MEMOIRES OF DUST
(The accountant and his numbers)

Raquel Angel-Nagler

REMEMBERING OMAR KHAYYAM
(RUBA `IYAT)

***
My friend,
Arrivals, departures are the same journey
And staying is a deserted village. It is home. It is exile.
My friend, you didn't want to arrive, you didn't want to part.
May friend,
Dance drunk on the deserted village,
It is the best thing you'll ever have.

***

My friend,
There are separations each moment, each hour.
Dance drunk on the last brink of the roof of a moment.
Live where you fear.

***

You come like a child, with blood and tears,
You leave like a cry.
From the age of the fish
So many good men walked,
In their pocket: the blood, the cry,
As if arrivals and departures are the same round journey, endless,
But you don't know where is the station for life,
In which dawn, the red tear, in which wall of echoes.

***

The pity that we should collapse like fragile leaves,
Or wither like a vine of madness, of desires.
The pity that desires are a shrunk season, sober,
There is not wine enough to let the desires dance drunk, intoxicated.
The pity that there is not life enough to desire.

***

Between arrival and departure
The dreams: love, passion, wine.
But, my friend,
The cry that you heard in the distance, was yours.
The trembling finger showing the way to pain, was yours.
My friend,
In each passing day you know less.

***

Happiness, desire, love,
Leak through the cracks of your eye lashes,
Un-winged, un-miraculous.
My friend,
Keep clenched all the ten fingers around what you remember.
My friend,
What you remember are the only fingers left.

***

If the journey wouldn't be endless.
If there would be a station to see when we are, where we are.
If out of the sea of dust a woman would appear,
The belly bigger than her life,
A woman like the blossom of water,
Clean as the cry of a child yet unborn,
We'll be drunk, clean as a vine before it began,
Clean as passion.

***

My friend,
The ones who spoke, their words, a circus of illusions,
Lie in the dead circus of words, dead magic.
My friend,
Forget the circus, illusions are a sad place.
Drink.
Let the smell of years burning,
Burn at your table.
The words you speak inside you make the silence bigger.
Be drunk on your silence.

***

They say they've pierced the time of the coral,
The blue eternity.
They didn't know the round belly of time,
They didn't know what time it is in their time,
They didn't know in which belly of time they float, in which orbit.
Time continued to flow in the coral, humming.
Time couldn't sing in the alphabet of the absurd: words,
Time grew silent inside them.

***

The lions in the sky, the lions beneath, on earth.
Bring your eyes, the cracks in your eye lids to see better.
The lions in the sky: a heaven that will kill you.
The lions beneath: a heaven you killed.
Justice flies, crawls, everywhere.

***

This morning is yours.
You drink wine,
And with each sip you drink your life,
With each sip you know less.
Drink, drink,
Let your life dance naked at the edge of what it doesn't know.
Drink, let it dance where it fears.

***

The clay that molded me.
I never knew that clay can cry.
I am the clay, I am the cry,
And I mold the clay, the cry,
Each day from the beginning.

***

How long does heaven last inside you,
How long- the hell.
How long will you count your soul,
How long will your soul count you.
How many are you, how many souls are in a soul.

***

My beloved,
Your thirst is not fate,
Your thirst is a stream that loves you.
Let fate dance alone on its altar,
Let the thirst give you wine, let your thirst be intoxicated.
The moon in the glass is drunk.

***

The universe revolves,
Because nature dances, drunk, inside it,
And you, my friend, you revolve,
The sunsets, the sunrises, the tongues of ash, dance drunk
Inside you, behind you, in front of you, like fate.
My friend, the fear of fate rises nameless, a thousand names.
The fear of what doesn't exists is a giant.

***

Inside you,
Light and shadows revolving on the machinery of heaven.
My friend,
The machinery of heaven is not eternal enough.
The crumbs of your dreams, black coal,
Don't heal nor nourish,
Give it wine, let it be drunk.
Eternity needs to be drunk in order to resist the empty benches of memory,
In order to feel that with each day it is less.

***

The seasons change before you are aware of it,
You don't know where childhood begins, where it ends.
You weep over the carcass of your childhood.
My friend, your tears are old wine, let them be drunk,
Let tiny eternities stream drunk, naked, clean,
Like the cry of a child that wasn't born yet.

***

Maybe you die forever
Because there is no capital left to use.
You are bankrupt.
Your paper skin, the money is paper, heaven is a book: paper,
And you don't know how much the journey to the after-life may cost,
You don't know if the paper boat of a child, white, clean as a cry, is enough.

***

The traffic light on the road is always red.
You walk, without legs, without feet, to the city.
The two ended way is one road.
Whatever you owned, whatever owned you, doesn't exist.
My friend, you travel so light.
My friend, you arrived long before you began.

***

The old man in the wine shop,
Drinks in order to remember, in order to forget.
He offers death wine.
Death: the fingers shape a bowl for shadows, for light,
The wine trickles through the cracks,
No matter what the old man thinks,
Death is drunk on the shadows, death is drunk on the light.

***

I wandered,
The road went further than all the horizons.
I was alone.
The road was silent because it didn't know,
Because it knew.
The cry I heard from somewhere, was mine.
It made the silence more silent.

***

The universe; the biggest circus that exists,
But, no matter how much magic we invent,
The act ends.
Behind the curtain the sky pours like blue blood
Behind the curtain we drown in the pouring sky,
We drown in our blood.

***

Before we came here, the world existed.
We came here to lift heavy weights:
Life, what we know, what we love.
When we'll leave, the world will continue,
But there will be one last question.

***

People sleep their life,
They sleep their death.
The big oblivion.
But in the store room of round bellies, of hopes:
The big insomnia:
A seed that remembers,
That has yet nothing to forget.

***

There is an old nocturnal hotel: the world;
The banquet of round bellies, of left-over caresses in left-over fingers,
Bodies are bought, bodies are sold.
The left-over of a caress is where everything begins,
Where everything ends.
And you don't know in which left-over fingers trickle like longing.

***

We came like rain, we left like a river.
Between rain and river
We learned all the names of water.

***

In the endless party
There were those who got drunk before us,
There were those who drunk the wine up to the last sip,
There were those who drank a sip or two.
They left all, drunk, sober, a moment, a life time before us.
We were draining gold fish ponds,
We needed a road sign, the foot prints leaving, leaving,
To know the way.

***

You lie, so patient, beneath the machinery of heaven.
It rains time, it rains stone,
And all you needed was a bottle of wine
To tame the poison.
To let your verses be drunk, to be drunk on your verses.

***

It is strange.
The immense wheel turns,
But there is no return.
You die only once, and maybe you live even less.
There is only one grave, and so many worms.

***

The cosmic potter
Mixes tenderness in the clay, a precious bowl.
Pity it is so fragile, the clay, the tenderness,
Maybe it was broken before we began.
The shards feed us the hard berries of dark.

***

It is not easy to create a clay jug, the ancient water,
It is not easy to break ancient water.
It is strange,
Before the clay jug,
The power to destroy had nowhere to go.

***

The more you use life,
The more you create life.
One day,
Too tired to use life, to create,
You'll turn the corner of the street,
The corner death loves.
Death will kill you.
You'll create death.
***

Get drunk on the wine, on passion, on the huge tree of the night.
You'll lie under earth for one eternity or even more,
You'll touch the roots of all questions, you'll inherit the roots of yourself,
Roots the sun heals.
You were born a root,
You'll die a root.
Roots don't die easily.
Drink, drink.

***

You are the king of the grass land.
You hunt animals. The animal in your plate is dead.
You don't that you'll be hunted,
You'll die like an animal,
With a knife in your cry,
You don't see how the knife finds its shapes in your eyes.

***

Birds see you:
Your small motions, vane, cruel, sad,
The shadows melting in your teeth like pain,
Your fear to cry 'help', 'mercy',
And you don't know if their song praises, accuses,
You don't know if a song can forgive.

***

In the places that were a province of heaven
Only the birds were left.
Their song : natural as magic.
They sing the red tear of dawn, slowly melting with the day.
Light is water, it melts in the song.
Look how beautiful they melt,
Look how beautiful you melt, sinner, saint, human.

***

Your soul leaves your body.
The body is in the grave, it finds its shapes in earth, in a root, in a leaf,
But the soul has nowhere to go, no anchor,
A nomad in the blue absence.

***

My beloved,
Every particle of your body was a piece of a star,
An old jewel smoldering,
It fell into you like a sky falling, falling,
The light includes you in each motion.
My beloved, touch me,
The old jewel glitters, pure glass, a mirror,
My beloved, touch me,
Your touch sees me, your touch makes me visible.
Touch me.

