THE MANUSCRIPTS OF A TWILIGHT

Raquel Angel-Nagler

When I was a child we were poor,
But everybody was poor, so it was normal.
They were survivors from the past,
From a past that was burned in an oven for people.
Also the cries at night were normal.
I thought that the dreams of grown-ups cry, always.
I was only a child, I didn't know I was the last border
Between them and the oven for people.
Now, I know it was not enough.
Some nights when the silence was particularly heavy,
They burned.
***
***
We die before we have time to mature,
Before we know the questions that make us old.
Our death is older than ourselves.
***
I write letters to my dreams,
The most beautiful letters.
They are so beautiful because they are so true.
It is easy to write your truths
When you know no one will answer.
***
It is not easy to change
The mornings, the afternoons of our life.
Time continues to walk in our time.
Time loves routine. It gets used to its usual street,
To its usual side-walks.
***
It is not easy to begin again.
Time continues to walk in our time,
All the beginnings continue to begin,
Yet, we don't have a quiet hour
To wait for a beginning.
***
In order to begin again
We need the hunger to begin,
Like the hunger of a stranger for a second life, after his first one.
We need to begin long before we begin.
***
Whatever door I open
I find the face of a child: my face.
I love this face: it's happy.
It is an hour before the loneliness,
An hour before the past. The past that burned it.
***
Whatever door I open
I find my past.
The smell of burning things,
The empty wall,
The shadows of old pictures carve it.
***
***
We keep our traps:
The trap of longing, the trap of loneliness
Under our cloths,
So that they'll be Invisible.
Yet, our eyes are naked.
We need urgently dark sun glasses.
***
The birds forgot my childhood.
They don't come to my hand full of seeds.
Birds need , like us, a hand full of wings,
In order to live.
***
One day, in the middle of a dream,
Our dreams lose their face in the mirror.
Our childhood, like so many other things,
Ends in the middle of a dream.
***
There are places that are not safe:
The station where we wait for ourselves, alone.
The train-tracks where we get lost forever,
In the middle of a dream.
Maybe our journey lasts always up to the middle of a dream.
***
Somewhere, sometime I realize
I don't need imagination.
Life imagines for me.
There is nothing to write, only to copy.
I am hungry.
***
It is not easy to write at the height of people.
There are tall ones, short ones.
I write for those who are short
Because they are bent, like me.
I write for those who carry a past
Bigger than themselves, like me.
***
The black stains on my desk.
I use a pen, like a child.
I carry everywhere the desk of the child.
I draw the map of the black stains,
I count the countries, the continents
Where I was alone. Where I am alone.
***
I was always in the world,
Yet, far from the world.
In places that feed the anonymous, the lonely.
My poems are an anonymous letter
To anonymous lives
Maybe, because I don't know to whom I write
I feel closer to these unknown faces.
It is always easier to feel close to the idea of people,
Than to people.
***
Sometime, in an evening like all others,
In the same room, at the same table
Your fate becomes clear,
Like someone who eats the last dinner
For the first time.
***
It is the closed doors that close all the rooms.
Each room could be another possible life, another possible dream.
They leave us in the same life,
In the same corridor of time. And we have no choice.
We follow it.
***
So much life, so many things that happen,
That don't happen.
If it were not for the leaves
That fall always in the same time,
For the twilight that comes always in the evening,
We would forget that eternity exists.
***
Everything is a door. It has two faces.
One day I'll open a door,
I'll see its other face.
Maybe I'll know why I lived in the corridor
For years, for ages.
***
We travel. We lose ourselves.
Even when they find us,
We are lost. We left too much of ourselves behind.
When we lose something on the path of time,
All we can do is remember
***
I write about lost life, lost truths.
And yet, I went always on the right street,
Maybe I slept for too long on the side-walks.
***
I tell my stories, even though I know it is too late.
Stories are stories when there is someone to hear them,
Someone to believe, utterly believe them.
Someone who is old in a young way.
***
The caress sees us
Through the cracks of the fingers,
But it is not enough.
It has to feel what it sees,
It has to find its way in our deepest skin,
The true abyss.
.
***
Sometimes, at night
There is a beautiful silence.
We walk with invisible steps
So that nothing will disappear, nothing will be lost.
But, at times, our steps forget. The mystery is lost.
Yet, it doesn't matter.
We lose mysteries all the time, even the mystery of time.
We lose beautiful silences each twilight.
***
The secret card game with play with life.
We have so much to lose: the past, the future,
We know we are losers:
Our hunger to win is a loser .Our hunger to survive is a loser.
And yet, we play in order to live.
***
Our blood is never young.
It is the sum of all the blood of the past within us,
Of all the blood that was bled.
Maybe the blood that we bled
Is the blood that hurt most, that we loved most.
***
When they bury us,
They bury also the ones who killed us:
The eyes that pierced us with their blindness.
They remained in our eyes.
The hands that never gave us their hand.
They remained in our empty hands.
***
There are too many words.
In order to write many things
We have to use few words.
Maybe we could write, like the sun, many things,
In the word ' light'.
***
I was never in Jerusalem, in the address of saints.
Yet, the body of a child: the child that I was
Was buried there.
An hour before the sky grew empty.
***
The long hours of a long day.
Everything happens a moment before dinner.
The thieves that steal our dirty cloths,
The quiet that washes our body,
The twilight that uses the eyes
Of an old man with an old peace.
***
At times we wake up and we are someone else.
People recognize us,
But we don't recognize ourselves.
Maybe, by mistake, we wore the cloths of someone else,
The smell of someone else.
It is not easy to remain always ourselves.
***
It is so nice to give presents, without any reason.
To give a thief what he stole.
To give a sinner the pleasure of sin,
To give a child a dream.
***
It is so easy to steal our life.
To use the glasses of someone else.
To use the gloves of someone else..
To take the clothes of someone who died,
Someone beloved.
To keep them in the chest
That we open each evening.
***
The long journey.
We return after years. In autumn.
The room is different.
The clock shows the time of growing old.
The walls show the cracks of growing old.
Life is a leaf of autumn on the little bed of a child.
***
Birds need their wings
In order to cover their face from the raining leaves,
In order to cover their face from the raining dreams.
When we are not careful, dreams rain also into our life,
They change us, they make us someone else.
We need umbrellas. Always.
***
Some evenings
We walk like a blind man.
We try to touch the face of someone 's life,
We try to hold someone's fate,
With all our loneliness in our hands.
Fate is not blind, loneliness is.
***
Each morning our dreams are shot, like the sun.
We recognize the body: it's us,
And yet, it is an old man with dreams older than himself.
Our dreams are shot hour after hour, day after day,
The old dreams, the young ones.
***
We bleed mostly inside.
We become invisible
So that no one will see where we bleed.
People stab us always where we bleed.
Yet, we also stab ourselves, always where we bleed.
***
I learned how to live with my life
When it was too late.
When pain lived in my life,
When loneliness lived there.
Yet, at times, quiet evenings live in my life.
I stitch the laces of the dream of a child.
I stitch the laces of a dream.
***
Some evenings I wear my black glasses
In order blind black moments .
Like the moment before my dreams die.
The moment before nothing is left to live for, to die for.
***
Tears are our true Chamaleon.
They change the color when our pain changes:
When pain burns us, when it blinds our nights,
When it bleeds our life.
They leave us naked, and we don't know it.
Pain makes us color-blind, life-blind.
***
We wear black glasses in order not to see ourselves
When our sandcastle is conquered,
When the dreams of our childhood are conquered.
Maybe black glasses make us invisible , even to ourselves.
***
We write our name on a wall
In order to be eternal.
Some evening someone passes by the wall.
He sees. He remembers.
This someone is all the eternity we have.
***
We are born an hour after pain,
An hour after the loneliness.
We learn, so soon, how to cry,
Without knowing why.
***
We keep always the light on.
There are so many dark stains on the window,
And it's not that we don't trust humanity,
But we never saw its other side.
We are safe.
***
Strangers live always in the shadows
In order to have time to send roots
An hour before they are torn:
Roots, branches, leaves.
I am a stranger too, I know it.
Shadows are a safe place.
***
An hour after the world was created
We began wandering, homeless.
And we continue wandering.
Those who are born homeless
Have no home within them.
They remain homeless.
Maybe the home within us is the only home we'll ever have
***
We are born
Nomads in life.
All our homes are nomads in life.
Some evenings we remain homeless.
We wait for a wandering home.
***
Alone in my room
I hear the distant sounds of real life,
Yet, I know no longer what real is.
I don't know if my poems
Are less real than my tears.
***
Words betray us,
Yet, we don't know how to be silent,
And anyway, also the silence betrays us.
***
DIOGENES
The spark of death in our eyes
Is stronger than the torch.
It is as strong as life,
Strong enough to find the Man.
***
We don't let anything die homeless:
We remember.
Even the nomads, the homeless in life,
Don't let the desert die homeless.
***
I go with an open shirt,
Yet, no one sees I am naked.
After all, we learn, an hour before we are born,
How to close our eyes, even when they are open.
***
I learned how to live nameless,
An hour before I had a name.
I continued to live nameless.
Being nameless is safe.
No one can see us.
***
We are not a magician, but at times we feel the aura of the hour.
We laugh, just like that, without a reason.
We cry, just like that, without a reason.
We are happy, and we don't know it.
***
Maybe my life is sick. Maybe I need a cure.
Maybe I need more bodies.
I need the body of tenderness,
I need the body that feels my feelings, that feels the feelings of others.
Feelings are contagious. Tenderness is contagious.
***
It is not easy to cure humanity.
There are not enough hospitals.
Yet, humanity is not a cureless disease.
Some quiet evenings we cure it:
We let it live in our lives.
***
The hurried days. The pain of living.
At times I think life is not a cureless disease,
But I don't have a quiet hour to cure it.
***
We grow old.
We live alone like a deserted home , like a deserted life.
Yet, at times, a wanderer with old eyes, old shoes
Visits us.
At times, a visitor can make a home more home.
***
Somewhere, sometime
The birds lose their beautiful colors.
The sky of feathers is no longer there.
A moment before our eyes lose their childhood.
Maybe we need a magician, or at least a child,
In order to see the Babel of colors. The visible.
***
We grow old behind a closed window.
We feel how fragile is life, maybe it is another kind of glass.
We know who are the criminals.
We know it is the eyes that don't see us,
That pierce us with their blindness,
That break it, hour after hour.
***
We grow old.
At times, hope is a cureless disease,
Yet, we have to be sick
In order to survive another hour, another night.
***
Because you never asked anything,
Because you didn't know the questions,
Because you didn't know there are answers.
I need you. I need your night in my night,
I need your dreams in my dreams.
***
We cry for something forgotten,
Like a lonely old woman, like a saint.
At times, we live for something forgotten,
And we forget why we lived.
***
I grew old. I forget.
Yet, in some quiet evening I think
That I forgot only what I never really remembered.
***
All the letters we never sent
Were already sent.
When we write a letter ,it is already sent.
We said what we wanted to say,
Which is usually the reason why we need letters.
***
We don't know the danger
Of everyday's things.
We look at them for so long,
Until we forget how to see.
Thankfully, there are the Sundays that save us.
***
Some nights, when the silence is particularly light,
I see life for a moment, the way one sees a face in a window.
I see its eyes,
Softened by the eternities.
I see its face
Carved by my own past. My burned past.
And I never thought that life remembered it.
***
At times we are bent, not from the years. No.
From playing with the children.
From playing with their immense laughter,
Bigger than their face,
From touching their loneliness,
A moment before they grow old.
***
Everything happens before breakfast:
The mornings where we open our eyes
The mysteries that become bigger,
The way it happens when we use the gaze of a child.
The postman that brings us a notice that we grew old a moment ago.
***
Each lie is the truth of something else.
The little lies of love, of the night,
Are the truth of loneliness,
Of the fear of dreaming alone.
***
No one knows how to close a door,
How to quit when it is time to grow old.
There are doors with the spring of time
That close by themselves.
***
No one knows how the doors of the past close,
How can they leave so much past
On both sides.
***
The longest journey is the one
Where silence
Sits near us, inside us,
The silence that has nothing more to say.
The loneliness that has nothing to say.
***
We sell our old home, all our old things,
In order to buy a dream:
A house in a new suburb of life.
Yet, we keep a few old pictures,
The shadows they carved in the wall,
A lonely flower pot.
We can never sell completely an old home.
***
I like doors that have personality, character.
I always wait on the other side of the door.
I am curious by nature.
Doors have always two sides, two personalities.
***
I like doors that are the shape of my life.
Doors without a name.
The people who love me
Know always where to enter.
***
Your eyes are wondering, like the eyes of a child.
