MONOLOGUE WITH TWO FACES

Raquel Angel-Nagler

ELENI POTAGA ATHINA
Author of "Circle A & B"

***

In a city fenced like fear, like the daily effort
I wait for you
Like a small question.
I see you, I see the city,
But where am I,
Where is the one who asks.
Where is the one who gathers his scattered fragments,
In order to know.
In which fragments am i real.
I wait for you the way one wait for the permission to live, to love,
Small answers whispering, whispering:
You are a cloud waiting for the permission to rain,
There is no permission, everything is unwritten,
Rain when you are water, burn when you are red coal,
Live when you are life.
You were in each fragment, real as a crack.
You were in each question,
In each syllable, in each pause, you grew big, bigger than what you asked.

***

Reality is a harsh master.
It needs all the love to go on,
Half understanding, half understood,
To choose meanings:
A little pilgrim to belief,
A little pilgrim the glittering blue.
You don't know how much meaning costs to be real,
To be a roof, a floor.
You don't know that being a moon, the big light borrower,
Is not enough.

***

Be a truce, the big truce with who you are,
Be a door . Enter. The simple certainty that you exist,
That you walk always closer to your center.
The simple certainty that you are different:
A song that will be sang only once.
The simple certainty that you exist
Not only inside, but also in the between,
That the skin of your song melts in the song of people,
The way light melts on a wall.
Be the simple certainty that nothing is simple,
Not even simplicity.
Your song: locked drops in the dew, entwining, entwining.

***

Your eyes: as clean, as clear as the cry of a child, as water.
But, too many summers grew old somewhere inside you.
You stand; a rock, the edge of the possible,
Your cry: infinite as the nameless fear.
Fear has no clarities,
A space where rains of stone could happen.
You don't know that inside the fear
The stony rain has already happened,
The purgatory of stone burning into dust.
The only clarity is dust,
The only certainty is dust.
Dust has a dangerous skin,
It scars you, it scratches you somewhere deep.
Your blood is dust.

***

The sea whirl caught me in its hard water.
My hand dove into the purgatory of depth.
I was the tear of a fish, silent, spreading, a soft sheet of salt.
I was free, the tiny eternities of freedom, in the silence,
I was invisible in the tear,
I was infinite in the softness.

***

You have no choice.
You open the gates of your city to time.
Time, the ancient dinosaur in a labyrinth of white coal, black fire.
A labyrinth of fear.
No one can cross time, and remain the same.
Man,
You open the gates, each moment, each coal, each fire, from the beginning.
Man,
What you fear has already happened.
The labyrinth of time is where you happen,
Where life plays as being you, as a child, a moment before fear.
The faces, the fear: strange because so familiar.
The child, forgotten, a moment after fear.

***

Belief is a tall vertical line climbing always higher,
And the ground floor of life is horizontal, feet walking, walking.
The lines are harsh teachers.
It needs all the love to imagine they meet:
A secret conversation between life and God.
It needs all the love to crucify you
When they meet in the arena of knives,
A temple bleeding, bleeding.
It needs all the love
To believe that innocence wasn't crucified in the eternal arena.

***

There is always sky behind the clouds, inside the clouds,
And the sun is a nomad in the blue desert, floating, floating.
The sun: an oasis, painting itself into black heat burnt sand,
Like a toy of life.
The sun: the space where shadows play with light.
A huge play ground.
Man,
There are small suns in the cracks of your skin,
They play at being you.
In the cracks of your skin, whiter than a sigh, tears play
Like raindrops, with lightness.
When tears play, they are light, they weigh no more than the cracks of dawn.

***

Mother,
The cracks in your hands:
The space where life happens, where tenderness happens,
Where pain tastes you with hundred tongues.
You hold the child, your arms, whiter than a tear,
Nourish the colors of innocence in the walls,
Consumed from so little use.
You till the earth molten in your skin,
Tired shoes always deeper, walking, walking towards the brown sea.
You guard the dawn, pollen of suns,
The smell of your small fears, the effort to tear the blue, to rain,
To be the wheat, the shimmering yellow of the possible.
Woman, you are farmer of life,
You are a soldier of life: a yellow sea, fluid as water. Water doesn't shatter easily.
You are the family of life, a roof, the floor.

***

A girl- Moses.
The world opened before her,
Like the sea of Moses, broken into two,
Like water pouring, clean as a cry, from a stone.
The world opened before her,
Like a desert that existed in the maps,
Like the longing for a promise,
The green legend of a land that began before she began,
Like a door to promise.
But the promise was not enough,
The longing was no door,
And the gaze, smuggler of borders, smuggler of dreams,
Carried the longing to a somewhere infinite,
As infinite as the impossible, as a nameless pain.

***

The tenderness in your gaze:
An empty space where life is quiet.
You are free in your quiet,
You can hear the sigh, the whispers of the air in your quiet.
You can touch the thoughts, like the bubbles of a child,
Shimmering, rising dissolving.
The bubbles don't change the blue: the world, the air.
They are what they always were:
A balloon of a child.
In the empty space you feel the play, the lightness, the tenderness,
In the empty space you are the play, the lightness, the tenderness,
In the empty space life plays as being you, all the ages that you are.
The empty space is the big play ground: you.

