THE SIDE-WALKS OF LIFE

Raquel Angel-Nagler

Strange things happen, always.
At times, we open the door of the evening
And someone holds the last sun-ray softly, infinitely softly.
And we cry
Because the last ray is so fragile,
And because of the softness.
***
We pass from age to age,
And we learn all the names of pain,
So we become a dictionary of suffering,
And it leafs through us in the evenings
Even though we were watching the flight of the birds over the roof,
And it leafs through our soul.
***
We are lost for very long,
And at last, someone finds us,
Because, like a street-artist, we painted our name on a wall.
Maybe we need always someone to find us,
Or maybe we died and we don't know it,
And death, the infinite artist,
Painted our name on the wall that stands between ourselves and the always.
***
History is alive in our life,
Yet, it is the home of the dead,
So, whoever returns home is defeated,
And it is the dead who keep history alive.
***
The house aged,
And the deaths inside it grew immense,
As if death needed, like life,
A long time to grow,
And someone who was lost in the house for too long,
Left, infinitely quiet, together with the immense nowhere,
Because the lost ones carry the nowhere inside them.Always.
***
We use dreams daily,
So, we carry things into mystery,
But, things have a mystery of their own,
And life knows it. So, if we use life daily
It may take us to the mystery of everything.
So, even the poor and the humble, and the strangers from the side-walks of life,
Live with the treasure of mystery in their hands.
This, and the treasure of sadness.
***
We build a home of our dream,
Utterly ephemeral,
And yet, like a dream, it persists.
Anyway, home is the place where we keep
At least one of our dreams.
So, it is absolutely usual.
***
Maybe, in the after-life there are only names, with nothing by them.
They don't see our eyes, because these eyes saw too much,
They don't see our hands that grew immense
From digging each day the grave of the day, and maybe of ourselves.
We are not there. Our name is guilty.
***
Someone tells us:
The poor and the humble will be saved,
And for sure, death saves them,
But we don't know if the treasure of pain
Will go on saving them.
***
We use the little clay left from the first day
To shape the body of our hours,
The hours that consumed our childhood in order to live,
And the body of love in the deserted thighs of a woman.
And yet, there are people, silent and humble,
Who come from the naked bed of a woman of love,
Innocent.
***
Someone dies and is buried,
The child returns,
And his tears, the infinite tears of a child,
Grow old hour by hour,
They are thin and final.
***
We dreamed, and we waited together,
And each one, in his own life.
We began waiting long ago, among the stones and the eternal departures,
And we still stand there, at the edge of the big road,
With our hands in our pockets,
Where we keep warm the dream that is dying.
***
When dreams die, we leave.
We go far, further than death,
To places where history didn't begin yet,
Where people live together even when they were alone,
And the women save us for a while,
Under the roof of big prehistoric bellies of love.
But the evening is always difficult,
Because we don't know how to mourn.
***
We live under the roof of our mother
Long before we know there is another home.
A father.
And even when we fight
We are not sure if we fight for the mother land or the father land,
And we don't know who lets us die.
***
The evening is always difficult,
Because there is no one left to sing a lullaby
To pain or to loneliness,
And we don't know how to sing.
***
We meet a woman, and we feel we have many things to say,
But then night comes,
And we are infinitely unknown, infinitely distant.
We have nowhere to go except inside ourselves,
And we stay there,
Maybe we even die there, inside ourselves.
***
The winter. The rain outside and inside us.
We don't see the ray of light among the clouds
For which we came here,
To this place. To this life.
***
We ask for the impossible,
For a dream that will make the impossible-possible.
And we don't realize that the possible goes far, much further than the impossible.
If we know how to see.
***
Everything is moving,
But the banana trees are always here, in the cafe.
They go nowhere.
They are real, they are gentle,
And yet, they resist the laws of reality.
And this one exception is wonderful,
Because also our years go nowhere,
They dose under the gentle roof.
***
No one understood our habits.
Only our mother used to say: you bargain your life,
As if she knew all the pains,
As if she knew that we all, and each one,
Bargains his life each day.
***
We grow old,
It rains always a miserable autumn,
And we feel the rain deeper than ever.
So, we pay the blind violinist,
So that he'll whisper our name at night, after we drawn,
But, he doesn't want our money,
He says that the night doesn't exist.
