easier to love the perfection of the imperfect.
***
Our playful thoughts in autumn
Are not playful at all,
The way a fallen leaf is not playful.
Maybe our thoughts like to play with death,
We forget that death loves playing the Russian roulette,
Which is not really playful,
And for sure, not safe.
***
There are things that we learn when we travel.
We realize that we are not alone,
That in the small car there are the invisible ones near us,
That there are the ones on the street who see us, the ones whom we see.
Maybe we are the safety belt of each other.
***
The past may be a tall wave, but usually it doesn't drown us
Because it has enough future to save us.
Yet, at times it tosses us
Into a shore that is not our own.
We are strangers, like the strangers from the side-walk of life.
We lose everything, except the past. This, and our dreams.
***
We look at ourselves the way one looks in the mirror,
And there are blind spots.
So we cannot really see how we are, what we are.
We need the eyes of someone else. But it is not simple,
Because the blind spots have a reason.
They protect us from ourselves.
So, we have to choose, to see or not see,
But once we choose to see, we are already there,
Naked as pain.
***
The sadness of departures,
When it is twilight, when all that remains of the train is the smoke,
And the sadness is endless,
Because the departure is endless,
Because the time within the departure continues to roll.
***
In the morning we air the house from the smell of the deep sighs.
We forget that the smell of the sighs is the smell of the night, of the past,
And the past is everywhere,
In our warm motions, in the softness of our body,
In the secrets of the room we want to air,
And it remains there for longer than what we can imagine.
***
We are born the way we live, the way we die,
Unrehearsed, unprepared, ready for nothing.
***
The hieroglyphs of the rain on the earth say something.
Maybe the roots can read it, or maybe the dead.
Maybe the dead know ancient languages
Because there is so much past in death.
***
When we return from the journey
We find time halted in the broken clocks,
Yet, the autumns continue.
***
Sadness has no name
Because it has all names,
All our names, and even the tender nicknames of our life.
***
The unknown has many names,
As many as who we were, who we are, who we'll be,
As many as the enigmas of a twilight.
***
Maybe the most beautiful things remain unknown,
Or at least, not understood,
Because they pass by us and we don't notice them.
Maybe the old ones see them better, if they can still see,
Because they have time,
So also the beautiful things, like the enigma of twilight,
Have time enough to be beautiful,
Time enough to make them beautiful.
***
Often we are silent, we don't speak even to someone we were seeing for long.
Maybe we are shy, maybe we feel safe in our silence,
Or maybe we believe in pure friendship:
The friendship of people who never met even though they met each day.
***
At times, when we feel particularly light or courageous,
We speak to someone we don't know but somehow we like,
And it is surprising, because he speaks too,
Because we need to speak long before we know how to speak,
And it may last as long as there are at least two people left in the world.
***
Children love fairytales with the witch or the wolf
Devouring a child.
Maybe they gather sadness for the future.
***
There are some details,
A gaze that refused us, a silence that didn't hear us,
That give more pain to our memories which are anyway usually painful.
And we have no choice, because even when we don't remember them,
There comes the twilight and other unsafe hours
When the memories remember us.
***
We are addicted to many things.
To food, to air, to a home.
And it is the best opium, because the next dose is here,
And because we don't see the addicts who have only the dose of air.
***
There are many things that prove to us the unexplainable.
The cries of someone in the middle of the street.
The silence of a stranger on the sidewalk of life.
And most of all our life.
Why we did what we did, why we didn't do what we didn't do,
And why the pain of what we did, of what we didn't do.
***
When we have everything, nothing can be missing,
Not even the ones who have nothing.
The ones where it's always autumn
And even the leaves are not their own.
But we are not lord of the leaves , so there is nothing we can do.
***
The past is not always gentle.
It may push us, like a real tough guy, into a corner,
And we have no choice. We surrender.
We let it live in our life, dream in our dreams.
***
Birds come from points of no return,
From places were the world ended,
Where they were shot as if they were air-born spies,
And we don't know how they return with all the death in their wings,
We don't know how birds mourn.
Maybe they cry the way they live, the way they die, flying,
Somewhere far and infinte.
***
Things come from places of no return,
Not only the dead in our dreams,
But also the dead in the subways who flee from the noise in their graves,
And the strangers who come from the places where the world ended
And they carry their dead in their life. This, and the dreams.
***
All these subways disturb our dead.
They grew used to the quiet of ancient stones, ancient skeletons.