You use the language of truth
Yet, the truth of a child dreams.
I don't have enough childhood within me,
To know why are you wondering, and why your truth dreams.
***
It is not easy to live alone with our truth.
We gather pieces of truth from the street:
A broken toy of a child, a loaf of bread.
We need also the truths of others in order to survive.
***
When the street grows empty
I go out to gather things that people lost:
A broken doll, a wallet full of dreams.
I am a scavenger by nature.
I gather lost things,
I gather the loneliness of being lost: my poems.
***
I am a scavenger by nature.
I gather old things:
A fallen leaf, the torn page of a story,
My past: a burned doll of a child.
The doll that makes me old.
***
There are truths that are true, yet, at time, they dream,
Like the truth of a child, like the truth of a moment of love.
It is not easy to gather the pieces of truth from dreams.
It is not easy to know the truth of a dreamer.
***
The distant music
Makes the night more infinite.
Yet, we need a magician, or at least a child,
In order to hear the infinite, to feel the infinite in what we hear.
***
The black stains on the window.
I draw on them the map of my dead ends.
My dead ends are the black stains on a window.
I forgot how is its other side.
***
We grow old.
We leave our gazes on the window seal,
Yet, no one passes by.
We have no choice.
We learn how to wait in the hard way,
The way we learn almost everything.
***
To learn how to retreat a little,
How to be vanquished a little.
To learn how to own our retreats,
In order to own our life.
***
I am a moon believer, like a child.
I believe in the moon in the water.
I need, like a child, magic, in order to live.
***
The long night.
Each morning we have to learn again how to survive
One night older, one pain older.
How to be different in order to be the same.
***
The creation of the world is finished.
Nothing left to be infinite,
Not even eternity, not even the dream of a child.
***
We are all human,
Therefore we need a home.
Even if it is the side-walk of life,
Even when there is no door .
Only the gaze of the others that knocks to enter.
***
So many ages. Everything changed its shape:
The provinces of life, our homes, us.
Everything except the little clay jag of water.
It remained the same.
A mouthful of life.
***
We are born, a child of our time.
Yet, there are so many times in other places,
In other provinces of life.
They are a child of another time: their own.
***
Whatever was buried can be unburied,
The jag where someone drank ages ago
That has still water.
***
There are things we cannot forget:
The closed doors of a home .
The closed arms of a mother.
They make us old, an hour after we are a child.
***
The first men were black.
Little by little we became whiter,
Our gods became white ,
Our paradise became white.
The shadows remained black.
***
What we see is truth,
And yet, our thoughts can change it,
They can make our eyes think.
Thoughts are good sunglasses.
***
We use so few eyes.
We see the things that love the style of our life:
A big sofa, a picture that we see and that sees us,
A door with a big beautiful key.
***
It is years now that I am a street cleaner,
The street of time.
I sweep the dust of the past.
I make people young. It is the past that ages us.
I carry the sack with the past each day. I grow older than my age.
It is not easy to carry my burned past and the past of the others.
One day, I'll be another past among the past of the others.
Someone else will make me younger.
***
It is not easy to be homeless,
To have no door where everybody
Has to knock in order to enter:
The winter, the rain, the loneliness.
The saints that pity us.
***
Everything happens in waves:
At times the pain is more pain, at times it's less.
At times we grow older than our age, at times, less.
We live, we die between one wave and the other.
***
I got used to look through half-closed eyes,
In order to see, feel, my shadows, the shadows of others.
I write the poetry of shadows.
Light writes itself.
***
I live invisible, I write invisible.
Invisible poems are not easy to find.
Maybe someday, someone will find them,
When I'm not home.
***
I live alone.
One person with so many lost lives,
So many burned things.
I am afraid.
I cannot keep even one more lost thing.
I can lose nothing anymore.
***
The autumn seems to come from another life.
The years seem to fall from another life.
And yet, they leave us leave-less, naked as the rain
They rain into this life.
***
Truths begin
When there is no other way to save ourselves from ourselves,
When even the side-streets are dead.
***
We walk, like a child, on the train-tracks.
We believe, like a child, that like this we'll never be lost,
Yet, we are lost, we don't know where we were lost,
And why we always lose ourselves when we are on the tracks.
***
There are in life too many questions that have answers.
Too many to ask. Too many to know what to ask,
Anyway, we live among answers ,and we are an answer,
Even if we don't know it.
***
I gather useless keys.
Keys that don't remember the door, the home.
Keys too rusted to be keys.
Yet, I believe in keys.
I need keys in order to see the two sides of the door,
In order to know if to enter.
***
There are too many useless keys in my life.
I was homeless everywhere.
Yet, some evenings, a poem comes,
Through a door that doesn't exist,
With a key that was useless .
***
Each thing has its own time, each own rhythm.
Also our eyes need their own time
In order to see someone from close,
In order to be less afraid.
Fear is afraid of closeness.
Loneliness is afraid of closeness.
***
Our eyes cannot see from too far, from too close.
Each eye has its own distance to see someone,
To see its own fear, the fear to be seen by the other.
We see the distances that make us lonely.
***
It is not easy to be homeless.
At night we are trapped by the stars,
At day time we are too tired to dream.
We lose our dreams when we don't use them.
***
I wear old small shoes,
Too tight on my feet.
All the big shoes were taken by big persons.
Yet, there are no shoes big enough
To conquer the only street that exists:
The street of time.
To conquer the fear of the street.
***
We write our memoirs,
Yet, we don't know who we were,
We lived for too long in the cafes of life.
We write the life of someone else,
Someone who wore our old cloths.
Someone who didn't know
He'll grow old in the old cloths.
***
We wait in the waiting room of life for so many things:
For ourselves, for a medicine that will save us,
For a moment of sleep.
Waiting is a tiring work.
***
I write complicated things
In order to make them more simple.
I write 'pain': pain is complicated.
I write 'loneliness': loneliness is complicated.
I let them speak in the everyday tongue.
***
I began writing too late,
When I knew no longer the questions,
When the answers didn't matter anymore.
Poems may not have answers, but they need questions.
Maybe it was too late for poems.
***
It is the big events that make us what we are:
Spectators in life. Sleepy.
Big events last for too long.
***
I wear old shoes, second-hand.
They are small, they hurt my feet.
When I walk in the daily street: the street of time
I wonder what hurts more:
The street smaller than my feet,
Or the shoes smaller than my feet.
***
To remember the eye of a child.
How to look at the people lost in the street,
Or maybe in themselves,
With an open gaze. With open answers.
***
I never speak to strangers with strange eyes.
They may be returning, like me, in the last moment, from the journey to the past.
They may be, like me, the last man surviving from their past.
It is the past that kills me. Now.
***
There is no home without childhood, at least our own.
There is no childhood when there is no home,
When it becomes, like me, like all the strangers, a nomad in life.
***
I wrote my will.
I left everything for those of a burned past:
For the burned doll of a child,
For the burned book of a poet.
I left everything, yet, it's not enough.
I have no past to give them.
My past was burned in their past.
***
It's evening in our life.
Within us: something like the smell of a forgotten garden.
Maybe the garden was us.
Maybe life was a leaf on the little bed of a child.
Yet, the smell is too old, too old to remember.
***
In your hands:
The feathers fallen from a frightened bird.
I glue them, one by one, on your body,
Yet, you are different, your coat of feathers is different.
Everything changes us.
Even another coat.
***
Usually, traps don't come alone.
The trap of the conquered is defeat.
The trap of conquering is defeat. It defeats us.
***
I like to hear the old men.
At times they say:
When you win something, you also lose something.
And yet, we believe in conquering.
We need a giant Gulliver that never grows small.
***
At times, a small word
Can change everything we say.
A little 'maybe' is enough.
***
The more I age, the less words I use.
Pain, loneliness are not talkative.
Silence is not talkative.
Each evening I become old.
***
The older I grow, the less words I need.
In a while my poems will be only two words:
The beginning. The end.
Some words are immense,
Because they are so small.
***
Sometimes you see someone you don't know. A stranger.
He weeps, alone in his eyes,
And yet, he weeps also in your eyes.
You carry him along for hours, for days.
You never know why he cried.
***
Usually I wear old cloths. Presents of someone.
I don't know why I smell different,
Why my sweat is different, why I walk different.
I never knew that the cloths of someone
Could make me someone else.
***
I grew old, almost eternal.
Some evenings I sit with the saints,
With those whose past was decapitated, like mine,
Was burned, like mine.
No one of us is eternal.
There is no eternity without the past.
***
Pain is not a saint,
Yet, it is eternal.
It is more eternal than all the saints
I meet some evenings, in my home.
***
Maybe I committed too many crimes against myself.
Yet, in order to execute me forever, to exterminate my name,
They have to kill all the lives that I was.
When they come to take me from my cell
They'll find
A little child playing with star-dust.
***
I write in the cellar of my days,
Where there are no untidy sounds, no voices.
Voices confuse me:
Everything finishes with a question mark:
The questions. The answers.
***
The poetry of words that want to say nothing:
A flower.
We love this poem.
***
At times I stop in the middle of the street
As if I heard someone shouting.
I also shout sometimes in the middle of the street.
We need to know that our shout exists,
Therefore, we exist.
We shout also when we don't know it.
***
Maybe the voyage doesn't exist.
Maybe I write the poetry
Of something that doesn't exist.
The poetry of a dream.
And yet, this dream makes me old.
***
Our shouts undress us from our old cloths,
They leave us naked in the middle of the street.
That's why we shout mostly inside us. Invisible.
***
I am not a national poet.
I don't remember the big words,
And they don't remember me,
Yet, I write about big things: pain, loneliness.
In order to write things that are really big
I use small words. Pain is a small word. Loneliness is a small word.
***
I live in a forgotten suburb of life.
A stranger.
I am anonymous, I write anonymous poems.
Anyway, who remembers the name of a poet.
***
The poetry of the man who light the street lights.
The poetry of a man
Who make the night less night.
***
There is always a home in our sleep,
Even when we are homeless,
When we sleep on the side-walks of life.
***
We wear old fashioned hats, fancy, second-hand,
In order to walk in the street.
And yet, we return home each day unseen,
Without eyes in our eyes, in our hat.
It is the gazes on the street that make us invisible.
***
Mirrors see that we are dying.
I sold all my mirrors to a second-hand shop.
I never liked prophets.
***
Everything happens an hour after we grow old.
Everything disturbs us:
The steps in the next room,
The untidy noise of the birds,
The whispers in the ground floor of our life.
Maybe we don't know that we've changed,
Or we know and we don't know why.
Maybe it is because we don't want to be old,
Because it makes us angry.
***
The things we don't love disappear.
There are no birds with their mad noise,
There are no people with old clothes,
And old wounds in their eyes,
There are no children with their untidy cries.
Only our life cries more often.
***
At times we are lost, utterly lost.
We stand in the street, we ask who we are.
Yet, no one sees us.
There are questions that make us invisible.
***
Some evenings I tag, like a child, my war ships,
In order to win the only war that matters:
To open the port that lets everyone in,
Even the ones wounded for so much death, like my life.
To die with a shore in our bodies.
.
***
Maybe there is something after death.
Maybe they'll judge us.
They'll ask if I am me.
I'll answer: yes. I am I.
There is no bigger confession.
***
Even the big events become small
From too much waiting.
Waiting tires us, it makes our dreams sleepy.
It is the dreams that make the big events big.
***
Maybe there is a god.
There is earth for sure.
Maybe they need us, between them,
In order to use our words.
Our words are born from eternal truth: life.
***
I wore my old shoes,
I travelled to places a moment before they had a name.
I left the little days, yet, they didn't leave me:
The same street of the hours, the same meals of the hours,
Maybe the little days are the only life that exists,
Or maybe it is because I wore my old shoes.
***
I'll vanquish my children, the children of my children
The only thing worth vanquishing: my dreams.
All the other things are consumed by the little days of life,
Even beauty.
Dreams can continue to dream for long.
As long as there are dreamers.
***
It is our little days, the street of the hours
That passes through them
That consume our old shoes, that consume our eyes.
Our eyes are consumed when they see always the same thing,
Even when it is not the same.
***
So many things that repeat themselves.
They consume our eyes:
There are no birds, no skies of feathers,
There are no wanderers with sad eyes in the corner of the street.
Things disappear when our eyes disappear.
***
The dreams that I had in the morning:
A journey to a place that will exist when I'll be there.
They all died in the evening, the hour when dreams die.
From then on I gather dreams from the street.
I find lost photos of dreams, a torn map of a dream.
I travel in the dreams of others.
***
Everything remains unknown
Until we know it.
We are a child who doesn't know his name,
Who doesn't know that names exist.
***
DEDICATED TO MARY ECONOMOU
All the miracles that happen to me were temporary.