***

Dawn.
The universe vibrates in an ecstasy of beauty,
The dance of the leaves is exquisite.
Sit in the shade of a leaf,
Get drunk on the beauty of what's coming,
Get drunk on the beauty of what's going,
Look how quiet the leaf includes all these things, how drunk on the green.

***

You enter the room where you live, where you crack like a shadow,
With your back to the door.
There are thousand silences between you and the door.
My friend,
Your back is the fourth wall of reality.
You are alone in your back, alone in the wall.
My friend,
The cry you heard, inexplicable as the real,
Was yours,
The cry found its shape in you.

***

My frien,
The world is earth,
Your body is earth,
Your pain is rain.
The earth was made for heavy loads: the grief, the dead.
The earth; a quarry of silence.
The earth; the fugitive sigh of a root.
My friend,
Earth is layer beneath layer, time beneath time,
And you don't know where to find yourself,
In which grief, in which silence, in which era of a sigh.

***

If I would have been a god,
I would have made another world.
Beneath the sky falling, falling,
We'll stretch our gaze to the blue in the pupils of someone else.
We'll be close as silence, separate as our words, the words that translate us,
And freedom, unstoppable as life will be pain,
A twilight that becomes water, flowing from all the rocks' faces, the hard faces.
A truce of water and rock.
And we'll own everything:
The pain, the twilight that is water. The truce of water and rock.

***

Everything is a number,
Even good and bad.
Slowly we learn how to count,
To guess the number of what's bad, what's good.
To find our shape, if we look enough, in an old equation, cracked, soft wrinkles.
To love, if we can, the choir of numbers. The exquisite choir.

***

It's true, we are made of clay,
But life is not clay in our hands,
We have to invent ourselves.
If we inhabit ourselves, our belly rounder than the belly of a fruit,
We'll invent, each day from the beginning, our life,
We'll invent the fruit, natural as magic, simple as magic.
My friend, nothing is simple, not even simplicity.

***

Whatever you had to sell was on the scales:
The ten fingers, the ten roots of what you are, the moss in your sweat,
The love shrunk from so little use, not bigger than a rice grain.
You have to take your life back.
You should know you came here to lift heave weights.
My friend,
Lift your life from the scales,
Take your life back.
Lift the rice grain from the scales,
Look how quiet the light includes the grain, un-miraculous, magic.

***

Your body is still in the chaos of creation,
Whirling atoms.
Drink wine, let the atoms be drunk.
Look at the street, opening, opening, the one way street.
Walk the street on your drunk feet,
My friend, the drunk atoms began before the street began,
Their chaos is you, their chaos is the way home

***

My friend,
The vine inside you is tall,
Because it is deep.
Dance around the vine like green suns,
Like a raindrop on a leaf, the whole world in a raindrop.
Let the dance be drunk on you,
It is the dance that brought you here,
And the dance will continue,
The earth will be drunk on the dance,
Sands will dance, drunk on the dream of clear water, the clarity of a glass of wine.

***

The genes of questions began
Before I began.
I was born curious:
Who I am, why I am.
There were too few questions and too many answers,
I didn't know the good questions.
When I'm drunk, I sense more, I understand more.
I dance intoxicated.
The dance is a language that know me,
The mother tongue of emotions, the mother tongue of who I am.
The dance: a gift for a difficult twilight,
The knot of light and shadows,
And I don't know who answers, who asks.

***

I am as slow as the world, as patient.
I don't know if slowing will make time more,
I don't know if a child makes time more eternal,
Why I weep on the carcass of a child.
I don't know why I die incessantly, each day,
Why I am reborn, incessantly, into the past,
I don't know how to count my age,
From which small death, from which past.

***

You came here and you draw borders: a line on the map.
You don't know why your life needed borders,
You don't know why so much fury for a line on a map, so much death.
You don't know someone's fingers will enter the borders, melting, melting in your palms.


***

How long shall I sweep the silence,
How long shall I walk the breath of the ice.
My friend,
Hell exists, a breath distant than life.
My friend,
Don't sweep the silence, there are lips in the silence,
There are the smiles that made the lips real.

***

So many departures.
You and I travel on this side of time,
We learn how to live.
On the other side of time: the school of death,
But we are not eternal enough to learn how to die.

***

No one has pierced the ocean of reality, the huge blue mouth.
No one knows what the mouth murmurs, cries,
No one knows the blue languages:
What life means, what longing means, no one knows if meanings exist.
No one , not even the a woman, the belly bigger than her life,
Knows why the womb cries,
Why the embryo sips blood and tears,
No one knows why the pain.

***

Deep, in the labyrinth of the beast
You live, you love, you bleed.
Deep in the labyrinth hold the thread,
Let the throats of your fists cry.
Maybe life will follow you, like pain,
You don't know who is the beast, you don't know the name, you don't know how deep it is,
You don't know if a safety net exists.

***

The genes began long before you began.
The drunk genes of wine, of joy. The genes of death.
You were hungry for so long that the gene of hunger exists.
You feel the justice when hunger is murdered,
But when the wine turns miraculously into blood,
You don't know who is guilty, who is innocent, if innocence exists.

***

The perfect ones became artificial suns.
In a place that has lost its name,
The artificial sunrise cracked by so much use, the artificial dawn its red tear consumed its softness invisible, the light weeping shadows,
There was no shield for perfection. Perfection was dead.

***

My friend,
Sift the dust gently.
The dust: a huge belly digesting what centuries alone cld digest:
The groans, the cries, the sobs, the smile of a child, bigger than his life, inexplicable.
Close your ears listen.
The dust cries smiles somewhere in your quarry of silence.
Listen. Listen.

***

My friend,
Sift the dust gently,
Sift the grimaces of human agony,
The sieve is bleeding.
My friend,
Your hands where light and shadows melt.
Gather the dust, wrap it grain by grain, desert by desert, in your hands.
Together is a place.

***

The hard rain.
It peels off your skin like the gaze of a child,
It lets your senses: the toy of life, vulnerable, a power.
My friend,
The toy is more stubborn than time,
It lets you guess the light in your skin, lick the taste of love you didn't know how to feel, Suckle the un-drank wine.
My friend,
The toy of life is drunk on you.
My friend,
Drink. Drink. Be drunk on your toy.

***

My beloved,
Mold the clay into a beautiful wine pot,
Dance, drunk on the beauty.
My beloved,
Tomorrow the dust of your secret body will dance, drunk on you,
Drunk on your round belly, rounder than the belly of a fruit,
Drunk on your nocturnal breasts, your moon milk trickling, trickling.

***

Here, the land's end, the last finger.
Here, at the land's end, I believe no longer in belief.
Here, the wind bends everything in one direction, like a god.
But I am a root, I don't bow, I am drunk on life,
I grow, drunk, always deeper.
Here, also the dark claustrophobia is drunk.
The last finger is one finger too close.

***

I came here like a stone, the color of water.
I leave like dawn, the red tear burning, burning.
I looked at the wall of the dark for so long, that it shut my eyes,
And yet, I leave each dawn from the beginning.
The red tear is fire, it is light.
The tear is a door.

***

When I die,
Moisten my dust with wine,
Let it dance drunk over my corpse,
Let it shipwreck in the ancient puddle in my feet.
The shadows begin in my feet, streaming.
There is no resurrection, and the big peace is a dead mask.

***

The fire that makes everything stone:
The eyes, the gentle body.
There is no stone, it left you,
It receded like a ship light into the beautiful forgetfulness of the sea.
There is again this smell: the red tear of dawn.
The big peace.

***

I drink the wine and it drinks me.
One day, they'll have to burn us, the inseparable, together.
All the drunkards of the town will come
To celebrate the incense of wine in death,
To feel death is a drunkard, one of the gang,
Bond of wine and blood.

***


My beloved,
On the lips of the river
Plant your drunk tongue, like a kiss.
Plant softly your minute white teeth,
Bite the dust of a kiss.
You die, yet the stars are never nearer,
The soul has nowhere to go.
You die once too much.
Let the soul get drunk. The journey of a thousand miles begins here.
The wine cup: a gondola of clay.
Let the soul be drunk on the clay.

***

You mold the clay, and the clay molds you.
You drink the wine, and the wine drinks you.
My friend,
Life: a wall where colors melt, light, the shadows.
My friend,
Whatever you say, whatever you do
Returns to you like an echo.
My friend,
Mold the clay, pure water in your hands,
Let the wine, the pure vine, play in your mouth.
The echoes will love you.

***

Truth may be
The small invisibles beneath the simple,
The beauty of the useful beneath the simple,
Truth may be wine drunk on life.
Take your idol to the stream.
The wheel has made many idols into clay, beautiful cups.
Drink the beauty, drink the truth. Drink.

