STORIES OF A RUSTLE

Raquel Angel-Nagler

***

THE SMALL CAFE, THE BANANA TREE
1.
Banana tree,
I passed by you today, but I hardly saw you.
I was in a hurry, even though I didn't know the where, the why.
Green sister, maybe we, humans, feel that time is not enough,
Maybe we live
From the certainty that we'll die.

2.
Banana tree, green sister,
You remind me that the true home
Is earth, the world,
That all the other homes
Are, at most, a home inside a home,
Or even a tidy room.
Too tidy to know who I am, what I am. I go.
Humans are never a tidy place.

***

3.
Banana tree, green sister,
You showed me
How to give a shape to the wind,
How to let the wind shape me.
You showed me how to breathe the world
When I breathe you, the air raining from each leaf, each moment, from the beginning.

***

4.
It's windy in the world.
I don't know if the banana tree
Likes the cold wind, the cold life.
After all, it came from the warm seas of the south.
Maybe it was smuggled by slave traders,
Sold in all the markets of the world,
Like the warm humans from the south.
But the banana tree is silent.
It is busy growing tall, growing wide.
Maybe, that's what we, human should do.
We should know we are an immense leaf of suns,
We should know this leaf is a law of nature.
No slave trader can sell these laws.

***

5.
The banana tree, the green sister,
Is beautiful.
It is not easy to draw a picture of beauty.
Maybe, I have to dig in the caves, somewhere
Inside me,
There are still the pictures on the walls,
The pictures ran on the walls, they were mother and child of motion, like life.
Maybe, all I have to draw is the picture of motion:
The leaves in the wind, the wind in the leaves,
The pictures in the caves rolling inside me, Rolling towards me, always more.
Green sister, it is not easy to grasp time, to paint motion on a canvass, or in a word.

***

6.
Banana tree,
You grow, always more, in my poems.
Green sister,
I need you in order to be always more human,
To see the visible, to trace the invisible.
I need you in order, in order to be, always more,
A leaf of the world.

***

7.
There were no banana tree by the sea.
I missed you green sister.
The sea speaks with salt in its mouth,
Like me.
I missed the quiet rain in your tongue,
The rain that drenches, softly, my life.

***

8.
Our thought, our feelings are truth,
When they think, they feel the world.
The world is truth.
There were thoughts that created gods,
Gardens of Eden,
But they couldn't create you, green sister,
A banana tree in another garden of Eden,
A small cafe. The living fruit.

***

9.
Banana tree, green sister,
You are born, like me, each day more.
You learn how to be more tree,
The way I learn how to be more human.
Yet, closeness is power.
I become, each day, more tree,
Maybe, you too, you become each day more human.

***

10.
The banana tree cannot leave.
It has no choice.
The silent roots.
The piece of sky that is its own.
The big struggle, like someone who has no choice, like someone who has to win,
Because he can go nowhere.
Green sister. You won.
You are here, and you walk into my life.

***

11.
The banana tree walks, each day, like me,
Towards the sun.
It loves the small talk, the people, the laughter,
Raining into its roots.
And it goes nowhere. It is like me, in the here, in the now,
The only home left.

***

12.
The banana tree soothes us,
The people in the small caffe,
The small tables of people.
I grew old, and maybe less honest.
I learned, little by little, how to steal
The coins of a smile, the coins of a grimace.
Green sister, you taught me the art of a thief,
How to steal the aura, the visible, invisible aura
Of what we are, of how we are.

***

13.
Banana tree, green sister,
You exist, even when I don't see you, when I don't hear the breath of your silence. You are real.
But, matter, the infinite artist, works in your body. One day, you may be different.
The infinite is playful, it may play with your shape. Remember, shape is not simply a jar for the content. It changes us.

***

14.
Banana tree, green sister,
You are in all my poems,
Anonymous as the air I breathe,
Invisible as the air I breathe,
Real, as the air I breathe.
Breath is a power,
And you, green sister, slim, delicate, graceful,
You are the power giver.
You sit in the atelier of living,
You shape life:
A green cup, naked exquisite.
Inside it: the winds of the world,
They inebriate us,
Like the adventure of living. Like loving.

***

15.
The banana leaves waves softly.
The green flag of the world.
After all, the world is the mother land of whatever exists,
And when you wave you hands, the immense hands of a human,
You wave a flag inside a flag.
Your hands are the mother land of human,
A mother land of small infinite.

***

16.
Banana tree, green sister,
You came too from far places.
Maybe you were surprised at the foreign earth,
Maybe you were surprised at the foreign sun,
But, time flows everywhere,
Also in the veins of a stranger,
You grew old, the way nights grow old, the invisible strangers,
Beautiful in your invisible.
I grew old in you.

***

17.
The roots of the banana tree are in the sun.
The discretion of the leaves.
Each leaf is alone and together,
Their shadows; alone and together.
The immense silence between breath and breath, the waiting for the winds of the world.
Green sister, maybe, you know something we don't:
There are many leaves, but only one tree,
The roots of our sun.

***

18.
I touch my eyes: I try them.
I touch my thoughts: I try them.
Green sister,
When we see each other each day,
We seem the same, we see without seeing.
Green sister,
Each day I have to begin again
To learn again how to see, how to feel what I see.
To learn again how to recognize the green family that we are, the green leaves of the world.

***

19.
Banana tree, green sister,
Some days I don't see you. I forget how to see.
Seeing is power, and you need power to see.
We are on the same journey:
A journey to the sun, a journey to roots.
We travel, alone and together.
Maybe, some days the togetherness is too loud, or the closeness is too close, closer than a silence.
I am alone.

20.
The small cafe. The banana tree, a gentle giant,
In the circus of life.
The cats, acrobats of roofs.
And the people, close as a breath,
The juggle with words, with meanings, with commas in the middle of a syllable, with commas in the middle of a gaze.
They don't know how beautiful they are

***

21.
Banana tree, green sister,
I don't know how tall you are,
Height begins from down, from the depth.
I don't know how distant you are,
No one can measure the distances inside a rustle, inside a silence.
Inside me, you are deep, so you are tall,
Inside me, you are the rustle inside the silence,
I hear both distances.

***

22.
Banana tree, green sister,
Like me you use borrowed things:
A piece of sky, the wing of a bird.
Like me, you have your obligation.
You have to pay you debt to the sky, to the wing,
Each day from the beginning.
Green sister,
I pay to my debt to living.
I pay the debt to you: a friend, a sister.
You look at me,
Your eyes are as green as your silence.
You sooth me.

***

23.
The banana tree
Always the same, always different.
Maybe it teaches us how to see,
Maybe it lets our eyes grow.
Maybe it is the farmer of our eyes:
The most exquisite farm.

***

24.
The banana tree,
The leaves are wind,
They bow gently.
The small breath of the roots: wind,
It kneels quiet, simple.
Maybe it is an earth-believer,
Maybe it knows something we don't:
How to worship life.
How to respect death.

***

25.
The banana tree is a perfect poem.
Nothing to detract, nothing to add.
And yet, I am human,
I try to change it, to make the poem my own.
After all,
Words are our Deus Ex Machina.

***

26.
Banana tree, green sister,
You are always here,
So, at times I see you without seeing, I lose you.
At times I don't see the people, I don't see the colors. Time is color. I lose them.
On my face: a soft mask, no eyes, two deep wells, they see shadows.
I don't see the small motions, the useful motions
That becomes light, life.
I become colorblind, life blind.

***

27.
Banana tree,
Maybe you are old, older than myself.
Maybe you travel each day towards the light,
Traveling exhaust you.
But your motions, the almost invisible motions of living are quiet.
I am tired of being old.
Some days I reach the light,
Some days, the clouds, huge caves in my head,
Keep me in.
Green sister,
Teach me how to grow old.

***

28.
Banana tree,
I speak to you, and I feel you hear me.
No one can love life so much,
Green sister,
And not to hear the others.
No one can feel the world raining into his life,
And not to feel life dripping from the others.

***

29.
Maybe I cannot speak to you, green sister,
Maybe you cannot speak to me,
But the nearness,
Being close each day from the beginning,
Is enough.
Maybe, it is the image of humans I love.
We say nothing, because everything was said,
Because the closeness speaks
In the motion of leaves tongues are made of.

***

30.
It's autumn in the small cafe
Yet, the banana tree is calm,
As if it let time walk with silent, regular steps inside it, like someone who was sowing something.
As if it knew time can be the big power of sowing, it can add seed to seed, it can add life to life.
As if it knew how to trust the strange algebra of time.

***

31.
The small cafe,
The banana tree lives, like all plants, working.
The branches climb high, without scaffolding, without safety net, towards the sun.
There are many humans, much more than what we imagine, that are banana trees.
They survive, each day from the beginning.
Surviving is a sad power.

***

There were many books, but they were not enough.
I loved to watch, I loved the losers, I loved the passer's by who looked, I loved the ones who stood out of their door, like an act of faith,
I loved the people who sowed their words, so near to truth, that the words were as simple, as close, as a breath.
I loved my teachers.

***

There are people who need to amuse their boredom in order to go on.
They travel the seas, they travel the mountains,
But it is not enough.
They don't let the motions of living travel with them, the most suspending travelers:
The most beautiful killer,
A tender gun.

***

Poetry needs power.
You need the power to use a tongue simple as a breath.
To use words, silences that are outgoing,
The people may not come out to meet poetry,
But you should have the power to walk towards them, to meet them, to see them, always more, always better.

***

We grow old.
We have to forget so much,
That we don't have time to remember,
And it is sad,
Because we wrote poems, poems that knew how to love,
And we bury them, because they remember too much, because remembering has become hard work.

***

We live fearless, restless.
We don't think about death.
We don't realize we were born with a flicker of death inside us,
The flicker that makes us what we are.
We don't realize that death forgets nothing.
It thinks about us. It needs us in order to exist.

***

We came from very far to meet ourselves.
Like a song that came from the past.
It remembers, it sings us.
And songs are story tellers, maybe the most ancient ones,
They tell us how we came here, why we came here,
As if they were answers to questions we didn't know how to ask.

SILENT FLOORS (THE DISEASE)
1.
The weeks in the small room.
You feel you become invisible,
Pure glass.
The smallest motion of living may break you.
You need the eyes of people, the big eyes,
The biggest, to see you,
To break, natural as magic,
The glass that doesn't exist.

***

2.
Bones are not glass. They don't break easily,
And yet, they fracture at the wall of pain, at the wall of sadness.
You don't know how immense you are
When you shake the broken hands.

3.
Falls are natural.
After all, gravity is a law of nature.
But they leave you,
Like an animal of pain,
Hidden in a corner of your silence.
Maybe people whose life has fallen,
Because of the gravity of pain, of sadness,
Hide like that.
Human gravity is a power. A human law.
It lets us fall, like a stone in an abyss.
And we don't realize that we are the stone, we are the abyss, that we are the builders of the abyss, of the stone, that we can be the hand, the immense human hand, the big destroyer.

***

4.
The sweat is not the good sweat
Of the harvest, of love.
It is the sweat of pain. It smells.
Maybe the people, people you love are clear rain,
Maybe they could wash it,
Maybe they could take away the salt that scars All my infinites: what I remember, what I forget,
What I fear, who I am.

***

5.
Days came, like a garden of suns,
But inside me it smelled autumn,
A deserted autumn, a desert of people.
All I could do is write the fallen leaves.
They were friends, they knew the shape of my tremble, the shape of my thirst.
Thirst is a power, life is thirst.

***

6.
There is only time in the room,
No world, no sky. Ceilings are the place where skies die, a heavy grave.
Time is paralyzed in the room, it goes nowhere.
You are thirsty.
You miss time when it was a waterfall,
When it drenched you.
You miss the touch of people: a hand that gives you water, that rains into you,
And you want no umbrella of mercy.

***

7.
I go out in the street,
My bones broken. I go out as naked as a bone.
I see the eyes that see me,
I see the eyes that choose not to see,
After all, life often breaks our secret bones,
So the choice to see is a big power. The biggest.

***

8.
Inside the room,
The summer seems useless.
Inside the room,
The feelings, the dreams are a lost motion,
It has nowhere to go.
I miss the daily journey: the people.
Maybe there could be a manual for small eternities:
A gaze, without a ticket of return,
The small suns in the sands of the hours.
The raining world,
Without an umbrella.

***

9.
The days, the weeks in the room.
I learned how to be a scavenger
Of gazes, of raining palms, of the beginning of a smile,
The small things, almost invisible,
That still keep us here, on this earth, in this life.
The only treasures available.
I am a scavenger of hope.

***

10
In the window: a piece of sky that is my own. It's not enough.
Inside me; the madness of walls.
I want to close my eyes inside, to forget the questions.
To forget the mine fields in the wide feet of a question,
To forget that these feet, with shoes or without,
Walk towards me always deeper. The mine fields are always more real.

***

11.
The disease, the pain,
Survival is in everything, everywhere.
I don't believe in praying,
Yet, I pray.
I don't realize I don't pray to some god,
I pray to the power to live. The power to survive is a sad power.
After all, I came from very far,
I made pedestrian, with shoes and without,
The journey to living. I didn't know the journey is endless.
There are no arrivals, there are no departures.

***

DALI'S WATCH
You paint the three dimensions,
But can you paint the fourth one,
Can you paint soft time,
A time that can wrap itself around your motions,
That can tell you gently,
What time it is in your time,
Can you open the infinite inside a tremble.

***

You paint your face,
You paint a glove over yourself.
The glove of a child with four fingers,
They are too cold to unfold,
They are too cold to know they tremble,
And the thumb is exiled,
Without a thumb you can grasp nothing,
Not even your face beneath the paint.

***

We are beneath the gods, the angels,
So all we can see are their feet, the cracked toes
From the eternity of standing on the tight sky rope,
And their only safety net is us:
Our fear of living, our fear of dying.

***

Circles were always holy, a symbol of the orbits of gods.
But when the people dance the circular dance,
The dance that came from very far,
It becomes another kind of holiness:
The past that made us who we were, who we are. The past is holy.
And our hand in the hand of others,
The touch that gives meaning to the dance.
The hands are holy, the orbit is human, it is holy.

***

You divide the absence into compartments:
The rooms, the halls.
It makes it less visible.
You don't realize that one small compartment
Can weigh like the whole absence,
Like the whole infinite in the small infinites of living.
The small absence, silent, patient,
In the motion of a man.

***

It is the small things that conquer you,
The moths of everyday in the weaving of your life.
You don't know how immense you are
When you weave the moths, each day from the beginning,
The crystal of salt shine in the weaving,
Each day from the beginning,
The motions of living, weave you, each day from the beginning.
The moths are power, and weaving them in your cloth is power. You weave the story of the victory over the moths.
The cloth is exquisite.

***

Weaving the internet, the immense spider,
Studied as a crime,
Is the power of the mask.
You can inject some light in the shadows,
The mask is airy, the mask is beautiful.
Behind the mask you are a face,
Behind the mask you are anonymous.
Anonymous as a bullet, as an atomic bomb.
Maybe your name is Hiroshima,
But it doesn't matter.

***

You see a man, as close as a breath,
You sniff the secret air,
You touch the flesh of an expression.
It is the first power.
You speak to a man on the phone,
You hear the hesitations, the postponements,
You hear the voice beneath the voice,
You feel the hues of a silence.
This as the second power.
You write to someone, hand-made words,
The tremble in a syllable, in a comma,
The bent phrases, like pain, like fatigue
This is the third power.
These are the holy trinity of a human,
The true journey between the alone and the alone.

***

When you want to go,
You have to know where you are,
In which island, in which sea of stone,
And then you go.
Be ready to climb on the uphill of the soul,
Be ready to feel the world raining into your life,
To feel the people raining into your life.
To know it is the only way home.

***

We walked, each day, in a different world,
Each day in a different life,
And even our small daily deaths were different.
So, no matter how strong homes we build,
No matter how strong cities,
No matter how strong worlds.
We are still nomads in ourselves, nomads in the world, nomads in our life, nomads in our death.

***

We are born, and we struggle to keep our head up,
And it is sad,
Because some never learn how to do it,
As if they never made the journey to human.
Maybe it is fear, maybe, suffering, maybe the pain of seeing I to I.
And maybe they don't trust the strength of the human neck
To be erect, even when it's bent.

***

Maybe the long journey from the first man to human,
Was a journey of feeling.
Our feelings learned how to think,
Our feelings learned how to understand what they feel,
Which is the big school of feeling. The biggest.

***

We came from very far, time was dark,
But on our journey
There were many who brought a branch of fire,
So, there were more, much more than one
Prometheus,
But we didn't know them, we didn't know how to love them,
All we had were the vultures tearing the air
on their way to pain.

***

Our colors change with the hours:
Grey, red, white,
Like precious marbles.
As if we were, each one, a temple to light.
As if we were, each one, the play ground of small infinites.

***

At times,
Silence is the only act of freedom left,
To protect the human in our head.
He is free.
To protect the dream inside us. It is free.
There are more kinds of prison than what we know.
There are too many silences around us.

***

You see people in the corners of the street:
The missing leg, the cry inside a hump.
We don't realize that the whole journey to human:
Attilas, saints, dreamers,
Is held in the missing leg, in the hump.
We don't realize it is held in the tiny fingers of a child.

***

You paint your face, like a clown,
In order to be less visible,
Your feelings: a blind mirror.
And yet,, your face, the face of a clown, is more visible:
A magnifying lens over what you think, over what you feel.
You are a clown, a man alone in the arena,
A magnifying lens in his face, in his painted laughter.

***

People are the true homeland, the immense home,
Yet, often they are lost,
They don't realize they belonged
From the first moment of the first hour.
There are people who are the way home,
Their motions of living lead you
To where you already are.
And your motions lead you,
You see the way home in your time-bitten shoes, in your pain-bitten shoes.
The deepest shoes.

***

TO LEANDROS POLENAKIS
The person in your head is human: a wingless bird.
And yet, birds fly through it.
Smugglers of borders, smugglers of dreams.
He loves to imagine a moment,
In an hour that doesn't exist.
He loves the mystery of what didn't happen.
He feels how fantasy plays with life, always.
He rules fantasy, and it rules him.
They are lovers, bound and free as love.

***

TO IRO ARGIRAKI

Tenderness is a gift,
And kindness is a gift.
It need power to give this gift,
And strangely,
These delicate gifts give strength.
Gentle Iro,
You sense what people need: the strength for the journey from hour to hour, from day to day.
The biggest journey.

***

The inexplicable is a power.
It may be the way home, the way to the puddle of a child: the biggest sea.
It is a traffic light that doesn't exist,
In a place that doesn't exist,
In a place that should exist. Always.

***

Fairy tales are more, much more serious
Than what we imagine.
You are a child
Who doesn't know if he can put back the Jinni in the bottle,
If the Frankenstein he made will love him,
If one little riding hood is enough for the hunger of a wolf, the terrible hunger.
Even the myths are not safe,
They don't sell you Prometheus,
They sell you the vultures,
They are as cheap as blood.