***
Children laugh and die,
But when they visit our dreams, they are old.
Maybe, because they don't laugh anymore,
And for sure, because time goes far, much further than childhood.
So, maybe the human history
Is made of old dead people, and they don't laugh.
***
We grow old and forgetful,
And we don't find the prayer book,
But, it doesn't matter.
Because we pray to our body of pain, and to the body of love that we were,
In our own way.
We sing to them a lullaby, softly, infinitely soft,
The way one sings to a child, and the body-child grows quiet .
And after all, the body is our child.
***
If there would have been an empty place in our life,
We would have stayed there.
But our life is a crowded room
Full of daily things, of all that we've lost, and of old-consumed dreams.
So, we'll be always somewhere else.
Maybe we'll return in order to die in our life,
And then, we'll leave again to a somewhere else.
***
When we die, they cover the mirrors,
So that people wouldn't know the real dead.
Because many die long before they die,
And the street is full of empty, unused destinies.
So, also the poor have their hands full.
***
We go down-stairs, and the staircase follows us,
And it is O.K., because everything moves,
As if a river passed through everything.
And the bubbling we hear some nights, when it is quiet,
Is the river that passes through the walls, through the floors,
And through all the staircases that exist.
***
They give us the names of saints,
Which are nice names for only one person,
But they forget that saints have their own sadness.
So, we have no choice. We shorten them,
We make them light, infinitely light,
And all that's left is the sadness of life.
***
We don't know how we arrived to this place.
We should have been somewhere else,
In a paradise down here or up there,
And we don't know what to do with all this sadness.
So, we have no choice. We protect ourselves. We dream.
***
It is strange,
But most of the things that exist are invisible,
So, we are blind,
And like the blind we should feel them with infinite fingers,
With infinite ears, with the odors,
And with the aura wrapped around each thing.
And it is enough. Enough to feel the love, and the sadness, and the pain,
And the flow of the birds over our evening.
And it is enough to feel the reality in everything.
***
We have killed.
We hide somewhere,
And we hide our face in our immense hands,
Like the first Cain.
Because each killing is the first one,
And each killer is the first killer ever. The first Cain.
***
We cannot forget our mother,
Her face opaque and already far,
And she said something we have forgotten,
Because it was something utterly simple ,
But it may be the most beautiful thing we ever heard,
And because we didn't want to cry.
And even now, years later, we try not to remember.
***
It is easy to sin when you are beggar,
They say that even hunger is a sin.
But, when the hang-man will come,
He'll be able to hang only our creased collar,
Because our neck died long ago from all the bowing.
And even the old woman of love in the street
Bowed for too long in order to thank the nights that gave her nothing,
And the bowing killed her.
So, the bowing of the humble is a killer, but maybe we don't have a choice,
We bow and it kills us.
***
At times, in an empty shop,
We hide suddenly behind a SEPARE
And we cry for all the things that we should have cried and we didn't,
And they are infinite.
It is easier to cry in a strange place
And to leave the cry behind. A stranger.
And to go on as if nothing happened,
Even though everything happened.
***
Maybe, when the time comes,
And we'll be silent, we'll say nothing,
We'll save something big, bigger than heaven.
We'll save our own hell,
The one that let us live, and love the body of love,
Hurt, cry, and dream the dream of people.
***
The dead keys in our hands,
And on the floor of the room that doesn't exist,
The letters of a child to an imaginary friend, to the angels, and even to God,
And someone, maybe a mad man, steps on them,
On his way from hell to hell.
***
In the corner of the street
The blind violinist.
The wind plays with his consumed shirt,
And he plays with his violin.
It is a simple song,
So simple that it is sung by people when they are together,
Because the evening comes,
And because in the evening we need simple songs.
***
We were born here,
But we were always strangers,
A tribe that came from somewhere else,
And our dreams grow cold in another corner of earth.
So, we belong here, and we belong to the tribe, and to the somewhere else,
And to the dreams that grow cold .
***
There is the woman with the face of the day, yellow and creased,
And the face of the night made of the paper of money and the paper of passion.
And the moon that used to rise high, like an old dream, always higher,
Comes low, as if to sooth her humbleness.
***
We don't know how we came here,
To this place, to the street with a cry in its depth,
But after all, we have to gain our life
Because it cost us all this pain,
And we have to use the pain in order to live,
And in order to feel the immense sadness of everything.