I was a child, temporarily.
I was saved from pain, temporarily.
I am alive, temporarily.
Miracles are not less miracles,
Even when they are not eternal.
***
My dreams died without any reason.
I had to become a scavenger.
I gather lost dreams from the street,
Dreams thrown to the garbage, burned pieces of dreams.
A person can do everything in order to dream,
Even if it is a dream that not his own.
***
Our dreams grow old. They die.
Yet, we have good friends who help us.
They send us parcels with their dreams.
We grow used to dream the dreams of others
***
The things we can find in a train station:
The remnants of a loneliness,
The shadows of lost tears that no one tried to find.
Old shoes that were consumed by someone from another land.
We wear them and they make us different.
They make our feet tired and old.
***
Our little days consume the big truths.
They make them small, the size of our eyes.
They make them real truths.
***
Again and again, things appear in our eyes
The moment after we leave.
As if they existed also in another place,
In another province of life.
At times we see them when we are tired,
When we are ready to accept everything,
Even what we see.
***
Miracles happen all the time:
People with old eyes who disappear
From the side walk of life, where they sleep,
The moment before our eyes are there.
And the miracle of being in the right side walk, in the right eyes,
Where we can see them.
***
Everything happens when we are not here,
Even the wanderer with the old eyes that didn't find us.
It's not our fault. We were not here,
Yet, where are we when we are not here,
Where do we live when there is no here,
And why do we come back always too late.
***
Each evening I see a stranger in the street,
He stands under a rain that lasts years.
Maybe he is waiting for something,
For a gaze that will find his gaze,
For a man with old eyes and an old umbrella.
I don't know why my clothes are wet, why my shoes are wet,
Why my eyes are wet.
***
We pray for forgiving:
For the sins of love, for the sins of hatred
For the sins of indifference,
When we cannot forgive ourselves.
***
We are ready to be born,
Even before we are born.
Yet, the mothers need more time to be mothers.
They are not ready.
***
We stand on the bridges of the world,
Like a child who wants to cross the bridge of time,
But is afraid.
Rivers have so much time running in their time,
So many abysses rolling in their liquid abyss.
It is not easy to cross a river.
***
There are so many rivers where time rolls in their time.
There are so many bridges in our life, where we cross time,
Where we become suddenly a child.
Where we become suddenly old.
***
Our body is the place of so many battlefields,
The mines of pain, the mines of love.
The body is not eternal,
But the battlefields are.
***
We advice the others
That which we cannot do ourselves,
That which we long to do ourselves.
We advice as if we were speaking to ourselves.
***
The evening within us.
Our watch stopped in another time,
Our dreams stopped in another time.
Yet, we grow old in this time.
And we don't know which clock death uses.
***
The evening within us.
We use our silence to count
The length of the loneliness, the length of the night.
As if ready.
***
As long as I have tears, I am saved.
I don't have to live in the street, to wait for the rain,
For the water drops to fall into my eyes, into my life,
The way tears do.
***
We forget how to hold hands like a child,
With all the hands we have, with all our bodies.
We give only one hand,
All the rest of us remains outside. Alone.
***
I write poems, I love poems,
Yet, the birds fly higher than thoughts,
Higher than our cry
***
We come always too late
To our life, to the train.
That's why we cannot ride,
We have always to walk the street of the hours,
To consume our old shoes .
***
When I am with other people,
I feel always that I have too few clothes.
I never knew how to hide myself behind myself,
And anyway, my poems are naked.
***
I stand unprotected in front of my burned dead,
My burned past.
They hurt me, even though they don't know me.
One day they'll burn me, even though they wouldn't know me.
***
A past that was burned, decapitated
A moment before it was past,
Has nowhere to go.
Yet, it burns my dreams.
***
I became modern.
I travel in my sleep in the cars of the tomorrow.
Maybe someone will find me in a dream of the future,
He'll find the poems that could have been written.
My most beautiful poems.
***
I am not old fashioned.
I don't believe in God,
And yet, I think it would be nice
If He would believe in us.
***
I grew old.
I don't have many questions left,
Yet, I would like to know
If pain can die,
And if the body of pain is eternal
***
I never understood my little days, the street of the hours,
Therefore, I never understood the world.
That's why I wander silent.
I don't know the right questions,
And I am not sure if I'll recognize the right answers.
***
Thankfully, I never understood the world.
The little I saw:
The pain, the burned gaze of a little animal,
Were the only education I had.
It was enough.
***
The older I grow,
The longer the past dreams in my dream. My burned past.
It is too much past for only one dream.
It is too much past for only one life.
***
I write a short book about short dreams.
I grew old.
There is too little time to dream.
The dreams have to be short.
***
One life is not enough,
Not enough to remember how to live.
That's why we have the night: our other life,
Where we learn how to dream
And we never forget it.
***
The things we did and we regretted.
The things we didn't do and we regretted.
They leave a shiver in our life.
Regret is a fever that lasts for years, for a life time.
***
Our life is not well. We need pills in order to sleep,
And we wake up after days, after ages.
We are old, and we don't know it yet.
***
So much loneliness
Yet, our days are too busy, too small to see it.
It is easy to hide big things behind small things.
***
Little by little we learn how to hide our eyes, our lives
Behind tears.
Also the gods of mercy used tears.
Maybe they were hiding too their eyes.
***
Some evenings I remember
The ones who stabbed the thin bones of a child.
The ones whose sleep forgave them.
Yet, there is too much past in the thin bones.
It doesn't forgive.
***
I love words that make me small,
Words that make me all that I love:
A child, a puppy, a new-born leaf.
Small is beautiful.
***
In order to find our life
We have first to lose it.
Yet, life is not a wallet, a hat,
That we lose somewhere in the street.
It lives too deep in our lives.
***
We feel that we lose our life
Looking for it,
Yet, we use our life in order to look.
We lose our life when we don't use it.
***
We feel that we lose our life
Looking for ourselves, missing ourselves.
Yet, missing ourselves is life.
At times, when it rains, and the strangers
Are on the side walk, without an umbrella of mercy,
Also life misses itself.

***
Your body: a secret violin, a secret music.
I close my eyes
In order to hear you better,
In order to see you better.
When we close our eyes we are closer to ourselves,
We feel what we see, what we hear.
***
We are always in an age that is not our own.
We don't know if we are coming or we are going,
We don't know how old is old ,how old are our dreams.
We don't know if death has an age.
***
Wherever we go there is a horizon.
That's why we look so far.
That's why we lose ourselves in the middle of the way,
In the middle of our dream.
***
We inhabit whatever we love,
Whatever carves in our eyes
The picture of 'home'.
We love this picture
***
At times,
We walk on the street of time with nameless footprints.
They make us different. Names change us.
Being nameless changes us.
Names are the first thing we own and the last.
***
We long to escape the habits of living, the habits of time,
Yet, our little days are too busy, too full.
They don't have a free moment to see us.
Maybe they'll see us one day, when they are tired.
The longing to escape in contagious when we are tired. Too tired.
***
I love children-trains.
I travel seated on the lap of my childhood.
My dreams curl by me, like a little animal that loves me
I love their magic. They take me so far
On such small tracks, on such a small seat.
***
Nothing can leave the infinite. Everything is forever.
A bird in the moment before flight keeps its wing alive, forever.
A hand in the moment before leaving its touch remains full, forever.
The moment when we are born, is forever.
***
At times, things that were lost in time
Are the ones that hurt us most, in the places where we hurt most,
Where our life hurts most.
Maybe everything is forever,
Even an eye the moment it becomes a tear.
***
At times, we return.
We visit the old school, the old benches. We visit ourselves.
On the desk: a broken clock. It shows the time of eternity.
***
Our years don't leave on the main street,
They leave in empty side streets, in secret alleys.
That's why we don't see them,
That's why we don't realize they have left.
Yet, in some quiet evening they return.
We tell them what we remember.
***
To be small. To be closer to my body,
Closer to my eyes,
To be closer to what they see.
***
I am a dawn lover.
I love the way it lights the dreams of the children,
The dreams of a lonely wanderer,
A moment before dreams die.
I never knew how old is the dream of a child,
How old is the death of his dream.
***
We open a door the way a child opens his questions.
Yet, we don't know how to close the door.
We leave so many questions on both sides.
***
Closing the door doesn't close our life.
We simply need silence in order to rest from the world.
We need silence to rest also from ourselves,
Yet, our thoughts are too loud.
***
We close a door as if to sum up our life,
Yet, we don't know if the life left in the corridor
Is also our life.
***
I don't know why we speak, always.
Why we say things that everybody knows,
Things that bore us, that make us old.
Yet, it is not easy to hear while we speak,
It is not easy to be silent while we speak.
***
I don't know why we speak, always.
Why we say things everybody knows.
Maybe, speaking to each other,
Even when we say things we all know,
Is an act of love, and we don't know it.
***
There are no old days.
Only old eyes.
Each day is new, different,
Even when it has within it so much past,
So many old things.
***
We look at our old days, all their old scarred things.
They need urgent repair.
They need a magician.
A magician is someone who knows how to see, the true magic.
He can repair old scars, our old solitudes.
We need a magician to repair our old days.
***
I write letters to myself.
Letters long to be answered.
I answer the way I answer my questions:
I see them. That's where all my answers begin.
***
In order to correct my poems
I speak to them.
I speak the way one speaks to a little beloved animal:
I take them for a walk in the street of people.
***
We wait for ages in a station of life.
We have an old suitcase with all our years in it.
Yet, when the train comes, it is always too late.
We've lost our suitcase in a corner of time. We are alone.
***
At night we put on a new night gown
In order to dream new dreams,
And yet, we dream old things.
Maybe our dreams are old, older than ourselves,
Maybe we inherit them,
The way one inherits his tendency for love.
***
The faces of the refuges on the street,
People of a god I don't know.
They give me a longing I cannot explain:
The longing to recognize the map their dreams leave
On the side-walk where they sleep,
To recognize the map of their faces.
I am a refuge too,
I know the map of a mine field, and why we dream carefully.
***
We understand things too late
When the street of time took them far.
At times, we understand them in a dream.
Dreams are a little animal:
They see, they smell, they feel.
***
The greatest adventure is turning the corner of the street.
We may find another sun, another sky.
We may not return for months, for years,
And we never return the same.
***
For me, reality died a long time ago.
At times, pain is stronger than reality. It kills it.
It leaves a lonely dream, dreamt by those who walk,
Like me, on the side-walk of life.
Maybe reality is alive in for others,
For those who walk in the middle of the street.
***
We walk the endless street of time
:
We keep our foot-prints carefully in our hand,
The way one keep something dear,
Something that can be lost any moment
Footprints are the proof that we travelled, that we lived.
We need proofs, always.
***
It is not easy to be remembered,
To keep our foot-prints in our pocket,
Until they become too heavy,
Until we walk, we sleep, we dream
With stones in our pocket.
The beautiful stones that will make our death beautiful.
***
It is not easy for the fruit
To fall far from the shade of the tree.
The shade is safe. It protects it.
It is not easy for the fruit
To fall too close to the shade of the tree,
The shade that makes it invisible.
***
I don't know how many times I died in cheap hotel rooms
Where no one was waiting for me, not even my childhood.
The cheap hotels where the beds smelled of the bodies of others.
So many die when no one waits for them.
***
At times, we hear the steps of a wanderer in the street.
The steps are lonely, fragile.
Maybe we hear ourselves in the street
So fragile. So alone in all the nights that exist.
We cry and we don't even notice it.
***
So much earth in my pain.
I write my poems
The way one comes back from the years of earth
To bring a secret root.
***
I was always homeless .I live in the corridors of life.
I know the closed side of the doors. The closed faces.
I know the whispers, the way only one who lives whispering
Can hear.
I recognize the cry for something only the cry remembers.
***
The things the shadows of twilight can find:
They can find the flower that needs the shadows in order to live.
They can find the body of love that needs the shadows in order to love.
They can find an old man with an old peace.
Peace is twilight.
***
I send always letters without address.
In order to have an address you need a home.
I am homeless,
And all my friends are homeless in their home.
***
The things that children love:
The low sky that gives them the bird.
The bird that gives them a feather.
They keep the feather under their pillow for years
In order to dream.
***
I grew old.
I know no longer what big is, what small is.
I don't know if my small steps on the street of time are really small.
I don't know if an autumn leaf on my bed is really small.
***
We forget how to love even our hopes.
Hopes are the toy of life.
A toy dies when no one sees it,
When no one touches it.
The death of hope
Is the death of something beautiful.
***
DEDICATED TO MY SON
We meet our children when they leave.
We meet the man within the child.
We meet the child within the man.
We love them both.