Strangely, these things know, the way only ancient things do,
Who our dead were and why they were what they were.
Maybe the dead will have to move far from the modern noises,
We would lose them,
We would lose our true mother-land, our dead,
And what our dead knew.
***
If the bibles and the mediums are right,
We'll return one day to the world.
We don't know if we'll be purer than before.
Maybe we'll love better life ,children, puppies, and of course, women.
So we may be more pure.
***
Maybe not everybody will want to be resuscitated.
The ones whose life is wounded.
The strangers from the side walk of life.
The ones whose life was too lonely to live.
Because no one knows
If the pain, the side-walk of life, the loneliness
Will be resuscitated too.
Because, at times, one life is enough.
***
Maybe one day we'll return to the world.
For sure, we'll be confused, we'll remember nothing.
They'll have to keep some places of memory.
The home where we learned how to be good
And we were not sure if good is quiet,
The school with the beautiful teacher, where we learned how to love.
The small hotel where our body carved the bed.
For sure, at least one place will remember us
***
There are many corners of silence.
The corner of silence of a child
Where he dreams of being a grown up.
The corner of silence of a grown up
Where he dreams of being a child.
The corner of silence of a poet
Where he dreams of writing the silence with silence.
***
When I was a child I didn't travel with the train,
I traveled with its sound, with the giant of smoke.
I traveled far, further than what I imagined
And I returned more pure, more impure,
Because the eyes of a child feel,
Even when they are not sure what they saw.
***
Poet grow old too.
They sit on their chaise-longue
And dream of a lyrical place for their eternity,
Maybe they want to make the end their best poem.
***
When we walk for long, we may overcome all the limits,
Even the limits of time. We may see strange things.
People carrying the first vases ever. And they are tired
Because they carry the future, and the future is always heavy.
***
We grow old.
It is the aged calendar which falls piece by piece with the slightest breeze
That knows it is too late, even before we know it,
That we need urgently a calendar for eternity.
It is sad, because we want to write poems for people,
And we don't know if there are people in eternity,
And if they need poetry in order to survive.
***
Everything ends, only the autumns continue,
Like sad children stories.
Maybe these stories continue
Because children gather sadness for the future.
***
Often love becomes spoiled, poisoned words.
And we don't know if love has an expiry date
Like the best delicatessen.
***
The nice things we have loved died.
They are one more death among the deaths around us, inside us.
Maybe we resist death more than what we imagine,
After all, we began dying a moment after we were born,
And from what they say, we'll continue dying long after we died.
***
Things have their own loneliness, their own truth,
And we have to remember it,
Because when we choose our home, it is also the home of the things,
And we have to find the right place for them
So that they'll be home.
***
So many autumns and we don't recognize the smell.
The odor of things that die in a life that is no longer its own,
Maybe we don't feel it
Because there are always dead leaves in our life.
***
There are many things that suffocate us.
When we drown in the sea, even if it is the sea of the past.
When they hang us for a crime we didn't commit.
When the unsaid is too much.
***
We grow old.
We take only short walks, up to the inn of small sins,
And we rest there.
We feel eternity is not for us,
We know nobody there, so it will be lonely.
***
Our mothers often read to us fairytales
With bad witches, bad wolves
Which always made us sad,
So we wept together, because some tears bring us close.
***
At times, the twilight reminds us
Of a wonderful life,
But we don't know when we lived it, or if we lived it,
And it is a pity,
Because forgetting the wonderful life
Doesn't make death any easier.
***
At times, we walk like prisoners among the grey buildings
And we don't look at the sky.
And it is a pity,
Because the sky lets our eyes be free, our thoughts be free,
And because of these eyes, these thoughts,
It makes us beautiful.
***
It is strange how the doves, the symbol of freedom,
Return always to their cage.
Maybe we get used to cages, maybe we call them home.
Maybe even loving the cage doesn't make it less cage.
***
Maybe, if we look enough
We can find, among the chaos of leaves,
The enigma of autumn,
Because we hold the enigma of a leaf in our hands.
***
In a world of endless motion
Everything is alive, even death,
Because time continues to roll in the time of the dead
And even in the time of the tomb-stone.
***
It is not that we don't know how to be a child,
But we are afraid of being a child,
Because a child is too naked,
And because he is not afraid to cry.
***
Maybe, whatever we loved
Was a candle, somewhere distant,
And it was trembling because it is not easy to be a tender light,
To love silently.
***
Leaves, like everything else, are a question that no one could answer yet. An enigma.