***

The words were heavy. They peeled off the lips of a child.
When life is a word-shattered roof,
You cry over the corpse of your childhood.
You don't know if corpses bleed.
You don't know if a child could kill your childhood.
You don't know how the killer could be your father.

***

The jug is innocent.
My friend, drink, get drunk.
You don't know who will guard your body, the clay in your motions,
From becoming, one day, a jug.
Drink, get drunk.
Sooth the clay in your lips. Sooth it.
***

Death sits at your window,
Big as the sky.
Your dust: the ash in the last lips of a woman.
Go up like a shriek, visible, glittering bronze.
An antique shield.
You don't know how much the invisible kills you, before, after death.
You don't know how much shields forget.
My friend,
Forgetting is a gift, before, after death.

***

No one knows the story of the soul when he dies.
Does the soul die whole half, not at all.
My friend drink, let the soul be drunk.
You don't want to deal with the psyche of numbers,
How the psyche breaks.

***

No one knows the story of the soul when he dies,
Does it break, frail as a halo.
You don't want some scavenger
Gathering old cabbages and pieces of soul, wrinkled, dry,
To throw it in his sack.
You don't know how much eternity ages.

***
My friend,
You say that when you'll die, the soul will die with you.
You don't know if there is a cemetery for souls,
Or if you'll be flattened like a leaf, in a common grave.
My friend,
Drink, be drunk, let the soul drink as long as forever lasts.
Save yourself from the big preacher, from the incense in his throat.

***

A cup of wine is the kingdom of senses,
Ann old jewel smoldering.
The scent of a woman,
The incense of the altar in her thighs
Is wine.
Wine is a door.

***

The game of time began
Long before the rules began.
The rules were a train without a time table.
Some nights time was on time, a tongue of ten tails in your breasts.
Mostly, it was too early or too late.
My beloved, love me,
Be drunk between the too early and the too late, like life.
The wine is always on time,
It ignites you with a glassed flame, with smoldering clay in its lips.

***

There are the old ones, maybe they came from the era of the fish.
The young ones are different.
No one crosses the same rive.
They don't know how ancient water is,
How ancient are the habits of water, leaving, flowing, flowing.
They don't know the habits of rivers, how they paint wings of stone floating, drowning.
They don't know that habits are drunk on stone.

***

You cannot run away. You are rooted.
And yet, life is a sea.
Maybe you are a coral where time shipwrecked.
The blue satin of the sea, the blue shipwreck of time
Are beautiful,
And you don't know how can a root cry,
How can beauty kill.

***

There is clay in your ten finger, the cool odor of roots.
That is what you'll ever receive,
That is what you'll ever give.
The clay molds you, and you mold the clay.
Together you create magic, life, love, souls.
My friend,
There is no other potter except you and the clay.
Memories jostle each other for face room:
The clay and you remember and forget,
Slowly, very slowly you write your story,
The journey clay always deeper inside you.

***

Stop potter, stop.
The idols you make are not alive,
They don't know how to love.
Idols are the secret place where wars begin,
How much fury, how much rage for a clay bible.
Look at the blood in the street, flowing, flowing,
Look at the blood in the street. Look.

***

The potter is humble, a room, the light climbs on the wall.
His clay is not enough. He has no choice.
He uses the clay of a cry for a jug.
He uses the clay of a hand, lonely, cracked, for a handle.
You drink the sadness, and the sadness drinks you, soothing, soothing.
Some nights there is a clay moon in the water. The moon slowly widens,
Your secret face in the moon.
You drink the light , you drink your face for the first time.
Nothing is simple, not even a simple jug.

***
Artist are human, incomplete, broken.
There are fragments of themselves in a statue, dust of dreams.
The fingers plunge deep,
There is a secret body beneath the stone, a woman, the breath: warm marble.
There is a secret wound in the stone, there is a secret wound in the fingers.
They are drunk on the wound.
The wound is their true art. It sees them.

***

In the big markets of the world
They sell and buy your clay hands.
They sell you clay futures.
They sell you clay happiness.
And you don't know who will guard the red clay, the red tear of dawn, the child of time,
Who will guard the clay child that was sold before it began,
Who will guard the clay pain cracking , cracking.

***

I am drunk on forbidden wine.
The wine loves me.
I am a smuggler of borders, smuggler of dreams, like a bird.
The birds love me.
And I am human, imperfect, broken as life.
The imperfections love me.


***

You walk towards time,
Walking by you, a wall blackening, blackening.
The words on the walls: a graffiti on the walls of an endless Pompeii, endless beauty.
You gather the dust, breathless as dust, heavy as dust.
And you don't know which beauty will burn again, which words will fly, the wings pure as a cry.
In which wild laughter, in which wall of echoes, in which silence.
You don't know that the silence you've heard was yours.

***

Remember your friend
Even when you are drunk.
You drank, by a window as big as the sky,
From the same cup, from the same taste of clay.
You left your finger prints on the wine,
You breathed the small invisibles. They were huge.

***

My beloved,
I am drunk to remember you better.
My beloved,
I drink from a cup that doesn't exist,
I am drunk on a sea that doesn't exist: the mad wine wrappers your body,
The wine tattoos on your body the blue coral
Nesting in time like a wonderful fish.
My beloved, my blue fish, drink, be drunk on what exists: the dreams of a wonderful fish.

***

The big thinkers who sought time, found it:
The big avalanche of age over age.
You, my friend, your breath is full of time. Exhale it.
Look for the scent of wine.
Remember: eternity drinks in order to continue.
My friend,
Eternity is drunk.
***
My friend,
Some writers collect people, names.
You, my friend, you collect the aura around them, the scent they exhale.
You collect in a jug a blizzard of odors, like smells maddened by wine.
My friend, the jug is a door.

***

You are a judge, Good fearing.
You send a man to the gallows,
A man, child of roots and rocks,
A man, a quarry of silence.
Silence is illegal.
The man speaks like a rock, like a root, slow, quiet.
He asks: whom do you hang, me or your fear.

***

They say love, the beautiful love,
Is a sin, a door to hell.
Maybe the tomorrow will engrave on our thighs the deep images of paradise.
An old jewel smoldering, melting like light , melting like Eros into love.

***

You don't fear the earth.
You are a root,
You know the dark claustrophobia of the dark.
You are a root.
You were buried a moment before you began.
You are human, you can see the dark,
You can see the dark inside the dark.
Your eyes lay siege on hell,
You lodge roofs of nightmare in its eyes.
You don't fear hell .
You saw its eyes, you saw yourself in its eyes.
You saw the root that hell is, you saw your root.

***

They speak of paradise,
Naked women in a river.
My beloved,
Wash naked in my wine.
The ones who speak of paradise were never there,
They lost the way long ago,
From the first virtue ever invented.

***

They say the hours will come,
Beautiful in their nakedness.
The wine in my glass is more naked,
And it is in the 'now'.
The prices of time are steep, a true Scheilock,
And I cannot afford the interests.

***

Heaven and hell can exist only mingled, twisted in each other.
Each day we walk on the orbits of heaven and the hell inside us.
The meadows of star dust, the black light, sun-poisoned.
We walk barefoot on the harsh dust, the black light walks barefoot on the star
We are the witness of the true story, the only bible left.
We are the eternal proof.

***

Nothing is certain.
Will the mystery of extinction wrap your body, your soul, your big invisible, or both?
My friend,
Drink wine, be drunk. The wine is a certainty.
Let the mystery dance drunk beyond the edge of the visible.
My friend,
The invisible is no protection. It bleeds inside the visible.
My friend, drink, drink.

***

Life is an exquisite garment,
It shelters your nakedness.
My friend, use the garment,
Drink, love, be vulnerable.
Tear the cloth before death does it,
Feel the nakedness of a breath, your seventh sense.
Drink, the naked wine in your naked tongue.
My friend, there will be always a last question.
It will be naked.

***

The cup is the body.
The wine is the soul,
And you don't know who is drunk,
You don't know who is alive, who is a dream of life,
Who dies little by little,
You don't know who will die once too many,
You don't know who is thirsty for more.

***

Blossom was a flame
On the wet earth of war.
The roots were stubborn,
They felt the dead body,
They felt the cry that gave them water,
They felt the knife in the middle of the cry.
The contours of what they felt were hard, precise.

***

You are drunk, you lose your way.
The fingers shape a cup for the rain,
The smile of a woman is leaking in the rain.
The pause between the two lips
Is a map of whispers.
My friend,
Whispers are a path, they'll find you.

***

You walk over the past.
Ancient stones in the earth: a fine work of echoes,
The whispers of rain leaking from the eternal womb.
The broken porcelain in the buried cheeks of a woman seems familiar.
You walk
And you don't realize how feet, with or without shoes,
Can hear, can imagine, can remember the sound of foot prints.
You don't know that feet can cry.