***

Your eyes between us.
There is no still space.
The eyes beating, touching in mid air.
I found your eyes in the center of tenderness,
I found your pain in the center of tenderness.
In the center of tenderness I found my longing.
Your eyes, thirsty for destinations,
And you don't know that your eyes, like the eyes of a child,
Bigger than his face, bigger than his life,
Were from the start, the center of tenderness.
Now, the space cracked by nameless pain, by so much use,
The space where destinations are slow rain,
Where the center of your tenderness leaks through the cracks
Into my center, like whispering water.
A monologue with two faces.
A tenderness nameless as rain, nameless as the big thirst.

***

The space inside you
Where life lives itself, where life lives at being you,
Where the daily small things happen:
Cherry petals, whiter than a tear, minute as a tear, repeat themselves,
And the beauty of the petals, the simple colors that are never really simple,
Leaks through the cracks of your fingers, the cracked air in the leaves.
You cannot contain the flow, the fall.
You cannot slow time to the rhythm of the fall.
Man,
The petals are holy, like everything that is fleeting.
The petals are holy like the everything that is rare,
Like a song that was sang only once.

***

Maybe life is a door.
Maybe the moments are a new door handle with ancient memories.
Your hand on the handle,
You open the door, silent,
As if questions, answers didn't exist,
Only the open door:
The space where everything can happen:
A moment, the storm, love, pain.
Woman,
We live, we die on both sides of the door.
Open the door like a storm, like pain, like love.
Open the door
Like the scent playing in a corner of a smile, like your hand, the smell whiter than a tear.
Strew your odors, the seeds that remember .
Open the door.

***

She opened her arms.
Softly you tattooed her
With the fire works in a butterfly's wing,
The butterfly fluttering, fluttering.
You don't know storm wait for such a flutter.
You don't know the dangerous skin of love.

***

You want to balance on the peak of the world,
An acrobat of life,
But so many summers grewold in your season,
The floor of the valley, cracked as pain, is safe.
The cracks recognize you.
When you look up, you see how the element solidify:
The moon light, the cries,
Intollerable vowels enter you.
The sky is not home.
You feel the touch of the touchable,
The touch is the way home,
The muddy road. Mud is gentle,
The earth in a tear,
The mud is playful: the slippery floor of a child.

***

You ask small questions.
Small questions have hard answers.
Your life: the vertical line of longing, the frail halo.
The horizontal line: the earth of living, of loving.
Trust the anatomy of the world .
Trust the vertical, that also today there will be sun.
Trust the horizontal, that the ground will find your steps, barefoot or with shoes.
Trust yourself.
You never wore a mask, you were not a mask.
Man, each one has many faces in his face,
Each moment borrows a face, learning peacefulness, learning the effort to live,
Each moment tends you as water, it drinks your thirst.
Trust gravity.
The heaviness hollows the air, breathe, breathe,
It ties you to earth,
A field of faces, a nursery of seeds. Seeds are hope, seeds are power.
Trust the twilight,
Shadows mingling with light.
The big truce. Be a truce.

***

The world began ten seconds ago.
The first light: a lamp turned on.
Yet, you have ancient memories,
How you were born in the gap between blood and cry,
The space where life happens ,like a storm.
You don't see the storm, you are the storm,
Lightening playing with your gaze.
Man,
The lightening in your eyes, the play solidifying the light,
The first light.
It was human.

***
The aim of arrows is flight.
They don't look for a center,
The center flows through them,
A moment before the flight.
The hour: a twilight river.
How beautiful the light includes everything.
The center moving always closer to itself,
As if the center was a journey.
There are no arrivals.

***

You have no choice. The horizon is no map.
You learn how to be a journey
Where arrival doesn't exist.
You don't believe in arrival anymore.
Somewhere deep, the fear of loosing yourself
In a huge station of things and faces.
Man,
The arrival was inside you
A moment before the start.
It was the space where you happened,
Where life played as being you,
Where the child took the children train.
You were the whole journey, the whistle and the echo of the train of a child.

***
The hard questions of small things.
How to continue the effort of living, of loving,
How the effort continues you,
As if you were the space, fenced,
Where hard questions happen, and there is no door..
Man, look, the small motions;
A hand diving into the purgatory of the daily,
Like a blue planet, the balloon of a child. Lightly.
A gaze caught in midflight, the whole rainbow in a kite.
Remember the little details,
A manual for tiny journeys towards yourself, towards a station that calls you by name.
The orbit that moves the stars, that moves in your heart beat.
The details are a door.

***

You add to her name the name of a child,
The name her mother called her.
You add to her name something infinite: the tenderness.
You add to her name a round season:
A green haze widening, thinning like day light.
You add to her name
The cracks of a season,
Cracks whiter than a tear.
There is something whole in a crack.

***

Truth doesn't need angels.
It can be told
In a letter of a child to God.

***

The first cave was dark.
In the first dark: the first child,
Touching you, whitely.
The first tongue of love, simple as magic,
The first grammar and the last.
You don't need a voice calling your name
To know who you are.
The touch of the dark, the touch of a child, white as a tear,
Melt in your skin.
The touch plays at being you.
You are safe in the touch.