Maybe, that's why they are so beautiful.
Maybe one day we'll have the answer,
And they'll still be beautiful,
Because each answer is also a question. Another enigma.
***
The night of the children reads to them from the book of fairytales.
Maybe that's why children sleep more, dream more,
And maybe they gather dreams for the dreamless years.
***
The moon in the sky and in the sea. The true magic,
And all we see are broken mirrors in the water,
And it is sad
Because also what we see in our life, our magic, are broken mirrors.
***
In the room, the light of a candle
And around it shadows,
As if it were a private twilight. A truce.
Because the night comes.
***
We never know how to be a child.
When we are a child, we are a child, because there is nothing else to be.
So when we grow up we have no manual for childhood.
***
Whatever exists, exists because we share it,
Because nothing can happen alone,
Not even the lonely moon.
***
Life passes, and this is something we cannot forgive.
Maybe that's why we learn to forgive nothing.
***
Usually, we don't say the truth
Because we are not ready,
And because we forgot how to cry.
***
The small hotel at night.
Your body full of shadows and sin
Lies tight to my sad body.
Slowly, you pull me out of hell.
***
In order to understand the world
We have to begin with the world,
Or at least, with a leaf of the world,
If this is the only thing we have.
***
I think that in the after-life we'll be still ourselves,
Because we don't know another way to be.
So maybe even in the forever of the after-life
We'll die the small deaths of loneliness, of pain,
And it is a strange forever.
***
At times, we find on our way
The fallen gaze of a stranger.
Some gazes are heavy because hunger is heavy, despair is heavy,
And we don't know if we are strong enough to lift it,
To bring it back to his eyes.
***
Not only people die, also ideas die.
Usually we die when we are skin and bone,
And also ideas die when they are skin and bone,
When they don't have life enough to live,
Not enough to feel the living.
***
The humanitarian feelings
Make us as tall as the child of a stranger, because hunger is tall.
As tall as the guillotine.
As tall as the night of a woman.
***
We grow mature slowly.
Maybe that's why we are never ready for the evening,
When old age usually begins.
We are not ready to become less eternal.
***
I love the autumn leaves in my hand,
Because they are an enigma.
Because the world is the enigma of a leaf.
***
Poets write poems
Because they refuse to die.
Maybe they became poets
Because they believed that eternity exists.
***
Maybe the strangers on the side-walk of life
Burn inside from hunger, from despair.
Maybe that's how they survive the long winter,
Because the winters on the side-walk of life are long,
Longer than in the middle of the street.
***
We arrive back home in the evening.
We have a Voodoo doll and poisoned arrows,
And we kill, one arrow for each one who killed us during the day.
It may not save us from hating the others,
And we are not sure if it saves us from hating ourselves.
***
The tall mountains are for the daring, for the un-forgetful,
And for the oblivion of someone else. For the stranger who crossed them
Because he had no choice,
Because the world ended where he came from.
***
We don't know if loving the same thing
Will make us love each other,
Or if we'll remain alone, only with the thing we love.
Because we know everything about things,
And almost nothing about human love.
***
We can be lost in many ways.
When we climb mountains that are too tall.
When we walk on the street of time too far.
When we are in a place for the old and we lose the person, the human, that we were.
Maybe, when we are lost somewhere, we are lost everywhere.
Or maybe some things can find us. The feeling of loss, the dreams, the regret.
***
Thoughts are never safe.
At day time we can keep them secret,
But at night we have to wear a hat, to keep them covered,
Because we know what thoughts are capable of doing when they are left naked.
***
Usually people live in the side streets of life,
Protected from great destinies,
And because they are busy living,
They don't have time for great destinies.
Maybe we need the wise men of the tribe.
Maybe they'll say nothing,
Maybe they'll just make living, the daily living,
Be a great destiny.
***
Sometimes, in nights that kill us
We look for the moon of our childhood. The innocent light.
We forget that the moon is always innocent,
Of course, it sees the pain, the despair,
But it sees also our bodies of love, and they purify it.
They give back the moon its innocence.
***
The ones for whom it is too late for everything,
For the quiet sleep of a child,
For a train they wouldn't take.
Yet, it is never too late to see the others for whom it is too late.
The stranger on the side-walk of life,
Because hunger, despair are always too late.
***
We grow old.
We leave the mirrors because they never helped us to love ourselves
And because we need it more than anything else
Before the night comes.