***
The things that we create and that create us.
The dreams, the thoughts that were forbidden.
And then, the death of the dreamers, the death of the forbidden thinkers.
All that's left is to close our eyes in order not to remember,
And to fall asleep for a thousand years.
***
The woman with the buttocks wide as a street,
And the yellow poor underwear,
Pitiful and infinite like a beggar of love.
Her life was so small, that her room disappeared,
And all that was left was the staircase and the lit sign
That showed the way to hell,
Even though the women of love sell only their body,
Their soul, their infinite soul, is too cheap.
And maybe for the angels too,
There are souls that are worth little.
***
In the deserted side walk, the strangers sleep.
There are whispers in a tongue we don't know,
But we guess that autumn is coming, and the cold leaves.
And the earth waits, old, patient.
***
The moon makes the cycle around the house, for years.
But somewhere, we lose our home,
Maybe because someone died, someone beloved.
And maybe the face of our mother, the infinite fatigue,
And the infinite tenderness, even in the moment after death,
Is home.
Because she was the tender soups. A tender room.
A floor of mercy.
***
In the house, The God-fearing woman, often disappears,
But she always returns,
Because she is too humble and too sad
To reach holiness.
Maybe, she'll live forever,
With the whole treasure of humbleness in her hands,
Because no one wants her treasure.
***
The blind violinist in the corner of the street.
One night the violin whispered: you hurt me,
But it had no choice,
Because the blind eyes saw only the infinite sadness,
And the music had to follow them.
***
Maybe, each book should have a torn page
In order to be closer to everything,
To our life, to our dreams,
And to our eyes that saw too much.
***
To write
Like the fingers of the blind who leaf through the dark,
Like the thighs of a woman that open, alone in her night,,
The infinite secret that we live.
***
We forget that even the most innocent words
May close doors, and leave us out,
Guilty and silent.
And yet, we speak.
***
Words may be fatal,
Like a goodbye, that becomes the last.
We said them, so, we are guilty,
Because the feeling of guilt goes far,
Much further than innocence.
***
At times, there are rough words,
So we lower our eyes
In order not to see the face that doesn't forgive us,
Or in order to see better ourselves,
To feel we were guilty because we are always guilty of something,
To feel innocent because we life has always its innocence,
And to forgive ourselves.
***
There are some confessions
That bring the autumn closer, infinitely closer,
The words fall like cold leaves that say nothing and everything,
And they deafen our whole life.
***
There are times
When we feel an inexplicable innocence,
Like someone condemned who was absolved in the last moment,
And it is strange, because no one really absolved us,
And the sentence was simply postponed.
So, we are innocent because we go on living,
And we don't know if we are guilty,
Because we die.
***
A woman passes, a woman of love,
And her steps are beautiful
Because she is pure
And her body of love purifies us.
Maybe she'll go to hell,
But she'll go, infinitely pure.
***
At the table
Someone cries, suddenly, inexplicably,
Because that's how fate moves in our life,
And there is nothing we can do,
Or maybe we can dream,
Because some dreams go far, much further than fate.
***
The lost mad house,
Only the mad and the lost know how to find it.
There was this old creased man who wanted to fly,
And when he died, they found on his window seal
Flimsy feathers, almost transparent,
Like the tears of a bird.
And there was the man who stretched his hand
Out of the window, out of the day, out of time,
And he was always drenched,
Because the rain was eternal.
***
The sleep of the mad is quiet.
We can hear the flutter of the wings,
We can hear the wheels of truth,
And we can hear the cry of a child
Who didn't want to grow.
***
In the lost mad house
A man holds a doll in his hands with infinite motherhood,
As if he knew all the lullaby-s to pain,
And someone who was too hungry to confess,
Flogged his skin with a hair brush
And his sins fell, small and pure.
***
The lost mad house.
Only the rain and the night know the way.
A strange woman nurses the baby she's lost
Before time, before the madness,
And some say they've heard a cry.
Another woman, silent, transparent,
Unfolds a woolen thread,
She wants to show the way to heaven,
She doesn't know that the only heaven she may find
Here, in this place, in the house of the mad,
Is the heaven inside her.
And maybe, if we are lucky, and we have a heaven inside us,
It is the only heaven that exists.
***
In the lost mad house,
Too many strange things happen,
So who has time to tidy his life.