***
PICASO
"We have to know the rules in order to break them",
Yet, at times we know the rules
And they break us.
***
One little life is not enough for all my poems.
I use also other lives in my life. The life of others.
Maybe the life of others is contagious, it enters our life,
And there is no cure.
***
The evenings are dangerous.
The strangers with the old eyes, old steps come from somewhere.
They consume their weary shoes on the street.
I don't know what they are looking for,
Maybe for a window that is always lit, like mine,
Or maybe their past is too tired to sleep, like mine.
***
Doors are a dangerous place.
They let our life leave us, even when they are closed.
Breath by breath we evaporate through the gaps.
We never know what happens to the vapors on the other side of the door.
Doors are never safe.
***
So much burned past within me, so many memories.
Some days I decide to bury them.
I put on the earth a beautiful stone.
Yet, stones remember.
They have so much time in their time.
***
I don't hear much music.
Words are the only music I love.
They say music makes you forget yourself,
But I forgot so much, I want to remember what I can remember.
***
For me, words are a picture drawn by a child.
A picture of what he feels,
Even when he draws everyday things.
***
We sit at the table. We use the empty chairs of the dead.
We continue a meal that was stopped in the middle,
We let them eat from our plate.
Food is love.
***
Maybe we are not happy, because we are not ready for happiness.
Maybe we don't love, because we are not ready for love.
Yet, we are not ready also for loneliness, even though we were lonely for years.
***
Children don't cry without reason
Yet, we know the reason
When we learn how to cry like a child,
For the blindness of a pushcart,
For the old eyes of an old wanderer
Who wept in our eyes.
***
They say that there where light ends, the darkness begins.
Yet, light never ends,
It continues in the side streets of life,
In a lonely candle for someone who died.
***
It is the light that makes the darkness seem more dark.
That's why we sleep with the lights off.
That's why we look at our life with the lights off .Always.
***
It is on the side-walks of life
Where strangers with strange eyes sleep,
Where I sleep,
That I have learned how to be alone, yet together.
Sidewalks are good teachers.
***
There is nothing that can pay the debt of living,
And anyway, we are never really prepared to pay the debt.
***
The rain comes always from far,
Even when it rains nears us,
Even when it falls into our life,
Like the gaze of a stranger.
***
At times, the rain-drops on the glass
Draw an illegible map,
Like the map of the journey to myself.
At times we glimpse who we are when it is too late,
When it is a map of the rain on the glass.
***
I don't know how I arrived here, and why I arrived so late.
Maybe it was the cross-roads that aged me.
Each choice makes us one choice older.
Maybe it was the deserted stations where I waited for myself
Hour after hour, for years.
Waiting is hard work. I am tired.
***
I am a dreamer who began dreaming
When it was too late to dream.
Yet, dreams are a little animal, they don't know about ages.
I dream dreams and I write them on a piece of paper near my bed.
That's why my poems are short,
When you are old you don't have time enough for long dreams,
And the piece of paper is small.
***
The corner of the street is the end of the world.
We don't really know it, yet, we are careful not to turn.
Maybe we are supersticious,
And maybe fate really loves the corners of the streets.
***
Whoever stands at the corner of the street
Has already decided .He is ready.
In order to see the end of the world at the corner of the street,
We have to be already there.
***
We stand at the corner of the street, undecided.
Yet, the corner of the street is an immense magnet
That pulls us to the sun of the next street, to its moons.
Magnets know what longing is.
***
At times, I ask people in the street if they remember me.
Maybe I need the proof that I existed in someone else's life
In order to feel less stranger.
Maybe I need a proof that I existed, that I exist.
***
I grew old. I moved to another house,
A house full of past.
There was not room enough to live, to change,
To be different than the yesterday.
It is the past that makes me walk in the side-walk of life,
Where strangers walk, carrying a suitcase full of past.
***
I grew old and unsafe.
I feel that the things of everyday life are dangerous,
An adventure to the unknown,
And the only adventure I can take is a book of poems,
Or at most, a movie on the T.V.
***
Maybe people see more than we know,
Maybe they know more than we imagine.
That's why I go always in the side streets of life
Where there are less eyes.
In order to survive, to live, I need the secret of my life.
***
When you grow old the climate changes.
It is always more dark because there is always more winter.
I use a torch, like a modern Diogenes,
Not in order to find the truth. No.
In order to know that I am home,
And anyway, home is truth.
***
So many eternities: pain, loneliness. So many candidates for Paradise.
Little by little we consume the eternity of pain.
Maybe that's why we have no Paradise. Nowhere. In no life.
***
I love living with everyday things,
Things that are a little old, a little scarred.
These things have an invisible beauty,
The beauty of things that are touched, that are used.
We see it when our eyes are ready.
Beauty is beautiful even if it is invisible.
***
People tell me: be careful. silence is a dangerous thing.
I don't know what they mean.
I never knew my silence was dangerous.
Maybe I never knew what people mean,
Maybe I walked for too long in the empty side streets of life.
***
I use simple words. Simple words have so many meanings.
I write: hunger, thirst.
Two simple words that were never really simple.
***
We grow old enough to be citizens of ourselves
After all we are so old that we are almost invisible.
We have the right to cry the cry that grew old in our mouth,
But we are tired, and the cry is tired .
***
People tell me they are the citizens of the everywhere,
That we are not a tree, we don't need roots.
I remain silent.
I am the citizen of the nowhere.
I don't have in my hand even the earth of the tree.
***
I looked always to the place people don't look.
It's not that I don't fear death. No.
It is that the more I fear it the more I look.
At times, fear is a temptation..
***
We all need a torch, not in order to see. No.
In order to be seen.
Usually the gaze of people passes somewhere near us
As if we were invisible.
One day their feet will stampede our life.
We need a torch. Always.
***
Maybe our true mother-land , the true mother-earth are people:
The roots in their eyes,
The soft earth in their tears.
Their hand that holds our hand: a naked branch.
***
At times I see in the street
Old dogs playing like a puppy.
I don't know how they do it.
Maybe dogs don't know how to age properly,
In an old way, like my life.
***
We wake up in the middle of a dream.
The street is empty.
Where did everybody go and why did we stay.
It is not safe to wake up in the middle of a dream.
We grow old in the middle of a dream.
We die in the middle of a dream.
***
We live between the fear of being alone in our room
And the threat of the street.
Nothing is safe. We fear even our fear.
Yet, some evenings we go out.
The stranger with the strange eyes who is the threat of the street
Is there. Alone.
We don't know his language, yet, our lives speak.
The fear of loneliness is a good teacher.
***
To love
The way we love our children when they are tiny,
When words are not there yet,
When only our lives speak.
To know it is enough.
***
The things that kill us are inside us from the beginning:
Old age is there, pain is there, loneliness is there.
They are silent but they are ready.
They leave a leaf of autumn on the little bed of a child.
***
Our whole life is an obscure memory,
As if it were something we remember in our sleep.
Maybe we'll wake up when it is not too late,
When there will be someone to remember.
***
Our childhood, our whole life are an obscure memory,
As if it were something someone remembers in his dream.
Yet, this dream is the only childhood , the only life we'll ever have,
And it doesn't matter, we are used to dream ourselves.
***
When I was a child I drew the picture of God
The way I wanted him.
I kept the drawing in my drawer for years.
I could always find God when I looked for Him.
Yet, things love to be lost.
At times we lose our dreams, at times ourselves,
At times we lose our gods.
***
Maybe we live blind, deaf, ready for nothing,
Not for the cry of pain,
Nor for the noise of time in our room.
***
The rain is a toy of a child. The puddle. The dance of the rubber boots.
Yet, little by little the toy becomes autumn.
A leaf of autumn in the little hand of a child.
***
Children don't know what time it is,
That's why they can live the eternity of a moment.
And we never forget it.
Even an hour before the last memory
We remember that we were once eternal. That's enough.
***
The rain write its will over our heads.
It writes the autumn, it writes the wet life of the strangers
Who stands under my window each evening,
And I don't know why I am wet, why my eyes are wet,
Even though I have always a good umbrella.
Umbrellas are not safe .
***
We grow old suddenly, from one hour to the other,
Long before we are ready , before we know it is time.
Yet, time rolling in our time knows what time it is.
Also the secret heaviness, the secret stones in our pockets,
Know what time it is.
***
There are no leaves on the side-walk of life where the strangers sleep,
Yet, they know what the rain carves on the leaves.
They can smell the shiver of a leaf that is cold,
After all, their lives shivered so many times.
***
No one returns from the past.
Yet, the one I met in the empty corridor, has returned.
Corridors are not a safe place.
You may find the silence of a stranger who sleeps there when it rains,
You may find someone who returned from the past,
Who is burned, like me, under his clothes.
***
The past, the pain, the loneliness of a stranger burn me.
Usually we burn under our clothes, where we are naked.
That's why we are always dressed, even in our sleep.
***
Candles, their soft light, are merciful.
They remember the ones that are forgotten, that are gone.
Maybe my life is a candle.
Maybe I burn in order to remember the burned ones.
***
Whispers are candles.
They give me their soft light
In the evenings when my eyes, my life are hardened by pain.
I light my whispers always more often.
***
We grow old behind closed doors,
Where no one can console us, where no saint can pity us.
Yet, some evenings we go out to a quiet side street of life.
We meet the stranger who grew old behind closed lips.
We stay there. We share our old silence.
***
The most beautiful poems
Are the ones I never wrote,
That's why they are the only ones
I'll leave for the future.
***
I never led people, I never told them where to go.
I didn't follow them.
I only asked where everybody goes
And why no one is here. Why I am alone.
Maybe I asked too many questions,
Maybe I should have written poems instead.
***
It is the things that are near us that can enter us,
That can shatter us inside.
At times they are things bigger that ourselves.
It is easy for big things to enter small ones,
Like the air of the whole world in our mouth.
It smells like an old man, after all, the world is old.
It leaves us dreamless.
Like the lonely street of time that passes through us,
That makes us walk until we cannot walk anymore,
Until we lose the secret muscle that lets us live.
We are shattered inside. We are tired.
***
It is the things that were near us from the start
That can make us old.
Maybe we don't know how to find them
Because they are too close.
Maybe they are in the lonely doll of a child near our bed.
Maybe they are in the pushcart, alone,
In the corridor of our life.
One day they'll find us. They'll make us suddenly old.
***
The past in my home was not a ghost. No.
It was there in the closed hands
That kept it from being lost.
It was in the chairs at the table where the past sat with us.
I was a child when I understood it for the first time.
Childhood understands.
That's why I became old, a moment after I was a child.
***
Loneliness is not a street. We cannot cross it.
It is a piazza with empty cafes
Where we turn round and round, hour after hour,
Until we become suddenly old.
***
Old people have old smells.
At times it is the sweat of the years.
At times it is the smell of closed rooms where they close their pain.
They don't like the odor of pity.
At times it is the beautiful scent of women that never forgot them.
I love the smell of old people. They wear it over their clothes.
***
To fall asleep like a child.
Like after a game that left him almost dead.
Like after a day that left him with too many answers.
Answers can tire us.
***
I love all the things that give me hope:
The train tracks that arrive farther than my life.
The horizon in the old eyes of an old man.
A little book of poetry. As long as we write poems
There is hope.
***
So many things that make the night more secret:
The distant laughter of a woman.
The silence in the old eyes of an old stranger:
A silence that comes from somewhere else.
A hidden corner where someone writes letters to God.
***
One life is not enough when it rains.
Except the life that gets suddenly wet,
We need a life that grew used to live wet
On the side- walks of time where the strangers sleep.
We need a life with an umbrella of mercy.
***
We have always an alibi.
We are ready for those who'll accuse us for our silence,
For not being there when everybody was there.
We are ready for the last judgment.
We'll say we were writing poems when everything happened.
***
I am not a dark person.
Even my hair is not dark anymore,
And the black clothes don't fit me.
Maybe it is my silence that makes people say I am dark.
Silence is not safe.
***
I gather small meaningless things from the street:
A lost doll, an old shoe consumed by age,
In order to write my poems.
I like to imagine that they had a meaning,
That meanings are not lost so easily.
***
Everything is a mystery until we understand it.
But, we are safe. We understand so few things.
Life, our beautiful life, will continue to be mysterious.
***
Our dead leave behind them so many things.
They leave us, their leave in our eyes the color of their longing.
They leave diaries: their imaginary friends.
They were lonely. Their secrets were lonely.
***
What we hear is never clear,
Like a conversation in a party club.
It is not that we don't want to hear,
But we don't have enough silence inside us.
That's why we hear ourselves so rarely.
***
At times we see strangers on the other side of the street.
They shout something, maybe they need help.
But we cannot hear them.