***

You are the root of the sea: a shore.
All the beginning and the ends melt in the sand.
Your face in the mirror of a pebble
Smooth from so much use.
I tend you the way water tends the pebble, the stone of my small hours.
My beloved, there is nothing small in the ritual of living, of loving, nothing to forget.
Without the small, how can I feel what's big,
How can I celebrate the un-measurable: you.
You are the gaze where I play like a child,
The paper boat floating, floating,
The gaze where life plays at being you.
You are the big nursery, the play ground,
For the pebble, where light melts,
Dissolving, dissolving in the sand.

***

Why thelonging to forget gravity,
To fly high enough to touch the truth,
Why when you choose to fly,
The uncertain muzzled, whispering in each choice, chooses you.
You don't know if truth is touchable, if it blue mist, dissolving, dissolving.
You don't know where is the truth,
Why should it be so tall,
Where is the truth of a child, of an old bent life.
Man,
It doesn't matter how high are your wings,
The feathers in which you live:
A small star, a child playing with star dust, a toy of life,
It matters how can you walk in your shoes,
The cracked shoes in which you lived like a foot, dusty, real,
Which ground will hold your feet when you fall,
Which truth.

***

They gave you the soul,
A tall ladder. We measure height from the depth.
You don't know whom you'll find on the rungs:
Yourself or a stranger, strangers have a soul too.
Man,
The fear of height, the fear of depth,
Which fear will you choose, which fear will choose you.
You don't know you are condemned to be free,
To choose the uncertain,
The uncertain: a tent of endless cries
That came from very far, it moved in the era of the fish.
Man,
You climb the ladder like Jacob:
One foot in heaven, one foot in fire,
The last choice.

***

Slowly, the ghosts of time
Walk through your white washed wall.
Branches, long skinny arms,
Undress you, like a slow autumn
Of a child, of the habit to love, of a rose, the minute after the bud.
Slowly, the hard question of where nakedness began,
In which white, in which black,
In which river, the water white as a tear, black as the big night of the soul,
In the same drop, in the same truth.
The hard question of how to know what white is,
If you don't know the dark. To know the color of the truth.
Man,
All the answers happened already,
They began long before you began.
Look at the child, naked as water, as a cry.
He doesn't know the answer,
He doesn't know he is the answer.
He doesn't know that truth happens
In the gap between what you know and how you live,
The gap where you are naked as love, as the fear of the uncertain.
He doesn't know his ancestors: Adam and Eve,
How naked how visible each one was in the gap between knowing and living.
How a leaf was enough to hide the gap, to shade the truth, the light was too restless.

***
From the start,
The ghosts of time walked through your white washed walls.
You didn't know how ghosts fight,
How they use the raw edges of your fear,
How they consume the colors of your muscles to live. You bleed colorless flesh.
You melt into a shriek.
You want to grind death, like a star.
You go on like a dream of reality.
Man,
You wouldn't know why death,
Why without death: the huge tree of the night somewhere deep within,
You wouldn't know who lives itself inside you. Life: a stranger in your dream.
You arrive to the last death,
By you: the carcass of your struggle.
Life recognizes you,
It cries for your struggle,
For the effort to live, to dream.
Maybe the struggle made death more real.
Man,
Reality is a harsh teacher.
It needs all the love
To feel life is real because death is real.
You don't know how beautiful you are when you are real.
Man, the last death is always the first.

***

The pain of living crashed your life.
Slowly, you leaked through the cracks.
You left like the space between question and answer;
The space of fear
And yet, you softened the dangerous skin of your tremble,
You made a space where slowing time is possible,
Where questions do what they should do: they ask,
Visible, vulnerable, real.
Where the future is a memory that didn't happen yet,
Where the past and the tomorrow continue each other, continue in each other,
You left like a space between two moments,
Where existence is possible,
Finite, continuing, new, older than the clocks.
Where the new is visible among old colors, faded from so much use,
As if it carved itself in the deepest window of the eyes,
Where seeing is possible,
Like the Sense of Senses, like the Song of Songs.
And yet, I cry for you,
They way one cries for those who cried for him.

***

At twilight, the earth, the blue balloon of a child,
Is a secret playground of light and shadows, the big children of the world.
In the land of shadows, the child, the first fear of the dark, is not alone.
He hangs the moon in the window, the lamp of the possible is a lamp of magic.
Children trust magic.
How do they know that the possible is enough,
Where do they learn how much magic:
A sun that doesn't go down in a hurry,
Colors that feed their eyes, that plays with their gaze,
The sound of a distant sea moving in their ears,
The rustle of a moon leaf,
How much magic can the possible contain.

***

The rose bud on its way to the rose,
Doesn't contain the promise of spring.
It is spring, the whole spring, in each petal colors are made of.
And a child on his way to the man,
S not a sore room of promises, the promise of life,
He is life.
Life lives itself through him,
Smooth as the skin of a new born,
Scarred as the ages of time in his time.
At times, in the middle of the effort of living,
You remember the spring of life.
You undo, like a yellow leaf, your papery cave,
You touch the bud, a moment before the rose,
You touch the child, a moment before forgetting.