***
You are lost.
The way home: your Ithaca,
Lies beneath too many footprints.
You have to choose, each cross roads, each footprint, from the beginning.
My friend,
Only the living can get lost.
Only the living can lose the way home.
My fried, drink the wine, get drunk,
Lose yourself each day more.
Live. Each day you'll know less.

***


Water doesn't blossom for those who are asleep.
My friend,
Your sleep is thirsty. It longs for something: a dream, beauty.
My friend, wake up, drink wine, be drunk.
Below earth water doesn't blossom.

***

I stood at the edge of the absence.
I was thirsty, I was longing.
Ten delicate fingers, ten haloes, entangled: a cup,
Gave me water.
I drank paradise from my thirst, from my longing.
My friend,
There are no arrivals, everything is a journey,
Even paradise, the thirst, the longing.

***

Time passes, squanderer of summers.
Your hope breathes each day less, the tears: withering water.
My friend, get drunk,
Let the water in your eyes blossom,
Tears live on the fingertips of a human.
My friend, drink.
Die each day less.

***

My friend,
The clay in your body is used again and again.
In the great umbilical cord nothing is lost.
You don't know what will you become, what the big belly will bear:
A wine cup, the brain of a sage,
The hand of a woman, the hand of a wizard: a child.

***

Time passes like a water fall.
You are thirsty for something: beauty. Simple water.
But one life time is not enough to drink your thirst,
Your thirst grow numb.
There are only twice when you feel the thirst whole, alive:
When you drown in your thirst the moment before you began, too soon,
A moment after the end. The too late is thirsty.

***

Before you began
Everything existed, an orbit of life.
You could discover no contintnt
Except maybe yourself,
Maybe the finger prints of a caress:
A mother, a lover, a child,
A flower of sand.

***

The moment is beautiful,
And you don't know who is the artist:
Something your eye shaped,
Something the world shaped in your eyes.
My friend,
Use the moment,
Get drunk on the moment.
Let the moment use you.

***

My beloved,
Your beauty: a scent that conquers me, that frees me, like a dream.
My beloved, bring the wine, the pure wine,
Lets drink the dream, it feels like a cluster of tears.
My beloved,
There is death in each sip of wine.
My beloved, drink, be drunk.
The last dream will be exquisite:
It will conquer us. It will free us.

***

Everything is a round cup.
The numbers draw themselves inside.
They turn, the end is the beginning.
My friend,
Drink, your lips in the round cup.
Let's get drunk.
Let the numbers, dizzy from carousel of beginning inside the end
Find us.

***

You are too righteous to drink.
You are righteous enough to buy and sell
Human hands, the worker, the lover.
You are too righteous to give the hands back:
The anatomy of a broken bough, the cracks of pain.
You are too righteous to cry.

***

The small bar, old, cracked, cheap rivulets of wine.
Everything is drunk: the fingertip of a cry, the cup, the roots in the sweat.
Everything is drunk: the void in hope, the void in fear.
We go on, drunk on the void.
So hopeless. So fearless.

***

Today, the trees in your orchard walk towards the sun, the milk of light is exquisite.
Today, the orchard etches on the inner window of your eye.
My friend, walk with the orchard towards the sun,
This inner window feeds on whatever exists, it lets you be drunk on the light, on beauty, on A pebble full of sea.
My friend, walk now.
There are too few suns left,
And you don't know which orchard, which window consumed them.

***

You come from the world of eternal thought.
The seasons, the cracked earth: big bellies of mother fertility,
Confuse you.
You don't know where you belong, to which belly, to which cord.
My friend,
The wine murmurs the name your mother called you.
Drink.
Your body, shaman of sensations, whisper where eternity begins.
My friend,
Drink. Eternity will come, like the Song of Songs, drunk on itself.

***

There are too few moments in your pocket,
The trembling moment that feel, that long, each one in its own longing,
And wine, the glass nest, is no refuge.
My friend,
No one can drink the same glass twice,
No one can drink the same moments twice.
My friend,
Drink the moment , the soft tongue that nourishes, that soothes.
Drink, be drunk on the moment.

***

My friend, drink.
The wine will crack your masks,
The nakedness of the breath, the vulnerable breath,
And the wine is always naked,
It is the nakedness that makes you drunk.
My friend,
You never knew how light is the mask,
How heavy is the naked,
As heavy as the skin of a child.

***

My friend,
The world, a round cemetery of time, the eternal orbit,
Heaven and hell are only a finger apart.
The finger points the way to the fire of suffering,
The finger points the way to the moon:
The beauty streaming, clean as the cry of a child.
My friend,
The moon is a door.

***

At the edge of the light, the first finger of the dark
I'm drunk on longing.
The longing whispers:
Let's be drunk on each other.
It says: today is not a collector, it leaves nothing for itself.
It says: I am the most beautiful thing you'll ever have, the most fragile.
At the first finger of the dark
Let's be drunk on each other,
Let's drink together, let's be fragile together,
'Together' is a place.

***

When you are with a woman,
Her face is all eyes, she is all in her eyes,
Drink her.
If you are drunk on desire, the moon in the wine,
Drink them.
My friend,
Tonight reality is generous,
Be drunk on everything.
My friend,
When you say 'nothing' it becomes something.
Be drunk on the nothing.
My friend,
Tonight, the wine is generous,
Soft tongues licking your teeth, soothing, soothing.

***

My friend,
You are an open palm, like an open shell.
Your palm is a confession:
The shell of the fruit that you are, the shell of the fruit of pain.
My friend,
You surrender too much.
How will you find the way back to yourself,
And then, how will you be alone.

***

Your life was from the start a Narcissus,
An endless circle around yourself.
You love yourself, the rituals of love are exquisite,
But also pain loves you, and the loneliness.
My friend,
In front of you, behind you, like shadows,
People who hurt, the body : a cry of innocence,
The hands shielding the head,
The soul roams somewhere else haloed, evasive.
My friend: the cry is a door.

***

My friend,
There is only the distance of a breath between heaven and hell,
With each breath we come and go between hell and heaven.
The longest journey.
There are those who call hell by name,
They don't realize how their voice shrinks, burned paper,
How silent is heaven, a store room of used souls.
Fear has many names.

***

I don't know where is the 4th wall of heaven,
How far, how close,
If the wall is like homes, shoulder to shoulder,
If its stones are a quarry of silence.
I don't know if there is a line on the map, like a country, like the front of wars, a line full of fury,
Between heaven and hell.
My beloved,
There is a plaza
Beyond hell, beyond heaven.
There, I'll wait for you,
Sinner, saint, human.

***

All night: your breath,
A far sea moving in my ear.
The only home: your breath,
The night pouring like wine, like a sea.
I didn't pay for a home in heaven,
I don't care and I couldn't afford it.
My beloved, breath, breath.

***

I cannot measure
How many heart beats are left on the abacus of a god,
How much of your night body remains in my fingers.
I don't know how much wine is left on the table of life.
I don't know how to live without being drunk on something.
My beloved,
Living sober is madness.

***

You scavenger, you know so little,
You gather so much nothing.
The 5th hand cloths of my 5th hand body, are worth less than nothing.
The heaven that stood in my window, big as the sky, fragile as glass,
Broken, pieces of nothing.
You scavenger,
Gather the absurd,
The ruins of a war before it began,
A moment at the wall of shooting, everything is nothing.
Drink man, the clock of the world is drunk.
Drink man, drink.

***

You don't see the invisible inside the visible,
So, you see little.
You don't find the words inside the silence,
So, you hear little.
You don't feel the ecstasy of a moment, drunk time,
So, you feel little.
My friend,
There is no blind sense in you,
But your fantasy is starving.
My friend, drink, let your fantasy get drunk.
Wine is an ancient bread.
Drink, drink.

***
My friend,
What you fear will happen,
Has happened already.
Your fear is now, yet it fears the past.
My friend,
The past is a leaf twisted in its yellow cave.
My friend,
There is no manual for leaves.
There is no manual for the past.
There is no manual for fear.

***

To be free of belief and disbelief.
To be free of the thirst for certainties,
Certainties are not water.
To be free of fear,
Fear is the disbelief in bridges.
My friend,
Freedom is a long bridge. The longest.

***

In the biggest circus in the world: life.
In the center , a plastic sun, moving, moving.
The acrobats, the clowns
Revolve around it, each drunk on his rhythm, drunk on his light,
And the shadows copy them, they have no choice.
My friend,
The circus is not a lantern of shadows.

***

I came into this world,
Condemned to death from the first moment of the first hour,
All that's left is a glass of wine,
The last wish.
After all you never die only once.
The last wish is also the first.