In order to hear someone
He has to be on the right side of the street.
***
I am always silent about my secrets.
Maybe I am suspicious. Maybe I trust no one.
Anyway, it's useless. Secrets are temporary.
We lose them the way we lose so many things:
A doll of our childhood, our childhood, ourselves.
***
We long for things so distant
That we don't remember anymore,
Like a doll that fell under the crib of our childhood ages ago.
That's why our longing is cureless.
We don't remember the doll,
And anyway, we don't know where our crib is now,
Where is the child.
***
It is the paper-boat of a child
That takes us to the longest journey.
Sometime, somewhere, we return,
And we don't know why we returned.
***
I like to keep the curtains drawn.
It's not that I distrust humanity,
But I am lonely.
Like all the lonely people I don't have neighbors,
And I don't know the faces in the street.
Open curtains are not safe.
***
I like to keep my curtains open.
It's not that I trust people,
But I am silent, often the silent ones are invisible.
People don't see me even when I am at the window
Wearing nothing except my hat.
***
Maybe the dead return too late, in an autumn that happens in the future,
When there is no one left in the world,
No one to speak to, to remember,
When all that remains is the rain, the autumn.
***
Maybe our dead return too late,
When we are too old to remember them,
When even our dreams don't remember.
They don't have a choice, they go back to where they came,
More dead than before.
And we don't know why we hurt.
***
It is never safe to read old diaries.
It is never safe to understand who we were,
To understand the sunglasses we wore always in order to see,
To understand the modern hats we wore in order not to be seen.
To understand who we are.
***
I was young once.
I used to be absolute, abrupt, too strong to know what weak is,
And I never forgot it.
It is a world of mirrors.
I see the faces of others . I see who I was.
***
I'll die, like the strangers
In a paradise of words I never understood,
And it will be too late, too late to understand
The meaning of what the others said and of what they didn't say.
There is no dictionary of meanings. Nowhere.
***
My true crime was stabbing myself. I was a stranger and alone.
The blood on the floor was mine,
Yet, no one saw me. I had no alibi.
I was guilty.
Strangers often have no alibi.
They stab themselves and no one sees them.
***
Each twilight
The light and the shadows judge me.
Usually the absolve me. They think I did my best,
But I know I am guilty, we are all guilty of something,
And we know it.
***
Usually we eat our dinner late,
After the shadows absolve us and we remain alive.
Food is a celebration.
It celebrates us, and it celebrates something bigger than ourselves.
***
The cross-roads is the sum of all infinites,
Of all the streets of time that exist,
Until we choose.
After we chose we lose all the infinites.
Only our dreams choose nothing. They are infinite.
***
I like to watch the ships sail.
There is so much infinite around them,
Maybe some infinite seeps into them,
Maybe the infinite can make small things infinite
Even a small poem.
***
I don't read newspapers,
They write the same thing with different names.
Yet, maybe I know who is the criminal.
I know that I stabbed myself in autumn, when it rained.
When they'll ask me I'll confess: yes, I am guilty.
Strangers often kill themselves when it rains over their life.
They are guilty.
***
I grew old. I don't travel anymore,
Yet, the places come to me.
Their image is unclear, maybe my eyes are no good anymore,
And anyway strange places are always unclear,
People see something hazy, something distant from their eyes.
Strangers are a strange place.
***
Maybe we write letters from the other side of life.
We write the things that we miss, the things that were important:
The way we sang in the shower because it made our voice clean,
The way the birds circled the house some evenings,
When the world was quiet.
***
At times, in a cafe, a stranger serves my coffee.
His hands silent from pain, as if he came just now from the endless voyage,
As if he knew what the infinite is, in this life, in those hands.
I am also a stranger. My suitcase is still unpacked.
My loneliness kept the infinite in this life, in this body.
***
A promise is a promise, until it is fulfilled,
Then, it is not a promise anymore. It is something else.
Maybe we are not ready for the something else.
Maybe we were ready only for the promise.
Promises are not safe.
***
Our clocks show the time of the irreversible,
But who has the time to see them,
Who has the time to go to court in order to change their system,
And who has the courage to know that everything is irreversible,
Even the cry he didn't cry even though he wanted to cry.
***
I live in the past, my burned past,
And the past lives in me,
As if time can go in two directions,
As if a cry can go in two directions.
***
We are never sure what happened in the past:
Yesterday, the day before,
When the crowd stampeded old dreams, new dreams.
We were not there, we don't remember,
And we don't know why we cry.
***
We are the only witnesses of ourselves
Yet, we don't know the truth.
Maybe we are in a thriller and we don't even see
Who is the killer, who is the killed.
Maybe we are guilty, but we don't know why.
***
I am a scavenger by nature, I collect the infinite from the street.
I find in the garbage the dream of a child
That continues to dream even in the trash.
I find an old shoe that was consumed in the infinite journey of a stranger.
I find pieces of pain.
Slowly I grow old, maybe I'll find the infinite in my nights.
***
My suitcase was packed.
It was ready for the journey to the infinite for so long that it was already there.
We need find the infinite inside us,
Or at least in our suitcase, in order to find it.
We should check better our suitcase.
***
We are all silent witnesses. We see, if we know how to see,
But we don't speak.
Only our life cries more often.
***
The trains on their tracks lose always the way to the infinite.
That's why our journey is so short.
That's why we feel we didn't really travel.
That's why we don't know we returned different.
Everything changes us. Even a journey that was too short.
***
The trains on their track lose always the way to the infinite.
That's why we have to return walking.
That's why the journey is so difficult.
We measure the street of time with our feet.
We measure the street of time with our life,
And we never return the same.
***
Slowly the past becomes a secret.
We don't know it, or maybe we don't want to know it.
We don't know who shoots us from the back,
We don't know in which ambush of time the shooter is waiting for us.
***
It's late in the world,
Time said all it had to say.
Yet, the autumns continue.
***
I don't know what makes us so vulnerable.
Maybe, even when it rains
We are not ready for an umbrella of mercy.
***
We live for so long with our truth
Because we didn't find home any other truth,
Until we go to street. We find other truths.
We find people who wear sunglasses when they see.
We find people who wear sunglasses in order not to be seen:
Pain disturbs our eyes.
There are too many truths on the street that disturb us,
That's why we don't know which truth to choose.
***
We live with our truth for so long.
Even when we discover the truths of others,
We don't lose it. We keep in the drawer near our bed.
***
We don't know who we fool and who fools us.
Maybe it is ourselves,
But we don't have a free moment to find it,
And anyway, so many things fool us:
The dreams, hopes, our life.
***
It is the cry for help from the past that shatters us.
We know who it is: the child that we were,
Yet, we don't run to help him,
Even though we know, better than anybody else,
That he needs help.
The past is not a safe place.
***
Day light is not merciful.
It shows our faces conquered by life, by the hours,
It shows our eyes conquered by what they saw.
We need urgently low brimmed hats and sunglasses to protect us.
***
Maybe my life was a mistake.
Maybe my truth was a mistake.
Yet, I wonder
How can a life be a mistake when it is home.
How can a truth be a mistake when it is a window into the street.
***
Our home is like the homes of everybody, everywhere.
Like everybody, we are homeless in our home.
We sleep in the corridors of life, like the strangers,
Even when we don't know it.
***
We are not a medium.
We don't know if our life is a dream,
Or if the dream is our life.
That's why we lose so many things: our keys, ourselves.
It is not easy to find things that are lost in a dream.
***
We remember the dreams that absolve us, that absolve our life.
We forget the dreams that never forgave us.
That left us unsaved.
***
Maybe we are a modern Samson,
Blind, deaf, ready for nothing.
We are never ready for the hair we lose,
For the love we lose,
For the life we lose day after day, and then, all at once.
***
Seeing disturbs us.
We wear sun-glasses, always,
Even when we dreams.
Probably dreams don't mind the sunglasses.
They are used to see in the dark of the room ,
In the dark inside us.
***
Dreams can change time, like a mad magician.
We are in one place, and in the same moment we are in another,
And we don't know where to go.
We are lost, and we don't know in whose time we are lost.
***
Dreams give us more lives.
The let us live again what we lived.
They let us live what we didn't live.
They let us, like a sad medium,
Live the past that was a mine-field,
And we were never really saved.
***
We don't dream. It is our dreams that dream us,
And we can change nothing.
We cannot close the eyes that were closed.
We cannot un-dream what we dreamt.
Dreams are forever, even when we forget.
***
At times we find ourselves
In the dream of others.
We wander in that dream, strangers, alone,
Like the strangers that dream on the side-walk of life,
And we never forget it.
***
The door open,
Like a giant book.
Yet, no one passes, no one enters.
Like a modern Plato I write the shadows
Of people that don't exist.
There is no face in my poem.
***
The only guns I know are the guns that shot me:
Pain. My past. The sunglasses over the secret eyes of people.
Secret gazes can shoot us, and all we feel is the blood in our eyes.
We should have worn sun-glasses.
***
We renew our life. We buy a new dress, new shoes,
Then we find that the dress is too narrow, the shoes are tight.
Old lives are old shoes. They are comfortable.
Maybe whenever we renew our life
It hurts us.
***
We hold the hand of someone,
We feel his tremble the way the blind feel the aura of our life.
I hold the hand of no one anymore. I tremble always.
***
Mirrors are a confessor, a confession.
We all need a mirror of mercy
That will absolve us.
***
We never know if we are on time
For the roulette where our life is played,
If we are on time to win our life.
To be rich.
***
We don't know that death has more than one meaning,
That it can be also alive in some places,
Where under the eternal autumn, the eternal rain,
There is an umbrella of mercy.
At times the dead can be alive in our bed-room, in our dreams,
Or under the porticos of the streets where we walk.
***
We grow old. We take the last taxi,
Yet, something in the air carries us somewhere else:
The smell of a distant sea that we loved,
The smell of a woman that loved us.
And we lose the way.
We die always in a somewhere else,
In a smell of mercy.
***
We change so much when we walk on the street of time.
It is not only our shoes that get consumed,
It is also our life that gets consumed by all the lives that crash on it.
It is alone, it is a stranger on the street.
The street forgives the strangers.
Our lives don't.
***
Our nights are a pilgrimage to our holy regret.
That's why we are purified in the morning.
That's why it is easy to do things we'll regret.
We'll be absolved.
***
In the morning we resuscitate behind tight clothes, tight shoes.
We have to finish the paperwork of our death,
The paperwork on our desk, before dying.
We need a certificate in order to live,
In order to die,
Even when we die hour after hour.
***
We hide in a corner of the office, in the corner of a file,
In order to protect ourselves from the eternal hours,
From the gaze of someone important who anyway,
Knows always where we hide.
In order to cry with no one to see us, not even ourselves
***
Nights can be a real slaughter
When we don't close well the doors of the house,
When we don't close well the doors of our fear.
Fear is a killer. It shoots us where we fear most.
***
I love the noises of the street, they are alive.
In the evening when it's empty, I go out, I gather pieces of the noise.
I gather the shout of someone who was too tired to be silent,
A button that fell from somebody who carried something big.
Big things are loud.
I gather the squeaking doll of a child.
***
We remember the hours in our pushcart.
The wheels still carve deep in our sleep.
We were alone for the first time,
And whenever we remember
We are alone for the first time.
***
I was a lonely child. I kept in my drawer a notebook with the telephone numbers of the angels.
I have it still bur I didn't call, even when pain was a slaughter.
They have my number too, and they never called .
***
We don't know what miracles are,
That's why we don't see them.
We need a magician, or at least a child
To tell us how to see what we see.
***
I grew old.
I try to gather the remnants of my body in a dress,
In order to walk on the street of time, like all the others,
In order to be less stranger. But it is useless.
I didn't have enough time to buy sunglasses
In order to cover my stranger's eyes.
***
After all these years, I am still a stranger.
Maybe being a stranger is a sentence for life.
Maybe the lock us because our eyes are strange,
Maybe because our ears are strange:
We never understand what the others mean.
The hunger to understand can be dangerous.
***
There are sins that take us directly to Paradise:
Like the sin of a secret love,
Like killing, each night, those who kill us each day.
***
I aged, and so did my friends.
Some grow old behind a silent window,
Some, behind too many words,
That make them older, older and more lonely.
Some, behind a beautiful stone.
***
I never make the account of my life.
For me, life is a thriller.
We never know who the killer is up to the last moment.
We don't know what we won, what we lost even after the last moment.
Maybe the angels will asses our account.
***
I grew old, too old to write the account of my life,
I forgot even how to count numbers.
Like the blind, I'll make my account,
By feeling with my fingers, my life.
***
We are one, and we long to be many.
Not like the gods, No. Really many.