***

Pain comes, inevitable, crushed bones, crumbs of stone
That nourish nothing.
Your body doesn't feel pain,
Your body is pain: a big store room of sighs and groans.
You have no choice, you turn to the body,
It knows what is the big need.
It knows you are bigger than feeling,
But your vision is torn by the crushed stone.
You are the space where everything happens,
Where the first pain happens,
Clean and clear as the cry of a child,
Clear and clean as the gaze of a woman.
The small white healing flowers leak from her gaze,
She knows where to find the pain, she sees, she makes the pain visible.
She sees, and pain is no longer the terrifying unknown.
Man,
It is the unknown that hurts you,
Because fear is pain.
The body knows the big need:
To see, to be seen.
Seeing is the Sense of Senses, the Song of Songs.
You stand by a window, as big as the sky,
The clouds in your eyes come and go, like pain,
The sky remains the same, except the huge scar of a lightning
Remnant from the hard birds of storm.

***

Let the world's skin smooth, the skin of a new born,
Born again and again, a moment before growing old.
Let your thoughts float, white, white as a tear, clear water.
Man,
You are not your thoughts,
You are the space where thoughts happen.
How the elements solidify. Keep the space fluid, empty enough to enter the one who you are, don't solidify him, enter like water.
Let enter the beauty of rain drop melt on a leaf , soft as dissolving,
Let eternity melt inside a raindrop, water in water, melting, dissolving, melting.

***

Borders seem real,
But when you look slowly, very slow,
The are just a line on the map.
The line invents itself,
It invents who you are.
You are not a border,
You are the field where life happens, where life lives you.
You know so little, you feel so much:
The effort of living that melts into a shriek,
The beauty of living, the sound on the roof of rain.
The frail halo is exquisite.
The effort of loving, simply, opening, closing like day light, like a season.
The beauty of loving: skin licking skin,
The taste, the colors of a whisper,
Far from the big noise of stone.

***

In the big temple of the night,
The acrobat, rope walking
On the peak of pain, on the peak of effort.
The vertical body,
The horizontal rope.
They have to meet, to keep him safe.
The only light: the moon, the lamp of the possible,
And the view: a huge white bird in midflight,
A white bird keeping the sky that is falling, always more, always deeper.
The bird dissolving, dissolving,
Like a truth that is a slow sigh, sad vapour.

***

Sunrise.
We witnesses that light exists,
But the light thins always more, like the day,
The twilight is heavy with shadows:
The fear of losing the past: home ,is big, bigger than the fear of tomorrow.
Whose is the face in the shadows, where can he find his face.
Man, the shadows repeat you, the fear, the fear.
Some twilight time is slow, visible,
Look at the light entwined with the shadows.
Twilight is a truce.
Shadows have many faces,
As many as the light.
There is the light and the heavy in each motion of feeling,
In each stillness of thought.
Your life: a witness.
It knows that also love has a weight,
That there is gravity in the white flight of a bird.

***

You grow always more ancient, you know always less,
Buut your tears, the tears of the old, so small, so final,
Know.
They are soft, clear,
A river on its way to the sea
Where it will lose its name.
Rivers learn the way to the sea
From the dry cracks in your skin,
From the deep map bbeneath the skin.
You look at yourself:
A river at the edge of the possible,
At the end of the world,
The silence has no sound, it's dead,
But there is always one last question.

***

Men are ready to die for the truth,
But they are not ready to die for love, each night from the beginning.
But what truth, whose truth .
Man, you didn't come into the world,
You burst inside it
Like white in a blackout of silence,
Like clear water from the soil of a woman.
Your body, tattooed of life,
Your body invents life, like a play, like a child.
Man,
Who will guard your truth: the red tear of dawn,
Who will guard life: the play, the child,
Who will guard you: the clear water, the white in the middle of the silence,
Who will guard you from a truth that kills. Your body crumbles, the beautiful temple:
A dead truth.

***

Everything is a cyclical dance:
The raining time, it leaks into your seasons,
The mute light of a planet, the bursting stars,
The delicate pollen, thin as air, strong as air.
Everything dance, slowly, carefully,
The motions go left, the motions go right,
The shoes entwining, but they don't lose themselves.
You know the dance is ancient,
The first adoration to god: nature.
Man, when you dance with nature
You are small, but something between yourself and yourself
Blossom like blood, the big dark fruit.
You long for a center in the dance, in your dark fruit
You don't know that each step is a center,
Without contour, without limits.
You were in the center from the start.
And you don't know that everything is a center,
The fruit that blossomed between yourself and yourself,
The toes flowing naked as a raindrop or with shoes,
In a cycle that has no shape, because it has all shapes,
That has no name, because it has all the names.
You were the center from the start.

***

If you feel, somewhere inside you,
The green dark bottom of the sea:
The hard effort to survive, the tear of a fish: the pain,
Than the sea outside seems strange because so familiar.
The sea flows through you, so secret, so visible, the way life does, it slows time.
You can see.
You know where it goes,
To which surf, the pain of blossoming in its white.
You know where to wait for the sea,
You know where to wait for yourself,
Ready for the sea coming, coming,
Clean and raw as a cry,
Clean and and raw as life.