***

Death is the same in all the equators of life.
The cup of wine is the same.
No one has the courage to die sober,
Even the big storm abates, intoxicated,
The water drop in its glass with the whole ocean in it
Is inebriating.
The ocean, a chilly god, rises in our glass.

***

Seek the woman,
The skin of wine,
The 10 fingers of the blind: they read you.
Words are useless,
The skin, the fingers,
Are the prose, the poems of what you say, of what you don't say,
The silence widens, like light,
It includes everything,
The ages of prose, the ages of a poem.
My friend, drink, drink,
Be drunk on a poem of silence.

***

My question began before answers began.
My drunkenness began before I began.
I was born drunk.
I drink the wine and the wine is drunk on me,
We drink each other for so long in order to be truly sober,
To know what to ask, to perfect the art of asking.

***

A jug of wine:
A poem. Longing.
My beloved,
We'll be drunk on the poem, on the longing,
We'll end each day more endless,
The nights will be unfinished, like something eternal.

***

You know the ecstasy of the angels.
You know the form of time in all the seven heavens.
And yet, you don't know anything.
My friend,
Nothing is more exalted than the living drunk, the mouth going into the world's details,
Nothing is more holy.

***

The air is clear, it gives shape to everything.
It rains the roots of green valleys,
It rains the seeds of green vineyards.
My beloved,
Your lips: a duet of beauty,
They sing the wine and the wine sings them.
My beloved,
Your lips separate and together,
I drink you, separate and together.
My beloved,
Together is a door.

***

They say life is a tool,
Learn how to use it.
In a quarry of silence, hunt stone,
Give shape to the invisible.
Carve the smallest feeling,
It will be a bridge, home, bread.
Carve the water,
Let the tool drink.

***

In this train station there is no justice.
In this train station you travel as long as forever lasts.
In this subterranean bifurcation of the trucks
You may arrive to death, the claustrophobia of the dark, the fear of depth,
Without knowing why,
You don't know if you are innocent or guilty,
You don't know if innocence exists.
My friend,
They say that when you know the 'why' you can endure anything,
Even the death of innocence.

***

You are not invited to the feast.
You don't know why.
You thought the feast was for everybody, like a feast for life.
You forget how feasts can celebrate the void in the mouth of a laughter,
The wine blackening in the gold teeth.
The faceless hands of the servants on the table.
My friend,
Stay home. Celebrate yourself.

***

So many saviors.
They long to save your life, the promises carved in gold.
It is strange,
They don't know how to save themselves from themselves.
It is strange,
You don't know why you need saving.
Why the night laying itself in your sheets,
Why the two slivers of moon: the lips of a woman, the belly round as the belly of a fruit,
Are not enough to save you.

***

The skill to use life, how to live, how to love.
The skill to use time,
How to slow it, how to live, to love slowly.
I don't know if one life time is enough to master everything.
I don't know why death comes always in the middle of a lesson,
Why we die always unfinished like something eternal.

***

The distance between the yesterday and the tomorrow is no more than a breath.
My friend,
This breath is the only place available
To live, to find yourself, to lose it.
My friend,,
Breath always wider, always deeper,
You'll die always less.

***

My friend,
Use your eyes, the wonderful tool of seeing,
Be in your eyes, your eyes as big as your life,
Two lakes of clarity in your face.
Look how time widens when you see,
How it shrinks when your eye lids are stone.
See how everything is entangled,
How each moment is a Gordian knot. Enormous.
My friend,
One day you'll see life inside death:
The worms crawling in your eyes,
They blind you. The big blessing.

***

My beloved, it's morning,
The sun, time, are young. The sun, time, are old:
A cemetery of moments, a cemetery of used suns,
And the animal of pain, the animal of wine,
Widen and thin like light, like hope.
My beloved, let's drink, let's be drunk.
The wine blossoms in our glass, the dark fruit of longing.

***

My beloved,
The morning begins in your lips,
The shadows begin at our feet.
Let's smash our glass, let the shadows drink,
Let them be drunk on our small simple cities.
My beloved,
Simplicity starts in repetitions.
Drink, drink.
The wine repeats you.
When you are drunk you are more yourself.

***

My friend,
You are terrified by the muteness of walls, the graffiti of pain.
You never drank before.
My friend,
Delayed encounters are beautiful,
Like a city you didn't see yet, yet you live for it alone.
Drink.
The wine will not bring you the city,
But it will paint it on your lips.
Drink,
Drink the wine, the blossom of the invisible in your glass,
Let your fear be drunk.
My friend,
Drink , be strong enough to be vulnerable.

***

You use walls, the graffiti of reason, of order,
The icy fire.
My friend,
No woman will throw herself in that fire for you,
No equation can desire, can die for passion.
My friend, drink wine,
The mother of chaos, of wild forest fire.
The duel of fires will be exquisite.

***

The pyres of what you were, of what you loved:
A paralytic tear in your eyes.
My friend,
This paralytic tear bigger than men on two feet.
Maybe the tear moved from the age of the fish,
It is a human story, the whole story in a water drop.
My friend,
Who will heal your tear,
Which hope, which small suns in the belly of a woman, which cry, clean as the cry of a child.

***

Others brought me here, illegal, without permission.
I came too small, too imperfect to know the big things:
Why I know each day less,
Why the absence, the palm, an open shell, so empty,
Why only when I say 'I' I see the 'I', I am present.
One day I'll die, illegal as I came,
And I don't know how much absence, how much presence will die in my death,
Who will weep over my carcass.

***
I drank to make the waiting for you less visible.
Now, you returned.
My lost one, my found one,
Maybe you leave again and again because of the pleasure of returning.
My beloved,
What wine, smoothed by your taste, will be enough to long, once too many,
What red coals of wine will be enough to be drunk on you, once too many.

***

My friend,
The full glass is a river of life, absurd as pain, as absence.
You swim in it, so young, so handsome, so meaningful.
Slowly, unexpected, punctual, you drown.
My friend,
There is no wine that can save you from a glass that is too full,
There is no wine that can give meaning to the absurd, meaning to pain.
My friend, drink, be drunk,
Let the absurd and meaning save each other.

***

You don't drink with men, with your woman.
You drink it alone in your mouth, alone in what you remember, in what you forgot.
My friend, don't get drunk. You are alone. You'll be lost,
And no one will know how lost you are.

***

My lad,
Drink the wine.
My lad,
There are no gifts. Everything is borrowed.
Your tongue that licks the moment, like a sigh,
The borrowed moment.
My lad, drink.
My lad, time is a harsh banker.
You cannot afford to pay the moment, to get it back.
Drink. Drink.

***

My friend,
They burn the books,
And you don't know if you are guilty of arson.
All you owned were the shrunk voices in a phrase, in a page.
You didn't learn how to live,
How to own your voice,
How to be burned and go on longing for the books,
The friends, the mother, the child.
You are not eternal enough to learn how to die , how to burn each day from the beginning.

***

My friend,
Keep close the cup of wine and the waist of a woman, the slender tree.
One day, unexpected, foreseeable,
Death will walk towards you:
The abyss in an open mouth of laughter,
The abyss in the yellow cave of a leaf.
My friend, drink, drink, because the abyss of the open mouth drinks you, each sip more.
My friend,
The distant cry you hear is yours.

***

My friend, it's morning,
You have time enough for a sip of wine.
My friend,
Wine is a gift, the age of gods.
It gives time to your time,
It curves time into the infinite of a zero.
My friend, drink, be drunk.
Tomorrow you'll die like a zero,
Infinitely small, infinitely big.
The age of gods in your glass.

***

My friend,
You don't know how much of you the poem took,
Which missing fragments left you incomplete, a broken sob,
Which suffering bends over the carcass of a word.
My friend,
Your poem misses nothing,
The fragments speak more than perfection,
There is perfection in each fragment.
You drink. In the small cracked glass, the moon in the water:
A sliver, the taste of the light is full.

***

My friend,
You ran through the same street
In a city that doesn't exist.
Slowly, unexpected, punctual,
Your legs shatter, fragment harder than stone.
You'll come without legs, without feet
To a city that doesn't exist, to a meaning that doesn't exist.
You'll be terrified by the whiteness of walls,
The graffiti of an echo that doesn't exist.
You'll forget how to cry.
My friend, you are human, the creator of meanings
In a world that is silent.
My friend, cry. Cry.
Your cry means something.
Your cry: an eye between two white eyelids that will not shut.

***

My friend, the poet of cool shades.
Your words are visible,
But, among the cracks of the visible:
The fragments of the invisible..
My friend,
The real poem is in the fragments,
Like a tear, broken, paralytic.
This tear says more than anyone on two legs.
My friend,
You came here incomplete, broken.
You recognize yourself in the cracks,
You recognize yourself in the paralytic tear.