***

There are no traffic lights on the street to Ithaca,
And yet, you wait for the light to change.
You are afraid to stay, you are afraid to arrive.
The inexplicable is a traffic light that doesn't exist,
That tells us when we are ready. When to go.

***

We write myths,
And they become a story of history.
But when the people sing the myths,
They become the true history,
Because history is a quire of voices,
The biggest opus.
There is no history for one voice, no matter
How visible it is.

***

We are the acrobats of life,
The biggest circus in the world:
The tight rope on which we walk from day to day, the woman rubber in the suitcase.
She has nowhere else to go.
The clown that no one dares guessing what he feels.
Maybe they are a poem of magic, of pain,
A poem of time, the river between their legs.
Maybe, one day the poem will flow with the river. Poems do it often.
They are not time-resistant.

***

There is gravity in the motions of living.
There is gravity in the motions of seeing.
You need someone.
You need to carry the gravity alone and together,
You need the quiet muscle in the hands of a human,
And you need the soft marble in the touch of a human.
Maybe, in a station of midnight, the twelfth station in the journey,
this quiet muscle, this touch,
Could make the gravity lighter, it would weigh no more than the dawn.

***

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY
1.
One of the elements your body is made of
Is your name.
The nameless loses the password, the way home.
And when he dies, he loses everything,
Even the memory, the traces of memory.
He didn't exist

***

2.
The soul is a small place,
A clay cup is enough to keep it.
It is magic how this soul, this tiny soul,
Makes us what we are,
How this soul is the only password to eternity,
The only password to suns, to the journey to light.

***

There are people who re-write history.
Remember: the past is who you were, who you are, the deepest seed.
Remember:
You should know who re-wrote the seed, why he re-wrote it.
Remember: seeds are power.
Words are not seeds. They are paper. They grow fragile. They break.

***

We came from very far, from all the first things.
From the first moment of the thought of death.
This moment, this first moment, was the first thought of after-life, of eternities. Of gods.
And we carried this thought in what we do, in what we think, in who we are.

***

They use matter to make science.
They use the person in your head to make science.
This person may be invisible in its nakedness,
He may be invisible in the cruel spark.
Matter is innocent.
Hiroshima is not.

***

We say: night falls,
And we are right.
The gravity of the dark in immense,
It can crash us.
Maybe the shadows inside us
Are water-colors of the dark,
They seem lighter.
But when they paint themselves
When they conquer all the continents of living,
The picture is heavy, the water colors are led,
We crash, the way we die, from inside out.

***

Your hands: two halves of a moon. They shine.
In your lips: two halves of a moon.
Their smile has something strange, it smells of light.
I walk towards you,
The way the sea walks towards the moon,
Always more. Always deeper.


Beneath the ocean,
The big forest of the world. The biggest.
Invisible in its depth,
Invisible as the indispensable.
It is the sir giver, the breath giver,

It is the power in the flight of a bird, the tall breath,
In the fish of time: the breath of time,
It is the power in the deep seeds,
The breath of the seed that we are.

***

Remember: there is no life without power.
Remember; the star light is the power giver,
But life has to learn how to use it, in order to become life.
How to become the motions of living, the motions of a seed.
After all, everything is a seed of something:
Life, each step of life, the dying.

***

We build everything, layer over layer:
The cities, the habits, what we know, the border.
Even the dream are layer over layer,
They grew, they became the big smugglers of borders.
The biggest bird.

***

We don't realize how small things can give us power, can be the engineers of the motions of living.
How a leaf is an engineer of breath,
How a seed, a deep seed,
Is the engineer of life, The engineer of loving,
How the world weaves, with threads transparent, miniscule,
A big safety net. The biggest.

***

There are those who forger a past,
A past that wasn't your own.
Remember: no one can change the past.
Remember: the past is a river of time,
You can see who you really were, who you are.
Close your eyes, wash them,
Your eyes full of clear, pure water.
You begin to see. You recognize yourself.
Recognizing yourself is power.

***

The past is a dangerous place:
So many choices that cannot be undone.
So many regrets that cannot be un-regretted.
So many lost things: love, friends, dreams.
And the past attacks you always in your back.
No one is really ready for his past.

***

I could believe in a god who'd believe in me,
Who'd know that life is hard work.
Who'd know that innocence walks on a tight rope.
Someone who'll weave the human and the godly, two infinites, in an exquisite cloth beneath it.
A safety net. A net of mercy.
I could believe in a god I could forgive,
Because I don't know how to forgive myself.

***

Form goes deep, much deeper than what you imagine.
It gives shape to your eyes,
It can give shape to your touch.
Everything is weaving itself in your motions.
Form becomes content,
Content becomes form,
As if they were the two faces of a coin: life.

***

FRACTALS
Nature is wrinkled, a wounded giant.
We don't see it, but the shapes inside the wrinkles, inside the wound
Repeat themselves everywhere, like the most exquisite mosaic.
And this repetition makes everything different,
It is the artist of beauty.

***

FRACTALS
Nature is an equation,
The mathematic of shapes, of colors, of sensation,
And the flow of the shapes, of the colors, of the sensation is a number, there are not numbers enough for the infinite.
As if everything were waves:
waves of time and pieces of water.
The equation copies the waves that happened.
The equation copies the waves that didn't happen.
It copies the waves that we are.

***

You are my Jerusalem.
You are my Rome.
In your body, the warm marble,
Sin and pleasure are the same.
They are exquisite.
Your body: a place to pray,
To save myself from myself.
You open your arms the way one opens a door:
An act of faith.

***

Statues break, the heroes of the past.
At times, we break them,
We cannot kill the past, the past that killed us,
But we can punish its marbles, its stone.
At times, the invisible hammers of time break them.
The smooth marble of the back cracks,
The hands fall like leaves of stone.
You don't realize that being a hero tires them,
That the years of worship tired them,
That they want the right to be small, weak,
Beneath the strength. Simply human.

***

You can win even before you enter the arena,
When you feel strong enough to live, to die, in order to win.
When you know that the blind motions:
The blind eyes of hate, the eyeless rage,
Are useless.
They defeat themselves.
When your eyes are clear, cool water. You see. You win.

***

It rains over the city. It rains mud.
There is mud in your eyes.
There is mud in your motions of living.
You forget that mud is an artist:
A jug that gives shape to water.
An ancient statue that gives shape to time.
The foot prints that the artist of mud kneads
Are small and big at the same time.
They give shape to your journey
From moment to moment, from hour to hour,
Each day, from the beginning.

***

Looters made the wars,
And the wars made us what we are.
Maybe, one day,
The courage, the infinite courage not to kill,,
The courage to eat the honest wheat,
To know it is enough.
This courage will make us what we are, who we are.

***

Wars happen always in Rome.
Rome burns, each time from the beginning,
Each time deeper.
And each war needs its Nero,
After all, you need a mad match box,
To burn in one motion
Life, beauty, stones.
Remember: hate doesn't burn easily.

***

We are all strong
In a certain way, in certain things.
But, we have our weaknesses.
Strangely scars may not make us stronger. They may be points of our weakness:
The place we leave naked, visible, to show who we were, how beautiful we were.

***

You use old words, consumed.
And you spread over everything,
Like a spice, like moon petals.
But, hunger is not a spice.
It is a main dish,
And pain is not a moon petal,
It is the autumn of moons.
You need new words.
Words as simple as the last bread in the plate,
As immense.
After all, words are the image of who you are.
You need words that see you,
That know your name.

***

In order to be a great teacher,
You have to be a great pupil,
And when you teach, sell nothing:
Solutions, the map of your soul.
Remember: Answers are slave traders.
Questions are free.
The human in their head is free.

***

You walk,
One foot in the past, one in the future.
No wonder your feet are heavy.
The past, the future are full of gravity.
Time may be a river, but it is a river of star dust,
Rusted metal, and it is eternal,
And carrying in each tiny step two eternities
Is not simple,
No matter how you walk: sideway, retreating,
You walk forwards, one foot in the past, one- in the future.

***

Nature has laws, rules.
It has geometry,
And it repeats itself
In the veins of a leaf,
In the branching of a tree,
In the meandering of a river,
In us.
Maybe this repetition makes everything different.
Maybe this repetition weaves the most beautiful cloth, the most exquisite.
There are evenings when you feel, natural as magic, how the light, the shadows repeat themselves in what you see, in what you are.

***

There are many homes:
The place where you were born,
The place that shaped you,
The place you left.
The time where you were born,
The time that shaped you.
The time you left, and that left you.
You say: home,
And you don't realize you need more, many more homes in order to say: home.

***

You know that a caterpillar
Will be one day a butterfly.
But knowing it doesn't make it less wonderful,
If the knowing left room enough for magic.
After all, matter is the magician of change.
Change is magic.

***

midnight,
The twelfth station of the journey to human,
You hear the songs of the stars,
You hear the song of the star dust you are made of.
Maybe, the closer you are to the human, the closer you are to the world.
And the song is so exquisite,
That you need new words to write it,
And you need a new pulse,
To feel the pulse of the most distant star
In your pulse.

***

Maybe we are not alone in the universe,
But we are alone in our body.
People on a strange rock.
We learn the wisdom of loneliness,
And we spread this wisdom always further, always deeper.
We are sad people.

***

For each war you wage with the others,
You wage at least a hundred wars
In the lonely arena that you are.
So, maybe peace will come one day,
On the wheelchair of the soul,
Of someone who lost the last war with himself,
Or maybe he won it,
When winning and loss will be the same.

***

The journey.
The winds coming from all directions, like life.
It leaves you, like everybody else,
With one wing only.
Flying with one wing is pain.
So, you have no choice,
Your shoes till the road, and the road tills them.
Yet, you keep the one wing in your pocket, always.
You let it fly in a poem, in a dream, in a motion of love. The biggest bird.

***

The war killed, like all wars,
Some things inside me.
Beautiful girl, when you'll see me,
You'll realize that the only eternity alive in me
Is the past.
I don't know how to love in the now,
I don't know how to love the now.
Maybe I'll die in the now, even though I don't live there.
Wars kill us even when we don't know
Who inside us we lost, who is left.

***

The loneliness in front of you, behind you.
The shadows around you.
The shadows are not always what you think.
They are faithful, they are always here.
They know the shape of your motions, the shapes of your silence, they may be a friend.
Also the loneliness knows who you are,
It is always here. A friend.
It is strange, when you make friends with your loneliness, you are never alone.

***

You are distant.
So, I dream you, I bring you close.
Dreams may be a piece torn from the world,
Like the rain.
I'll rain into your body, I'll rain into your life,
You'll feel the rain, dreams can go far,
And your motions of living, your motions of loving will rain, natural as magic, into my dream.
My beloved, dreams are never distant, they travel in the speed of human light, the small infinites inside me.

***

The nights are infinite.
There is no sleep left,
And the dreams are pain.
I dream I am bleeding, and the blood bleeds me,
I embrace the beauty of death.
Maybe, when I embrace the beauty of death, I embrace only of half of my eternities.
Maybe, one day, Ill dream life, the beauty of life.
Maybe one day, the twilight will be infinite.
Room enough for the shadows to mingle with light, for life mingling with death, for the mingling of beauties.
A truce.

***

I tame my breasts. I tame their tremble.
I never wanted to want you.
There were separations everywhere:
In the palm closed as silence.
In the cigarette that was left un-smoked. It burned.
In the train: you were inside, you were on the tracks.
I know that even if you'll be close,
You'll be far.

***

It is not easy to be a feather,
It is not easy to be light.
When the hours are heavy, when the heaviness rains into your life,
To fly through all the gravities,
To carry with you the before and the after
And to weigh no more than a moment,
To weigh no more than a truce of the three times,
No more than a truce between a raindrop and the rain.

***

There are gazes that make the day smaller,
That freeze the tears.
Maybe hate is cold,
Maybe the fear at its core is frozen.
Maybe, one day, these gazes will die.
One day, the giants will melt.
The end of the ice age.
The broken glaciers in the eyes.

***

Maybe, one day, I wouldn't write anymore,
Or maybe, I'll write differently.
I'll make the words an act, the motions of living,
Which is a big poetry. The biggest.

***

In order to live, I have to write.
In order to write, I have to live.
The words that haven't lived, that haven't loved,
That haven't thought, that have struggled,
Know nothing.

***

We are not slaves of nature,
We are the family of nature,
And we are the family of human nature:
The people.
We should remember it is the family
That makes us what we are, who we are.
It is the family that binds us, that lets us free,
Like love.

***

Seeing is a power, if you know how to see.
The faces of people,
The waterfalls of time in the wrinkles,
The broken glass in the smile.
To know that you see, and the other see you.
To be visible is a power.
To know that the invisible: who we are, what we are,
Struggles inside the visible.
A power inside a power.

***

Time is everywhere,
Even in a stone.
Time runs in it on the hundred hoofs of a gazelle,
Time flows, like wild water, in lets it fall in all its abysses.
Time rolls the past of the stone into the future.
But, stones remember. They can move time backwards into the past.
Remembering is a power. It brings the three times closer.
A truce.

***

We invent our tools,
And they invent us.
They become our footprints in the journey to human.
They become the fingerprints of what we are,
Where we are.
Our footprints remember us, our fingerprints remember us, they are a password to our story.

***

We annihilated the distances
With our inventions,
But we didn't invent yet something
To annihilate the distances between us,
Or maybe, we don't have the power for closeness.
The closer we are, the more alone we are.

***

It was the station zero in the journey to human,
The journey was harsh,
There were many dead, they were barefoot, they entered our shoes,
And with each step, they sigh in our feet.
One day, we'll arrive. We'll take off our shoes,
We'll bury our dead at long last.

***

Whatever we think, whatever we feel,
Is a picture of the world.
The hunger, the pain, are a picture of the world too.
There is always a choice:
To see or not to see.
To go towards the human,
Or to stay at station zero,
So far, so close to where you go, to who you are.

***

The tree in the yard was, in its quiet way, a friend.
One day, some men cut it,
They made of our friend a table, a chair,
branches in the fire place.
It is empty in our yard. It is empty in the shade.
People mock us: how can a tree be a friend,
But if whatever lives cannot be a friend,
We are alone.

***

I was a child.
I pitied the puppets, the teddy bears,
The soft breathing clothes,
On lonely shelves that were not their own.
I used to free them,
I left them on the children train, in the infinite circle of the train.
It was my first act of freedom fighter.

***

Our memories confess, the memories of a whole nation.
But memories have a mind of their own.
The swear a holy oath
How pure we were, how beautiful.
They know they lie.
Yet, they know too, that they are a tool of survival.
How could we go on when we didn't believe in our wonderful past. In who we were.

***

The strangers come here,
Like a bird, smuggler of borders,
Like the last note of a song that began somewhere far, and no one knows where it will go.
Life is a cage, of a bird, of song, of a man,
That should have been opened long ago.
Cages are fear, and fear is a cage,
They rule our song.

***

There are the humble who serve us.
Eyes lowered
As if they were dreaming, as if they tried to avoid our gaze, gazes can be pain,
As if they were apologizing for the wounds
That tore their hands, the visible wounds
Over the deep invisible.
And only when they leave, we realize they are missing.
We remember they died, standing, day after day, alone.

***

It is Sunday, the day of the god.
The sun is tall, too far from the life of the people.
Maybe god is even taller, further from who we are, where we are.
As long as we need the gods,
We are alone.

***

I grew old, and strangely, wiser.
I keep the raining gazes, even of passers by,
In my pocket.
Water for the rainless years.

***

There are many ways to triumph.
Some, raise crosses.
Some write a poem, words are power.
Some make a jug of water.
They give a shape to the water,
They give a shape to a thirst that was defeated.
And some, love a woman. They sow their seed
In her thighs, the soft marble.
And everything is triumph: the triumph of life in the motions of loving,
The innocence in the power of closeness, a body inside a body, in the motions of sowing, the triumph of time in a seed, the infinite seed.

***

There are hands that I trust,
Hands that are safe, like an invisible hand shake.
I trust hands that give shape to trust.
I trust hands that sow themselves in the hands of others, the good seed.
I trust palms that are the depth of a human.

***

When everybody leaves,
When they find another dream, another god,
You can go with them, you can stay.
You can begin another journey to human,
After all this journey was made of many cross roads, of many streams of time.
You have to chose, always.

***

You have a yellow pile of old letters,
As if they were a proof that you loved, that you were love. But letters memorize what you were, what you were not,
And maybe what you need is to forget, as much as possible, to kill old questions, as many as possible.
You have no choice. You burn them.
You forget that what you remember is not paper. It is stone.

***

The tree gives shape to the wind.
The wind gives shape to the tree.
After all, everything is motion, everything is Motion inside a motion.
Everything is matter: the tree, the wind, the motion,
The exquisite artist, the infinite artist.

***

Everything is matter:
Thought, imagination, the silence.
The silence walks inside us, in our eyes. It is alive.
The balance on the tight rope: life.
And for sure history. History is matter. It is us:
We change even when we are the same.

***

We lie down. We travel still
On a racing earth.
And yet, everything inside us moves in an orbit.
Our pulse is in the pulse of the most distant star.

***

Your body is the shape of matter.
Your body is the shape of motion:
The journey of the thoughts, the cells,
Of the distance between hour to hour, between day to day,
The motions of living, of loving.
We travel even when we are still.

***

Matter is endless, even in depth,
Even the most tiny particle has an abyss inside it,
And the immense things;
The person in our head,
Have no bottom.

***

The bodies of love are always powerful,
Even the memories of love are power.
There are the memories of the thighs of love,
There are the memories of the seed.
The motions of love are power, seeds are power.
We are the child of power,
And it is sad,
Because we don't realize it always.

***

Scarecrows are the shape of fear.
We have many scarecrows:
In our garden, in our eyes, in the eyes of others.
We came from very far,
The journey to human wasn't simple.
It carried us, it carried the exquisite birds,
And it carried the scarecrow of fear.
Fear knows how to hate.
There are other kinds of power,
The way a bird touches the flower, light and deep.
The nectar is a gentle power, it knows how to love.
We don't know how immense we are when we have the nectar in our motions of living.

***

I grew old. I learned how to live careful,
How to fear.
It is sad,
The less life is left,
The less we let ourselves celebrate it.
Fear is power,
It doesn't let us drink the laughter beneath our lips.
Fear is thirst.

***

Some cities are harbors,
Harbors oof hands.
All we see are the hands that keep the scars
Beneath the skin.
All we see are the hands that keep the
Scars under the water.
Seas don't have graves. They remember.
After all,
We don't see the hands beneath our homes.
We don't realize that homes are the graves of hands. We don't know if graves remember.

***

We make love
On silky sheets, on feather blankets,
And we don't realize that love may be heavy,
As heavy as fear, the fear of closeness, of nakedness, the fear of being visible.
And it is sad,
We don't realize that nakedness is a power,
That even a naked gaze can defeat us,
Can make us stronger.