***

Boredom is work,
A motion trembling in its stillness, repeating, repeating itself,
Repeating the emptiness:
The huge eye hole where everything can enter, everything is the possible, everything can happen:
The blossom of what you feel
In the silent distances of boredom.
The sudden blossom of a butterfly:
The colors of a flutter in the repetitions of the air.
Man, storms wait for this flutter.
Strange stillness, as if boredom was the shiver of a door
Between opening and closing.
You are free in this shiver, you can choose.

***

The day,
The layers of light beneath shadow
Arrive, like the sea, from distant lands.
The sea inside you.
There are no graves in the sea, no true anchors.
There are bodies that went too deep, who needed the depth,
The shipwrecks, the rusted tear of a fish,
The motions of time in each wave,
Are strange because so familiar.
They shape you again and again, they shape the meaning of who you are,
They are the big power of time, it leaves you no choice.
No one can cross time and remain the same,
No matter the fear of losing yourself, of being other,
No matter how many shipwrecks drowned in you,
No matter the fear of another shipwreck.
Man, the shipwreck you fear has already happened,
Somewhere in your forgetting:
Your frail halo,
Anchor starving for a god.

***
How to walk lightly, as if gravity didn't exist.
To speak only when needed, like the zooming of a bee.
To long, with the small infinites of a wave spreading its limbs over the sand.
How to exist without weight, without the fences of fear,
Simply to coexist with the simple certainty of what is.
How to love enough to know that nothing is simple, not even simplicity,
To know nothing is certain. The 'what is', is free, it can choose.
That choice is never certain, that the uncertain is fear.
How to love enough to live.

***

How to sing with a light mouth, as if gravity didn't exist.
How to let the mouth be a song,
To play in the pauses, there where the music begins
How to know the lightness is enough.
How to live with the certainty of a bud on its way to the rose,
How to love when the rose bends its neck, when the effort to be rose is too much.
How to exists, to draw the thin silences of boundaries: more doors than fence.
How to exists, like a moon, looking for sun,
Looking on the other side of time
For small dark corners where love is possible,
Anonymous as light.
How to let the sea it drags be simply water,
Not thirst, not the pain of the exiled.
How to feel, among all the choices of the uncertain,
That choice exists,
That like a planet , an open conversation with the world,
You choose the orbit, and the orbit chooses you.
Inside you like a quarry of silence: worlds, worlds.
You are never alone in your choice.
You are never alone in the silence.

***

Life is a picture of a child.
Straight lines, like home.
The curves: the blue balloon of the sky.
Sharp edges protrude,
Visible, clean as the cry of a child.
Children know the pain of edges,
The pain of not smoothing them.
They don't know that the edges will shape them to what the world wants;
Smoothness, smoothness, if they must,
To what their secret center needs, the space where life lives as being them, if they dare.
They don't know that the center is a twilight house, that they make it themselves, alone by the alone.

***

Why did you begin the journey,
The train, the stations, stage by stage,
Are an effort, the tracks of the uncertain, fear.
Why are you condemned to be free, too choose
The train, the stations, the effort,
Why the fatigue of choice,
Why is freedom too much, why it has no maps, no traffic lights, the red pause to sooth you.
You stay at the station,
Your face in the window of the train,
The only life left among all the lives possible:
The fatigue, the effort, the fear, choose you.

***

Reality is a harsh teacher.
It needs all the love to go on the rope,
An acrobat of life.
To walk between two choices:
Hope, fear,
Between the two pains of the uncertain.
It needs all the love to go on the rope,
Always closer to the quiet coal in your center,
To the dangerous skin of the uncertain,
And to know you are innocent.
You had to choose, so small, so alone on the rope,
A choice that loved you, the eyes that multiplied you, like an echo,
That guarded your center in their inner window of their gaze.
And you don't know if innocence is simpler when you see it,
You don't know if the uncertain is simpler when it is visible, a shadow thinning to nothing.
You don't know if you have love enough to choose, each rope from the beginning.

***
The summers grew old inside the people.
The yesterday is a leaf black and flat like a shadow
The colors consumed from so much use.
How, without past, can they foresee the future,
How, without past, can they find themselves, where they are,
To know where beginnings didn't end.
How can they find the way back home.

***

The daily is never really small, never simple.
It is the first stone knife ever,
It carves your possible: a home, a song.
Man, run from the big shadows melting on walls like a thunder,
Run away on the black sister:
The asphalt on the way to life.
The black sister, cracked, uneven,
Knows where to find what life really needs, the true bread.
The black sister knows who you are,
To which city life goes, without legs, without feet.
Man, you don't enter the city only once,
You enter your city each day from the beginning,
Clean water in the throats of your wrist, dawn.
You enter it like life.