***

My beloved,
At night you expand like silence,
Wider, deeper,
Your eyes leave your face, they embrace me
They stay in the embrace, they tend me as a mother, as a child.
My beloved,
How will you find the way back to yourself,
And after, how will you bear being so alone.

***

My beloved,
The small days make you predictable, and so, they make you vulnerable.
My beloved,
The skill for survival, the wisdom of the daily,
The passersby, passing through your time,
Are doors, you need doors.
My beloved,
Tonight, long for yourself,
The longing that saves you from routine, from decay.
Tonight,
Your naked longing, always more vulnerable.
Tonight,
Long for me.

***

My friend,
Your silence expands like a breath.
I love the nakedness of your breath,
I love the beauty with which you listen.
My friend,
Your breath surrenders so much.
How will you find the way back to yourself,
To be alone, face to face, with your silence,
To be alone with the white madness of walls.

***

My friend,
You have to choose, always.
At the cross roads of pain,
He who doesn't feel doesn't hurt,
But the fear of feeling
Is another kind of pain,
It find you where you fear most: the feeling.
You choose the pain.

***

My beloved,
You are never dulled by so much travelling,
There is no dust in the cracks of your fingers.
My beloved,
Tonight, travel towards me, slowly,
The motions will blossom in your hands.
My beloved,
I am terrified of the addiction of travelling, the ruins that don't etch a window in my eye,
I am terrified of the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii.

***

My friend, poet of symbols,
Symbols are an exquisite tool,
The shape of the invisible, of the unknown,
Curling inside the visible.
My friend,
The moon in the water, the unknown in the water.
Your words: a river, clean as a cry,
Your words make the moon visible.
Your words a wall of echoes,
The night climbs in the voice.

***

My friend, poet of borrowed light.
Your words are your borrowed light, you create them, they create you,
My friend,
The meaning of life is creation,
The meaning of creation is life.
My friend,
What is the meaning of your borrowed light: a child, naked, with no shield yet.
My friend,
Maybe you are strong enough to be vulnerable.

***

My friend,
There are servants of time, of its laws
Who believe they appease eternity.
My friend,
Eternity is not about laws. Laws are not a door.
The only infinites are those of a moment, of a rain in the mouth, clean as the cry of a child,
Of the warm marble in the touch of a woman. They are a door.
No one knows how long can a moment be,
No one knows how light can a door be.

***

If love and wine are sins,
You don't know who will go to heaven,
You don't know if hell is room enough for everybody,
You don't know if the shadows melting, drunk, in the walls are innocent or guilty,
You don't know if hell believes that innocence exists.

***

My friend,
You are a small thief, nothing more.
You steal from the night a root, the earth in the thighs, delicate as a halo.
You steal from life the blue mist that drags a lake, like thirst, like longing.
My friend,
Time is the biggest thief, the hard bargainer.
Whatever you steal steals you.
The nights shrink like the yellow cave of a leaf,
Life is no bigger than a puddle of mist.
You are starved. You starve for time.

***

My beloved,
Time uswith nothing that is ours.
Time drags from the past what is,
Time loads on stretcher the future: what is not.
My beloved,
The yesterday, the tomorrow entangle somewhere in your depth,
You are what is,
You are what is not.
My beloved,
Love me. Let your love rain what is, what is not, eternity in a raindrop.
My beloved,
Tell me where I'll find you tonight.

***

My beloved,
The silent loneliness beneath love
Brought us nowhere, not even to ourselves.
We knew so little.
They say one should love not too far, not too close,
And we don't know how far is the too far,
How close is the too close.
My beloved,
Tell me where shall I find you.

***

It is strange how the fragments, silent sages: broken clay, consumed stones, a crushed brick,
Peel off our skin, if flakes from our thoughts, from what we never remembered, from what we forgot.
It is strange how those silent sages speak: so obsessive, so unstoppable.
The stories pour quietly, incessant,
Into who we are.

***

There is no more than the distance of a breath
Between heaven and hell,
Two passionate gods.
My beloved, come close.
I love the nakedness of your breath.
My beloved I see the two gods in your throat
The two gods in your naked sigh,
Dissolving, dissolving,
My beloved, dissolving is also uniting.
My beloved breath, sigh, unite, dissolve.

***

My friend,
Go for wine, for love for dreams,
Life may be only a moment,
But you can slow the moment: the wine, a woman.
No one knows how much a moment can last when time is slow.

My friend,
The world is real,
But you don't live in the world,
You live in your dream.
My friend,
The world dreams you.

***

My friend,
The season of happiness is a moment. It's here.
My friend,
Be drunk on the wine, on the woman, on the moment,
When you're drunk you delay time, the white light slowly melts in its white walls
My friend,
The moment is a door.

***

Small measured motions are enough for daily things,
But love is different.
The mad dance of gazes, of thighs, without limit,
Drunk on themselves, without limit.
The only limit is the madness.
It has no limits.

***

You love the clay jug for the wine,
It feels like the clay in your body,
And the wine, red, trembling, like blood leaking from your veins.
My friend,
The nakedness of your breath,
You sense in your breath the clay, the wine, the blood.
My friend,
Your breath is your 7th sense.
My friend,
Breath, breath.

***

My beloved,
It rains in time,
No pity for the rain drop separated from the sea.
No one could have so many skins as time.
My beloved, my silent love,
Your silence is clear, it had to conquer the clarity again and again,
Nothing is enough to be conquered only once.
My beloved, my silent love, you leave.
Your back speaks more than your face.
Before the back I never knew how sad you were.
I never knew that back can weep.

***

My friend,
Maybe life is only a moment.
My friend,
Maybe a moment can be big only as much as you make it.
Look at the moon,
How it tears the dark for a moment, for a whole night.
My friend,
Drink the wine, be drunk on the wine, on a woman.
They slow time, each in his own way, each in the same way.
My friend,
There are so many moments inside a moment.

***

My beloved,
Drink the moon light,
Let the clarity fill each corner of your silence.
My beloved,
The silence, the moon light
Will be the only moon we'll take with us.
The other moons wouldn't find us.

***

The caravan of time is swift.
All you can do is seizea moment, a step of the hoofs.
You can love this moment, you can be drunk on the moment,
On the drum of the hoofs.
My friend,
Don't cry for the next moment,
The paralytic tears for what doesn't exist go nowhere.

***

No one can cross the night
And remain the same.
No one can cross the red tear of dawn
Alone, thirsty,
Without knowing where the water will be today.
You adjust to the terrible uncertainty in your usual way:
You don't see.

***

My beloved, it's dawn.
Sip the light.
Remember, the dawn will come with you, it will climb on your whiteness.
Remember, in your palm: the substance of time, fluid, latescent.
You drink it, and it drinks you .
My beloved,
There is a runner against time inside you,
The distances play in his feet.
My beloved,
When you remember,
You are vaster than what you are.

***

My beloved,
You are all eyes, you are all in your eyes,
Your eyes, more spacious than your face,
Your eyes, a deep lake ,
I fall into your eyes and I don't reach bottom.
My beloved,
Are your eyes a lake without memory,
Will you remember how I drown in your eyes
Each night from the beginning.
My beloved,
Wait for me in what you remember.

***

My beloved,
Each day is a cemetery of time.
Each day, time begins from the beginning,
Each day, I learn how to love from the beginning,
Nothing is enough to be conquered only once.
I am addicted to the moment of beginning,
The ancient jewel.
I am addicted to the blue sparks spilling,
To splitting the jewel to a thousand jewels,
The thousand jewels insert themselves between myself and myself.
I am many.

***

My friend,
Nature doesn't care if you are a believer, if you pray, if you fast.
After all, nature is God.
Maybe it cares when you try to murder, to burn, to peel off the skin of what it created:
The forest of faces, the tears of a fish.
My friend, drink, get drunk, love madly,
The thighs of a woman, the whiteness melting in your thighs.
My friend,
Nature couldn't care less.

***

My friend,
Hope is not an arrival,
It is a journey.
Maybe the last station is a silent track
When you drag your shadow in a circle, a big zero.
You are not sure if death doesn't hope.

***

My beloved,
The world is too new for a name,
The grass is too full for words.
My beloved,
Drink the wine, be drunk.
The world: the biggest circus, the huge carousel turning, turning.
My beloved,
On the magic carousel the beginning and the end melt into each other,
Like longing .

***

My friend,
No matter how many questions you ask,
The answers are never enough to save you:
How to erase death, or at least the fear.
My friend,
Drink the wine, be drunk.
Each day you know less,
With each seep you feel more.