To belong to the first tribe that existed,
To the last tribe that will exist
***
There are tribes,
In each tribe there are the wise men who know how things should be done.
And there is the magician.
The wise men don't write poetry.
The magician does.
***
It is not easy to find the truth
In our room, in the street,
Maybe because truth is simple,
So simple that it doesn't seem truth.
***
We wait for so long for a message from life.
Maybe it is the postman,
Or maybe life doesn't write so much.
We are alone. We have to write it ourselves,
With our own handwriting, with our own spelling mistakes.
We have to write the message.
***
So much loneliness,
As if there was no one within us not even ourselves.
We don't know where we are, when we'll come back,
And anyway, why did we leave.
***
I grew old.
My legs don't do anymore what they are supposed to do:
To carry me. To walk.
It is the end of the journey.
And maybe it's not. The street of time passes through us,
Long before we walk for the first time, long after we walk our last step.
***
I love to listen to the leaves.
They speak in a language I understand:
The language of seasons.
I understand the leaf of autumn left on by bed.
***
No one can begin again twice,
And there is nowhere to begin again.
Even the strangers who try to begin again
Remain in the same life, in the same loneliness.
***
Whatever happened cannot happen again, for sure not in the same way,
Because time continues to roll in the time of everything.
Each morning we wake up in the same hour, but not in the same bed.
Our bed is one night older,
And we are one night older, one night more alone.
***
When it rains
We all need the dream of a portico:
The stray cats that hide in the dream,
Us, when we are alone, and even our life is wet.
***
Sometimes I hear sudden shouts on the street.
Lonely people who used to be very quiet.
Maybe shouting of the lonely is dangerous.
Loneliness has silent rage in its loneliness.
When this rage shouts,
It is a Molotov of all its silences.
***
Because we are made of things we don't remember
We can never know who we are,
And we don't know why we bleed each day.
Maybe it was someone who was shot in the street
When we were in our sound-proof cart.
***
Lately, when I am lonely
I sing.
No one, not even the neighbors suspects I am lonely.
No one suspects the birds are lonely.
***
I play my role, I smile
In order to seem more happy.
And, for a tiny eternity, I am more happy.
Maybe smiling changes,
Like a modern magician,
The maps of sadness in our mind,
The continents of sadness within us.
***
Maybe the humble understand more
Because they are silent even when they speak.
They hear.
***
I wanted to be small
In order to understand small things.
Everything is made of small things, even our beautiful body.
Yet, when we understand, we know no longer
What's small. What's big. And why we wanted to be small.
***
The clock rings the time of those who survived.
Clocks know that we'll die.
I broke all my clocks.
I don't like prophets.
***
Because I am a mad-man I don't have an age.
Because I am a mad-man I don't speak,
I shout in the middle of the street,
I shout, naked as the rain, without an umbrella.
That's why my poems are locked in a safety closet in the madhouse.
Madness is contagious.
***
I leave behind me my poems.
But there is no danger.
No one will read me,
And even if someone does,
He wouldn't hear my cries in the paper.
He'll be safe.
***
It is the dreams, even those that flooded us over our head,
That made us a deep river,
That made us know what rivers know:
The way to the sea.
***
Maybe the only life we had
In the one that never happened ,or that should have happened.
Maybe that's why we cry like a child.
Children never cry without reason
Even when they don't know it.
***
We are sick, for so long, from all the lives that we lost.
We go to a hospital for chronic diseases,
But, they leave the uncuracle-uncurable.
We need a magician, or maybe a child,
Who don't believe that lives are lost in the nowhere.
***
Some evenings there is a sudden silent in the air,
Made of things we forgot.
We know them, we know their smell:
The smell of old garden that we loved,
Of a woman who loved us.
Silence is a safe place to keep what we forget.
***
Some dreams are not lost easily,
Maybe they are the dreams that could save us,
Maybe they could save even humanity.
But we need the dreamer
In order to find them, in order to dream them.
***
When we turn the corner of the street
We never know what we'll find,
What is sure is that we'll find our fate.
Fate loves the corners of the street.
***
I don't describe the first signs of aging.
I know them. They are slow, they are many
And my poems are short,
They begin a moment we become old .
Yet, some grow old in a young way, some in an old way.
They confuse me, they make my poems longer.
***
Maybe strangers don't cry simply because they are sad.
Maybe they cry because of the eyes that don't see them even when they cry.
Because they are invisible.
Maybe one day they'll leave and we wouldn't know whom we miss,
And why we miss.
***
Some evenings my poems are not ready,
Or maybe I am not ready.
Perhaps there is a reason,
Perhaps because the hour is beautiful,
Because the twilight is the best poem and I have nothing to add.
***
There are moments that make everything seem possible. Even eternity.
The small lamp we turn on in the veranda, when it's dark,
Is forever.
It makes us eternal, and we never forget it.
***
The distant song of someone at dawn is not lonely.
He sings for himself, he sings for all those who wake up early,
Whose life wakes them up early.
Also the birds are not lonely.
***
We all need a medium to remember the past.
At times we need another medium- a medium of mercy,
In order to forget it.
The past may be a mine-field.
***
At times, time is mercy.
It lets us forget what we want to forget.
But our dreams make time go in both directions.
They bring back what we forgot.
Dreams are not safe.
***
I don't take anymore my evening walks.
I don't have the courage to meet what I want to forget. My old shadows.
They take their walk in the same street, in the same hour.
It's safer to stay home. I don't know if the shadows know my address.
***
I remember no longer the things I wanted to remember.
I don't remember even why I wanted to remember.
Maybe they were important.
Usually we forget important things:
The keys to our house, and why our door is always closed.
***
I grew old and lonely. I have nowhere to go except the past.
I don't go out to find it in the street. The street of the past is a mine-field.
I take an album of old pictures. They cannot come out of the album.
They cannot cry. I am safe.
***
When I'll die I'll have nowhere to go.
Even the angels wouldn't be able to pronounce my name.
The names of strangers are strange, and even their passports are strange.
I'll need urgently another Paradise, or at least a hell,
Where I'll have a name.
***
When I have a free moment, I look for things I have lost.
At times we keep in the drawer near our bed our dreams,
The passport that knows who we are, the keys we didn't find
That keep our door closed.
We need to look often in our drawer.
***
Maybe our body is the wise man of the tribe.
It knows when it is alive, it knows when it's dying,
And all we can do is follow it.
***
When pain comes
It kills all our possible lives.
Maybe that's why we need the life of someone else: a touch, a gaze,
In order to survive.
***
We save the others
In order to save them.
In order to save ourselves.
***
Often the applauds fall like leaves of autumn.
Maybe leaves live more.
They have four seasons.
***
Someone beloved dies.
We are alone. No one can help us.
Yet, some evenings the dead return.
We kiss. We say nothing.
We love too much to say I love you.
***
We begin our journey so solemn,
Like a crusade to somewhere important.
We rarely conquer a Jerusalem.
At best we can conquer our way back,
Which is important.
***
Maybe I am too old for all this,
Yet, some nights I walk in suspicious corridors of suspicious motels.
I hear the sighs of love that I almost forgot.
For an hour or two, I die less.
***
It always happens like this.
We die in the middle of the long dream, or even at its end,
When we cannot dream anymore.
***
Usually we are undecided.
Maybe we have too many truths.
That's why half-truth is dangerous.
We need the other half to deny it.
***
At times
Our rage grows old behind closed lips.
Like all strangers, my rage has learned how to be silent
Even when the silence tears my mouth.
Silence is safe.
***
I felt so many kinds of tears,
Yet, the tears of rage have a different hue, a different color.
They paint our eyes, they paint our face.
Thankfully, there is still the silence to hide us.
***
The tears of rage have a different gravity.
They are heavy.
We have to keep them in clenched hands
So that they wouldn't be lost.
In the evening we lie down, we close our eyes,
In order to forgive.
***
At night we close our eyes in order to see better.
When we close our eyes we see what we cannot see when they open .
Maybe that's why we close the eyes of the dead. Always.
***
Often we close our eyes at day time
In order not to see,
In order to see, like the blind, what can's be seen,
In order to be invisible, which is useful. We are always guilty of something and we know it.
***
We begin from a sudden star-dust that becomes a body.
Love begins in hands softer that the softest star-dust.
The world begins again from the star- dust in a small hotel room, at night.
***
We dream so much.
We are always somewhere else, even when we are home.
When the post man comes
And we say we are not here, we are really not here.
***
Life passes and we don't know it,
Because we remember the wrong things.
Maybe we need a medium to see our past,
To tell us what to remember.
***
Maybe what I suffer of is an over-dose of sadness. It can kill me.
Maybe I can take pills that kill the sadness that kills me,
But I am not sure if they'll kill also the things that make me sad.
***
Some evenings I go where the sun goes:
To the side-walk of life where strangers die in the middle of a dream,
Where poems die in the middle of a dream,
And I didn't return yet.
***
In the middle of a lonely dream we open our door to someone,
But when we wake up, the door is locked,
And no one, not even us, is home.
We are experts in loneliness.
We know that there is no one home, even when we are home.
***
Each of our moments, of our hours, becomes dust.
The dust of time.
Yet, the autumns continue.
***
We cry naked, even behind our sunglasses.
Our tears are secrets that are not secret anymore.
We need better sunglasses
***
I have in my drawer so many anonymous letters I want to send.
They help.
We all need drawers with such letters
In order to revenge the dreams that remained dreams,
The possible lives that were not possible,
All the things that made us anonymous.
***
In order to be anonymous, we need to be a stranger.
To have a name that no one can pronounce,
To have a passport, the paper that knows who we are and that no one can read.
To sleep on the side walk of life with no name on the door that doesn't exist.
Some evenings we cry because we are nameless,
Because we remember that somewhere we had a name.
***
At times a page, a poem, flies through the window
Into the autumn where it rains leaves.
I run after it, the leaves fill my hands, my life.
I look inside the poetry of autumn
For the poetry of my autumn.
Maybe it is a poem of leaves.
Leaves have only one autumn, the first, the last.
***
We remember what our memories remember,
We know that memories imagine things: us, our past.
Yet, it is the only past we have,
And we have no choice. We take it.
***
At times we meet someone in the street,
Someone we don't remember, but he remembers us.
He is in a hurry, he tells us only some things from somewhere in our past.
It feels as if we entered in the middle of a movie
And we don't know who is the hero, and if there was a hero.
***
It is not easy to be young.
We lose each day so many possible lives, we lose so much that we are lost.
We feel that life is so distant, that we are at the door of the other life.
It is easier to be old.
For me life is as close as pain, and at night, so near the other life,
I dream this life. I live twice.
***
I don't travel anymore
But I like to read the time-table of the trains, of the ships.
They are the best journey. They take me so far.
I return and I don't know why I returned.
***
I grew old. Lately I see everywhere people without a face, with almost no body.
I know them. I know their smell.
They smell like the nights of pain where I died at times.
I need urgently a medium to hide me,
Or at least the police to arrest the killers.
***
We drown forever in all the dreams that we lost.
We want to write the date, the hour of death, the name of the killer.
We want to revenge the dreams,
And anyway death fascinates us the way fear does.
***
For some reason, my beloved dead return only at night.
They sing, they want to remember their voice.
That's why I cannot sleep,
That's why I feel so tender in the morning.
***
We buy dreams all the time,
In the shops, in the book stores, in a small hotel room, at night.
Maybe dreams are consumed easily,
Maybe that's why we go for dream-shopping
Each day or even each hour.
***
We dance, naked under our clothes.
We caress the eye of someone, naked under our clothes.
At night we undress in order to feel again what we felt.
***
We live. We play roles.
We don't realize that the face of our roles
Resembles us, more that our face.
***
The star-light is an old magician.
Maybe that's why it can change everything without changing it,
And it explains nothing.
Maybe that's why it is the best poem.
***
You get used to sleep on the side-walk of life, like all strangers.
Your bones grow harder.
And yet, at times they break,
When gazes pass through you, as if you didn't exist,
When a child brings an old doll to your child.
***
We are so heavy because we carry inside us
All the great things we didn't do,
All the conquering we didn't conquer.
That's why we have to rest so much, to live so little.
Resting is safe.
***
At times I buy a dream wrapped in a beautiful paper.
I give my body the smell of a dream, the dream of someone else.
We are used to wear the clothes, the hats that are someone else's dream.
At time we live a life that is someone else's dream.
***
I love the smell of love, the smell of your body.
I love the odor of sin in a little hotel room.
They feel like the smell of mercy.
***
Winter.
The snow falls everywhere, like a childhood story.
It falls also on the children of the strangers in the side walk of life.
They lose the story, they lose the childhood in the same moment.
***
We live in the suburbs of a beautiful dream.