***

The moon, the lamp of the possible,
Where forgetting begins, like forgiving,
Where the black wind tears off our vision,
Tears off all the colors nights are made of,
Where the longing is clear, un-forgetting, unforgotten,
Where worlds are lost
Merely by waking up

***

The river, white, whiter than a tear,
Flows through you, restless, quiet.
At time it halts,
Hanging between space and gravity,
An acrobat of life.
It rope walks on the impossible,
The impossible inside each possible:
The impossible of a future, a withered season,
Like a memory than didn't happen yet, consumed by so much waiting.
This is the place of ancient silence,
Here, only the silence is possible.
You are free in your silence,
You may slow time in your silence, if you can,
You can flow in your restless river, the silence white as a tear, if you must.

***

A bird on the peak of the night,
An acrobat of blown skies,
The longing to fly,
The fear of height, the fear of depth,
Balance on the peak of the night.
Who is the bird, who fears,
Who is the dreamer, who is the dream.

***

Suddenly life is defined.
A word muzzled, tamed.
Love has a fragile skin,
Like the skin of a new-born,
It peels off like paper, it tears,
The tears consume the new-born, the love, you.
All that's left is a beautiful memory,
It sits by you, it tells the story
That invents you, that explains you to yourself.
You are innocent, you are not the word, you are not in the word.
But innocence became a vacant estate,
You are alone in your innocence,
The love: torn paper in a blown sky.

***

The big night of the soul.
Ghosts walk whitely, quietly, through the walls.
Your wings: two old torn shawls, hanging over your shape,
Like the roof of the night, like a curtain of dreams.
The dream is an ambush,
The dangerous skin of your city,
Moonlight is a wall of echoes.
There is no door.

***

The Cain mark beneath the skin,
Searching, searching for a way to break through.
The white washed wall, crucify the Cain mark, crucify the crucified.
You don't know yet how much love you need, how much silence,
To live, to go on with the mark, crucified,
The tattoo of the cursed,
And to be innocent.

***

You don't know the price of the priceless.
The meaning that began from somewhere deep, from all the shapes your life is,
The meaning that leaks like rain into your skin, and into the between, like a drenched halo.
The meaning of falling sky inside you,
The meaning of your feet,
Footsteps multiply like an echo,
On the black stones of the night, shining, shining.
The meaning of feet, found by the ground, finding you.
The meaning of height and depth in the transparence of the rain.
You don't know you cannot put a price tag on the priceless.

***

You and i
In two last motions: a touch,
They becomes one in the touch.
Woman,
The touch was the first language you knew, and the last you'll understand.
The touch is the first certainty and the last.
My touch melting in yours,
The years melting in our pillow,
The years that loved us. A touch.

***

Somewhere, you let go.
You don't need the voice calling your name
To know that you exist.
You don't need the moon, the lamp of the possible,
Polishing your whisper. Your whisper is clean enough.
Woman, what you need is to know how to love, how to be loved:
The togetherness and the alone in the motions of love.
The togetherness and the alone:
All the faces you are, in a window as big as the sky,
So visible, so vulnerable, so real.

***

Suddenly, a small shadow bursts out of my face,
Like a transparent water fall,
Transparent as the tremble of the unexpected, as the shiver of the unknown.
Transparence has a dangerous skin.
The shadow repeats me, the same and not the same, the way shadows do,
I didn't know how to name its shape, its colors:
How to give it reality, the gravity inside a word, a muzzle.
I didn't know how heavy a name could be,
I didn't know that shadows cry
When the name is heavier than a tear.
I didn't know why reality, who is real, which reality whispers in the name.
The shadow was there, in the center of my vision,
Until it thinned to nothing,
But the bench of memory is never empty.
It remembers.
When you cross the gravity alone, the tremble of the transparence, the unknown, infinite as a nameless pain, alone.
You never come out the same.
***
The whirl wind opening, closing,
The power of opposites
In one motion.
How can you find a bridge, the hard crossing.
A bridge between the power of who you are, and the power of the others to be.
Between you and love.
Who opposes, who is opposing.
A whirlwind of faces opening, closing, so together, so alone.
You don't know that bridges measure the distances of solitude.
You don't know how long the crossing may last, when a gaze might be enough.

***

Life: a vortex of shadows and light,
Petrified eyes of the sea.
Life: a shore.
The sand, a muse of quiet. Someone crying over the carcass of a childhood.
Life is a harsh teacher.
You need all the love you have
To live them both,
A wall where broken hearts melt, where petrified eyes become water, whiter than a tear.
To find the silent space where life lives, playing at being you,
Who you are when you are alone in your silence.
There are many doors: the alone, the silence, the melting wall.
Open the door.

***

She begins like a planet, a blue stone,
Swallowed by the big light.
She replenishes the lamps of dawn, the lamps of the possible,
Consumed from so much use.
She chews, what centuries alone can:
Rivers, past, fate, shadows, worlds.
A secret tenderness dives through this purgatory.
It lifts her like a ladder,
One foot in the sky, one foot in fire.
She lifts her light,
The big light where everything began.
The first light was human.
The first hell was human.

***
The birds come, like the sea,
From distant lands.
The colors of their motion, foreign, half known,
Like a memory that didn't happen yet,
Where the possible and the impossible melt like syllables in the sand.
Man, draw o letter, syllables yellow as the sand, as age.
Draw it like the letter of a child to the impossible, to whatever is magic.
Children love to play with the impossible, magic is a toy of life.
When the impossible ends, they grow suddenly old,
A heap of the possible, a decapitates toy.
Draw a letter to the impossible.