***
When I was a child
I loved the sound of the trains, the giant smoke,
Because they fed my dreams,
Because children are hungry when they don't dream enough,
And this hunger lasts for years, for ages.
***
We ask for many things
But we forget to ask how to use them
How to use life, how to use dreams.
Some things die when we don't use them.
***
The small hotel.
We lie, your night in my night.
You lift your skirt, your innocent wings,
And you enter heaven, pure.
***
Children love writing letters to the angel of the children,
Because he knows that the truth of a child is different,
And because he is not afraid to cry.
***
Maybe one day we'll understand among the chaos of shadows
The enigma of twilight,
Because we can touch the enigma of shadows everywhere, even inside us.
***
We run each day up to the end of ourselves, up to the end of the world,
In order to live.
And the Odyssey of coming back home is not a poem. It is a cry.
***
The woman who reads the cards.
I don't know what she can read in them,
But I love to read her face reading the cards, reading me,
Because faces are the real cards.
The kings, the queens of fate.
***
We are always in a hurry,
And yet, we are always late,
For the sound of the train that could take us far.
For the silence of the office that can take us nowhere.
For the flight of the birds some twilights, that takes us everywhere.
***
We are always in a hurry,
And yet, we are always late,
For the bus, for the train.
That's why we are never here where everything happens.
The crime of the century. The shouts of the crowd.
And we are innocent. We were late.
***
When we lose our soul somewhere,
We lose it everywhere.
We can still pet a puppy or even a child,
But we'll have to wear gloves
In order to cover the invalid. The soul-less fingers.
***
The infinite I walked in small rooms
When I thought what to write.
Because the infinite is everywhere
It's enough to feel it.
It can be in the small room
Or in a poem of a line or two.
***
We forget how to see the others, and maybe also ourselves,
So when the crime of the century happens,
We'll have for witnesses all the people who didn't see,
Who didn't notice, who didn't know.
We are guilty.
***
Some people pass their life looking at the horizon.
Maybe they know something we don't,
Because the horizon is full of future, and at times, hope.
***
When I was a child
The giant smoke of the train
Took me further than the train,
Because it arrives to the infinite,
Because it took me to the infinite each morning.
***
Playing with life is dangerous,
And playing with the lives of others even more,
Because the arena where we play is a mine-field,
Where we may lose a hand, a soul.
And when we think about it, life is a mine-field too.
***
Little by little we become invalids.
We cannot protect ourselves from the others, from ourselves.
At times, the wheel-chair of life: the past
Carries us to somewhere safe.
***
Usually the future doesn't forgive us,
Because the past doesn't forgive us,
And there is too much past in the future.
Anyway, we still as forgiveness,
Because we don't know how to forgive ourselves.
***
The future doesn't judge us innocent, nor the childhood,
And yet, we have many alibis for our sadness.
Maybe they are not enough.
***
We need an alibi for every crime,
Even for killing ourselves
Because we are lonely, because there is no reason to live.
But we don't have a solid alibi, because we were,
As always, alone, when the crime happened.
They'll hang us, our dead body, our dead life.
***
They say that the humble will earn the earth,
That when we are humble the angels smile,
But we are not sure if all we'll earn is the humbleness,
Because we may have grown used to it,
And anyway, the smile of the angels may be a delicatessen for the soul,
But for sure, not for the body.
***
We are humble. We sell on the street umbrellas from the biblical flood,
And third hand parasols for sunny days that may not come.
We sell humbleness to the humble, because no one else wants to buy it,
And because it is the only way to earn, one day, the earth.
***
In the circus everybody is humble.
The clown is humble because there is no other way to be a clown.
The man on the tight rope runs his humble marathon in order to live,
And the lion is humble, because he already forgot he is a lion,
That's why he'll be able to live by the lamb.
I think it is the circus that will earn the earth.
***
Poetry
May begin as a landscape, or as a city tour,
And we realize, when it is too late,
That it is a tour to another landscape, to another city:
To ourselves, or even to the stranger with the strange eyes on the side-walk of life.
Poetry is not safe.
***
Maybe poetry is a mine-field
Under a field of tulips.
It is never safe.
***
The foggy bar.
We look at each other. What are we looking for.
Maybe for everything, or maybe only for something,
Because there are many something and too few everything.
***
We are alone in the foggy bar.
We wear a wide coat,
Room enough for all the things that wouldn't happen,
Room enough to live alone,
Because loneliness and the things that wouldn't happen
Bloat us. They hurt.