The world continues to be inexplicable,
So it forgives the mad, even though they need no longer forgiveness.
They are pure.
***
In the lost mad house
A blind man fishes from his eyes old drown tears,
Because he missed them, and he wants to cry.
And someone finds
In the belly of his cooked chicken
The pages of his most beautiful poems,
And we are not sure if they are the poems he never wrote.
And someone looks in the trash-bins
For old newspapers with old news,
Because he believes that madness goes far,
Much further than history.
***
In the lost mad house
There is someone who wants to be left alone,
And the thought of visitors nails him to the door,
And only his tongue curved in the mouth
Seems as if he were gathering all that he never said,
And maybe this is what we all do in the evening,
We gather in our tongue all that we should have said
And we didn't.
***
In the lost mad house
Someone tries to stitch the cracked door with a thread,
And the thread divides into many,
Like all the destinies of man.
Maybe the mad don't have a destiny,
Because they go everywhere.
***
In the lost mad house
The aged woman with the big gaze held by the ribbons
Tells us: I brought it.
And we don't know what she means,
Maybe her biography,
And when she began seeing things in a different way, which is utterly mad,
Or the inexplicable of everything and the logic of madness,
Or maybe the angels coveted her
And she brought her tired sin.
***
In the lost mad house
A woman holds with mad fingers
An empty doll-house,
And she doesn't know that she has touched all the enigmas,
All the empty doll-houses,
With these mad fingers.
***
In the lost mad house
Someone killed his mother
And from then on, he sits and embraces himself
With infinite hands,
The way mothers embrace.
He'll be orphan forever.
***
It is too late for the blind violinist. He is in the waiting list,
And we need to sooth him, because we need to sooth ourselves.
We want to comb his hair from the years of rain
That wet his hair and his life,
And to hold his hand, infinitely delicate, infinitely tired,
When he climbs down from dark to dark,
Like a cry that goes far, much further than death.
***
Death is never calm, even when it seems so.
We die like an animal in pain,
A death full of mouths.
***
We remember the mother and the pushcart with the child
Among the quiet shadows of quiet afternoons.
One evening, we came close.
The child was a woman of love. She sold her body.
And the mother sold the child and her soul.
But we shouldn't forget that the evening is long
And crowded with shadows,
And we cannot cross it without some pity.
***
One night, the dead-mute was in the deserted station to the nowhere,
And she cried, the way only the deaf-mute can cry,
And everything cracked, the station,
The trains that didn't exist, and the nowhere,
And life heard her, and also death, so hell was ready.
***
There are always more bulldozers.
They unbury prehistoric bones,
And the homes and the sofas people sit on,
Among the heaps of bones,
Are as inexplicable as everything else,
As usual as everything else.
***
In the hotel of love
The man at the desk doesn't ask for names,
Because the bodies of love are nameless,
And he waits for the end of the day,
Maybe he'll find there forgiveness,
The creased, tired, pure forgiveness,
That no god can give.
***
Before we leave
We want to cover our life and our face
With a colored, threadbare blanket of a child,
And to leave only one eye open,
In order to forgive.
***
Before we leave
We have to forgive ourselves, and we don't know how.
Maybe we should write a new biography,
And it will forgive us.
***
We discovered ships,
And we learned how to read the stars,
So we learned how to die also somewhere else.
And we learned how to own the treasure of cruelty,
And how to let our soul die.
***
There is too much cruelty and pain and death.
Maybe, someone up there
Unglues his picture
From the first page of creation.
***
Maybe we should stand in the cross-roads,
Because the cross-roads know people and pain.
To count the ones with the hard silence,
The ones who forgave themselves,
Because no one would forgive them,
And at night, we'll close our eyes
In order not to remember.
***
Our sleep knows more than what we imagine,
Because we die silent and ancient,
And we didn't know that there was a war ,
And that dreams, and the childhood in our dreams,
And the long years in our dreams
Were a mine field.
***
There are religions of death,
Where death is the one that forgives us,
And they erase the heretics,
The ones who believe in life and in the forgiveness of life.
So we die, and we die again when death forgives us.
***
They shoot people at a wall that is too cold to lean on,
In a dawn that is too cold to live,
And the bullet gives them the cold treasure. Death.
And it is strange, because their dreams
Are the burning bush of another Moses.
***
The city is circled.