***

The dance.
The breasts of soft marble are silent,
And the arms protect their whisper,
And then, in one moment, in one airy pulse,
They leave themselves behind.
They become pure rhythm,
They become pure motion, pure bellies of passion,
Dancing together and alone.
As if they were the first men,
Dancing around the first fire,
And the fire dancing inside them.

***

Carnivals happen everywhere.
The endless markets, they sell wine,
And they sell the masks of happiness.
We play ourselves, and no one recognizes us.
It is funny. It is sad.
The old clowns laugh at us, when they laugh at themselves. Maybe we realize it, maybe not. But, at long last, we laugh, in a gentle way, at ourselves.
We'll remember this laughter, even when we forget.

***

Some people dance by the sea,
They dance the rhythm, they dance the surf,
They dance themselves.
Their motions: a secret river.
Their body; a whirlpool.
Their arms fall from the body,
They go on a journey of their own.
They dance the way they live.
Each motion, alone in itself.
Each motion inside a motion.

***

We grow old.
We learn how to be happy in a deeper way, in a quiet way.
But happiness is power, and the nights are infinite, they exhaust us.
Maybe we need to camouflage what the nights Know. To remember less.

***

Old age doesn't sing.
Songs are remember,
And the old are busy forgetting as much as possible,
In order to forgive themselves.

***

Everything is politics:
What we live, what we eat, what we do, what we dream.
Politics is life,
But, before the person in our head is free,
Politics is a prisoner. The bars in its eyes are immense. It is free only in its silence.

***

On the stage, a woman sang,
A muse, half drunk by the wine
In her voice, by the wine in her body.
A muse is power. The stage is power. The wine is power.
She was carnivorous, she devoured us,
Blinded by her power, she devoured herself.
And I don't know which power was more carnivorous.

***

Another troy should rise,
Because wars are never enough,
And the password to death is never enough.
The journey to human built Troy,
Exquisite Troy, infinite troy, carnivorous troy,
In one of its stations,
Maybe, it was the twelfth station, the station of midnight, a moment before dawn.

***

The Titan in his fortress
Waits for danger, for the ambush of fear,
Alone in his infinite loneliness, alone in his infinite strength.
Power may be a lonely prison. It may rule you.
Fear is a lonely prison. It rules you.

***

The huge hands of a Titan
May be gentle.
They may plant a tree
On the grave of someone they shot.
And it is sad,
There are too many Titans among us.
There are too many trees.

***

There are nights with infinite moons.
There are bodies of love,
And their motions of love sow moons.
Light for the moonless years.

***

The sea of Galilee
Is a tiny lake,
Yet, it was room enough for saints, for angels.
It left the people who were thirsty for the miracle of simple water, for the miracle of simple thirst that is quenched- thirsty.
And yet, thirst is never really simple.

***

The more we live, the more we lose:
loves, dreams.
And yet, whenever a fire burns inside us,
We rekindle it with whatever was lost,
As if it were never lost, as if it waited for the fire, the deep fire stars are made of, life is made of.

***

Maybe our dreams know how to love better than ourselves:
The dense night, the stars falling,
And in the middle: a woman,
A lost sun, deep in the night.
And it is sad
That our days don't know how to love,
How to find the sun in the hand of a woman,
The secret orbit.
Some hands can sow star dust, the magic dust.

***

Each child born in a home is a tiny god.
The cry is a command, it is absolute.
And yet, it is another kind of god, no bibles in it.
It is holy because it is funny, because it is helpless.
And it is a new traveler.
Its minute shoes began already the journey to human.

***

Maybe, we are chrysalides.
We are born and we don't know who we are,
We don't know we are human,
We don't know how beautiful our wings will be,
We don't know that flowers are hard work.
We don't know that human wings
Are as light, as heavy as the flight of a butterfly
In a flower, as the flight of a flower in a butterfly.

***

RESSURECTION
We open ancient graves,
We don't look for miracles, for resurrected gods,
We look for buried bones, invisible bones of invisible men,
Which is another kind of miracle:
They show us the way from one hour to the other, from one way to the other. The biggest journey
We remember them. They were visible in their own way. They were among us, on the road to human.

***

We dream of a woman.
Her hair: a rebellious wave.
Her hands: a warm river.
Her lips: a waterfall, it rains, transparent.
We are thirsty.
Loving is a big thirst. Loving is water.

***

Someone plays the piano
As if it were the prolongation of his fingers,
As if it were the prolongation of his soul.
It is not easy to play like that, with naked fingers, with naked soul. It is not easy to hear it, naked.
After all, we made a world for dressed people,
For shirts over our fear.

***

The wise man of the tribe
Realizes that everything is motion,
That the world is the play ground of motion.
He knows how to let the motions move through you,
How to move inside the motions.
He knows how to love the mad playground,
He knows it is us.

***

Maybe, a moment before death, or even a moment after,
All our words gush out, all the unsaid silences,
All the sighs that grew old in our mouth, the hate, the love, the regret. We ask forgiveness, because we don't know how to forgive ourselves. We speak because we have an open account with life. We speak so that the unsaid wouldn't struggle anymore inside our words.
We die, naked in our body,
Naked in our mouth. The last truce.

***

The Eucalyptus tree by the sea.
The tree of my childhood,
The only root left.
There were many seas in my sea,
I had no choice, I swam,
And the seas swam towards me, always more,
The root- always further.
I drowned once too many.
The sea has no graves. I remember.

***

So much rage in a line on a map, so much fury.
You draw the line with a pen.
The line is innocent. It could be a picture of a child.
You cannot imagine how much black ink
can a pen contain, how many dead birds,
the border smugglers.

***

You want to forget yourself.
At night, the wine is a smooth journey, an inebriating journey to forgetting.
But then, you return to who you are,
One night older, one night more alone.
But there are those who forget themselves.
When you kill someone at war, at the wall.
You don't dare to return to who you were,
And there is nowhere to return, you are someone else.
No one can cross the night and remain the same.

***

The journey is a pilgrimage. Always.
It could be a god, and angel, it could be you,
The child deep inside you, the tiny shoes that began the whole journey.
It could be the human you met on the way.
You don't realize you'll never arrive.
The journey is endless.
You don't realize that the human is your Ithaca.
That he is still, the shape of waiting. That he travels towards you
Always more, always deeper.

***

Walls are important.
They are the place where people write
The graffiti of rage, the graffiti of pain.
They are anonymous, as anonymous as pain,
And they are big, utterly visible.
After all, in one hand of one person, one hand- writing,
There could be a thousand hands or even more.
They are a vote: thumb down.

***

You paint a plate,
The paint is almost invisible like anything simple.
The white clay is consumed. It is beautiful.
A slab of bread on it, the bread is naked, visible.
It is close and far at the same time.
You just painted a big enigma. The biggest.

***

Can you draw soft time, soft enough to chew it
While it chews us,
Enough to sooth the hunger of the hours, the days.
Inside us, time is hungry.
Inside us time is eternal. Inside us the hunger of time is eternal.
Can you grasp time on the canvass, can you grasp a twilight on the canvass, the hunger of light, the hunger of shadows mingled. A truce.

***

Can you draw the fourth dimension,
To let the motions of living move on your canvass.
Can you draw a sowing palm, a falling seed.
To let the motion of the sowing free.
To draw time moving in the seed,
To draw the seed moving in time.
Like a message to something eternal.

***

Everything is a theatre of memory,
The world. Us.
We play our role.
We remember what we could never forget.
We forget what we could never really remember.
We realize that in order to be who we are,
We need what we remember, what we forget.
We can afford to lose nothing.

***

We say: let the day be bigger than ourselves,
And we forget that living is a circle around an ancient fire,
A circular dance of people.
We forget that we are as infinite as a circle,
That there is no day bigger than the people,
Bigger than Ithaca: the dream where the round dance goes.

***

Footprints are precious.
They are a snapshot of time.
They know where you where, where you go,
That you were barefoot inside the foot prints.
They know that who you are, what you are
Is barefoot inside your shoes.

***

In the big circus of the world
The acrobats play the game of survival,
The acrobats are enchanted, enchanting,
They enchant us.
We forget that the game of survival defeats us.
It leaves no empty moment.
We forget that the play is the story of a slave trader. It sells our life.

***

When water in poured into a vessel,
It becomes the vessel.
When blood is poured into a vessel,
It becomes the vessel.
Remember,
There is always a choice.
You are the artist of the vessels.

***

Even the water in the village is old.
The men are too tired to sweat.
They sow the dry rain in their hands,
The only seed left.
They are thirsty, and they don't know that thirst is power, they don't know that thirst forgives nothing.

***

Life eases one worry, and brings another one,
Maybe even bigger.
There is nowhere to pause,
To slow time for a while.
Life is a restless place, waves without limits.
There is no island of water.

***

You are not a guest in the world, The world is not a guest in you.
You are the world, the world is you.
You keep the house hold, the clean table, the good bread on the table:
The world on the table, you at the table.
The small, patient, almost invisible of living
On the table, at the table.

***

Often, life seems a foreign language,
We translate ourselves to ourselves,
In order to read what we think, what we feel, what we dream,
In a language that knows us,
In order to be who we are.
We forget that words are simply translations.

***

Maybe we are Janus,
We stay, two faced, inexplicable,
At the table of living,
Cooks and privileged guests.
It is sad,
We don't realize that the two faces are one,
That life is inexplicable, invisible in its nakedness, that it has no face, so it has all the faces.

***

We are bound to our reason, to what we feel,
To what we do, to what we don't do,
To who we are, to who we are not, to whom we are with.
So, we are not infinite.
The infinite is free inside the infinite. The infinite flight of a bird that doesn't exist.

***

The space of thinkable thoughts is immense.
A big arena.
Thoughts fighting thoughts,
Thoughts killing thoughts.
The biggest gladiators.
And yet, this space has borders:
The unthinkable.
Maybe the unthinkable is the arena of the infinite.

***

Nothing is continuous,
Not even a line, or a journey.
Everything is made of small lines
Of infinitely small steps.
So, we are together, in the same line, in the same journey,
And yet, each steps is another small line, each step is alone in its shoes.
The shoes may be tight, and yet, they are made of endless infinites.
The road may be steep,
And yet, it is made of endless small straight infinites.

***

We see small thing,
And we don't discern the infinite inside them:
The circle in the center of seeing,
The circle of a moon inside a blind sack.
Circles are infinite.
We don't see the huge black hole
In the universe of sadness. The biggest infinite.

***

Maybe, the first moment of the first thought of death,
Is the first thought of the infinite.
We don't know how to live without a future.
The future is hope,
And hopelessness is a killer.
We don't know how to stay alive without hope.

***

We are small,
And yet, we can touch the infinite;
The star light, the light in a gaze that sees us.
We are small, and yet, we break the limits.
We are smugglers of borders, we are smugglers of dreams.
Breaking the limits is infinite.
We are small, and yet, we touch the infinite,
We give it a first name: the name of a child.
Maybe that's why we have names from the first moment of the first hour.
If you don't believe in the infinite of names,
You are alone.

***

The earth is the biggest arena of the world.
The iron plows the rocks.
Your fist breaks stone, the fingers fall, dust, so light, so deep. The deepest seed.
Wherever you fight you leave something of yourself behind,
Whenever your fist breaks the stone, you leave something of yourself, something broken,
Something that doesn't forget.
You never return the same.

***

You came from very far.
The first creation was color-blind,
So, there was the dark.
But now, the world is a theatre of colors,
And yet, you are color-blind.
You don't see the hues of a tremble on a leaf:
An exquisite butterfly. You don't see how the silence shines in the mouth of actors, a mirror of what they don't say.
Maybe you believe that the colors were made for animals:
They love them, and they tell them how to love.

***

Pilgrimages are always about home, about the way home.
There are those who go once in a lifetime:
A relic of a god, an hour of promise, of the tremble of a paradise high, in the thin air.
There are those who go on the deepest pilgrimage: they go towards a home here, in this life, always more.
It is incredible how many homes a human can have: something he remembers, the shoulder of a woman, the tear of a fish.
It is incredible how many pilgrimages human walk, each day from the beginning.
It is incredible how many beginnings are in a day, in a moment.

***

Everything became smaller.
The dinosaurs became birds.
The endless ocean became sea, rivers
In the continent of living.
You don't know what's big, what's small for a human.
Maybe the eyes should be at the height of a human,
And they should remember how to tremble.
Trembling is power. It gives shape to a gaze. It tells you it's human.

***

Breaking free needs power,
And staying free is another kind of power, immense.
You stay in the power, and yet, you walk towards it, always more, always deeper.
Living is the big arena of powers. The biggest,
And you have to know which power to use,
The when, the where.

***

Love is power, and this power has infinite motions:
The motions of the night: the feathers of the moon in your hand.
The motions of the years: the bird of the moon in your hand.
The moon may be full, it may be a sliver, a wing:
It is lit.

***

Life may be generous:
A parachute, invisible as the indispensable,
Invisible in its softness,
That lets you lend gentle, very gentle.
But, you cannot try the parachute,
You don't know if it will open in time, between the too early and the too late.
But the motions of living, the invisible motions of the parachute, are the only safety net we have. So, we have no choice. We trust them.

***

He returned from the war.
He looked like everybody else,
He looked like everything else.
He had to kill in order to win,
He had to die inside him countless times,
In order to win.
Maybe the only thing that defeated him was the winning.

***

You are a child. You want to build a time-machine.
You don't know that whenever you look at the sky
You see the deepest past. It has the shape of a star.
You don't know you were born with a time machine inside you. It is enough to raise your head, to see.
Seeing may be a big journey in time. The biggest.

***

God says:
I am what I am,
And I will be what I will be.
God is a verb, like life, like a leaf, growing, falling: the seasons of a leaf are motion,
And the seasons of time in everything, even in a god, are motion, a verb.

***

God chooses carefully.
He selects men, invisible as someone consumed, someone broken.
Maybe, because they know what pain is,
Maybe, because they believe in pain,
they make out of pain a religion.
The only religion available in this world, in this life.
Maybe they don't know there is no paradise for someone invisible, someone who needs pain in order to believe.

***

Often they say: failure is not an option,
But, failures are the only option. They see us, they know us,
They follow us, invisible as the shadows on our back.
The true day of judgment, is not when the failures judge us, but when we judge ourselves.
Maybe we judge in the last moment, or even a moment later,
If our life was a failure,
If death is a failure.

***

The dust comes from very far,
From lands with legendary names.
And we, here, we breath the dust.
The dust of the dead; the last tombstone.
The dust of the living: also living raises dust,
Layer after layer fall from the eyes, from the touch, from the peaks of pain.
The dust is a power, it breaks all the limits,
It doesn't see the lines on the map.
The borders are dead, or maybe, they never really existed, so nothing was killed.
The dust is innocent.

***

We grow old.
Our touch, our eyes, our pain
Are creased, yet naked.
They say that the old are wise,
But maybe wisdom is the power to feel,
Always more, always deeper, always more naked.
It is the power that knows how to tremble,
How to look into the eyes, even when it bows.

***

To learn the alchemy of nature.
To compete, like the trees, for the sun,
To collaborate, like the sun, with the trees.
The alchemy of growth. Growth is motion,
The motion of living.

***

Time is inside you,
From the first moment of the first hour,
But the sense of timing is not.
This sense is precious, you have to learn it,
The sooner, the better.
This sense can save you from time: the time of fire. You'll know when the burning began, who is burning now, in this very moment. The time of a bullet.

***

You should love life so much,
That you feel in your pulse, the pulse of the most distant star.
That you feel the fish swimming in your sweat.
That you realize there is only one ocean,
No matter how many seas are drawn on the map.

***

Everything is a circle inside a circle;
The planets, the moons, the seasons.
As if time danced the circle dance, like us.
It resists the strength of the straight lines.
They are too foreseeable, too boring to be eternal.
Dancing the infinite should be fun.

***

The sun is setting always somewhere on earth,
But, it also rises, at the same time, somewhere else.
As if it were the cosmic clown.
Red laughter, a red tear, painted on the same face, at the same moment.
We are the audience. We love and fear the clown.
We see our face in his face,
We see the sunrise and the sunset in our deepest eyes.
We enter the immense circus in twos, or more.
We don't know if we can resist what a clown feels, alone.

***

Some people prefer the adventure of sitting by
The birds,
Of watching the seasons of their habits,
Than wishing to have wings.
And some people have wings: a poem, a truth.
They have a choice: to fly or not to fly.
They don't know how illegal, how beautiful they are when they fly.
Smugglers of borders. Smugglers of dreams.

***

There are children for whom the soon, the now,
Are too late.
All we see is their eyes, the eyes of hunger;
Bigger than their face, bigger than their life.
It is too late in these eyes.

***

Myths may be memories.
People remember
And they sow the memories in a myth.
The memories will grow, they will become the seasons of a tree, a forest of seasons.
Sowing is power. It makes the seeds of what we remember,
Our story.

***

THE AECHEOLOGY OF IDEAS
We dig in the past,
In marbles, in fallen stones,
In ideas.
Ideas are statues.
At times, we call them gods. We give them their eternity.
At times we realize they are man-made, hand-made thoughts. We carve our thoughts in the whitest marble. naked mirrors.
We can break mirrors and they can break us.

***

You made me love the grey.
Your immense eyes. There is morning fog in your eyes:
The promise, the danger mingle.
Your touch is a twilight. A truce.
Truce is always grey: light and shadows embrace.
There is a cloud between your thighs. The cloud is grey. It rains.
The fear of loving, the longing for love, in each rain drop.

***

We are not vultures,
And yet, we eat dead stars.
The stars become clouds, they rain into our life.
We drink stars.
We devour the star-iron, blood is made of.
We chew the stars-stones, bones are made of.
We sniff the air in the glass lungs of the city,
In the warm lungs of a sunrise.
Maybe, in the moment of death, or even a moment before,
We give back all the rain, the iron, the stones, the warmth, all the light
That we lent to us.

***

It is strange.
Rain is born like us:
The embryos, seeds of water,
Grow little by little, always more, always taller.
They become a cloud.
Maybe the rain is the last moment.
The sacred ceremony of the death of a seed.

***

The four masks of the wind come from very far.
From the biggest theatre of the world: the suns.
We look at the masks,
And we don't recognize the stars behind them,
The most ancient actors ever.
We don't know
That no one can cross the theatre of suns, the infinite masks,
And remain the same.
We don't know
That no one can cross the human theatre,
The cold, harsh, trembling masks of human,
And remain the same.

***

The time in your time is hard.
The dawn, a harsh mother is not enough,
It is not for everybody.
You rise.
Opening the door is an act of faith,
Going out of the door is an act of love.
The motions of dawn at the door, the motions of light inside the shadows, are visible.
The immense truce.