***

The eye of the pond suddenly opened,
The water filled the space, a liquid screen.
The eye of the pond saw itself in the screen,
And through the transparence.
It saw the green eye of the sea behind.
Two eyes, witnesses, confessions,
Water entangled and untangled in water,
Like a secret dance, like a truce
That began when time was ancient,
And the dance young.
Dances see, like life, whatever entered the body.
The body is the big sore rooms of groans, wounds, love.
They know what the body knows.
They dance with the body, in the body, through the body, out of the body:
A halo of beauty.
They don't mind how long the beauty last,
But how deep it feels, how much pulse trembles beneath the visible ,
The skin beneath the skin, the first soil of beauty and the last.

***

You come here broken, imperfect, unfinished,
And yet, you long for the perfect.
The peaks of beauty balancing on the peaks of life,
You fill your face with the clearest blue.
You fill your eyes with the clearest white,
White, clearer than a tear.
And you don't know that perfection is fragile, it cracks .
You don't know it is the cracks that make it real, whole, the face of a full moon.
You don't know that this full face is power,
It had the cracks from the start.
Man, look, see your cracked clay in their cracks.
The cracks are perfect, a dream of beauty,
Clear water melting in the big thirst.

***

Each time you return from the rain
Permeable enough,
With the skin peeling like wet paper,
So vulnerable to touch
The beginnings and the end in a raindrop,
A clear river on its way to the sea, where it will lose its name, in a raindrop.
Naked enough to feel the thirst.

***

Your life: a Marathon runner.
Your life: a fast runaway,
And love was restless as a breath, the spaces inside, moving, moving.
You didn't know how to slow time,
And like the runner, like life,
You had to choose with each shoe the uncertain.
You ran, so that the uncertain wouldn't reach you.
You didn't know how to live, how to love with the uncertain.
You didn't know that the uncertain is a wall of echoes,
Life, time melting in the wall.
The uncertain is no door .
Run with the uncertain in your shoes,
The uncertain : a door handle.
Who will open the door.
Why certainty is a harsh master,
It needs all the love to be certain among the thousand uncertainties,
It needs all the love to believe that certainty exist.
It needs all the love to believe that a door exists. To open the door.

***
Morning. Suns explode,
The colors entwine, untwine, like fire works.
The light, the sea black, sun burnt,
The possible is on pyre.
Yet, at night, the moon, the lamp of the possible,
Brings the possible back, drags the sea back.
In a corner of your vision:
Your foot steps from last year in the sand.
The sun, the moon, a cyclical dance
That continue, continues,
Always closer to your center.
Somewhere deep, the skin beneath the skin,
You feel that the possible;
The seed in the soil of a woman,
The roots in your skin, growing silent, patient, remembering, scarring,
Is enough.

***

The big clay vase,
As clear as clean as the cry of a child.
You have no choice,
You have to be clear water
In order to know what the cry knows,
To know what the first cry knew,
Who cried, who listened, who understood.
Man, the last cry is always the first.

***

The ecstasy of feeling:
I am not. You are.
The sadness of loosing yourself in love.
When you lose yourself, who loves, who is loved.
The face of a woman in your face,
A mirror, a lens that magnifies the hieroglyphs in a shady niche:
The beginning of a smile.
The mirror floats over your head, a glass bird,
It doesn't see you, you don't exist.
What is love when you don't exist.
Man, when was the last time you remember loosing yourself,
In which childhood, in which story that invented you.
In the shadow room: the sunset.
Yellow and red, two passionate metals.
Man. Find yourself in the red, in the yellow,
The doble passion that licks your skin.
Man, love is the meeting of two metals, hot,
A dialogue of passion, the colors flowing, flowing.
No monologue licks your skin,
Nor melts your metal, nor glues a tapestry of two more eyes,
Eyes that see you, vulnerable, melting, melting.
A monologue is not enough.

***

You feel the world is meaningless, indifferent,
You feel you look for a meaning in a meaningless world.
Man, meanings begin inside you,
Like the seed in the soil of a woman,
Like a seed of a question that came from very far,
That found you, questions find you when answers are not enough,
The question found your big pain, inside your pain you were ready.
In the distances of the dark stars grind time, crumb by crumb .
In the distances of the dark meaning can be a lit window, a curtain fluttering,
Making you half visible, the moon hanging in your window: the lamp of the possible.
Man, the lit window, the lamp, the curtain, the colors consumed from so little use
Are the way home. The biggest meaning. The way home is power.
Man, walk home. Your whole life is ready.

***

The aim of arrows is flight.
My gaze is another kind of arrow, another aim.
It looks for your eyes,
The eyes that make me visible, vulnerable,
The eyes that know the big loneliness of arrows,
Directions peel off the skin, like paper.
My skin is naked like the cry of a child.
Aim, aim at the cry,
Listen, I inhabit the cry, my room of echoes,
The walls drag the whispers like blue mist, dripping, dripping.
And I don't know who is the mist , who is the naked water, who is the naked thirst.
Who is the cry, who is the echo.