In order to pass we need a passport that knows who we are,
And the women with a belly full of love
Have to lift their dress and show them the prehistoric treasures.
And the wall is too cold to lean on, so the body lean over themselves,
Over their death.
And the stranger who is nameless and his dream is nameless,
Sits, infinitely tired, infinitely silent,
With the other twelve, for the last supper.
***
There are thousand ways to gain ourselves,
And thousand ways to lose it.
So, we have to choose.
***
We live behind closed doors,
One day we open them, maybe we are curious, we want to see their other face,
Or maybe the door that is always there makes us restless,
And we see the pain spread everywhere, like leaves of autumn.
We are not ready. We are never ready for pain,
So, we sweep the leaves of pain from our door,
And we close it. Forever.
We forget that autumn happens also in our side of the door.
It leaves a leaf on our bed.
***
There are killers,
And there are those who know how to torture the body,
And there are those who know how to torture the soul,
And there is someone, sitting in a corner,
Who erases his finger prints from the pages of his life.
***
There is fate, there are the gods, and there is death,
And we don't know with what else we can live.
Maybe we can use the hunger, and the dead water, and the humbleness,
So, the delicatessen of life, and the delicatessen of sadness
Are complete.
***
We have no choice. We have to arrive somewhere,
And the only path is the moon-ray on the floor, that follows us.
Because it is dark,
And because the moon-ray, infinitely delicate, infinitely bright,
Is the reason we came here, to this place, to this night.
***
It is easier to forgive when it is twilight,
Because the light in the shadows, and the birds
Are pure, and they forgive.
***
The ones who have only the food bag of a child,
And inside a dream,
They are untouchable,
Because they have many things to protect them:
The childhood, and the food of a mother, and the dream.
And because they forgive.
***
Maybe there is no joy.
We have to arrive to the end of the sadness,
And it is there
That the end of the sadness moves even further.
We are sad people.
***
We behave the way our parents did.
The same hours of life, the same lips in our laughter, the same silence,
Otherwise, history will mean nothing,
Or maybe it will mean everything.
***
The blind violinist
Stands in his usual corner,
But he is too old to play,
Yet, he turned his blind eyes to the twilight,
Infinitely soft,
And this softness was music.
***
We grow old.
We stretch our hand, grey, thin, like the blind,
In order to find the door,
In order to die out, in the open air of the world.
Maybe the birds will cover our bodies,
The light shroud.
***
The road follows us wherever we are.
It is not a single road,
But a web of choices,
So, we choose all the time,
And the choices follow us.
***
They get into the cave, they close the entrance,
And they struggle naked, like the struggle for love,
And they bore children, like the bears, in their sleep,
Because they were too tired,
And because they had to fill the world
With people, and with the struggle for love,
And with pain.
***
Some things come like a quiet nightmare.
The loves, the hopes, the dreams that are dying,
And we don't resist it.
We collapse speechless, like a house in a silent movie,
Or like an old fairytale.
***
The ones who are forgotten come out in the evening,
To loot love and wine.
They drink and they collapse,
Like ruins in a silent movie,
Because they have to return to the place where they are forgotten,
Maybe even their home.
***
Even when we die like a man,
We die like an animal,
With a knife in our cry.
***
The deserted woman in the deserted street.
She has only a letter she wrote to herself in her childhood,
And she carries it always.
She is too lost,
So she chews the letter, she swallows it,
And she has somewhere to go.
***
We have to know how to escape,
How to leave nothing of ourselves behind,
Like a passing shadow, like a bird.
***
Night.
The phosphorescent eyes of the cat move all the time.
They see the dark in the room,
They see the dark inside us.
Thankfully, they are secretive,
They confess nothing.
So, we are safe.
***
The small hotel at night.
The man and the woman
Became the cemetery of children that will never happen,
So, they love and they dig graves.
***
Our old flesh,
The siege of hard veins
And of autumn.
So when we love, the body of love is too tired to give sperm.
It gives its sad leaves.
***
The neighborhood.
Streets without names, houses without numbers,
The flies paint the air like a picture of God,
And the humidity that conquered the walls paints the bones with pain.
So, no one can find us here, not even ourselves,
And it is safer,
Because after years of avoiding the mirror in the room,
In the eyes, and the mirror in the dreams,
Finding ourselves will be pain, or at least, sad.