We are safe.
We don't know that too much dreaming can kill us,
Like an over-dose.
We die and we don't know we are dead.
***
We don't write about everyday places, everyday dreams,
And yet, they are the true thriller.
We don't know, up to the last moment,
How the day will die, who will die with it, what lives, what dreams.
We don't know if there is a killer.
***
We all live in the everyday, even when we live in the suburbs of life.
Time rolls in the time of our bodies, of our days,
And all we can do is follow it,
Live day after day, die day after day.
Even in the suburbs of life
There is a calendar with most of the pages torn.
***
We grow old.
We sit with the other old people in the cafe
Where world wars are decided, attacks, retreats.
We used to be the wise men of the tribe,
And we still are.
We let everybody shout until they cannot shout anymore.
Slowly we clear the mine-field on the table.
***
We move from the small town to the city.
We want to be anonymous,
So that we can commit the sins of love, of shouting what we think
In the veranda.
Some evening we cry naked in the street and no one sees us.
At long last we are anonymous.
***
Maybe it is the chatter, the small laugh of the women
Seated on the stairs to the house,
That let the world be world.
***
Everything changes all the time,
As if everything gave shape to the wind:
The trees, our days, our life.
Maybe we die like the great prophets, like a leaf,
We fly and we don't know that we fly.
***
We grow old. We stay home.
Sometimes we read stories from the old pages of an old calendar.
It is as if we held time in our hands.
We hold often time in our hands,
Even when we fold our clothes at night.
***
We hold always time in our hands,
Even when we hold ourselves.
Maybe that's why the hands of the dead are clenched.
They hold time.
***
The fear of our childhood never really dies.
It grows old. Yet we are still afraid of the dark,
We still need the lamp in the corridor of the night.
Maybe the fear of the dark is the first fear and the last one.
***
Nights are a mysterious taxi.
We don't know who will drive, where it will go.
We are old. We are afraid to go where the night goes,
And we don't trust drivers who dream.
***
The cemeteries are the place of the conquered.
Yet, we die like an Egyptian king. We take with us
The soldiers of dream, the treasure of a night in a small hotel room,
The fur from the caress of a beloved animal.
They are not conquered.
***
Our dreams are an anonymous letter to ourselves.
They know us more than we know ourselves,
Yet, we don't know who inside us writes them,
And why he sends them at night.
***
We inhabit the ground floor of our dreams.
We pay our rent regularly.
We are safe. We cannot allow ourselves to lose more dreams.
Dreams are the poems of life,
When we lose them we lose something beautiful.
Yet, we don't know if death dreams
And if it pays the rents.
***
I grew old.
I am a poet of what is not a poem.
Pain is not a poem, dying is not a poem,
Yet, some evenings, when the twilight is particularly beautiful,
I write a poem that is a poem.
***
I am an alcoholic of pain. I drink it each morning.
Pain is a strong alcohol. It makes you forget who you are,
And why you are here, in this place, in this life.
***
I grew old . So much unknown around me.
I know always less.
Yet, I have time enough to feel more.
I couldn't be the wise man of the tribe,
But maybe I could be the magician.
***
Maybe the world is just a big promise.
We don't know what the promise is.
It could be simply the moment when the lights turn on suddenly
In the immense twilight,
Which is not simple at all. Such moments can make us eternal,
And we never forget it.
***
Maybe the world is just a big promise.
We don't know what the promise is.
It could be the promise that there wouldn't be another biblical flood,
And we believe it, because we need promises.
We forget the floods in which we drown each day, in order to believe.
***
Maybe nothing exists except promises.
The world is a promise, life is a promise.
We live in a promise, we live a promise.
We feel unreal, and we don't know why.
***
The hours leave us
Even though we were always here, in the corner of the street,
And we didn't dare turning in order not to lose them from sight.
Maybe the corners of the street turn even when we don't turn,
And the hours leave even when we see them.
***
The hours are a wild animal, we don't know how to tame them,
How to make them curl in our lap when we are home,
How to lick our life.
They leave us whenever they want, even when all the doors are locked,
And we don't know where they go, to which jungle of life.
***
I grew old. My eyes are not so good anymore, nor my knees,
And yet, some evenings I bend, I look for a poem that I can't find,
The poetry of my twilight lost in the poetry of the twilight.
I look because I believe that poems cannot be lost so easily,
Not the poetry of the twilight. Nor the poetry of my twilight.
***
Our childhood parts, our children part, our hours part.
At night when we undress, when we are naked
We find all the wounds of parting that don't have time to close.
***
Some nights I pass by statues of ancient people. I look at their eyes.
Their tears have no dust, even though it didn't rain for ages.
Maybe tears are the only thing that doesn't need dusting.
***
Like all strangers, I am a specialist in loneliness.
Maybe loneliness goes farther than tears,
Because it is invisible, because it makes even our tears invisible.
***
I don't like calendars. They write somewhere the day I became old,
Somewhere else they write the date in which I'll be too old to live..
I tore all my calendars. I don't like prophets.
***
We are made of dreams that rained over us for so many nights.
We don't remember them.
All we know is that in the morning
Our eyes are wet. Our life is wet.
***
We kill the 'Now' in so many ways,
As if we believed there is a second life.
We don't know that the 'now' is the second life, the third, the fourth.
***
We grow old. Everything is a mine-field:
The hours, the future, the past.
We walk carefully, but maybe not carefully enough.
We lose a hand, we lose a leg, we lose the rest of our life.
***
We live in big houses
But there are not enough doors for all our keys,
Not enough windows for all our shutters.
We need urgently another house. After all our home is our castle.
***
We grow old, and we don't like our face.
Maybe we can break the mirror.
For sure, the mirror can break us.
***
I always feel the feeling of loss
When I have to choose.
We choose all the time
And we lose all the things we didn't choose, forever.
And I am not ready for so much loss.
***
The doors of the corridors are always closed.
When I pass there I feel always a feeling of loss,
As if I've lost a possible friend, a possible life.
Anyway, we lose, hour after hour,
Our hours, our lives, our possible lives,
And we don't notice.
***
Time is infinite, that's why each moment is infinite,
We cannot see all the infinite that happens in a moment,
Yet at times we feel it, in a little hotel room at night,
Or in a poem that is really small, and we never forget it.
***
We are not infinite and we don't know how to use it, yet, we need it.
Maybe we feel that the infinite is the secret of small things.
It could be a tear that has no reason except the sudden feeling of the immense.
That's why the secret is so precious.
***
We long for things we never knew and maybe we'll never know. It makes us suffer.
Maybe it's not because we dream so much. Maybe there are genes for everything,
Even for longing, for pain. We are truely cureless.
***
Usually we close the door when we see a face we don't know.
Maybe our doors are closed even when they are open.
The person has no choice, he goes away,
But he takes the door with him. Forever.
We are door-less, and we don't know it.
***
Usually we close the door when we see a face we don't know. A beggar.
Maybe, until we'll be able to save everybody, it's useless to save one or two.
Some evenings we cry, and we don't know why we cry.
***
In the morning we dream of saving the world.
Often, we cry in the evening,
Because we didn't save even ourselves.
***
We buy second hand things full of the fate of others.
We don't know it, yet, whatever we buy,
We buy our own fate.
***
We buy lottery tickets, in order to buy fate.
We don't know that fate is the buyer.
***
It is death that makes our existence more secret.
Maybe we understand what we lived, why we lived
A moment before death, or even a moment after.
***
We are busy saving ourselves, saving the world.
That's why we don't have a free moment to do anything else,
Not even to save the garden that is always thirsty.
***,
I love the secret of the hours that never returned,
Like looms that don't exist anymore,
And yet, they weave us.
They exist.
***
Maybe we cry like a child in order to sleep afterwards, purified like a child.
Yet, we forgot how to sleep like a child,
We need pills that will make our life tired.
So, it's useless.
***
When we grow old, we lose the gift of crying like a child.
We cry and our eyes, our life, continue to be heavy.
Maybe when we age everything has a different gravity,
Even our tears.
***
Things turn all the time on the giant wheel,
Yet, everything is irreversible. Nothing returns the same,
Even the spoons with which we had the soup last night are different.
Maybe it wasn't really the wheel.
Maybe there are endless spoons in a spoon.
***
I sweep the autumn from the yard,
I erase the rustle of the leaves, in order to forget.
Maybe it is the things that we erase that we remember most.
Maybe we can erase nothing.
***
We die suddenly, even when we died little by little,
We don't have even the time to whisper our name ,
And we who remain, we don't have the time to salute them, at least with a gaze,
We don't have time to ask them if they know where they go.
***
Waking up from the dream we live in is never gentle.
We wake up because of pain or because our life is bleeding.
It may kill us: we are dream addicted and we need our daily dose.
We wake up and all we feel is that we cry more often.
***
We travel, for so long, in our dreams.
At times we have a glimpse of the world at night, before falling asleep.
Mostly we see the world in the last moment of the last night,
And we are not sure what we saw.
***
Dreaming doesn't mean that we don't see the world,
We simply see it in a different way.
Maybe, In order to see the world, we need all the different ways that exist,
And at times, even this is not enough.
***
Little by little our memories, like everything else, become dust.
Slowly it covers the past. We don't know it. We remember the dust.
We cry and we don't know why we cry.
***
Our Achilles' heel is not only in our heel,
It is in our eyes, it is in our ears.
There is no hero. what kills us is what we see, what we hear.
We die each day and we don't know why we die.
***
The strangers on the side walk of life
Exist in a somewhere else, somewhere distant.
Yet, when a child brings a toy to their child,
They come back.
***
I grew old. I wear always my old pajamas,
I need sleep , my drug, , in order to forget what I cannot forget,
My burned past,
Some nights it's not enough.
Some nights an over dose of past kills me.
***
It is not that we are not naked,
It's that we are not naked in the right places.
We have the sunglasses in order to see,
We have the ear-phones in order to listen to music
Whenever someone speaks.
If we have clothes over us or not, it doesn't matter.
***
We smuggle ourselves through life, alone,
Like thieves.
We don't know what we stole, but we feel guilty.
We need the wise men of the tribe
Who know that we stole only our life,
And why we feel what we feel.
***
I wish I would have a magician with me when I chose my road.
Someone to feel its aura,
To smell the storm in the distance, to smell fate.
But it is useless. Even when we turn the corner of the street
It is another road, and we never return.
***
We ask the same questions for so long.
We don't expect answers anymore,
But we want to die
Knowing that we have asked them.
***
It is the ancient crime of words.
It is the ancient crime of silence.
They always betrays us. They confess what we feel.
***
Maybe the blind know how to hear. They feel the words,
They touch with delicate fingers their aura.
They write poems all the time.
***
I grew old.
Maybe I left the most important things unlived,
But I no longer know what is important and what is not.
I don't know if my poem is more important
Than the letter a stranger wrote because he was lonely.
***
We have two faces, at least.
Some evenings our second face is the face of the rain.
It makes the tears of the other face invisible.
Having two faces is not always a sin.
***
We are too suspicious to be innocent.
We are too suspicious to believe in mercy.
We are guilty and we don't know it.
Only our life cries more often.
***
We ask forgiveness
When we cannot forgive ourselves,
That's why we need always a god nearby, or at least a saint.
***
The days pass in vain, they only makes us old.
We wear new clothes, yet we don't look new.
All these things that are in vain exhaust us.
Maybe we need the wise men of the tribe.
They don't know why we live, but they know how to live,
Which is not simple at all. Maybe one day we'll call them.
***
Our days, our hours die one after the other.
Often we look in the mirror, not in order to see ourselves. No.
In order to know if we live.
***
We die little by little from loneliness, from a body that becomes old before it was young,
Because it is tired.
We need the Garden here, in this life, before it is too late,
Or at least some flower pots in our veranda, a chaise-long,
In order to purify our fatigue in the evening.
***
We grow slowly. We live in a world too big for our small motions.
The sky, the birds are too far,
Yet, the tenderness is at the height of our eyes,
And we never forget it.
***
We sew a secret in the bottom of a bag, and we leave it there.
We grow old, the bottom of the bag is torn,
And there is nothing in.
Maybe they were love letters,
And we forgot who it was and why we sent them.
Secrets have to be fresh.
***
The most beautiful poems
Are the ones that last little,
Like a face we see for a moment in the window of a train,
Which is the whole enigma of life.
***
I love the enigma of nocturnal faces that pass in the street.
I like the couple that looks for a hotel room,
Which is a different enigma.
That's why I stay awake at night,
And anyway, I have my own enigmas which I don't want to solve.
***
Slowly we realize that we are judged all the time: the words, the gazes.
That's why we wear sunglasses over our tears,
That's why we rarely say the truth.