***

It is noon in the world.
The air is black: sunburned.
And the continent of leaves is burning,
Leaves burn, louder than a cry.
We should have ran,
Like someone whose home is on fire.
We should have ran,
Because our home is on fire.

***

There are echoes in our lives,
Echoes that began when the world began.
Nothing is lost.
Echoes are precious. They are the footprints of our voice: the call we are made of, the visible call, the call for all that is visible, for the invisible,
The story we are made of.
We could afford losing nothing.

***

We are all grass grazers: the grazers of light, of rain.
We eat the animals that chew grass,
We eat the animals that chew animals.
And we are all star eaters: the light in a rain drop, the warmth in the light.
Maybe the poets knew what they said.

***

The time inside us is stubborn. A mule.
And we ride this mule, the same mule
From the beginning of everything.
The mule, the persistent, immense mule,
Will continue to walk
Even when there will be no world left.
Eternity is a lonely place.

***

The country that is your body
Seems quiet, still.
You don't realize that beneath your skin,
Change is the only king.
The tiny citizens shoot and are shot,
They flee in all directions: hunters, hunted.
The biggest civil war in the world.

***

Loving needs space,
Enough for closeness,
Enough for the silence, silent as a breath.
But we are sad people,
And the sadness is enough to fill all the spaces available.
We are sad, the way we breathe. Alone.

***

We are small, and yet, we are mines of the infinite.
The thinkable thoughts inside us are infinite.
The habits of the hours, the motions of living,
Invisible as the useful, invisible as the endless.
And the circular dance of our seasons, the seasons of a leaf.
We may not realize it,
But we dance with the infinite, when we let the infinite dance in our motions.
The infinite is the theatre where time dances with everything, with us: the leaves of seasons,
With the habits of a leaf.

***

Spheres are the shadow of the infinite.
Maybe we feel it.
Maybe the love of ball games
Goes far inside us, much further than what we imagine,
It plays the adventure of the first child ever, kicking a fruit.
It plays the adventure of the goalkeeper and the deep spheres in our head.

***

We lose the 'now' all the time,
The 'now' we long for so much.
Whatever we see, is already past,
Because light is not an infinite runner,
It cannot reach the 'now' fast enough
To use it.
Maybe the 'now' is too immediate, a threat.
Maybe we are never ready for the 'now',
The past is predictable, safer.

***

We are small people inside the cosmos.
We may be speck of light, specks of shadow,
But specks, anyway.
Yet, we know how to love.
We don't know how immense we are
When we sit under the deep tree of the night,
And we find in our palm, the palm of a speck,
The motion of love in a deep line,
a line carving our palm always more, always deeper.

***

Even if the universe is infinite,
There will be a last thought.
It will be lonely.
It will be human.

***

The universe cannot see itself. It's infinite.
There is no place out of the infinite to watch the infinite.
And our eyes cannot see themselves.
Maybe there are too many infinites in our circle of seeing, in our universe of seeing.

***

The idea of the infinite came from very far.
After all, the first man who invented numbers,
Knew he could always add one number more,
One number further, one number deeper.

***

Beneath the deep shadows of the universe,
You feel bigger,
because you know you are small.
We are strange people, when we are big enough to know we are small.
Small may be power.

***

If there would be an infinite hotel,
You would never see the view from the terrace,
No sky, no stars,
Because there is no terrace, no last floor.
All you see are the small infinites: the walls in your room, the door, no handle.

***

There are circles everywhere.
The circles of seeing in our eyes.
The circles in the habits of light.
Circles are infinite.
We see the infinite all the time.
Maybe we are not infinite enough to realize it,
Not infinite enough to use it in our motions of living, of loving.

***

You grow old. Time is a wall,
And yet, you get the twilight:
A small window of time.
You see your shadows dancing, softly, infinitely soft, with the light.
The most exquisite dance. A gift.

***

Maybe the infinite is a dictionary of numbers.
Nothing is too small to enter the pages,
But the infinite consumes too many numbers.
It is hungry.
So, the dictionary has to begin from the beginning, each moment, each hour.

***

Maybe the infinite is an immense monster
We try to tame
In circles, in spheres,
In all the thinkable thoughts we think.
Yet, we don't know how to tame the infinite in the gaze of a human, in pain.

***

In each moment, in each change
Of our habits of living,
Of the habits of light,
There is time.
So, even the smallest change, moving a chair, turning on a lamp, is a giant.
It has the infinite inside it.

***

Nothing is continuous.
Even the journey to human
Was divided into endless steps: the small infinites.
We didn't know if we arrived, if the endless can arrive,
And in each footprint, the infinite walked,
Invisible in its smallness,
Invisible in it infinite.

***

We came from very far,
From the deepest sea.
We didn't know how much we lost, how much we forgot.
We don't remember how to feel, how to understand, how to be awake,
In all the arms we have.
We don't remember the octopus inside us.
The ancestor.
***

Planets don't shine,
And yet, they rain candles
In the eyes of everything living:
The bud of a bee in the bud of a flower. The tear of a fish.

***

Flying is power.
Birds have to carry the whole gravity inside them,
The immense gravity that nails planets to their place,
In order to arrive high, far, close, much closer to the sun.
And we carry gravity too, in each motion that leaves the earth:
A dream, the fingers of love.

***

Air is a river,
It can move you, in can move inside you,
Like the wind of the sun.
You don't know how immense you are when you breathe,
You don't know that air is nailed to the floor of earth,
That you breathe a planet.

***

The world came from very far,
The era of Janus.
Between the yellow coal of the sun,
And the hard black ice of the night:
A string of twilight, the softest water,
A good place to nurse what you lived, what you loved.
We are children of twilight, the gentle river,
And yet, we are thirsty.

***

Ants are layer beneath layer:
The queen, the mother of the nation,
The soldiers, the terrible Kamikaze,
The workers, they chew the sweat for the others,
They are immutable like a law of nature.
You don't know who came first: you or the ant,
Who taught whom the laws of living.

***

In the big circus of the world,
The big predators are the mimes.
They mimic the motions of something innocent, something clumsy, infinitely funny.
Beneath the red painted laughter: a knife.
The knife is not innocent. It is a serial killer.
And only the clown understands everything.

***

Time walks incessantly,
And in the world, nothing remains the same, not even the sameness.
You have no choice,
You have to begin again, each moment again,
Each moment different.
We are small, strange survivors from a yesterday.

***

There is the language of light,
You hardly know how to read it,
At most: the sun, the moon, the stars.
You cannot read the language of small things: the fireflies.
They speak with light, they write themselves with light, they love with light.
So few know how to have the night inside them,
And to speak with light,
Maybe a big dreamer, after all dreams are a candle with the whole night inside it. It speaks light.

***

Water is the heaviest train:
A station to load star dust,
A station to load earth, seeds, roots.
It carries life to life, the biggest gravity.
The tracks are immense. Invisible. Natural as magic.

***

There are those men who wear a face
Studied as a crime.
Maybe they copy the motions of the big predators,
The metal in the claws, invisible in its shine.
In the teeth, wild wine. The adventure of blood is inebriating.
It makes them thirsty, always more, always deeper.

***

There was autumn inside us, from the start,
The smell of separation, the smell of rain.
In my lips: leaves. They are fragile.
Don't come close.
Autumn leaves are the separations that began from the start.
After all there are separations in everything,
Even in a rain drop. It shines. It parts.

***

Water is innocent. Drink it.
You'll feel the weightless dew. It is heavy.
You'll touch time in a rivulet.
You'll catch the fish of time: the clear moments.
Water is time. Drink it.

***

You are my eternal England.
I know your name, but I don't know the name beneath your name.
I know the taste of your shadow, but I don't know the name of what I feel.
They say that things that are nameless don't exist,
And they say that names are too narrow, too tight for what exist.
So, we are all an enigma. We have a name. We are nameless.

***

Don't close your eyes.
When you close them, you are far.
I don't know where you go,
To whose eyes: yours, others.
Close me in your closed eyes,
I'll walk towards you, always more, always deeper.

***

The white cloud,
Paints in crashed white the earth, crashed water.
It seems like war,
Maybe because we go to war too often.
We don't recognize the simple laws of nature:
The sky in the earth, the earth in the sky.
The big truce. The biggest.

***

Your eyes are open outside, and closed inside.
Your tremble is inside, the words out.
Let me touch your eyes, closed and open,
Your words out, the tremble inside.
When we touch, we understand better the eyes, the words, the tremble.

***

There are people who know how to love,
Even when they are not loved.
They love in their own way, silent, patient, faithful as time, clear and secret as anything that exists.
They are invisible. It needs power to live invisible. It needs power to love invisible.

***

Your hands, they rain over me.
Your hands are a mirror,
I see the line of sadness in your palm.
Your hands are time,
My hands are time,
We flow, your time in my time.
The line of sadness is still,
Yet, it moves,
Sadness is motion, diaphanous, visible.
It leaves the hand, yet, it stays.

***

Feeling are a motion, they flow, they grow old,
But you, my friend, you are a still motion.
I remember so little, only what I always knew.
I wouldn't come to see you in your city,
In order to remember better,
In order to know you are near.

***

It's twilight in our life.
Your motions are old, your motions are love.
Remember, as long as it is twilight in your motions: the shadows mingling with light,
Your motions of love are alive. Your motions are truce.

***

Maybe you should read less,
In order to have time, time enough to live.
Time enough to use your own eyes,
To spend all the treasure of seeing, without limits.
Seeing is choice, like everything else.
You have to choose, each day, from the beginning, again.

***

You find your way in the chaos of the world.
It is the only way to live.
And the most incredible thing
Is that you found the path to human.
You didn't realize that it was like finding a star, one star, in the middle of the infinite,
Without manuals, without compass.

***

There are those, the deserted, the humble,
Where the days are too close to each other,
They push time, they push life, they crash us.
It is strange,
Because pain can enlarge time,
It can make it the minute before the infinite.
It is strange, because also the infinites crash us.

***

Everything is departure,
The words, the gaze, the silence, the motions of our hours.
And everything is return. What we remember,
What we cannot forget.
Everything is a mirror of opposites:
Two opposites, one inside another.
The biggest mirror.

***

The people full of past.
The people full of future.
In each word: part of their past, part of their future.
In each hand shake: part of their past, part of their future.
In each word, in each hand shake: a path.
They walk towards each other, always more, always deeper.

***

The tiny shoes.
They didn't know they'll till the road, and the road will till them.
Your silence: too tight, as tight as fear.
You didn't know that you were barefoot inside the shoes, muddy, clean.
You didn't know you were free in your silence,
You could walk inside your silence towards yourself, always more, towards your words, always more, that words will walk towards you
Always more.

***

Whatever was to be said, was said already.
But you forgot the pain. Pain is a sister, the family of human.
You forgot the tremble in the eyes, it knows the pain of seeing.
You forgot that the journey to human is not East,
It is pain, it is the eyes that know how to tremble, it is the longing to arrive, in a journey
That doesn't end. The journey of small infinites.

***

My beloved,
You don't cry for the past,
You cry for the past that didn't happen yet.
You are simply human.
Remember, sadness is human, it is priceless, because we see,
because we know what we see, because we feel what we see.
No one can put a price tag on the priceless.

***

You are old, because you were a child.
You are old
Because you are too tired to feel.
And you are old
Because you feel you can afford so many separations, so many departures.
You are old
Because you know there were departures, there were separations in everything:
In a gaze, in a word that didn't finish, in the silence.
Your sadness is not old, it begins from the beginning, each day from the beginning.

***

Remember: this garden of wheat,
The yellow garden,
Came from very far,
From the first hands that tamed the seed,
The stubborn seed.
He paid his debt to life.
And this small olive tree, the root as deep as time, the fruit as deep as life.
It paid its debt to life.
Remember, we have to pay this debt, each day again, each day from the beginning.

***

We are humble people, but we have a dream,
We dream an arch,
For men, for the animals to get in.
Storms wait for such dreams.
Somewhere there will be a boat.

***

The storm.
Above: the wild geese, the immense flight.
They are play things of the world, play things of the storm, like anything else.
They dream nothing, not even eternity.
Slowly, time melts in their body, like the wind,
Like the smell of height.
They are pure time, flying.

***

Fate may be a road, it may be a wall,
They may be the same thing.
There is time in the road, there is time in the wall,
So, whatever we believe in, the road of fate, the wall of fate,
Time walks in it, always further, yet, it walks always close.

***

Some book smell of old paper, of old seasons of words.
Slowly, time melts in our time, it's evening in our life, our body: a delicate shadow,
We find the books, our hands: a tremble that grew soft with the years, hold them
like a lover, like a friend,
So that we wouldn't be lost alone.

***

You don't remember.
Your sadness is different.
There were dead lives that resuscitated suddenly,
They resuscitated also the pain that was,
All the separations that were.
There were separations in everything,
Even in a gaze open, closed inside.
And we were, each one, alone in his body,
Alone in the separation.
Your sadness is different.

***

There are the neighborhoods of those whose life is deserted,
Of those who are strangers, their life is a stranger everywhere.
Their walls: shoulder to shoulder.
Their walls: pain to pain.
They believe in life, because they have to believe in something.
Life is waiting. Waiting for dawn, waiting for themselves.
They know everything about dying.
They know everything about the waiting: waiting is a struggle.
They know everything about staying alive.

***

In the small nocturnal hotel,
The bodies of love on second hand beds,
Second hand sheets.
They feel who died there, who will die. They know how to mourn,
But the urge to love is strong, strong than any mourning.
They make love over the dead in the beds, in the sheets, they make love over their death.

***

Strangers came from places where the world ended,
They brought with them their deepest treasures: the rituals of life, the festivals, the legends embroidered in a cloth.
Maybe, that's why their life is priceless.
As if the ceremony that began in the past,
Begins each day, from the beginning.
No one can put a price tag on the priceless.

***

In the clear water, you see yourself,
And someone comes close,
Shipwrecked like you. You save each other.
It is nice to live anchor to anchor, it feels safe.
It is hard living anchor to anchor,
You pay the price of safety, each day, from the beginning. Safety is overpriced: it is never really safe.

***

We are born with the picture of the world inside us,
And when we die, we take the picture along,
Nothing else.
And yet, you would like to leave something behind you: a poem without limits, a pain that was beyond limits.
Each one pays his debt to life in his own way.

***

The blind violinist in the corner of the street
Uses whatever he can find to make music:
The rain that falls into his life, clear, secret,
The blind gazes, the blind laughter of the passers-by, and his wound: the eyes, the wounds that will never close,
Because he knows death is even blinder than him.
No one knows that his music sees, that it is the only eyes he'll ever have,
That the eyes of the blind are open inside,
Invisible, infinite.

***

Don Quixote, the sad man.
He stumbles over logic, he drags himself
In blind streets, dead end after dead end.
His eyes are human. His eyes are mad.
He has his own Ithaca, the way dreamers have.
There are no blind wind mills in Ithaca,
There is Dulcinante, the dream of love.

***

You cannot fake love.
Your motions betray you, the face of your silence betrays you.
There are separations in everything, also in love. You cannot fake them,
When the separations keep you too far, so close. There is no perfect separation,
It remains unfinished, like everything else.
You cannot fake the unfinished. You don't know where it goes.

***

Poets are the big exiles of the world.
They belong nowhere. They are alone.
Maybe they long to enter the family of poetry,
But poetry is not a generous mother.
It leaves them thirsty.
Each word they write is thirst, pure thirst.

***

Like a tree,
We are layer beneath layer of life.
Like a tree,
We walk each morning towards the sun.
Like a tree,
We give shape to the wind, the wind that will shape us, that will leave us naked,
each day more, each day deeper.

***

Words are an adventure.
They carve their path in a poem,
And you don't know where they go, why.
You don't realize that there are going towards you.
You should be ready.

***

Near your bed: a drawer of treasures.
The tooth of a child, it grows in mothballs,
A letter full of mirrors, your face, the face of someone, his face is kept close in the mirrors.
A picture: a still motion that goes on moving inside you.
You close your eyes in order to see better.
You close the drawer in order to remember better.
After all, you remember only what you cannot forget.

***

There are too many drawers with sad treasures,
Something from a kiosk on the way: a toy of a lost child, lost nights, letters that humble their pain.
We may forget a lot, which is soothing,
But remembering the sadness is stubborn. A mule.
And we ride this mule for years, for ages,
And the mule rides us.

***

Our body is a mother and a child.
But we are orphans. We lose our body in all the wars of the world.
We carry the body of a soldier that fought and lost,
We carry his head and the hole in his head,
We carry his lost hands, the fingers we gathered one by one,
Infinitely tender.
Tonight, there will be war again,
The moon is the color of war.

***

There are promised lands,
That promise everything and nothing
Like old Moses in front of Canaan,
Like the strangers who live in the side walks of life. The street is the promised land, so it is forbidden.
One day, a ball rolls, old, patched ball, towards a child of the strangers.
The child jumped and caught the ball.
The ball paid its debt to life.
I saw him, he was the promised land:
His smile, the ball, the feet on the street.
Maybe balls love children, because they are both a shadow of the infinite.

***

People die all the time,
Yet, the stories say they die at night,
And it is a big question:
Is remembering our life, the dreams,
More lethal than living.
No one is really ready for his past.

***

Love may become monotonous,
So when you are a god, and eternal,
You have to invent yourself, to invent the body of love, the seed.
To kidnap, if needed, to rape, if needed,
To loot someone else's bed, if needed.
You don't realize it,
But you mix the races, you mix the colors beneath and over the skin.
So raping, kidnapping, looting bodies
Is not safe.

***

You say: I'll take your loss.
You say: I'll take your pain.
You say: you know that the heaven is empty,
Nothing to save you.
In your words; the only sky left.
You give it to me.

***

We die,
Life, eternal, mortal as pain.
In its shades, the seeds full of past, full of future
Continue.
Maybe they are the soul that people speak about so much.
Seeds go far, much further than death.
They are layer of eternity, beneath layer of eternity.

***

Everything should have happened the way it did.
The separations in everything, in the moments, in the eyes, in what we remembered,
and in your gaze, heavy and moist as a summer evening.
And the night should have been the way it was.
Our pulse in the pulse of the most distant star,
Your pulse in my pulse, coming, leaving, coming.
The night was what it should have been.

***

The road, uphill. The effort of living.
And yet, we go always lower.
The uphill tilled our shoes, our breath. We are tired.
The high road seems like a new Everest.
We are on the ground floor of life.
On the table: our seventy years.
On the table: the immense nostalgia for the inebriating uphill road, the endless effort.
The nostalgia to feel drunk.

***

No matter in which road we are,
Our feet hesitate, postpone, delay.
We are never ready for the crossroad on the way, for the crossroads inside us.
We are never really ready to choose.
We forget that each step is a choice,
We forget that life is the biggest chess game
that exists.

***

There are those who chant the evening prayer.
They don't chant to god,
They speak to the twilight:
The shadows mingling with light.
They need a truce, urgent, now or even sooner.
The civil war inside them, kills them, each day
From the beginning, each day more.