***

You came here yesterday,
Slowly you learn how to listen, how to love.
My friend,
You don't realize your body is full of past,
You don't realize that you fear more the yesterday than the tomorrow.
My friend, drink.
What you fear will happen, has happened already.
Drink, sooth the past, let it be drunk on small things: how once a day the light widens and thins , the small things the light does.
My friend, when you remember you widen like the small things of light.

***

My friend,
Chance may be generous:
Light climbing on the whiteness of your wall,
A woman with so many dimensions to touch,
Wine, mollifying the bald moon.
It may be enough to feel king of yourself,
Or at least, king of a moment.

***

If there would have been justice in nature,
Would it be justice for men, animals, plants?
If such a triple justice would exist,
We'll all die starving.
Justice is never cheap.

***

My friend,
They say clay remembers
Where you came from, who you were,
Who gave you the murmuring clay jug.
My friend, don't listen.
Memories are an echo from a rock that doesn't exist.
You are too permeable to the echoes.
The jug paints another echo with each sip.
My friend,
Drink. Paint the echoes that love you.

***

In the biggest theatre of the world: human.
On the stage: heaven and hell.
Without suffering, the actors don't exist.
Without actors, suffering doesn't exist.
The shadows climb on the wall,
The light climbs on the wall.
The shadows are a door.
The light is a door.
The actors chose and are chosen.
My friend, the actor,
Drink with the actors. Let all of you be drunk.
After all, choosing is pain. Being chosen is pain.

***

This world of dust.
The dust is opaque. The dust is as clear as a threat.
A face that helps you remember your fear.
My friend, drink the wine.
The wine is old, older than yourself.
It knows how to mollify the bald cross in your tongue,
How to go on with dust in your teeth.
How to laugh, to love:
The lost paradise found, lost, found again.

***

My friend,
You live, you created a direction, a purpose.
Don't get entangled in too many thoughts. The tangle goes nowhere. They have no door.
My friend,
There where the air trembles, green-lit,
Sow your seeds. Seeds are not aimless, they work.
They invent the wine,
They invent the faces, as lucent as a drunk glass,
They invent your addiction to beauty.
Beauty is a door.

***

A river flowing to its source.
My friend,
Drink the wine and it will drink you.
Drink the river till the source,
In order to be fire, you have to throw yourself into it,
In order to be water you have to throw into it.
In order live, you have to throw yourself into it.
My friend, burn, drown, live , be drunk.
Drink the wine till the source.

***

At night, you lie in your garden.
The green is moist, too full for words.
The dawn has risen, too clear to see.
Close your eyes,
You'll see better. The end of the path coming near,
But nearing is also distant, a moon ray, a phantom moon, too real to be real.
Close your eyes. Lie by yourself quietly, as the dawn lying on the green.
Drink. The wine is peaceful.

***

My friend,
Death steals the knowledge of who you are, where you go,
Like the wine, the beautiful thief, dreaming, dreaming.
And you, old drunkard, you lose yourself, you find it, you lose it again.
You don't fear death, it is too permanent to be real.
My friend, drink.
Wine is a dream of reality, a river that remembers and forgets the way to the source.
Drink. Drink.

***

It's spring.
The water blossoms without limits.
There are no limits in the fields, the green light streaming, streaming.
There are no limits to the faces, expanded by the wine, always further, always closer.
We are drunk, without limits,
And we don't if it is the lost paradise, if the lost paradise is holy.
We don't know what holy means.

***

My friend, you forget too much, so the yesterday is always better.
My friend, today look, see.
See the faces flowing between the walls of the street, always others, always a home, always exile. See your face flowing between the walls.
My friend,
The today is here , the first time is the last. Feel it before it is too late. Live it before it is too late.
My friend,
The today is a door.

***

Nothing is forever, what you see, what you hold,
Everything except the beauty that carves itself in your hands, in the treble of your ten fingers,
The beauty that waters your eyes.
The beauty that conquers your eyes and frees them again and again.
Conquering once is never enough for conquest.
This is yours.
All the rest will wither in the cemetery of the moments, withering like eternity,
In a light more frail than a halo, in dark incense that consumes itself like the last breath of stone.

***

The glass, the wine in the glass, the moon in the wine.
My friend,
Drink the wine, drink the moon before it consumes itself.
My friend,
The glasses are full of emptiness.
All that's left is a bald moon. Mollify it. Be kind.
My friend,
The bald moon is you.

***

The moment is painted pale green, the grass of time.
My friend,
Drink the wine slowly. Slow time in your lips.
Feel how lucent is the glass, how drunk on itself.
Then smash the glass.
No one can cross the same moment, walk on the same grass of time, twice.

***

My friend,
If you can use reason instead of excuses.
If you can, make the moment laugh, the play ground of time.
If you can, learn how to live.
My friend,
No one is eternal enough to learn how to die.

***

Here, in this cafe, there are circles everywhere.
The cup that rounds the shape of wine,
The wine that rounds the shape of your lips,
And the table is round. It rotates.
And the moments that round the shape of time, like the belly of a fruit, like a zero, the root of infinites.
My friend,
Drink the wine, slow your lips, drink time from zero , from the root, in a slow, long moment.
You can never know how many moments exist in a zero, when your lips are slow, when time is slow.

***

The meadows of gold dust, are fenced.
The black light, sun-burned.
Some walk in the fenced gold dust, in the black light , and they don't know the way out.
Some call death by his first name,
Some believe that nothing has purpose,
That pain saves nothing, that meanings are dead, like god.
They continue to walk in the fenced gold dust, in the black light,
And their only power is the fragility of a human, trying to find meaning.

***

You mourn the memories, passing, passing.
You mourn even the memories that didn't happen yet.
My friend, drink,
Let the wine tremble in your mouth,
Clean pure as a child.
Get drunk.
My friend,
The memories that didn't happen yet, happened already.

***

There are no arrivals, no departures.
Everything is an orbit of living.
My friend, drink, get drunk.
You'll feel less how you arrive and part at the same moment.
The smell of years burning from some fireplace, an incense of small adventures, that are never really small,
The smell of time in the wine, breathing the odor of roots.
My friend drink the smells. Be drunk.

***

The body forgets nothing.
Hunger is a gene, and thirst, and longing.
When you drink wine, you water the genes, the secret garden,
Green is happy.
My friend, your body recognizes the gene of wine, the gene of beauty, flesh of its flesh.
And you don't know how much forever a gene can contain.

***

Tomorrow could be a memory that didn't happen yet.
A cave, the monsters on the walls. The mouth of the cave: closed. It confesses nothing.
My friend, drink.
Forget the orbit of the void, where even stars begin and end, a closed circle, the fence is infinite.
My friend, drink.
Wine is a safe place. The sacred water of forgetting.
Forgetting is a door.

***

The woorld is real,
But you, my friend, you don't live in it.
You live in what you dream, in what you fear.
You kindle the small fires for your small hells.
There is no small hell, there is no small fear. Here, small is big.
My friend,
You die so many times before you die.

***
My friend,
You burned the books, you burned god, you burned life after life.
My friend, the smell of smoke in your dreams.
My friend, drink, dream, dream.
The wine is a warm rain, greasing your lips, extinguishing nothing.
The dream will continue drunk, on burning toes.
My friend, drink, dream drunk.
Dream always more, die always less.

***
Maybe the moment is friendly, maybe it is your motherland.
The song you hear is the Song of Songs.
The laughter you hear, somewhere close, is yours.
Drink. The wine remembers.
But I don't know if you can forget,
No matter how drunk is the wine.
The dead are deep in who you are, the carcass of your childhood, a girl who is a coffin.
And you can kill no one twice.

***

The tomorrow is far, much further than what you imagine.
Today is the season of wine.
Today you can be drunk.
Today you can cross all the feelings that exist, rivers in a glass.
My friend,
No one can cross the same today twice.

***

You hear the song of war, a big wail.
You see the landscape of loneliness in the faces.
My friend,
Drink the wine.
When you are drunk, the wine, the dark fruit drips patient, quiet, like the blood of a child.
It is easy to love a child.

***

My friend,
The valley where trains shriek,
Where garden shake the moist, silk, heavy,
Taught you the tracks of the journey,
And the moments that end before they began,
Taught you how to be eternal,
How a glass may have more wine than a vineyard.
My friend,
Get drunk before the vineyard withers in your glass.

***

The mille-pied of life is a fast runner,
It carries you to a nest of roots
Before the leaves began. The green paradise is lost.
Lost paradise is a wound, it bleeds time, like something eternal.
My friend,
Drink wine, thhe great healer.
The wine will blossom in your lips like a paradise found.
The wound is drunk.

***

My friend, drink.
It is the season of wine.
Drink. You don't know how long a season may last,
A season may be all the life available.
Drink,
Let the liquor seep into the season, distilling,distilling,
Inventing happiness pure as a cry.