***

Times is a harsh mistress.
It grows inside you, even before you were a child.
It makes you rigid, the rigid is fragile. A cracked stone.
Inside each cracks it divides the feelings:
The vein of stone bleeding, whiter than a tear,
From the thoughts.
Man, feelings are ancient, they moved in the age of the fish.
You felt the hard salt in your skin, you felt the sea steaming in your breath,
Before you knew how to think,
They tell you, a moment before thought, what to think.
Your thoughts are locked in a drop of dew,
They don't know what the dew thinks,
They don't know how it feels to be dew,
They don't know how to become dew:
The only door left.

***

In the land of fading apparitions,
Your eyes divide the colors.
You hear the whisper of a hew,
But the noise of the colors is deafening.
You slow time, you see one color, carefully, like the vision of the first time.
You ask the color what it says, what it wants.
You know that other colors exist,
But you cannot forget the first.
Look at the colors in your deepest brush:
The lizard, the dangerous skin, that became a rainbow, a shadow, light.
Maybe everything began in one lonely color.
Maybe the first light, the thousand colors in the white,
Was a lizard.
The mad cells spill sparks, fevers, grinding time into color.

***

Everything is an effort.
The effort of a seed in the soil of a woman,
The effort of a child to send roots, invent leaves.
The effort of living, of accepting the good enough, the only enough available.
The effort of loving, of being so together, so alone.
The effort of choosing,
The effort of walking towards the uncertain,
So many feet in your shoes,
The effort of going together.
The effort of growing always older, of knowing always less, like a leaking season.
Inside you: a blizzard of birds,
Wings drumming over a winter that has happened already.
Man, no one can cross this blizzard and remain the same.
The effort to find the first point of departure: a door.
The effort to remember the 'I am', your floor, your ceiling.
The effort to remember the way home.
The distances pouring, pouring.

***

Art offers itself, layer beneath layer, like earth,
To those who look slow enough,
The smell of the cigarette still smoking.
Beneath: the empty night.
The night empty enough to let art in,
To let the cigarette steam , to let art remember all the nights beneath this night
It offers itself, white, grey as a cigarette half smoked,
The deep space where loneliness smokes its silence, its lips peeling like paper.
So strange because so familiar.

***

Slowly, the ghosts of time
Walk through the white washed wall.
A faceless forest that came from very far.
Their branches; long fingers,
Undress you, like a slow autumn.
The autumn of the child, of habits, of loving, of a rose, the moment after the bud.
Slowly, the hard question of where nakedness began.
The hard question of 'why's'.
Why the mind wants you dressed, keeping you in the miraculous state of the proper.
You undress but the cloths remain, glued to who you are,
To the skin of lived and unlived lives,
Why undressing, utterly, fully, balances at the edge of the impossible.
Man, all the answers happened already, everything began when you began.
Look for the child, naked as water, as a cry.
Look for the child.
He doesn't know the answer,
He doesn't know he is the answer,
He doesn't know that truth is a naked moment.
He doesn't know his ancestors,
Adam and Eve,
How naked, how visible each one was when he was himself, how beautiful.
How a leaf was enough to hide the truth.

***

Life used his white, whiter than a tear.
Beneath his white it bled dark, the dark fruit of blood.
In the arena: the last bull, the last you.
The bull black, the open white in its eyes.
You look, you don't know whom you fight: the black, the white.
Man,
It is the last war, the civil war inside you.
The white and the black kill you,
Because you want to live,
To live like the white rain from a black cloud, like a truce.
Man, be the rain, be the cloud, be the bull, be you,
The only way to live, don't forget it.
Don't forget that the last war is always the first,
That living is the endless effort, the endless beauty
Of the white sparks in a blackout of silence.

***

Everything becomes light
When there is enough darkness inside you,
Enough to know that light exists, because the dark exists,
Enough to trust the sun to rise, to set,
To be swallowed in the big dark like a stone,
Enough to trust that the dark
Will spit the sun also tomorrow.
Everything becomes light
When you look from a corner of quiet,
When fear is toothless,
When it cannot chew the tremble of white in your eyes.
The white furnished the day
Colors that were consumed from so much use.
Light comes slow, and the dark,
Slow as an old answer that began before you began, slow as a door.
The stars dust, the cells of the Big Bang flow through you
Like an old answer that has to be asked, each day from the beginning,
Like a distant door shrieking in your ear.
To ask how much world is the 'I am', how much alone.
Man, questions are a door, when the answers are not enough.

***

A Goddess real as life.
One head black, one eye tearing black.
One head white, one eye tearing white.
There is nothing simple about the colors.
You look for meaning,
The color of guilt, the color of innocence.
You believe that the black and the white tears are two rivers
In the middle of the nowhere.
You don't know how permeable they are,
Their dangerous skin. They leak into each other.
You need the goddess, two haloes telling you
What to be, where to go,
You don't know how to continue without the tears of gods.
You don't know how much their tears cost,
How many hearts, how many eyes you have to sell,
How many unlived lives.
You don't know how much the twilight spilling in the water costs.
The shadows and light mingle, without meaning,
With the big meaning: a truce.
Man, truce is priceless.
You cannot put a price tag on the priceless.

***