***

The market of human hands, of what these hands make, of human mind, of what these minds think,
This market is another kind of war. It loots us,
It kills us with each sale more each sale deeper.
Sister, I sit by your bed. It's empty.
Your clothes folded, your shoes brushed,
As if you were ready to go out in the morning,
To begin another kind of bleeding: to sell what wasn't sold yet. Your soul.
Sister, souls are cheap, the cost almost nothing.

***

One day, you wake up soul-less.
Your soul is erased like a shadow.
So, you become scavenger of souls.
You find a bird with broken wings: the soul of a human.
You find pain inside the pain: the soul of a stranger, nomad in pain.
You find the blind moth in a gaze; someone who lost the war even before it began.
It is sad,
But you can find souls,
In another kind of heaven, the hands of a scavenger. His hands are generous,
They accept all the souls. These hands sooth you, but they don't save you,
scavengers are strange,
They believe you should learn how to forgive your self, in order to be forgiven.

***

We bury, deep inside our body, our pain.
But, it is useless.
Pain is a carnivorous insect, it devours us from within.
Maybe, it is better to leave the pain open, on a rock, the way some ancient men did,
The vultures will come,
They are the cleaning angels of the world,
They eat pain.
We are frozen, we tremble by the thought.
We forget the human vultures.
They devour us, the leave only the pain, naked as a bone.
Pain is useless.

***

You, my brother, slight, delicate,
And yet, you carry inside you my whole childhood.
At the table: my fifteen years,
At the table: you. Ageless. My twin.
I loved what you loved,
I sang what you sang.
Brother, you were a mother,
You bore me in your shape, in the hues of your silence, each day more.
I left you, brother, the way one leaves a mother, when he wants to bear himself, alone, each day better.

***

There are those who don't want wings.
They have the fear of height. They want to feel safe.
They don't realize that they fly on the wings of others: the dreams, the beliefs, a song.
And others have the fear of depth,
And there is an immense question:
What is the depth of death.
Is the fear more fatal than death.

***

We are the strangest creatures in the world.
Wingless birds, and yet, we fly, smugglers of borders, smugglers of dreams.
We are clawless, and yet, we kill.
And, some nights, we have a hundred hands,
A centipede of love.

***

We return, and we don't know from where,
As if we came from the nothing.
But, nothing comes from the nothing.
We don't realize that the world gave us hands.
Hands are a home, somewhere to go, somewhere to come from,
That it gave us lucidity, the power to see: somewhere to go, somewhere to come from.
One day we'll realize it, we'll know we come from somewhere, somewhere big,
And something more,
Like a glass we shattered, the waterfall of suns in it,
We'll pay our debt to the world.

***

There are people who have an abyss inside them. They kill
Without a tremble in the eyes, without a tremble in their void.
And I don't know
How can one resist leaving beneath the line of zero,
How can one resist the holocaust of empty rooms, rooms that died with the dead,
The holocaust inside a silence.
I don't know.

***

We are waves. We break the sea, and it breaks us.
We are eternal, wave after wave.
But, we have learned, in the deep silence beneath a wave,
That there are not many seas,
Only one ocean.
Storms wait for a silence like that.

***

The blind violinist
Never fights with the chords.
He has nothing to win.
We, the seeing, fight with the world, each day from the beginning. We lose, each day, from the beginning.
The blind violinist, doesn't fight. He gives.
He gives the chords the terrible wound: his eyes.
He gives them his fingers, his infinite fingers.
He plays an Ode to the invisible.
The Ode is exquisite. It gives deep, much deeper eyes to those who see.

***

There are those who play the guitar like war,
Like the first wars of the first tribes.
They slice pieces of the chords, with violent hands.
They stone the song.
They bury the dead gazelles that used to be fingers in the holocaust of a cry.
Maybe the cry is human.

***

Life is hard work. You are tired.
But when you say that,
You remember, you realize,
That life is the best thing you'll ever have.
And you go on, between the hard work
And the best thing.
You don't know it is the only way to Ithaca: life. Who you are. what you are.

***

We say that the night is mysterious because we don't see.
And the day is a mystery, because we see too much, and we don't understand what we see.
We love mystery, even though we fear it,
And the big question is
How can we love and fear the same thing, at the same time: life. Our life.
Maybe we know too little. Maybe we remember too much.
Maybe we remember, somewhere deep, the first thunder ever, still bleeding like the sliced throat of a child.

***

Maybe our sadness is a motion. There is too much past in the motion,
There is too much to remember.
The stalactites in our eyes are older than our life,
And the caves where we dream the beasts that we killed and that killed us are cloudy.
Maybe we should begin from the beginning, each day, maybe we should remember that the men in the caves knew how to love,
And how to share the silence, even before they knew how to speak,
And at times, they knew how to be sad, because sadness is human.

***

The day dies in the glass.
In the dark,
All the inexplicable.
And a man, alone, with the night in his feet,
Was the most inexplicable.
There was star dust in his body
From the first moment of the first hour.
There was enough world in him,
Enough to give, enough to make it its own.
There was enough past in him,
Enough to remember, enough to walk towards the future always more, always deeper.

***

The trees by the street.
They give shape to the wind,
And the wind gives them shape.
And the forest of people give shape to the motions of living,
And the motions shape them.
The small, silent, patient motions.
History begins in such motions, each day, from the beginning.

***

We are young.
We need the madness of youth,
The madness of life.
Maybe, youth is the first Catharsis.
The true tears come later.

***

Poets are a clown for all seasons.
Beneath the laughter: the cry.
Beneath the cry; the laughter.
They don't know it. They feel serious.
They don't know that we love them
Because clowns make life possible.
The exquisite circus.

***

living is a big lens. It magnifies all the motions.
Only one turned to see us,
When everything seemed lost.
We don't know how to live invisible,
We need at least someone to turn,
To see us, because we see him too,
Because we make him also visible.
Because living is a big lens. The biggest.

***

Children's play is serious work.
When they build a sand castle,
They repeat the motions, until they know the sandcastle, and the sand castle knows them,
As if they knew that the small patient repetitions, are big.
Poets play with sandcastles, like a child.
They fight with sandcastles like a Don Quixote.

***

My beloved,
Tonight the moon is heavy. It will rain.
I touch the moon in the water,
I touch my touch, softened by the years.
I found you, I lost you, I found you again.
I see a body floating by the moon, in the river of time. I see you. I see the world rushing on both sides of the river.
I see myself, I move with the world. I am still.

***

In the window,
The sad man, bent.
As if he was trying to tidy something on his desk. Maybe the past.
Maybe he is a poet, maybe, an accountant,
Maybe poets are accountants of words.
The sad man, he stays always on one side of the window. It feels safe.
He doesn't know he lives on both sides of the window, he doesn't know he dies on both sides of the window.

***

We die, and we travel into the world, always more.
It is incredible how different we can become,
How invisible like the useful.
A vulture devours us, the cleaning angels of the world.
A tree drinks our thirst.
A rainbow in a waterdrop, it downs our eyes.
It is sad,
There are persons, deep wingless vultures,
Who become useful only postmortem.

***

Children feel the nature inside them deep,
Much deeper than what we imagine.
They speak to a plant, before they know how to speak.
Maybe they are here, but they can choose to be there, at the same time, the way matter does.
They play with the breeze, and of course with the dream. Their dream is a big bird. It flies.

***

Someone dies,
And we wish him a good journey.
We don't know how right we are.
We don't realize that dying is a journey into the world, even the universe.
We have to give back the star dust to the stars.
We have to pay the debt to the world: the roots, the seeds.
We don't realize that the pulse of a human beats in the pulse of the most distant star.

***

All your things stayed in your room the way they were.
As if you died long ago. As if they were a tomb.
All things carry inside them pieces of yourself.
They are nomads inside you, they are motion without limits.
And you, among all these motions,
You find yourself, you lose yourself, you forget, you remember.
You don't know that you lose only what you never found,
That you forget,
Only what you never remembered.

***

I ride by you in the car.
You are beautiful. You drive.
I don't think I was ever so close to someone.
I see the world rushing on both sides of the road.
I was never so close to the world.
I lost you and I found you, many times.
I see your face. I am by the roadside,
And the car continues to tear time, to tear the world.
I was never so close to the world.

***

There were delays, hesitations, postponements.
The world passes by you, like a children’s train.
You are on the train,
Light and heavy as a child,
Light and heavy as beauty.
You are on the tracks.
The world passes by you, like a children’s train.
Heavy and light as a dream.

***

You have to learn how to live in all directions,
Like a sphere,
To play with your life, light, heavy,
The way a child plays with his ball.

***

We began digging trenches,
Long, long before the first Cain.
We are the big engineers of fear,
And fears engineers who we are, what we are.

***

You dig the earth, carefully, precisely,
Bone by bone.
You don't realize it,
But you are a surgeon of civilization,
And you are a motion, the immense motion.
It moves towards you always more, always deeper.

***

Truth,
Doesn't have claws, fangs longer than itself.
It waits, patient, stubborn, by the road to Ithaca.

It waits for you to arrive.

***

There are those who sell certainties:
Eternities, gains, victories.
Remember:
The only certainty they have in their pockets is death.
They sell death.

***

There is no traffic light on the way to human,
And yet, you wait.
Maybe the traffic light is somewhere deep inside you.
Maybe the sense of self-worth,
The sense of the human beneath the human,
Is red.

***

Maybe, magicians knew, from the beginning,
Something we didn't.
Maybe they knew we need to believe in something:
Miracles, black and white magic,
Because we don't know how to believe in ourselves.

***

We create memories incessantly.
We create more, much more than a lifetime.
A palace, no matter how poor we are.
Room after room of who we were,
of who we were not, of who we are,
of who we could be.
It is strange,
Memories are the big justice. The biggest.

***

Something is hidden behind our daily routine.
The power to live, the fear of living,
the pain of living, the rage of living.
We don't know how easy it is
To hide something, enormous,
Behind something small: a daily motion,
Silent, patient, hardly visible.

***

The sun rains shadows, my beloved.
Each light rains shadows.
So, whenever you see shadows,
You should know there is somewhere a sun, a moon, a fire.
It is strange,
But it is the shadows that give us hope,
That shadows are hope.

***

It needs strength to look at the sun,
To stare at the eye of the light,
To know light is the seed of everything,
That seeds grow in this seed.
It needs power to know that the light, the infinite seed,
Is for everybody.

***

We look at the sun, burning, immense, eternal,
Because we all need light,
Because we need always more.
Maybe it is the sun that makes us feel how small we are,
And how big we are, when we look at the eye of the light.

***

The 'self' is a dead end.
If you want to arrive somewhere,
You need more, much more people inside you,
Someone who made the way before,
Someone who'll go with you,
So that you wouldn't be lost alone.
The people are never dead end,
They are a traffic light. It is green.
They are the journey inside your journey,
Even though you arrive at your Ithaca alone.

***

We should never accept the hands that kept the cross:
The immense magician who crucifies eternity.
These hands count the uncountable:
The world, life with iron nails in its breath,
The missing hands - they were sold,
The infinite hands of a human, so vulnerable,
So naked.
They crucify the pain. They make it eternal.

***

Maybe hope is a child,
So tiny, so immense.
It is not easy to make the surgery of hope.
To find out what it is that makes us immense,
Inside a small body.
It is not easy to take hope out of the moth balls.

***

Maybe love is a secret handicraft.
We can weave it, and it can weave us.
The secret waits for us, patient, almost invisible,
The way truth does.
Maybe, one day, we'll weave the wonderful cloth, thread in thread, knot in knot.
The weaving so vulnerable, so powerful.

***

MIDIA
Your face: guilty, pure.
Your face: a cry, silence.
It is not easy to walk over the mine fields of time,
To find the body of pain in all your hours, each hour from the beginning,
The body that walks towards you, always more,
Always deeper.

***

We came from very far.
We are layer beneath layer of past,
Of people, of the languages of life, of the rituals of life,
So, when they dig the earth, layer beneath layer,
They wouldn't find us.
They'll find history, naked as a bone.

***

There is so much world inside us,
So much fate of people.
So, if they try to cut the deep world in our entrails,
They'll have to slice at the center of our living.
We don't realize we belong to the world,
And the world belongs to us.
We don't realize how belonging makes us.
So vulnerable, so strong.
We don't realize belonging makes us bound and free, like love.

***

Our body is not a book,
It is an immense library of all the first things.
But we don't realize that the library
Goes far, much further than our last things.
That the library will continue in a world without language,
And yet, there will be always a last question.

***

Poets are human spiders.
They weave their net,
They trap our flies of pain,
They smoke them overshadows.
They let our wings melt. The only wing
We can afford their poem.
It takes us, the wingless flies,
towards the hopeless,
towards sadness,
always more.
Poets are sad spiders.

***

You prefer autumn, the sad tree of time.
It is not easy to make the surgery of time,
To find the tiny insects of time: the moments, stubborn, patient, hungry insects.
The insects that make the tall tree, as tall as life, die little by little and all at once.
It is not easy to make the surgery of hope.

***

We cry. We call it: the pure rain,
Even though, somewhere deep inside,
We know nothing is really pure,
We know that tears are not catharsis, that they purify nothing.
It is not easy to make the surgery of a tear,
To find the center of sadness, pure, impure,
Inside it.

***

We need power to feel the pain, to know it,
Our pain and the pain of others.
But we don't realize we need power to feel happiness,
And there is the big question:
We know everything about pain, and so little about happiness. How shall we recognize it.
We need a manual for happiness, how to smuggle it, beautiful, illegal, into our hours,
Into our motions of living.
A manual for small eternities.

***
GAVRINAS
I leap through the tree.
I love the tree of autumn.
Autumn is a gentle motion.
There is much tenderness in the fallen leaves.,
Their life in the lives of others.
There is much tenderness in the rustle,
It sings a lullaby to pain.
No one knows what the pain of a leaf feels.

***

Shadows come from all direction,
Like life, like a storm.
We are superstitious, and we believe that shadows are a bad omen, our face written on the ground.
Maybe, shadows are the black stray cat, chased away from all the Fridays of life.
We don't see how the blind violinist
Uses the shadows in his fingers
To play a children song,
To prolong the childhood for a day, maybe for years.

***

Saturday evening.
There are songs from somewhere,
They sing with a background of sadness.
They sing a folk song.
Folk songs are a journey in time. They remember.
They are history before history.
History that was lost.
We have to bring our history back.
To sing.

***

In the village,
The play ground is the banks of the river.
The children drench each other with.
At time, the catch a fish of time: a moment, a dream.
But they are not amazed.
Maybe they know too little,
Maybe they know too much.
There are centuries of nature inside them,
And magic is an old friend.

***

You have to be ready for the rain,
You have to be ready for everything:
How to live drenched, without umbrella.
You have to ready because the water rains from all directions, like life, like a storm.

***

It was a day like all others, humble like all others.
The same little pains, that were not really little,
The same little words, that were never really little,
But today,
A shell fell from the roof, a sun ray inside it.
The humble are not discoverers, nor poets,
So, it was unthinkable to hold the sun in their hands, to feel how the unthinkable becomes a thought.
The ray was rusty, consumed,
But it was exquisite.

***

We speak,
And we forget that when a word is said,
It is irreversible.
We forget that this word carries something of us, even something small.
We don't know how naked words can be
When they dance on our lips,
Strip-teasers in the small club of the said,
Of what was said without saying.

***

It rains birds.
Nature can give us so much,
It can give us clarity, it can give us lucidity,
We see the birds rain, they rain into our life.
We hear them sing,
They sing nests: the world beneath the rain, our life beneath the rain, and the people: a nest inside a nest.

***

We are strange creatures.
We eat, from the first moment of the first hour,
The particles of fume that began when the universe began, the galaxies,
The pieces of the first star,
Invisible in its infinite,
Invisible in its nakedness.
We are star eaters.
They say that we are what we eat.

***

Time is the only conductor
In the big orchestra, the biggest.
The symphony of cicadas and stars.
Its hands, infinite, invisible, precise, exquisite,
Weave themselves, like any conductor,
Into the fabric of the music:
A flying carpet of cicadas, of stars.

***

Time is the measurer of motion,
Time is motion,
So when it measures our motion,
It measures the infinites in our smallest motion:
Itself.

***

The planets inside us, child of dead stars.
Each one has its own velocity of spinning,
At times we have more night in our orbit,
At times, more suns.
They change us. Even the sameness cannot be the same. They rule us, no velocity, no slowness can save us.
They are the fire in our first sun,
In the last cigarette we smoke.
The dead star inside us, dies again.

***

Time is not always merciful.
It leaves deep wrinkles wherever it passes:
Planets, moons, faces.
It leaves knives beneath the wrinkles,
Deep knives, visible.
It teaches us how to bleed.

***

We have always a choice.
It's not only the question: to be or not to be.
It is the question how to be,
How to live, how to use all our lives
Each day, each moment, each time from the beginning.
And this choice is something very powerful,
The most powerful thing we own.

***

There is no manual
To recognize pain, beauty, the human,
Except when they are inside you.
You write the manual, each day, from the beginning,
The manual for pain, for the human, for beauty,
A manual for small eternities,
The only eternities available.
They are big.

***

We came from very far.
We tamed the earth and it tamed us.
We sowed each other with sweat, with pain, with life, with love,
The way a man sows his woman,
The way a woman sows her man.
We are married to earth
The deepest marriage we'll ever know.

***

Maybe beauty is health.
There is no health in pain.
There is no beauty in pain,
And let the saints speak about the paradise of pain.
There is no Apollo of pain,
There is no Hercules of pain.

***

We came from very far, and we carried with us
The most precious thing: the tribe.
No one could have survived the journey alone,
No one could have waited in the station to human alone.
We are tribe people, nomads in life, nomads in death.
No one could have arrived to the twelfth station, midnight, the station before dawn, alone.

***

It is midnight, the twelfth station in the journey to human.
There is time in the station
There are people in the station,
There are eyes in the station.
The shadows of everything on the wall,
Are the most exquisite mosaic.

***

Pain loots you. It leaves you naked, skinless,
And time melts in your pain,
So, your pain walks towards you, always more,
Each day from the beginning.
No one returns from this walk the same.

***

Something leaves our days empty, like a fatigued habit,
And to think that we are only in the middle of the journey, the journey to human.
Maybe we didn't know, from the beginning,
How far we have to go, how much uphill of the soul.
Maybe we didn't realize how much we love life,
Enough to take such a journey, even though we wouldn't see the arrival. Our Ithaca.

***

People pass by us, they look uncertain, a little fearful.
After all, we don't know what to expect of a stranger, smuggler of borders.
Maybe, one day, we'll realize that more than anything else we fear ourselves, that this fear is not innocent.
It is a killer.
Maybe, we'll love the adventure of a man going out in the street, the adventure of faces, colors,
That mingle. The adventure of a truce.