***
The melancholy of the twilight.
We feel more than ever the sadness of surviving the remnants of the evening,
The remnants of our life. And we are alone.
Maybe we believe in being alone because we don't believe that half-sadness exists.
***
We dream too much and we are always somewhere else,
So we have no alibi,
Because we were not here, and we don't know where we were.
We are guilty.
Anyway, also the prison is not a threat, because we'll be somewhere else.
***
In order to find people, we need a road,
And in order to make a road we need a dream,
Because roads are the dream of finding people,
And people are the dream of finding a road.
***
The journey to dream is not safe. At times it kills us.
We send the birds to find our dead
Because they died in the same dream
And because birds know where tears died.
***
The stranger on the side-walk of life
Left hope somewhere on the way,
But he continued, because he had no choice.
It was the hopelessness or the nothing.
***
We don't know if death purifies us.
Maybe it purifies the ones who don't need it.
The people who were pure, the dreams that were pure.
***
Maybe it was a choice.
Maybe we chose to be a traveler without a map,
Because we believed that the dream was enough.
But it wasn't.
Maybe a wild animal will find us. Wild animals are pure.
They know where tears died.
***
Some dreams purify us
Because they are an act of love. Because they love life,
Because love always purifies us, even the body of love.
***
The woman in the foggy bar was strange
Like someone from another age, someone from an old love, an old sin.
We don't know if in other ages people had such bars of love, of sin.
Maybe they existed, otherwise how could their sins purify us.
***
There are dreams that are safe,
Because we dream alone, because others don't dream in our dream,
Because we are never here, where everything happens.
Our life. The life of others.
***
The night. The hour between sleep and no sleep, is the hour of the best ideas.
To write a poem about a second moon.
It will be nice to see the love of two moons in the middle of everything,
To let it purify us.
To write a poem, like a modern Buddhist, on the sand,
Because the sand is eternal.
***
At times we feel we are prisoner of a dream that was lost in our childhood.
When we think of it, we are prisoners of many things,
But the prison of some dreams is different,
Because they have the key,
And because some dreams are not lost easily.
***
The streets of the big cities
Seem like a cry, like the dream of a mad man,
Like a drug addict, a moment before the dose.
That's why poems are written in these,
The poetry of a cry.
***
At times, we feel that the world is a personal matter,
But there is only one world and too many persons,
So it may be true for the world inside us:
The spring, the leaf of autumn in our bed.
***
The nocturnal train.
From the window the cities pass like torn flags in the wind,
Because flags are torn when we don't need them anymore,
When the train has crossed all the borders of dream.
***
When we go out to the street
We wear a wide coat, in order to cover a dream,
Because some dreams are not safe,
And maybe even the thought of them is not safe.
For sure, the prisons are full of thoughts.
***
Compassion
Is the only thing that forgives us,
When we ask forgiveness
Because we didn't forgive ourselves.
***
We need scare-crows
Because the birds are hungry,
And because they are strangers,
So also their hunger is a stranger,
It is hungry in a language we don't know.
***
We need scare-crows
Because the birds are hungry,
Because the autumn of the birds is hungry.
It is a leaf of autumn in our life.
***
Maybe if we don't find the infinite in small things,
In the gaze of the child of a stranger from the side-walk of life
Or even in a poem,
We can find it nowhere.
***
We live the infinite in small doses,
With small spoons,
And it is a pity,
Because we don't feel the infinite in the infinite,
We don't feel the infinite inside us.
***
We grow old.
Some nights you try to remember the body of love.
You bring up your night gown.
You show me the sadness, the tender sadness.
***
The endless sirens in the street
Sound like a cry of hate.
Maybe that's why, in the big cities
It is not easy to remember how to love.
***
We live the pages of great history
In the newspapers where we brush our shoes,
And it is O.K.
Because history that cannot run with us each
Up to the end of the world, in order to live,
Is not great.
***
The days exhaust us. The marathon of living.
So when night comes, the beautiful night,
We don't know what to do,
Because when we are exhausted,
Even beauty exhausts us.
***
The small hotel, at night.
We lie by the window of old lost things,
And it makes the bodies of love even more important,
Because they remember.
***
Maybe we torture the after-life
By thinking of it too much, and by the black thought,
Because we are not saints, and we know it.
For sure, we torture ourselves.
Maybe the after- life doesn't even exist,
So it is three tortures in one.
***
Poetry doesn't say.
It means.
Maybe that's why a poem needs so few words.
***