Yet, some quiet evenings, when we are alone,
Our lost dreams find us, and it hurts.
***
The immense twilight,
And the biblical thighs of a woman.
We swim in the shadows of the twilight and of the thighs,
And it is magic.
We wish to drown in this body, in these shadows, forever.
We cry, and we know why we cry.
***
Maybe we are giants in miniature.
We drown in mirrors, and in the eyes of those who don't see us,
And it hurts.
And they stampede our life,
Because the life of a small giant seems small.
Maybe pain is the proof that God exists.
***
Maybe all the big poems we wanted to write
Enter in a small basket,
Like the basket where a child takes his food to school.
And when we look in its depth
We find a child and a children book.
And to think that this fed us for so long.
***
The biblical flood floods us again
And we don't know whom to save first
Because we don't have an arc,
And because many useless things need us:
A page with an old poem that didn't forget us,
A passport that never really knew who we are,
And our old biography that we never had time to rewrite.
Maybe we'll drown, and the water, the infinite water,
Will forgive us.
***
The theatre of our life.
The actors play, unprepared, unrehearsed,
Because the unknown writes the play
From the first moment of the first act.
***
At times, someone comes close,
His face creased from too much clay,
And when he loosens his belt, he has no umbilicus.
So, he is the first man,
The sad one who began all the sadness,
The killing, the traitors, the dead dreams,
And even the belly full of love became pain.
But, we have no choice.
We follow the sad father.
***
In the small hotel
The woman of love touches the belly of love and cries,
Because it is a tale of love
That will end without love, sad and lonely.
***
Maybe one day we'll open a small shop,
We'll sell things of pain.
Embalmed eyes that saw too much,
The cry of an animal hanging on the wall,
And the dead knees of the humble.
And people will buy them,
Maybe because it makes them better when they know
That someone suffered more than them.
***
Strangely
At times, we don't see our real life in the mirror,
We see it through the window, in the street.
We may find our face in the face of someone else,
And when we are a maid, or a nanny, or the woman who washes clothes,
They are the faces that are too humble, too tired, too invisible to speak,
And they make our silence more immense, more terrible.
And we have to choose.
To avoid the window and real life,
Or to kill ourselves because the silence kills us.
***
Life may be a killer,
But, there are survivors.
Strangely, among the survivors there may be those who died long ago,
Deep inside them, and they carry their tomb-stone everywhere.
So cemeteries are the true survivors.
***
We live
And under everything there is a mine-field
Of certainty, of habits that regulate the hours of the sun,
Of roofs that regulate the hours of the rain.
So, at times we lose a leg or an eye, or the certainty, or the roof or the habit.
And we don't know where to go.
***
We can raise, in one evening, all that we forgot,
From deserted things.
From old clothes deserted on the caot rack.
From broken chairs in the deserted yard,
And to make a play house for our deserted childhood,
And to raise then the tears that deserted us.
And to be eternal.
***
The dead is dead.
And it rains everywhere, inside the humid grave, and in his consumed body,
And in the whole real world and in the legends.
And the mother holds an umbrella of mercy over everything,
And over herself, because it rains also inside her soul.
***
We are adolescents,
And we know everything about patricide.
We are innocent,
We only want to be orphans for a tiny eternity or even more,
And we don't know how.
***
We are, each one, alone in a different way.
Some leave their life deserted, in order to see the four winds,
And some leave an evening, somewhere in their childhood,
In order to have something to lean on.
***
It is late.
It is the time when the pederasts dream children,
The robber- his immense hand,
And the blind hangs the moon in the window,
Because the light dreams him.
***
The old house got used to be humble,
And the people who live there are invisible,
Because they too got used to be humble.
And all through the hours
The walls rain humidity and dreams that grew old,
And there is no umbrella humble enough to save them.
***
The crowd continues to cross the bridge.
The come and go to the suburbs of life.
They are anonymous, even though somewhere they have a name,
And they are transparent, maybe they don't exist,
Because no one sees them and they see no one,
And only the blind violinist in the corner knows he is blind,
And he sees them.
***
We bring the garden to our life,
The berries and the earth and the insects.
For a moment we feel all our dead in our life,
But we forget,
Because we are always busy fighting pain,
And remembering may be a killer.
***
We have to go on living,
And most of all, those who are destroyed.