***

There are hours in which we feel
That we never arrived to earth,
That we still remain in the void, in the non existence.
We forget that the void is a mother of stars,
We forget the universe inside us. It exists.
We forget how infinite we are, how real we are,
When we stretch our hands over the void.
Hands are the best bridge, the biggest.

***

Autumn.
The fallen leaves are giants,
They are the greatest poem,
The most heroic one,
Wrapped in a Haiku of a rustle.

***

The ship left the island,
And time became patient again.
The time of slow rocks.
The time of the lizard on the rock.
And the only motion is the warmth beneath time,
It flows in the rocks, in the lizard,
It flows wrapped in the slow suns in the sand.
Maybe beauty is slow warmth.

***

We die from inside out.
Somewhere deep. We have, each one,
His own killer, invisible in its nakedness,
Invisible in its motion, rehearsed, repeated.
At times,
We touch the spots of blood in our silence,
We feel the knives beneath each wrinkle.
We don't realize that we bleed,
We don't know that time can bleed in a small wrinkle.
We don't realize that time rains over us, The untamed, the precise rain,
And there is no umbrella of mercy.

***

A song to Che Gevara
Dedicated to Alberto Angel

As long as you believe in the power of human,
The hard power, the tender power,
You can cry
When they sing a man who cried for you.

***

Time harsh as loss.
Time softened by the years, like the hand of a human.
Time close as breath.
Time untouchable as the wind, as the air.
And inside this time, this mad time,
You have to find the way home.

***

Often we don't know who we are, where we aew,
Where we go, with whom we go.
And it is strange,
We are curious people,
Maybe we use the curiosities that are safe,
Maybe we feel the infinite mine field
Beneath the wide feet of a question.

***

It is not easy to confess the rage against parents.
The habits of the past are iron. Absolute.
Maybe the past inside you feels for you.
It feels the sacrilege. Parents are sacred.
It feels the sin, the infinite sin, and you, alone in your body, you feel the hell of rage.
You are guilty.

***

Slowly, we learn how to live with ourselves,
But the person inside us, the one we don't know,
Is a mystery.
We don't know what to expect from him:
Tenderness, rage, the crime of the century.
It is not as bad as it sounds,
As a rule, we are responsible for everything,
For whatever happens,
But this person changes all our contracts,
All our maps.
We are never here, when the plaza bleeds flags, shouts. We are somewhere else.
We are innocent.

***

Someone dies, a mother, a woman,
And there are too many words that were left unsaid.
They remain frozen in time, a hard statue.
Words have a weight,
And it is strange
Because the unsaid ones weigh more, infinitely more, as if gravity grew in each syllable of silence.

***

You try to break the cycle:
Fathers, forefathers, the repetitions.
You try to find a crack, invisible, naked,
And yet you feel how the past melted inside you,
How this past is full of fathers, of cycles, like a seed.
You have no choice,
You have to begin the future from the only beginning available: the past.

***

You fall in love.
Your motions of love move in the most beautiful shadows, the most mysterious.
But the motions of living are lit,
They may shatter the shadows.
They are another kind of mystery. More secret. Deeper.

***

You feel always someone over your shoulders,
Watching you, correcting you. Invisible as gravity.
A father, a mother.
And suddenly, the weight changes, the shoulders change, the someone changes.
Your son.
The whole weight of your son, the whole weight of the rebel in his eyes.
Seeing is never weightless.

***

Life puts in front of you
Only the duties it can fulfill:
The motions of living,
The muscles of living,
Invisible like the useful.
The exquisite motion.

***

You don't know what time it is in the world.
You don't know what time it is in your life, in the life of others.
It is strange:
In this time, in this age, in this world, among these people,
You could be anybody,
And yet, you became yourself.
You don't if you chose or if you were chosen.

***

We inhabit, each one, another world.
No one could create exactly the same story,
The syllables of feeling, the phrases of living,
The commas of silence, the full stop of a cry.
We don't know how to travel towards someone,
Worlds have each, its own orbit,
The cycle between the alone and the alone.

***

Maybe the passion of the bodies of love
Is a sun, a mysterious sun,
But, the twilight comes, as it should.
Maybe you learn how to love
The shadows mingling with light: a truce.
Maybe you learn the motion of a body that goes on loving,
The motion that is a truce.
The deepest motion.

***

Maybe the best teachers are the story tellers.
They tell us: ourselves.
The mysterious elves inside the motions of living, of loving,
The secret cross roads inside each step,
The cross roads are legendary labyrinths,
And we need a thread or at least a shoe lace, always.
They tell us the dragons in our silence.
And they tell us the inexplicable adventure that we are.

***

We can never understand fully the others, till the depth.
There are waves in the depth, they change us, depth by depth,
So, we can never understand fully the changes,
And there is no bridge deep enough.
Anyway, bridges measure the distances between us,
We don't know how many distances can walk inside a gaze.

***

You can be a guide to a somewhere, if you were there before:
The pain of living, the rage of living, becoming diaphanous, invisible. To be too tired to think,
To know where to go.
There were big dreamers who were there:
Naked foot prints, heaps of old shoes left on the way to Ithaca: home.

***

You should feel that life is the best thing you'll ever have,
And you should remember it each moment, each hour,
Because everything begins, each moment, each hour, from the beginning, again.
Because everything is motion, time is restless, it is meticulous, and it rolls in the time of the tiniest things, even in the time of a stone, and the beginnings are a big motion, because they
continue all the beginnings that were. You need power to begin, and you need an immense power to continue.

***

You can be the tip of a spear,
To be first in the lines of those who don't want to die, to be sold, the soft hair on your chest naked, to the traders of bullets.
You can be the tip of the spear
In another war, the war for peace.
armies may win a war,
But winning the peace is another kind of war,
Deeper, invisible in its depth, invisible in its dream.
You can be the tip of a spear,
And they may pierce you with the tip of a spear at the wall.
You may be the tip of the spear in the death march, your eyes clear, your eyes bleeding, to peace.

***

Maybe love is a state of being,
But we speak of falling in love.
The fall is not terrible, let the poets say what they want,
But after the fall, staying in love is always uphill,
You stay in love, each day from the beginning.
Staying in love is hard work, like living.

***

Freedom has a smell.
The scent is exquisite,
It is free and bound like a wave in a sea of scents,
Like all the freedoms that exist.
Like love.

***

You are not born once.
You are born, each moment from the beginning, free and bound at the same time.
You have to choose, each moment,
If you own enough freedom to choose,
Enough to own your choice,
Always more, always deeper.

***

The person in your head could be free,
But, there is too much past inside him,
The past may be a big slave trader, a slave, a pirate of treasures,
And his past, like any other's, is full of future. Future is hope.
So, the person in your head has to choose,
Moment by moment, infinite by infinite,
The slave trader, the slave, the pirate of treasures, the treasure of hope.
The power to choose is the biggest thing you own.

***

We learn how to love,
The way we learn how to live,
Little by little, each day more, each day better,
But we are never eternal enough
To learn how to die.

***

Maybe love is a selfish motion.
Maybe we love because we need to build again
The paper boat of a child,
The exquisite boat, the infinite boat,
That used to save us from ourselves.

***

Maybe you won the war,
But you cannot win the peace.
Peace has to win you.
Peace is a power,
Invisible as the useful,
Invisible as the small motions of living.
They may shoot you at the wall
Because you spoke about peace,
But they cannot shoot the peace.

***

The humble, the ones who didn't inherit the earth,
Need to believe in something, a promise, at least a soul.
So, they sing the soul, the aching soul,
And they sing it high, higher than life,
In order to purify themselves.
And it is sad,
Because they don't know that the only purifier is life, on this earth, in this world,
That the pain was always pure.

***

The evening, the sea of shadows.
Alone in the depth of the sea,
Time grows in the depth, the way time always does.
You try to catch time, but in vain.
You touch the fish of time, the exquisite fish:
The people.
You feel yourself inside the touch.

***

Something of ourselves leaves
In whatever we do:
A gaze, a touch, a word.
We don't realize how much of ourselves
Sends roots in others.
We don't know how little of ourselves began inside us, how much was a traveler without a ticket of return.

***

Maybe we die like a child.
Maybe the small things, toys of the eyes,
The first things ever, are silent. They remember.
Maybe we die, each time for the first time,
Like a child.
Maybe little by little, we learn how to live from the beginning, like a child.

***

Nature is everywhere,
And yet, we don't realize how much nature
Can the human nature contain,
How many forest fires, how many earthquakes,
How many untamed lava.
Maybe one day we'll find inside us
The quiet waves of earth, the magic sea fields.
A truce.

***

Everything tells our story.
The bones that are too naked, too dry to be silent.
The stones where time carves myths, magic rivers, dragons are the only water available
The small water jug that remained the same for ages. It is beautiful. It is empty.
We are thirsty. One past is not enough to quench us.

***

We spread our hand
And the infinite touches our palms,
But we don't realize it,
We don't realize that the whole nature
Plays in the tips of our fingers.
We don't know that our hand is a seed
And the motion of sowing.
It sows itself in whatever it does.
It is a world of hands, and of the journey of the hands towards us, always more, always better.

***

Our feelings are entangled, a wild ivy inside us.
And we don't know how to disentangle them.
We don't realize feelings never travel alone.
We don't realize how many feelings are in a feeling.
We don't realize how many humans are in a human.

***

The city, alone in its night.
The night, the city let you remember and forget yourself.
You remember the feelings that kept you here.
Feelings are thirst, and they are a hand that gives you water.
They are the questions you didn't ask,
They are a big answer.
The night, the city let you remember and forget.
After all you remember only the things you could never forget.

***

Everything is a twilight,
The shadows mingling with light.
Even a simple smile, the corner of a gaze, a thought.
And all we see is the twilight, we don't realize it is the magician of content.
A truce.

***

Art is patient.
Little by little it blows in our eyes, the strangest wind. It blows in what our eyes feel, in what they think.
It blows as if it belonged to everybody.
No one owns the wind.

***

People were in prison for ages,
But some, the person in their head was free.
They wrote poems on the walls.
Maybe this person in the head was there from the start, and art began when he began:
The first man painting his dreams, his free wilder-beasts, a picture of power, in the cave.
A gift to freedom.

***

At times they tell us that there are no answers,
But, we should go on asking.
After all, we made the journey to human,
In order to know how to ask, what to ask,
To understand the magician of answers: life.
To play with the inexplicable that we are.

***

BYRON
The person in his head
Was free in a heroic way.
It was this person who wrote his poem,
It was this person who wrote his war.
He didn't know how many will be shot at the wall,
People whose only poem was their life.

***

Homes are a place to return to, like memories.
Homes are the place to keep at least one of your dreams.
Homes are a journey in a journey.
You drift through the dream to what you were,
To who you are.
It is the journey before the journey:
Where you want to go.

***

You don't know if god exists,
And you don't know if it matters, even if he exists.
After all, life is a giant, your life here, on earth,
And death is a giant. It continues your journey into the world.
No one can make these giants dwarfs. No one.

***

There are years when it rains in the world.
The rain is contagious.
It rains into your life, into the lives of others.
You feel the sadness of the rain.
This sadness has no umbrella of mercy.
It drenches us.
At times the water softens us.
At times, there are small suns in the raindrops.
Sadness is a power. It changes us.

***

They say that whatever we do is written in the sand,
But, there is no sand in our head.
The person in our head remembers. He remembers the pictures we carved on the rocks.
The person in our head writes our story,
He writes our journey: old patched shoes that broke stones.

***

There are those whose passage through life is simple. They are not a sun.
There are those who love life, enough to live for it, enough to find the small suns inside the hours, the secret summers.
They don't know that being simple is never simple, that nothing is really simple.

***

Poets love big dramas.
Despair is a drama, and war.
As if they brought the ancient theatre here.
It is nice to carry the past along,
But we shouldn't forget that the past bore us in nights of love, that star were born within it.
We should be small, so that there is room enough, so that we can live each day, the whole day, so that our motions of living can write the hours, each hour from the beginning. The drama invisible in its nakedness.
No matter what the poets say.

***

Poets should learn how to use the silence,
The commas, the full stops.
They should write the way life writes itself,
Endless small voices, moments of quiet.
We are sad people, sad and mute.
We need to hear ourselves.

***

The simple art, without tall cries, tall hours.
How slowly we accept its simplicity,
How slowly we let it enter our motions of living,
Our voices of living.
We don't know how immense we are
When we sing the small motions in the voice,
When the people understand it and sing it too,
How immense we are when we know that being simple is hard work.

***

The terrible laughter of people, the laughter is dry. The desert in their mouth.
They are thirsty.
There were so many promises of wells, of oasis.
And it is sad,
If you don't find the well, the oasis inside you,
You'll find it nowhere.

***

It is station one in the journey to human.
The cave, the family of people, the fruits, the dead meat,
But the art of survival is not enough, we need another art. We draw the world, we draw the world inside us, we let all those, almost invisible, immense shapes of color,
Tell what we are, who we are, how we are.
It is the twelfth station of the journey.
We continue to draw on all the walls of the world, the new caves, the new humans.
We don't know yet who we are,
Because time is a waterfall inside us, in the world. It changes us, we are unfinished,
Ready for another change,
And art cannot live among finished things,
It needs somewhere to go. So, after all the ages we arrived to the perfect art: the unfinished art, the endless.

***

We die, and we cry for the dying light,
But our graves are silent,
So death is the end of the crying,
Only the living know how to cry.
We don't realize that crying is alive, a giant.
We don't know how alive we are, how immense,
When we cry.

***

We could be a garden
With trees from the 5 continents,
But, we are a jungle.
We steal each other's sun, each other's rain.
We are thirsty. We are blind.

***

Death comes always too soon,
Before we had time to understand
What we want, who we are, who is it inside us who will die.
We don't realize that whatever we understand is precious,
That we are buried, like a Pharaoh,
With our biggest treasures: the thirst to understand. The deepest water.

***

The heat burns the light, The light is black,
Like the fire of a bullet,
Like the bullets of pain,
And the only light left
Is the thirst for light.
The terrible thirst. The exquisite thirst.

***

We should be patient,
The light comes slowly,
Like the beginning of a smile,
Like the eye of a human
Who realizes, sunrise by sunrise, that the person in his head is free.
We should be patient,
The light comes slowly,
It is born, like us, each day from the beginning.

***

Letters can be strangers.
Your letter, happy, sad,
I read it. I continue it with what I think, what I feel.
That's what makes your letter precious.
It knows me.

***

Poets kiss beauty, the human god.
But beauty is a strange creature.
The beauty of sadness,
Of water that grew old in a face. Quiet waves in the forehead.
Maybe humans are human
Because they can find beauty in a corner of silence, in a syllable of life.

***

THE MERMAID
On the bench
A mermaid, naked as a breath.
The sun rises, it drenches her body,
A pool of light and foam.
In the light she sees herself,
She is alone, this alone bleeds.
Mermaids are a symbol, a dream,
They are lonely. They know how to bleed.

***

Water is power. Stones are power.
The rain, the rivers, the waterfalls of time tame the stone.
And the stones tame them.
Maybe our life is water, and it is stone.
We tame it and it tames us.

***

Claws don't become what they are easily.
They have to be sharpened by time, by pain,
By sadness, by rage.
The first man of the first tribe had the first claws.
Claws are the big tamer, they tamed men for ages.
We should be careful when we shake hands.
Claws may tame us.

***

The biblical flood repeats itself.
We need an arc for the people, for the animals,
And we need enough tenderness to take everybody along.
Maybe, the river of time, will flow this time,
Towards the human. Always more, always closer.

***

I am on the train. The train leaves.
I see the train. I see myself on the train.
We see separations everywhere,
Because time travels in everything, train, bus ships, in our motions.
Time, the magician of separations,
In the biggest circus: life.

***

We should know we have a debt to life.
We should know that the only way to pay it
Is to be free: the only coin we have,
To pay it, each day from the beginning,
Which is not simple at all,
To pay it even when we are in prison:
The person in our head can be free.
We don't want open accounts with life,
So, we pay our debt even at the wall,
A moment before the bullet.

***

People live in forests that were burned,
The naked claustrophobia of roots,
Among heads: a holocaust of empty rooms.
They don't dare crying anymore, they fear themselves.
They don't know how to resist below the line of zero.
They don't know how immense they'll be when they'll cry,
The human sadness,
A cliff over all the lines of zero.

***

Some say we are ants,
Carrying weights bigger than ourselves.
They don't realize how immense we are when we carry the person in our head. He is free.
He is heavy and light.
They don't know ants don't cry.

***

At times we envy the lucky of the world.
The plastic beauty, the rituals of cloths,
The plash legal bed.
We forget that everything has a price tag.
We forget that we had to sell our hands in all the markets of the world, that's how bills are paid.
Luck is never cheap

***

Smells are just pieces of air,
And we solidify them.
They become
A petal of a body,
The moon in the water, the scent of liquid light,
And wet sand, a sand castle, it smells like a child, the deepest smell.

***

We have more, much more senses
Than what we imagine.
We know always where to find each part of our body, the pieces of Lego that we are,
Even in the deepest dark, in the blinding light.
And it is strange,
We don't know where to find who we are,
What we are.

***

We begin eating before we begin:
Our eyes eat, the smell is edible,
And our hands, the immense factory of a human,
Feel the fuel inside the plate.
After all, the fuel in our plate
Is the true black gold.
Our engines are thirsty.

***

Walls leave you in,
They leave all the rest of the world out,
So they don't protect you even from yourself.
And walls are strange creatures,
They are only as strong as those who defend them,
As strong as those who were shot at their feet.

***

When you bow to the dead,
You bow to your own history,
You bow to Ithaca:
The way home, the endless journey.

***

The motions of living,
The small, patient, endless repetitions,
Change you.
You walk towards life, invisible as the useful,
Invisible as the small certainties.
Your hands multiply, they sow your life,
Always better, a motion studied as the habit of living.

***

There are too many threats, inside, outside.
You feel the threats somewhere deep, each hour more, each day more.
You feel fear. It protects you, it makes you cautious, it multiplies your eyes, it multiplies a secret sense: the sense of risk.
And yet, it can become the biggest threat.
A serial killer.

***

We never conquered nature,
But we made something big, much bigger.
We live with nature inside us,
And nature, the magician of toys,
Plays inside us.
A truce.

***

The sky is a strange place.
A factory of stars.
Valleys with shepherd moons.
Planets, the toys of suns.
And the heavens are the holocaust of empty rooms, of silence.

***

In the big orchestra
Everything has rhythm, also living.
It is the pulse that gives rhythm to our life,
The magician of percussion,
The dancing drummer.
We dance our life always, even when we are still.

***

We were hungry for too long.
Hunger is in our genes.
Hunger: the big tamer of the beast inside us. It is hungry,
Hunger: the big rebel. The biggest.
We have to choose.

***

Sensations learn with us
How to sense.
How to recognize what they feel,
How to use what they feel,
How to use life, each day from the beginning,
Each day better.