***

Between yourself and yourself there is hardly room for time.
Between yourself and the world, there is hardly room for time.
My friend, we can be happy together,
We can be sad together.
Together is a place.
My friend,
Drink in the together, cry and laugh in the together.
My friend,
The together is contagious.

***

Death is not an ambush.
It waits for you, visible, in the middle of the street, in the middle of your unfinished life.
My friend, drink. Be drunk.
Late the days flake off, slow as a caress,
Let the planets turn, haloed, un-haloed.
Die only once.

***

My friend,
Drink the wine, be drunk.
Over thinking is a disease, it exhausts you each thought from the beginning.
My friend,
All the gods know are destinations.
My friend,
The wine is a journey, without departure, without arrival.
Be drunk on the journey. It is magic.

***

Why the secrets of the wise are hidden,
Why don't they become visible as the hungry bread.
Why are they closed like in a shell.
Why don't they know pearls are not edible.

***

My beloved,
Your purple eyes: violets.
Your head drooped, it is at the height of my shoulders.
I love to feel your quiet beauty at my shoulders,
Your head close as sadness.
My beloved, slender violet,
Your sadness is beautiful, it is human.
We were sad for so long
That we have sadness in our genes.
Lean your sadness on me, lean.

***

In a world walled in silence,
I asked for answers, I asked for meanings, for years, ages.
I didn't ask the dynasty of endless cries inside me, around me,
The next mile to an oasis.
I didn't know cries are a door.

***

One grain, a crumb alone remained on the threshing knife.
Maybe one day it will be a field of bread.
Maybe nothing is deeper than the bread
Making roots out of everything.
My friend, guard the grain, listen,
The round belly, the embryo sipping blood,
Expands, expands like light.

***
One cup of wine is priceless.
It is not money. Money is bankrupt, it's paper.
Your senses conquer it again and again,
Nothing can be conquered only once.
Lets the soul be drunk.
Eternity tires it.

***

All you get is a sliver of bread and some water.
My friend,
Bread is the big equalizer.
Hunger is the great equalizer,
The dynasties of broken shields.
My friend,
There is no one greater than bread.
There is no one deeper than hunger.

***

The waves, the surf enchant you.
You feel there is a sea, an ocean inside you, the deepest waters.
Death is slow, imperceptible. Slowly you drown in yourself. You don't reach bottom
My friend,
The sea has no graves,
You drown each moment from the beginning.
You are alone, you and the tear of a fish.

***

The ones who die pure
Never peeled off, they don't feel how the senses entangle, pure, impure,
They forgot how to cry. They make everything stone. They drown like a stone.
My friend,
Die impure, drown with all the senses raw, tangled.
See the tear of a fish, floating, breathing water.
Remember, the tear of a fish is a lidless eye. It sees. It cannot un-see.

***

Nature, the great creator,
Is so beautiful because it is imperfect, unfinished from head to toe.
It is so hurting because it is imperfect.
At times, it is the shape of a tight shoe,
And you have no choice, you walk and your feet cry,
Your toes flake off unstoppable, slow as tears.
Take a lot of hope to go on, a lot of love.

***

In the distance there is a rumor that the sea exists.
You walk for a life time to find it.
My friend, at the end of wandering, the sea will still be a rumor, a longing.
My friend,
The longing expands you in all directions,
You are immeasurable.
My friend,
The sea was, from the beginning, inside you.

***

You traveler,
Somewhere you found the way home, your Ithaca.
Somewhere you found who you are.
My friend, the journey is endless. The journey is everything.
Your Ithaca is a journey,
Who you are is a journey.
My friend,
There are no arrivals,
And yet, each moment can be a tent of a nomad, a roof of rain.

***
We are sown, we are reaped, the last harvest.
My friend,
Lie down, cry if you can.
Be in open conversation with the sky, if you can.
Drink if you can.
My friend,
The roots slow down everything,
Time enough to drink, to be drunk,
To become a memory if you can.

***

Today morning
Everything is a question.
Everything is an answer.
Today evening,
The same answers.
Maybe there will be a last question. It will be lonely.

***

The old things is not permanent.
People go, others come.
The answers will be the same,
The same empires of money, the same empires of thirst.
And you don't know what will be the questions,
You don't know if there will be something still to ask.

***
People disappear mysteriously,
You don't know the why, the when.
Maybe there is something that measures us,
Something that knows life is precious, rare, an old jewel smoldering,
That we cannot afford more.

***

Maybe suffering makes you what you are,
Smaller, bigger.
My friend,
Lie by yourself, quietly, like water.
Close your eyes,
See the questions floating, floating.
My friend,
Your questions are the thirst,
You are the water.

***

Reason tells you to seize the moment rolling on the slope.
It says death a red traffic light,
That there is no short cut to after-life.
The only Ithaca is now.
You'll stay at the traffic light forever.

***

Your body is a deserted village.
A small Sisyphus dragging his hard shadow.
You need the untouchable to go on living,
Something your depth knows.
My friend,
The climbing is life, the beautiful, harsh struggle, and the falling stone.
You need to be stubborn like the climb, the struggle, like the stone, you need to love.

***

Earth is hungry,
It feeds on men, it wants more.
My friend,
There is no other earth available.
My friend, drink, make death drunk.
Silence after silence will offer themselves,
The only lips will be the wine.
Like Jesus, death will come in a kiss.
Like a human, dying will be forever.

***

Life and death write themselves,
Without your witnessing.
So many yesterdays without you,
So many tomorrows without you.
And today, the pause between what is and what is not.
The pause is slender: a comma.
The pause is endless: the scroll of sighs.

***

Before the station to the nowhere,
Drink wine. Be drunk.
You'll arrive to the nowhere of the soul.
My friend, no one will look for you,
Lost souls cost almost nothing.
There is no one to save you.
Only a lonely child knows the map to the nowhere.
Cry, if you can over the carcass of your childhood,
Cry, if you can, like the dying who don't know who will hear them in a world that is silent,
Who don't know if there can be one last question.
Cry. Drink. Cry.

***

No one has discovered death's mysteries.
All I know is we're born from impotent mercy,
The round belly of a seed,
Which is another mystery.
I know living needs power, dying needs power,
And I don't know which belly will guard the seed, the infinite seed,
I don't know who which belly will guard the power to die.

***

Expectations kill you, their hairy hands sweat something nameless , salty roots.
My friend,
Grasp the wine and a chair among friends,
Drink, speak, laugh, all the things that invent time.
Here, now, you are safe.

***

In the big theatre of life,
The play is about your season of pain.
Roots are hardened tears. Your role peels off your skin.
My friend,
The stage is round, like the belly of a planet,
With each turn the roles may change, even though the play is the same.
My friend, don't be lost in a role. Find your way out.

***

There is always sun above the clouds,
It lets your breath blossom
Strewing coolodors, the leaves of a breath.
It lets the clouds blossom in the rain.
In the long slow river
The sigh of a fish blossoms, the pallor of a tongue is fluid, it cannot be hardened in a word.

***

My friend,
Drink, let the glass shape the wine, let your mouth shape the moment.
Remember the markets of the world.
Your value is only the moments you shaped and that shaped you,
The roots in your sweat glitter like an old jewel.
My friend,
There is no other value.
Money is bankrupt. It's paper.

***

Life promises nothing, not even answers,
And yet, answers rain all around,
But to find the right question is the promised land.
My friend,
Answers are not arrivals. They are a journey, a drop of rain falling, falling.
And questions, the promised land are a journey too, mile after mile of desert.
My friend,
You have to know in which rain, in which land, in which desert, in which station
They meet, they recognize who is who, who asks, who answers.
My friend, drink, let the wine, round as a cup, round your lips, like the question of a smile,
The question of a child.

***

My friend,
Your life was a nest of shadows,
It was not a child,
No tender water in the eyes, no lullabies for pain.
My friend, Your life: a window to hurt,
Your life hurts in the glass.
My friend,
Open your eyes in, your eyes out, see.
You were hurt from the beginning,
And you don't know who should forgive whom,
You don't know if the past forgives.

***

My beloved,
The cup of wine changes you. It lets you be who you are.
My beloved,
You are all eyes, anything else is an illusion.
Your eyes: bigger than yourself, you are all in the eyes.
Nothing touches bottom when it falls in your eyes.
Your eyes: a lake without memory.
My beloved,
Remember who I am when I drown in your eyes.
Remember I was before the lake,
I was before the forgetting.

***

They say that those who kept tha laws of god up to the last comma,
Will be eternal. Will resuscitate, as they were:
The laws, the rules, the rules, the commas.
My friend,
Get drunk on wine and beauty. Let time be drunk on you,
Catch the butterflies of time. They are exquisite.
My friend,
The temporary is a door, a solution.

***