***
We have to be careful when we walk on the street of time.
There are small moments spread everywhere.
They can be a mine-field, they can kill the rest of our life.
And yet, it is the only street we have.
***
The street is not safe. The strange faces, the strange eyes.
We stay home. The door is double locked. The bars on the windows.
Maybe we are sentenced to life and we don't know it,
And the only witness was the fear.
***
At times I want to write my poems with chalks, like a child,
To feel how fragile they are, how easily they break,
How we erase what we wrote and we can never erase them completely.
There are still patches of words on the black-board.
They are a poem.
***
My body is the only clock I trust.
It knows the hours of sleep, of hunger, of pain.
It probably knows the hour when I'll be too old to live.
But it's not a biblical prophet. It says nothing.
***
The enigma of things that happen all the time, all around us.
Like people who go somewhere and return at night in our sleep.
They seem simple, yet we don't understand them.
Or we try not to understand,
In order not to cry.
***
I love trains. I used to have trucks in my bedroom
And a station, where I could remember
All the journeys that I didn't do and I'll never will.
Everything makes us what we are,
Even a station in our bedroom, and the journeys we didn't do.
***
Lately I sleep quietly.
All that's left in my home are poems.
I don't know who may steal poems, and why would he do it.
We don't use poetry anymore in order to live, in order to dream,
Maybe not even in order to write love letters.
***
Often, when I meet people in the street I tell them it is too late.
They think I say it because I am old and maybe a little mad,
But it is too late for everybody.
It is too late for the lives we didn't live,
For the little hotels we didn't visit some nights with a woman.
For sure it is too late for the stranger that stood under our window in a night when it was too cold to live.
It is really too late for everybody.
***
I am a city lover, yet, I love also gardens.
I draw trees on my walls, on my doors,
Some evening I gather the leaves that fell.
Maybe that's why God created His Paradise.
Not for justice. No. For beauty.
Maybe it was His best poem.
***
I grew old. I don't mind anymore about the years I have lost.
I let them be lost. Soon I'll be lost too.
But I am not sure if there where we'll be lost,
We'll lose the habit of losing years. I am not sure that we'll become more eternal.
After all we lose eternities in this place, in this life.
***
I write my confession, I confess to people I name 'they'.
I want them, at long last, to spell my strange name correctly.
I want them to know that I don't want to be a stranger,
Simply because sleeping on the side walk of life, where the strangers sleep, tired me,
And also the rain disturbed me. It wept on my poem.
***
I remember the man who visited my parents.
An old religious Jew, who looked probably like my grandfather.
I don't know from where he came, from which burned past,
And I don't know why he continues to come when I am not careful,
When my memories are not careful.
I don't understand how such things can know when we are not careful,
When we are not ready.
***
I don't know how some things from the past
Come always when we are not ready.
Maybe they don't have to be a medium.
Maybe we are never ready for something.
***
We regret all the time, and it is always too late,
When the things were said, when the things were done.
Yet, it is never too late for regretting.
We regret for years, for ages, and we never get used to it.
***
No one can take from us the horizon,
The dream of the infinite.
We look at it, and we are there.
Sometimes, not too often, we feel the horizon passing through us,
And we never forget it.
***
There are moments when we find the horizon,
The dream of the infinite,
In something simple:
In the dance of a hand, alone, as if it left the body,
In gazes. Gazes always leave the eyes, and we don't know where they go,
Which is not simple at all.
When I was a child, the birds were too far,
Because I was too small.
Now, that I grew old, the birds are still too far,
Because my dreams are too small.
Maybe the last thing we lose is our dreams. Our last poem.
***
Thoughts are always a mystery.
Most of the times we don't know what we really think, and why we think what we don't know.
Maybe we dream our thoughts.
Maybe we don't want to know the truth.
Maybe we dream our thoughts because it is easier, because we can be somewhere else when we think.
***
Mornings come. They remind us the dreams of the dead.
But the timing is wrong. They should come in the evening
When we are tired, when our life is tired,
When the dead are not simply a dream.
***
I stay too much home. I don't know what happens outside,
Only a few newspapers with even fewer truths.
I let my imagination roam.
From above everything seems small. Simple.
But I don't believe anymore in simple things.
Even the dots on the ground could be people: sad beggars of life,
Which is not simple at all.
***
It is the magician of the tribe
Who promises the world its mystery.
It is the wise men of the tribe
Who know what to do with such a promise,
And how to divide it to smaller promises:
The hours, the days,
In order to make the promise possible.
***
I do so little except thinking. I don't need so much light to think.
That's why I live in the evenings.
There is a lonely street lamp that gives more shadows than light.
I love shadows.
If there wouldn't be shadows
There wouldn't be poets, there wouldn't be poems.
***
I love the low lights of a small nocturnal hotel,
Or a lonely street lamp where couples find their bodies.
The places that give us true mercy.
Mercy doesn't need too much light.
***
I know only few stories about heroes,
Like the people who live at the end of the street,
Which is the end of the known world, hour after hour, day after day.
In the evening they stand all by the street
Waiting for Godot. The hero.
***
We are exhausted.
We have to run each day up to the end of the world, in order to live.
That's why we don't sleep too well. We are too tired.
Maybe the end of the world passes through us,
Maybe we run up to the end of ourselves, and there is nowhere to run anymore.
Maybe we died already, and we don't know it.
***
Our dead don't live far away.
They stay in the ground floor of our life, but they don't come too often,
They don't see too well the stairs,
And they are busy seeing things they didn't see before:
The mystery of obvious things, the strange light in the room, when it rains.
Maybe, they write also poems.
***
Lately, I have lots of time.
I save old letters from suffocation in a drawer.
I love those letters.
The smell of things that should have happened, even if they didn't happen.
They smell of innocence. Maybe innocence is old fashioned,
But the things that should have happened, are not.
***
We die all the time, because time moves always in our time.
There are many ways to die.
It sounds strange, but I always preferred death by drowning.
I used to drown in a book, in a movie
And I remained drown for hours, for days.
Maybe these drownings were my best poems.
***
I remember the innocence of a child.
I used to write my name on a copybook, clear, nice.
I knew nothing about fate.
I didn't know that fate could change my name
Even while I turned the corner of a street.
I didn't know my name will become the name of a stranger,
The name of loneliness.
***
When we are a child, we play our great roles, secretly, behind locked doors.
Later, everything changes, even the theatre of our life.
We still play roles, but we keep our locked face, secret, behind the role.
At times, we find the key to the locked face in a small hotel, at night,
And our death is always naked. We give it all the keys we ever had.
***
I used to love bridges, the abyss under me,
And I, safe at the railings.
Even later, when pain was a slaughter,
I didn't jump from the bridge,
Because I have already jumped it.
I was in the abyss, drowning, alone.
***
Maybe we cannot live life and dream life at the same time.
We have to choose,
Yet, it is not easy, often dreams seem real and what's real seems a dream.
So we have to compromise,
We have to find the reality within dreams, the dreams within reality:
In what we say, in what we see, in what we don't see,
Even in what happened in the small hotel at night.
One day they'll put us to trial. They'll say we have betrayed everything,
But we'll say we had no choice. We had to compromise.
***
Maybe I am a dreamer.
I write dreams and I give them to the people in the street,
But in the evening when I return home, I have no dream left.
I didn't know that people need so many dreams, that they are never enough.
I didn't know that a dreamer should keep at least one dream from being lost.
At times we lose a dream we loved, and we never forget it.
***
We return to reality when dreams cannot save us,
When pain comes,
When a stranger comes whose gaze froze in a night when it was cold and he was out,
When dreams come stampeded, like the people who dreamt them.
Often, also reality cannot save us.
***
We are a child, yet we know the short-cut to reality: the questions.
The questions of the teacher in the lesson,
The tears in the eyes of our mother that are a question,
The body that discovers us at night, which is not a question.
***
At times, we cross the most dangerous street,
Like a stranger who crossed half of the world,
In order to catch a dream.
Often we are killed,
Or at least we lose the dream.
I am a stranger. My dream was lost in the middle of the street
Because it was too tired to continue.
***
At night, when I look at my past, I see nothing.
Everything is burned.
When the time comes they'll ask me why I am not burned too,
I'll say I am guilty. I wasn't there. But my dreams are burning me.
***
I had always a home around me,
Even though no one knew it.
I came to the strange country with my home.
I was a stranger but no one saw it.
There are very few people who visit me,
People who are strangers in life,
Some evenings they come,
We speak, and our eyes understand everything.
***
In the morning, when we wake up,
We try to return to our age.
Impossible.
We are one night older, a hundred dreams older.
Waking up is not safe.
***
We need to lose ourselves from time to time.
Maybe, when we lose ourselves we cannot write a poem,
But we can live it.
***
At times we simply walk on the street
And we look somewhere else,
Which is not simple at all.
Without looking somewhere else there wouldn't be the journey,
There wouldn't be the birds, there wouldn't be poems.
***
At times we walk on the street and we look somewhere else,
Simply because the birds are somewhere else.
The birds always know when autumn will come
And we have to be ready.
We leave on autumn, like the birds,
Because of nostalgia, and because our life is cold.
***
Wherever we come from, we always come from far away,
Because we come from the past, and we go on even farther.
Yet, the tomorrow goes always farther, farther than tears,
Because we stop going, in the middle of the tomorrow,
In the middle of a cry.
***
At times, at night, when it is quiet, we hear a distant flute.
We don't know where it comes from. Music can come from far,
Maybe even from the lands where the strangers come from,
They love the flute.
Maybe music doesn't know the laws of sound. It has other laws.
***
At times, at night, when it is quiet, we hear a distant music.
We feel as if we were hearing the dream of someone.
It may be once in a life time that we hear the dream of someone else.
It may be once in a life time that we see someone naked without seeing him.
***
The unexplainable explains so many things.
Why we write poems.
Why magicians continue to exist.
Why our life, our beautiful life, is still mysterious.
***
The unexplainable can give magic to an hour of a quiet evening.
Such an hour, can contain, in miniature, all the mysteries of a twilight,
All the shadows of light.
***
We live three lives in one.
We live together the past, the 'now', the future.
That's why we are so tired,
That's why we grow old before the third life begins.
***
At times we meet in the corridor of our house a stranger,
As if we've lost our way, which is impossible.
Probably it is the stranger who lost his way
Because he came only today from his past,
The past that was burned.
***
The same things happen again and again,
But in a different way,
That's why everything continues to be mysterious,
Even the daily twilight,
That's why we continue to write poems.
***
At times, we cry suddenly, in the most inadequate hours.
We never know when we'll remember that we'll die,
We don't know it will happen at noon-time
When we have to be quiet.
We never forget that we'll die, but often we don't remember it.
***
All the finished things leave us.
Only the unfinished ones are here:
The unfinished love, the unfinished poem.
They are a leaf of spring on our bed.
***
Thankfully, we don't know how to measure the real important things
Like the height of a child, the depth of a cry.
When we measure things, they lose their infinite, forever.
***
There are hours when we have to answer some things,
We don't to whom, maybe to ourselves,
And we don't like it, because we don't like to justify ourselves,
Even though we do it all the time.
After all, we are always guilty of something, and we know it.
***
The whirlwind of the world, of the past, hurt us, but it was necessary,
The bitter medicine of a child.
It mingled the tribes that we were, it mingled the bodies of love.
I don't know what went wrong, but it didn't cure us.
We are still tribes of strangers. We are alone.
***
We learn how to improvise, a moment before we are born.
We become the best actors, because we improvise life,
And we have to survive each day up to the end of the day.
Even if there would be laws against improvisers, we would be law breakers.
Thankfully, life has no jails.
***
I used to improvise everything
In my journey, in love, in what I cooked.
I loved the unexpected.
But I grew old. Old people improvise little,
They need the habit of living, in order to live.
Yet, my life improvises me.
***
We love, alone in our body.
At night, in the small hotel,
Where our bodies of love leave into another space,
Our body returns alone,
And we don't know where is the other body
And if it will return before we have to leave the room,
Before the dream leaves us.
***
Thrilling things happen all the time:
A poem, a gaze of a stranger that found our gaze,
But we don't notice them,
Maybe because we watch too many movies
And we confuse the thrillers
With what is thrilling.
***
When we leave our home, we leave the past forever.
When, and if we return, it will be another home, in another address of time ,
And for us, it will be the future, the moment before it becomes past.
***
Everything may be a matter of life and death,
Even a poem,
When you are a poet, when it is night, and you need urgently some paper,
Even a torn page,
In order to make it eternal.
***
Time enters our age, when we are a child, form everywhere.
At night, when our body discovers us.
When our old beloved dog dies.
When there are silent tears in the eyes of our mother,
And we know why.
***