***

Touch is the magician of depth.
It deepens whatever we feel, whatever we do.
We understand better what was said, what wasn't said.
And what we feel, deepens the touch.
We let it walk, invisible in its nakedness,
Beneath our deepest silence, beneath our deepest palm.

***

Cells are the unsung heroes of our body.
As if they were the simple patient people,
The unsung heroes of our journey,
And yet, at times we remember,
At times we sing them,
At times they become our song.
The immense cells of the struggle,
Of the journey life is made of
In the streets of the hours, in the streets of our blood.

***

Some nights,
Everything is an engine of passion,
Everything is fuel:
The dark, the skin inside the hands, the hands inside the skin, the smell that finds you in your silent rooms,
The motion of a body in another:
The holy engine.

***

Our senses define the world,
But, it's not enough, we need more.
So, they create a world inside the world.
They define a world that is ours.
We live, each in his own world,
And we don't understand the extra-terrestrials,
The words of those from other worlds,
Or at least the dictionary of their silence.
We are alone.

***

W cannot know what life is,
Because we don't know what is death.
All we can do is recognize it, like an animal of pain:
We become more ferocious,
And everything becomes a mine field of silence.
Among us, there are such men, they recognize death, they use death:
Chieftains of black money, chieftains of war.

***

Small words have power: yes, no, never.
We need power in order to say them.
Even thou they are small, they are big, as big as a choice.
Choice is the biggest power we have, the biggest freedom.

***

Small poems may have power,
They may include a couple of words,
Words as simple as the way home.
And we don't realize words are never simple,
They carry too much of ourselves inside them. They are heavy. They are more naked than what we imagine.
We don't realize there is no simple way home:
Our Ithaca.

***

Time erases itself calmly, even though it is eternal,
And we lived, we loved life so much, enough to live for it.
We know we have to part, to make room for the future,
But knowing is not feeling.
We don't believe in after-life,
And we are not eternal enough to learn how to die.

***

Again and again we look for the meaning of living,
A mystery that seems beautiful, more beautiful than ourselves,
A mystery that can be better than all the choices.
There are angels in our thoughts.
Maybe living our life, each day from the beginning, is the most beautiful mystery, the biggest choice,
And maybe the best angels
Are the angels in the drawing of a child.
The exquisite birds.

***

Little by little, even fate seems common, daily.
You love rare things
Maybe you don't realize that everything is matter, the magician of rare things. It is made of repetitions, but it never repeats itself in the same way.
In the balcony: the twilight,
And small lights tremble, far, each in its own tremble.
The moon in the water, your face in the water,
Flow in a way that will never happen again.
You don't know how rare you are,
When you stretch your hands, in a motion that happens only once, towards life.

***

The algebra of a revolution is strange.
The numbers are rage. Rage adds hands to the hands.
The numbers are aching. Pain can add hands to the hands.
The numbers are hungry. Hunger adds hands to the hands.
We may be few, but the rage, the pain, the hunger,
Add few to the few, they multiply few by the few.
We cannot imagine how many hands the few can contain, how much rage, how much pain,
How much hunger.
We don't know which equation begins a revolution. Maybe the algebra of hunger is the biggest rebel.

***

The women of love
Sells their naked night.
They sell their magic thighs.
But inside them, they sell nothing.
The body beneath the body of love is their own.
After all, this body made, barefoot and with shoes,
The journey to human.
The journey is priceless, you cannot put a price tag on the priceless.

***

We have to know in order to learn.
We have to know what's useful inside us,
In order to learn what life needs.
The motions of living, small, patient,
Consecrated by repetition,
The motions invisible as the useful.
The motions consecrated by the useful.

***

Each day, we exhaust our emotions.
In the evening there are empty rooms inside us.
We cannot even cry. Crying is power.
We have no choice.
We sit in the empty room inside us, we look at the immense twilight. The lights trembling from somewhere far.
We are immense again. We feel.

***

We think that we exhaust our emotion each day.
That the evening will be a corridor of closed doors. We'll feel nothing.
We don't realize that the giver of emotions
Are the eyes what they saw, the odors, what they smelled, the hands of people, how they touched,
And all these fall inside us, like the leaves of the world.
They replenish the feelings, they sow themselves in the feelings, they train our feelings how to feel, always more, always better.

***

Beauty is power, even if we don't notice it.
Beneath the pretty face, the pretty cloths,
Beauty may be a deep body.
Loving is power, and an equation.
It adds the face to the cloths, there are no numbers.
It adds the deep body, there are not enough numbers to count it.
It gives beauty its true size.

***

The sunset sows burned seeds, burned dreams, in the sea.
Seeds are power. Dreams are power.
And hunger is power, it is in our genes.
One day, we will eat no longer the hunger, the dreams.
We'll sit at the table. In the plates: wheat. In the plates: the death of hunger. The death of a dinosaur.

***

We look at the mirror,
And we see time.
Time gives us a shape, like everything else:
Iron, a leaf, a stone,
And we give shape to time.
It is a world of artists,
The clay always wet in the tips of the fingers.

***

Letters are patient,
As if they knew we understand slowly, we remember slowly,
So we may read our letters, again and again, for the first time.
The letter, half torn, almost illegible,
Like the person who wrote it,
But the small, stubborn repetitions,
Understand always more,
They create our memory, always deeper.

***

Maybe the best song
Are stray animals,
They know all the alleys where people live,
Where they take out on Sabbath the plastic tables,
Where they celebrate, not the day of god,
But the day of stray things: folk songs, almost forgotten, cats on stray roofs.
And the stray song, the stray animal in their mouth, belong to no one and to everybody.

***

When we walk the hundred roads of silence,
We shouldn't forget
The sound of colors, of shadows, of light,
Of people, somewhere far.
The sounds pass through us as if we were permeable.
After all, each thing has a rhythm,
A pulse, a drummer in a rock band.
Something plays inside us always. The mad band of feelings.

***

We come from very far.
The road was a wave. At times it was as tall as a wave,
At times, as low.
It could climb the uphill of living,
It could be at line zero, beneath the ground floor of life.
And we have to choose, each day from the beginning, where we want to go,
We have to choose how far, how high, how low.

***

Maybe everything is a window into something.
The glass in our words, in the way we walk, in the way we look.
We cannot imagine how naked we are, how fragile.
We don't know how faithful windows can be.
One day, they'll sell our house, they'll sell also our face in the window.

***

We think that our footfall is dark in our soles. Shadows.
We forget that these shadows lit our feet for ages, when our footprints followed the journey,
With shoes or without.
We felt others step in our shoes. We felt the small suns in their sweat.
They were enough.

***

Women walk, long flowing lines,
Like an ancient dance, the ritual of surrender,
To the alone.
They don't realize that the first thing they sacrificed was not the body,
It was the breath, the breath that gave and took life, feelings, the world. The breath was free.

***

Artists use
The world that was drawn inside them, from the first moment of the first hour,
So, when they draw the world on a canvass,
They draw us, inside-out.
We don't realize how naked we are, when they draw us inside-out. How secret. We don't recognize ourselves inside out, we don't like it.
We have no choice, we buy it, we hang it in a corner of silence, the rope is tight.

***

If you cannot open your eyes in your city,
The eyes in your face, the eyes inside your head,
You can open them nowhere.
If you cannot stretch your hands in your city,
The hands that can understand the silences, even more than words,
You can stretch them nowhere.
You can go nowhere. There is an immense dead end in all motion. A full stop.

***

The repetitions of motions
Multiply our hands,
They can grow earth from a seed,
They can create love from a touch,
They can draw a human from a motion of living,
A motion that begins each day from the beginning.
So, life is not only motion, it is a dance of repetitions, a dance invisible as the useful,
Invisible in its nakedness.

***

We come from very far. We didn't know we made all this way,
In order to know we were an image of the world, from the start.
Storms rain inside us, suns rain inside us,
And people rain inside us,
And all we can do is see our face in each rain drop, all we can do is see the world watching us, in each rain drop.

***

Fashions change. Suddenly hats are bigger,
But it is useless.
Life can drench us, no matter what hat we wear.
We need bigger shoes,
We don't know how immense we are, when more, much more than two feet,
Walk in our shoes,
How deep each step becomes, how clear,
How absolute.

***

We came from very far,
We carried the fear from the peaks of the world,
From the peaks of life,
And we climbed, each day from the beginning.
We didn't know how immense we were.
A little bigger than fear. That was enough.

***

Even the water grew old.
Peace comes dropping slowly,
Like a gentle rain.
We can hold it in our palm, the way one holds the water of time.
We flow forwards, towards who we'll be.
We flow backwards, against time,
Because we need to remember,
In order to know where to return.
Maybe peace is the way home.

***

We don't realize how big people are
When they dance folk dance,
When the motions tell their story,
When the hands hold each other, to understand the song better,
How big is the joy.
A little bigger than pain. That's enough.

***

We came from very far,
Ancient faces, like rain bitten stone.
The ages of forests in our eyes,
The gaze fixed, still,
As if trying to understand all the mysteries at once.
We are curious creatures, impatient,
We needed, from the start,
A short cut to living, a short cut to understand.

***

We think what the others think.
After all, we are full of past, it makes us similar.
But, there are always the dreamers,
They are a storm of time.
No one can cross a storm of time and remain the same.

***

Poems may be our paper veins,
And yet, they know how to bleed.
But we forget
The simple words we say to simple people.
They are a poem too. The deepest poem.
They don't have paper in their veins,
They have life.
Life is never simple.

***

The office where we live our paper life.
Little by little we grow paper eyes, paper soul,
And we become paper too.
Everything is a desert of paper.
We are thirsty.
No one can forget his thirst is not paper.

***

People die in wars for the home land,
Simple people, peasants.
And it is sad,
Because for them the village is the true homeland, they are ready to live for it, to die for it.
The big homeland is a memory. Memories don't chew earth in their mouth.
When they shoot them at the wall,
They shoot all the men in the village, the homes, the tree in the middle of the plaza,
The small homeland. One bullet is enough.

***

We learn how to keep inside us a secret place,
To protect us from naked gazes.
And it is sad,
We made all the journey to human,
We lost our first far,
In order to be more visible,
In order to see, I to I, the eyes of a gaze.
In order to understand what eyes say, which is not simple at all. No word has the hundred eyes of a gaze.

***

Someone comes with gold in his hands.
The gold is beautiful, like a promise, like hope.
We don't think whose gold it is, where it came from, who killed for it,
Who died in the gold mines.
We don't know how cruel gold can be.

***

We are young. We let life in,
And then we close all the skins we have,
Because of fatigue, because of pain.
We forget how to walk towards the world.
And it is sad,
We forget that the world continues to enter in each breath, in each bite.
We forget that the world walks towards us, always more, always deeper, sad, beautiful.
We forget that with each motion
We walk towards the world.
We can choose:
To see the motion of the world, to see our motion, or not to see.
Choice is the biggest power we have, the biggest freedom.

***

***

We are young, and we think that whatever felt was already felt.
We don't know that learning how to feel is a patient, slow motion.
It finds us when we are least ready.
We grow old,
Even the water grows old: the rain.
We feel, always more, always deeper,
The rain drops, alone, diaphanous, falling with the rain.
We feel the truce.

***

No one can drink the whole rivers,
And yet, there were dreamers who drank it whole,
Their mouth was as big as a thirsty child, no more.
It is strange,
Dreamers give us thirst and sooth it.

***

We laugh and weep
An hour before the clock.
After all we are all clowns
In the biggest circus: life.
We laugh the mourning
When we try to amuse the pain.

***

We don't know who are the fish gasping on the sand.
We don't realize they are the fish of time: us.
We don't realize how thirsty we are,
We don't know we need the waterfall of hands,
Of the motions of living,
To carry us to the river,
To teach us how to breathe water.

***

I love the plazas,
Where people trade fruits, coffee, the talk, the gazes, the beginning of a smile.
The places from which people bring back the innocent: the peaceful coin.
The exquisite bargain.

***

Everything is matter,
The world in our world,
Us, in the womb of the world.
We don't realize we bear each other, every day from the beginning,
We don't know how we bear ourselves, every day from the beginning.
We don't understand how the world continues to bear us, for so long,
Each one is the same and different.
Boredom is not an option.

***

I look for life, myself, the people's, I look for a hand that can give me water.
And yet, all I can do is draw words.
Words are simply translations.
Maybe, one day, I'll be the ultimate artist.
I'll draw life with life.
I'll draw water with water.

***

In order to write,
I need the magician of words.
Words can draw the endless repetitions
Of the motions of living, of the motions of silence,
And as a true magician they use the repetitions.
They make them the same, in order to be different.

***

There were those who made their freedom, not out of war.
Out of love. They were lovers of life, so they were lovers of people.
They found freedom in the small hours of small people, who were never really small.
Maybe freedom is contagious.
Maybe you have to look for freedom
Where you least expect it:
In prison. The person in your head can be free.
In the alleys of silence. You are free in your silence.
At the wall, a moment before the bullet. In the cry. You are free in the cry.
They'll bury you, but they cannot bury the freedom, the love, the hope. There is no grave
Deep enough.

***

There were poets
Who used life to write life,
Who used people to write people.
They were so close to truth
That their words were plain,
As plain as a breath, as plain as sharing a silence.

***

I look for myself, not for an image.
I look for the way one walks in the deep mud by the river of time, the one who knows he wouldn't arrive, but he walks, always more, towards home.
I look for the one who can cry, like the birds,
A moment before dawn.

***

Maybe we are nomads in our life, nomads in ourselves,
Estranged, lost,
When we lack the compass:
The storm of people, the journey to human.
The needle shows north.

***

Hunger carves our face,
As if we were an ancient stone bitten by the rain.
And it is sad,
We brought the first hunger of the first tribe,
Here, now.
We didn't realize the journey will be so long, so endless.
We didn't realize we wrote hunger in our genes.

***

Cats love the moon.
It is also a wanderer in the night.
They crawl, like the moon, from one lit place to the other,
They don't know everything will be past, from change to change.
They know nothing about truth, about the truth of change,
But they are the magicians of sense. They sense the world, they sense the motions of living,
Which is another kind of truth,
And their senses change them, they create more, much more eyes.
Senses are power, they can multiply us: our hands, our motions of loving,
the scent in what remember, the smell of fear, the unforgettable.

***

Singing is better than drawing, because you don't sing alone.
You can sing the steps of humans towards the human, always better, always deeper,
And when the people sing it with you, it's more,
much more than a drawing, more than a song.
It sings their story. The way to Ithaca.

***

Our songs come with us from very far,
Yet, now we sing them in a different way
Because we are different, we think in a different way, maybe we even love in a different way,
Because the poems are us.

***

The cities are the playground of men, the ones who build,
They play with the stones, like the Lego of a child,
They play with their dreams, like magic, like a dreamer.
Playing is power.
Dreamers know how to play, and children, and clowns.
In the big circus of the city,
They play with the stones inside them,
With the beginning of a smile that doesn't know where to go.

***

We don't have to look for music,
It finds us everywhere,
In the creaking old shoes in the street,
In a rustle that goes far,
In a cry that comes always closer,
And yet, only when we find the music,
It plays for us.

***

We become adult, each day from the beginning.
The first pain, the first hours that become work,
When we become a mother, when we lose a mother.
When we know, deep, certain, that we'll die.
The big adulthood. The biggest.

***

At times, we are happy. We are blessed and we can bless.
In order to be blessed, we should know how to bless, which is a big blessing.
We have to know how to receive and give,
We have to learn how to give time to time,
How to give happiness to happiness,
Each day from the beginning.
The algebra of life is strange.

***

We came from very far,
And each step was chance and choice,
Each step was unavoidable,
And yet, we had to choose,
Not the' to be or not to be',
But how to be, how not to be,
The deepest choice, the deepest power we could have.

***

The flags choke the sky, and the fire of war.
Our body is a road,
And the immense iron insects pass over.
It is not easy to be human when your life is broken like a bone.
It is not easy to be human with a flag in your breath, when the flag breathes you.

***

We are young. We wage a war, and the body wins.
The war in the mind begins later:
The person in our head struggles to be free,
The most bloody war, the biggest you'll ever have.
A little bigger than fear.

***

Some say that the truth comes from the nothing,
Like magic,
And they forget the world inside us, matter and time.
After all, the world is where all truths begin,
And the only magic,
Is how much world can enter in each one of us.

***

We feel that are common days happen by chance, by fate, by something mysterious.
We don't realize that each day is a new journey
To ourselves, to the world.
We forget we have to choose, always.
And the only mystery is how we choose, each day from the beginning, where to go, how to go, with whom to go. How the small repetitions of choosing, shape the choice, they make it closer to who we are.

***

The tide is dark, like blood that grew old.
Everywhere, the shapes of innocence, drowning.
It is not the hands that shot,
It is the bullets that drown. They were innocent.
The float in the dark tide, belly up, like dead fish of time,
They float in the red tide in your chest, the innocent tide.
They float innocence inside innocent.
They see the hands studied as a crime.
They hear the verdict: the hands are not guilty.

***

In order to understand the story of our journey,
We should see the caravan inside us.
We should see the path of time,
Touch the dunes of time: human.
We should feel the sudden storms of time, the immense rain falling into our life, the tornado of a moment.
No one can cross the storm of time and remain the same.

***

There are ghost writers, ancient phantoms inside a pain. They draw wings on the shoulders of the night.
They don't know how much past exists inside us, they don't realize the past had our shape,
The shape of a man, it wasn't the shape of a bird. The birds had another journey.
They don't realize that the past walks towards us, like life, wingless, clear, real.
They are not a cat. Cats see, but they don't have night visions.
All they see is the vision of fear, the fear of ghosts. The fear is real.

***

Things happen. They happen in the same way, in order to be different.
So, you know you fall, because the ground walks towards you.
You know you belong to everything, the earth, the floor of your life,
Because the ground walks towards you.

***

Each choice is a scale.
It weighs what you know, what you don't know, what you remember, a failure you cannot forget
And you choose, each moment from the beginning.
It is strange,
We never realize we weigh our life, when we weigh a moment,
We never know how much life can a moment contain.

***

We came from very far,
And the biggest challenge was, from the beginning, the change,
Because it changes us, because everything changed.
We didn't know what time it was in our life,
What time it was in the world,
Because we had to adapt. Adaption was a gladiator in the biggest arena: the world,
A strange gladiator, patient, stubborn,
Because it had to be always thumb up.
Thumb down was not an option.

***

There are many persons in our head,
They chit-chat the way people do.
At times they play in the biggest playground: our life.
They feel our thoughts,
They think what we feel,
They think the smells,
They touch the song of the wingless bird: a human.

***

You want to know if you are really in your skin.
So, you speak to what you remember, to what you could never forget.
You realize all these are you, and are a road:
You are the way home, the only way available.
You realize the road is one lane street, it walks inside your skin, it walks towards you always deeper.

***

It was a beach of children.
They were busy, they didn't know they were playing, they were serious.
The wet sand on the ten tips of the fingers,
They built sandcastles, tunnels, bridges.
They repeated their motions, each moment from the beginning,
The repetitions were the same, so that they'll make, each time from the beginning, something different.

***

Maybe, life is the art of loss.
We lose life after life.
We don't know how many lives can a life contain.
We don't realize that each loss changes us.
We don't know we have to lose life after life, in order to live.
We don't know that this loss is a power,
The power to change.
The power of repetition:
To repeat the same motions, each time from the beginning, in order to be different.

***

We dig in earth, and strangely, we discover something living:
The anatomy of society.
The heads with crown or without,
With a human inside them or without,
The food between the teeth, a mouthful of hunger,
The feet with shoes or without,
And the hands, the immense hands
That knew how to love,
How to build a different pyramid:
A playground of life.

***

The biography of nature is written inside us.
Whatever we are, begins in the world,
Whatever we are is the world.
And yet, we write our motions of living, the story that was our own,
And we don't know that the world writes itself with us, over us, inside us.
We don't know that the world recognizes our face, painted on a cave, painted on tall glass:
a skyscraper of faces, that the world knows our story, that the world is our story.

***

Faces walk on the street, they are the street, the windows, the doors, the stones, they are silent because they are closed.
At time I try to write the architecture of a face:
The immense pyramid, the tight dark tunnels to crawl in,
In order to find the triple treasure:
The mummy of a cry. Alive.

***

Maybe the pain, the suffering
Are the creases of reality,
Or maybe they are reality.
Maybe reality is creased like anything that lived, that loved, that changed.
Change is power and adjusting is power.
They crease our smooth skin,
They have no choice,
They make room for the next change.

***

Kings come and go,
But the people stay,
Because they are the country, they are the way home,
And it is sad,
That history loves the seasons of kings,
The manicured forests,
And it doesn't tell us more about things that are more exact, more real:
The seasons of a seed, the infinite seed beneath the skin of life, added to the seasons of people:
The algebra of truth.

***

The sea stretches beautiful as hope, as a dream,
And the waves curl at our feet, softly.
We don't realize how much sea exists inside us,
We don't realize that we are a sea.
We don't know there are not many seas,
Only one ocean.

***

The sunset is magic.
It moves slowly, silently, regularly,
Like someone who sows something in the world, in our eyes,
It sows its seeds, its magic. Sowing is power. Magic is power.
And yet, we are never eternal enough
To find the seeds of a sunset inside us.

***

Beauty is power. It is an ancient garden.
But time flows in everything,
In the beauty, in the garden, in our eyes.
It changes everything. Even the sameness is not the same,
And yet, somewhere inside us
We feel the first eye that saw the first beauty,
We don't feel it like a memory.
We feel it here. Now.

***

Nights may be a symbol of death,
But they are utterly alive.
There is the breath of the stone,
There are the bodies of love, they caress star dust.
There is the shepherd moons among the lambs: our quiet eyes.
There are humans whose pulse beats with the pulse of the most distant star.
Symbols are dead, but not the night.

***

MERMAID
The virgin body,
And yet, it knows what passion is.
The night in their motions,
The moons inside them are warm.
Maybe they are as ancient as the dream of beauty,
As ancient as the dream of virgin love,
Mother of gods.

***

They say
That meditation upon the unknown,
Leaves us alone, far from the people.
It may be true.
For sure, the great dreamer thought about the known, what exists; the pain, the hunger, the wars.
They were not close to the people. They were the people.

***

Wars are an immense cemetery:
Life, the bodies, the dead innocence, the dead dreams,
The silence were the big warriors bury the left over's of the human inside them.
And yet, time continues to roll in all the abysses of the world. It chokes them, it flattens them.
Maybe the people will resist no longer to survive beneath the line of zero,
Maybe they'll want to live. To inhabit the ground floor of life.

***

Maybe we don't speak clearly,
Maybe we ourselves, don't understand what we say,
And we don't realize
That the endless sighs we hear,
That the cries for something lost, coming from far,
Are our own.

***

On the tragic stage
The great heroes:
Medea, Antigoni, Oedipus,
They need great actors.
So, when the last curtain is near,
They don't scream,
They know how to weave
The fear, the hate, the pain
Into human sadness:
The big moment of the play.
The biggest.

***

On the great tragic stage
Ancient faces, faces as if carved in precious marble.
Every crack in the stone,
Seems like a waterfall of shadows and light.
They stare at the tragic scene
And they cannot find the twilight,
The place where shadows mingle with light.
They cannot find a truce.

***

It needs power to love,
It needs power to be loved,
It needs power not to be loved.
There are men who know how to love,
In their own content way,
Even when they are not loved.
We don't realize how much power it needs
To be content, how much loving.

***

Nights are a strange place.
They may roll like a stone in the abyss,
They may be a cave, the first cave of the first man ever. Home.
They may close us in their silence,
And yet, we are free in our silence,
And the same time rolls through everything,
So, nights are us,
And day are us.

***

It needs power to meet the gaze of others.
Gazes say many things at the same time;
The love, the fear of love, the fear to beloved, the fear of closeness, the fear to be far,
The sadness of what was said, of what wasn't said, of what should have been said.
It needs power to love
After we saw the gaze,
Walking barefoot in our eyes.

***

We have a talent for sadness.
Even the spring, the exquisite spring,
Doesn't let us forget the winter that was,
The winter that will be.
And it is sad,
Because we don't realize that the winter
Prepares everything, nature, us, for spring.
It prepares for the inevitable: change.
The ice inside us will become a lake, our face in the lake, clear, secret,
And the magic leaf of snow in our ten fingers will become leaves.
There will be a garden of people inside us.

***

I try to write a love poem in an old style.
I say:
You are a gentle echo,
You are the tremble of a leaf,
Your voice leans on my breath.
Your eyes lean on my gaze.
But the woman I wrote feels unreal.
I know women.
They are not a leaf, they are a tree, tall and bent. Gentle.
They are the echo of no one. They are a voice,
And their voice leans on their shoulders,
The slender, the patient, the immense shoulders of a woman,
And their eyes lean on their body: the farmer of life.

***

Men fought for everything,
And for sure, for women,
They fought like an animal of pain,
An animal that has to continue its seed, the line of life.
But, we are romantic creatures:
The dream of love, the dream of beauty.
We write songs about the paradise of love,
And we don't mention the wars of the seed,
The eternal wars, the wars that made us eternal.

***

Our cells are a king in a dark circus.
No clown can make them laugh,
No clown can make them forget their works, the engines, the fuel.
And yet, they know how to be gentle in a strange way.
When we touch, cell to cell, the skin of someone,
It feels like a hand shake, like friends in a small cafe of a small hour.

***

Birds are immigrants in our land, smugglers of borders,
And yet, we love them.
We don't understand what they say,
And yet, we love them.
It is a pity
That the human immigrant in our city were not birds,
They didn't know how to fly.
They let us put them on a train. They left.

***

Autumn.
The sun chokes the colors,
The leaves dance their mad death dance,
And yet, the rain falls, regular, heavy, like someone who sows something,
Like someone who knows that sowing is never death. It is life, the ten fingers of life, the leaves of the world.

***

In some places
Spring comes in small doses.
The tiny flower pots in the window,
The only garden available.
A piece of sun in the narrow window,
The only sun available.
It needs power to be a garden in a flower pot.
It needs power to be a piece of sun in a window.
It needs power to be human,
To believe that one day
The sun will be for everybody.

***

The earth, layer beneath layer,
Like everything else.
We dig it, layer beneath layer,
We find bones,
They are like us, and they are different,
And we are not sure
What does it mean to be human.
The compassion, the way we treat our dead,
The way we know how time carves our shape,
How we know we'll die.
The way the person in our head learned how to think, how to be free, how to live,
Because survival is not enough, it is only half the freedom.

***

Artists create the world,
Unsure, indecisive as the gods.
They don't know they were born with a picture of the world inside them.
They don't know that when they'll die,
All they'll be able to take with them is the picture.
They don't know that when gods die,
The world remains intact.

***

There is no small power,
Even the power to be tender, to be harsh.
Power is a seed, a sperm.
We are realists, we doubt how big can a seed be, a sperm.
We don't know they are our small infinites.
We don't know how much infinite a small infinite can contain.

***

There is nothing to say.
We lived, we loved the world, the people,
In our own way.
So, when the crusaders, the iron faces, come,
All we can do is lay down our silence.
Inside our silence we are free. We protect our silence.

***

They say that poetry is a pseudonym of life,
That we need words in order to be real,
In order to make the world real.
They don't know they look at a mad mirror,
That words are us,
That it is us who give them a body, motion,
That it us who are the artist of reality.

***

There are cold hand, frozen,
The ice burns in the touch.
And there are hands black, sun burned.
The coal burns in the touch.
We don't know how deep our hands are, how tall.
We don't know how many hands a touch can contain.

***

We photograph the towers of humanity.
We photograph reality.
We don't include the people, the builders, they are too bulky.
We don't know how to photo the small, almost invisible motions of their pain, falling, diaphanous from the ten tips of our fingers.
We don't know where to find the feelings.
We don't find a safety net for the pain.
Maybe photos are our safety net, they let our eyes fall softly from the gaze.

***

I don't know what made me more thirsty,
The Raki or poetry.
I don't know which one is more drunk,
Which one can squeeze the flesh of more words
In order to drink their blood, the golden blood, The strained pain,
For breakfast.

***

The strangers came,
Their steps silent, regular,
Like someone who sows.
The strangers left on the train.
In the window, their empty eyes, like someone who has nothing left to sow, like someone who sows something invisible, the small, almost imperceptible motions of pain.
They left with a ticket for strangers.

***

We need a skeleton, always.
Bones are alive.
They give shape to our body,
They give shape to our motions,
And they give shape to our hands, the immense hands of a human,
And they give shape to our story.
Bones last more, much more than us,
And they love to speak.

***

There are rebels
Without a revolution.
The person in their head is asleep.
There are rebels who don't realize
That the first revolution happens inside them,
It happens inside the person in their head. He is awake, he thinks, he knows what time it is in the world, what time it is in his life.
The biggest rebel.

***

There are small questions:
Where I am, where I go, with whom I go.
We may not know the answers,
But even asking them changes us.
And it is strange,
Because there are more, much more answers than questions.

***

The long journey
Brought us again and again to dead ends.
But we learned how to escape,
How to use the way in which we came.
There were so many repetitions of steps on the path.
Repetitions are a teacher and a pupil.
They know where to go.

***

We invent ourselves each day from the beginning.
After all, we are actors in the big theatre of time.
The more we live, the more 'I' we have to invent, and it is thrilling, to be one and to be many.
And the big question remains: how many die when we die, how many are left.

***

Speaking, singing, working
Are a way of thinking,
And even loving is a way of thinking.
Maybe thoughts are an endless river in our head, we meet our face in the water, when we speak, when we sing, when we work, when we love, each moment from the beginning, and this endless river changes us.
And we are never the same in the same way.

***

We need words that meet each other,
We need a tongue that is flowing warmth,
We need a language that is a small fire.
People sit around it, they are warm,
Their words meet.
Maybe that's how words began,
They named each other.

***

Friendship needs power.
The power to be close and far at the same time.
The power to walk towards time, alone and together.
The power to share the silence.
The power to shape your hand inside the hand of the other: light and heavy as trust.

***

There are songs
As close as simple as a breath,
A small wave of air,
With the whole world inside it.
There are songs that are indispensable, priceless,
They let us breath.
You cannot put a price tag on the priceless.

***

You keep the deep sadness for yourself.
You write the rest of your sadness.
You write, and you feel suddenly
The old, the new, the deep, the shallow sadness
Raining from the ten tips of your fingers,
You cannot classify the rain drops, they weave themselves each in the other, the glittering, precious cloth of human sadness.
And the only umbrella of mercy is the poem.

***

We write.
We bring small rules into the anarchy.
Words are tidy, disciplined.
They protect us.
But time glows in everything, also in the words.
It changes them, it changes the tidy to untidy,
They protect nothing.
Maybe, using words now, changed words,
Is an act of faith,
And maybe it was so always.

***

The old stranger is silent, still.
Maybe he feels there is nothing to say, nothing to do,
Just sit at the door
And wait for the rain to stop.
He is patient, like the rain,
He learned, like the rain,
What time it is in the world
But, he doesn't know what time it is in his life,
And there is no clock available.

***

The great poets
Were wild forest fires.
They knew how to burn in a word, in a comma.
They knew how to burn us in a syllable of silence, in the last full stop.
New forests begin in such fires.

***

We grow old. We keep something in our eyes, something that paints everything, endless colors.
We came from very far,
And yet, the world inside us is always more.
Maybe, that is what the journey was all about.
Everything is an arrival. Nothing is an arrival,
And the departure is always further, always closer. The big truce.

***

We grow old.
The person in our head feels the thoughts, feels what he remembers:
A world that traveled inside us,
Yet, is leaving us.
He feels the colors always closer, always more distant.
He knew the journey was endless, there is no arrival, and yet, he arrived here, to the end of the colors.

***

Love is a strange thing.
Women love even when they feel illegal in love.
People love their insignificant street, with moons that ignore their existence.
And the peasants love the earth that lets them live, that kills them.
And the strangest thing is that in the holocaust of feelings, we learn how to love.

***

We write a song. We paint it with a silent brush,
And we don't know where it will go,
To a child who loves the song, painted as a clown, the wonderful circus of a song.
To the blind violinist on the street, he wants the song of colors. He knows colors are magic.
He knows they see him, they sing him.
He knows they can sing also a lullaby, the oldest song ever. They can sing a lullaby to pain.

***

The war.
Amidst the dead earth, the dead innocence,
I see a magic ghost: glory.
It is beautiful,
Even though its eyes are burned,
It holds the missing leg in its hand.
It cannot see itself. It can go nowhere.
Maybe it wants to die too,
Maybe ghosts were never alive, so they don't know how to die.

***

We want to be remembered,
Maybe being forgotten feels as if you never existed.
We want to be missed,
Because we lived, we loved,
Because of the terrible remorse
That we didn't love enough,
Remorse is a power, and yet, it's glass.
We see the scars on the glass: our face.
The glass is broken.

***

We are young.
We love our youth, our beauty, more than anything else, more than anyone else.
We love, impatient, restless.
We don't know that love is a journey,
It is endless.
We don't know one day we'll have to learn how to love slowly, how to postpone time, how to make the moments longer, before they change,
Before they change everything.

***

Even the water grew old.
Life grows old inside us,
And we grow old living.
Maybe we learn how to love, slowly, patiently,
How to postpone time,
How to live each day a whole day, from the beginning.

***

We grow old,
Passion is quiet, and the person in our head is old truth.
There is the envy.
We think of ancient men: Moses, Lear,
Who owned a strong madness,
And a time was a water fall in their head.
They never forgot how alive thirst feels,
How exquisite.

***

Time flows through everything, the endless water,
Through us, through our love.
At times, love grows, like a river that comes from far, deep, quiet, strong.
Water for the waterless years.

***

We came from very far, from the first dark caves,
And yet, our homes are still the shape of our life.
There are homes like a handshake: quiet, strong human,
There are homes like an eye closed inside.
We forget that home is, more than anything else, the way home. It goes towards us, always more.
We may be mysterious, secret,
But our homes, our deep shelters,
Tear the torn mask, easily, without effort, each day from the beginning.

***

There is so much world inside us,
There are so many people, gazes, hands
Like a river that knows its way to the sea,
Words that fall like the rain into our life.
There are not many seas, only one ocean.
There are no islands.

***

In the window: a piece of sky that I own, that owns me.
In the window: a piece of the world that I own and that owns me.
The sky, the world and I, we are free and bound
Like everything that exists, like friends, like life, like love.
And the more we own, the more we owe.
There are no open accounts with life.

***

There are sad buildings, sad and ancient.
A beehive of humans.
The people: working bees,
They sell the best honey: their hands, the sweet wheat they grow.
They know little, they don't have time to think,
The queen is the only god they know.
The terrible god that bore them,
That lets them die, each day more, each day deeper.

***

We grow old. Time left us alone.
In a corner of the room: a pile of letters,
Of yellow loves, of yellow promises.
Promises are important,
They are the imaginary friend of a child,
Someone to share something that exists,
And it exists because we share it.
Someone to share the silences.

***

Our songs came with us from very far.
They may be the ancient fire that kept the people close, warm.
Our notes weave themselves in the notes of the others, as if they were completing something missing: the closeness.
We don't know how many threads of notes can a closeness contain.

***

Poets have somewhere to go,
They walk towards the past,
Towards their shadow friends:
The old poets.
And the old poets give them a flute, like a modern Pan,
Or words that are as simple as a breath, as inevitable.
After all, the past is the tool of the future.

***

People may die out of love,
Because of joy,
Because life was the beginning of a cry,
Because we don't know how to continue so naked.
After all, love, joy, a cry, leave you naked,
No matter how many coats you wear.

***

The gazes, the motions are not enough.
We invent words.
Words are the fingerprints of the person in our head, they know exactly what you think,
They may say exactly what you think.
We don't know how many fingerprints can a word contain.

***

At times, we try to forget our small infinites:
An hour of waiting for something: the rain, the sun, the lotto: the numbers of pain, the numbers that count the pain.
We learn, each day from the beginning, each waiting from the beginning, each small infinite from the beginning,
The algebra of pain.

***

In the biggest circus of the world: life,
We jump from age to age.
We don't realize how high we jump,
How incredibly far.
We don't realize we jump on the tight rope of time,
And there is no safety net, a net of mercy.

***

Spring is not always an easy place.
The flowers are exhausted,
It takes power to blossom,
It takes power to be a worker in the factory of pollen.
The endless factory.

***

You are young, you grow taller, deeper.
Growing is power.
You ask. Asking is power.
You wait for nothing, not even time,
You walk towards time always more.
You multiply the growing,
Slowly, you learn the algebra of life,
How to multiply yourself.

***

You dig the earth.
The person in your head walks barefoot, like a pilgrim,
The pilgrimage is not to a god,
It is a pilgrimage to his story.
The station zero,
Where the story becomes history.
He didn't want to stay at the line zero. He continues, he wants to add history to history,
The equations are not safe, there may be wars beneath the additions.

***

You should taste the earth, the footprints that scarred the earth,
In order to know who passed there before.
You taste it with your hands: the ten hungry tongues, they lick the dust of time.
They uncover the big cemetery, the biggest.
There are pyramids in the footprints,
There are immense churches in the footprints.
You come from very far,
You walk still towards the footprints that are yours.

***

We are star eaters: the dust, the warmth, the rain, the whitewashed bones.
We sit at the biggest buffet in the world,
And it is strange.
The buffet is written in our genes,
And the hunger is written in our genes,
In capital letters.

***