So, the humble, the poor, the stranger from the side-walk of life,
Fill up their destiny with destroyed things,
And with mercy,
Because mercy doesn't destroy them,
So, they don't destroy it.
And if we need mercy, we know where to go.
***
We are people of the bible
So, we don't go to the small hotel at night.
We only dream a naked body of love,
Because like that, it is easier to forgive ourselves,
And we forget that our dreams don't forgive us.
***
The women of love stand in the corner of the street,
Dark and invisible,
And they keep between their thighs
Their treasure of sadness,
And this treasure, this sadness purify them.
***
We can open a door even when we are old and blind,
Because our homes are full of memories of open doors,
And the sky that entered the house,
And they remember how to cover our face,
So that our blind eyes will keep all the beauty in their infinite fingers.
***
The night makes the children orphans and old,
Because they have to cross it,
The way one crosses life. Alone.
And whatever happens to us
Has happened already in these small, infinite nights.
***
Our hands write the biography of our life,
And our life writes the biography of our hands:
The building, the destroying, the murders, the begging,
The masterpiece of painting.
And because whatever was lived cannot be unlived,
We can rewrite nothing.
***
It seems exaggerated, because it is only our little pains,
The pain of living,
But the sum of these pains is infinite,
Because the pain of living is also the pain of dying,
So, these little pains make us unrecognizable. They make us what we are.
***
We cannot explain who we are
Because we exist only in one place, in ourselves,
So we cannot explain the person who exists only inside us
To someone who exists only in himself.
And we cry only inside us, even when it seems that we cry out.
***
There is always someone in the depth of the corridor,
The one that makes us begin all the stories,
So we tell the story,
And we don't understand how our clothes are wet, how our life is wet,
Because the only umbrella of mercy is our story, as long as it lasts.
And it rains always.
***
Maybe only the dead could resist life.
The tears in the knees, the knives in the tongue,
And the surrender to a love that doesn't exist.
And maybe they could resist life
Because they doesn't need it anymore.
***
People are caught in simple thing.
They bend to tie their shoes and their back breaks.
They find a beloved toy of their childhood, and they break.
So, they die a useless death, if such a death exists.
***
Things become black
Because they are dirty, because of black omens.
We are superstitious people,
And even a black man, infinitely clean, infinitely innocent,
Is suspicious.
They say that death is black, so we have no choice.
We hate black.
***
We are so alone
That we have no one to give our treasure of sadness,
And we love,
So that the one who finds it, will give it back to us.
***
Poems are ancient, infinitely ancient,
The first poem is: let there be light.
And it is strange, because from then on
Poets use shadows and twilights to write their poems
***
Some poets write their poems on the sea
So that the nomad birds will find them, and the sea people,
And the child who digs deep in the sand.
***
The journey from our door
To the stranger on the side-walk of life
May take hours, years.
But, at times, the journey from our gaze to his takes only a moment,
And this moment is eternal.
***
Maybe if I would have a whole eternity in my hand
I would consume it in the journey between my bed and the door,
Because we arrive to life unprepared, unrehearsed,
Ready for nothing,
And even an eternity may not be enough.
***
We walk on the street of time for years, and it hurts us.
Maybe that's how the birds began,
Because the street hurts their barefoot feet even more,
And because they wanted to fly over pain.
***
We were among the first immigrants
From the ice-age here,
We were lucky and we found a train ticket.
And no one knows why we look always somewhere else,
No one knows we look for the harsh ice,
That was a mother.
And the brothers were everywhere,
So, we shared the meat of hunger and the hunger.
***
We are all refugees from something, maybe even from ourselves,
So we are familiar with the art of avoiding gazes,
Of speaking with people
As if they were in another room or in another floor,
And of erasing our finger-prints from the hand that held our hand.
So, we are all sick, we have a persecution mania,
And it is fatal.
***
When we decided to travel, it was too late.
All the biblical wandering in the desert were written and sung,
And all that's left is a deserted bridge over the nothing.
So, we write the bridge over the nothing,
And we realize that it is a masterpiece,
Because everything, a gaze, a song, a cry,
Are, each one, a bridge over the nothing.
***
There are many ways to get used to die little by little.
To sit in the cellar with the rats.
To put each day some poison in our soup,
And even living, without all these efforts,
Is enough.
***
We are healthy corpses.
We walk, we run, we lift weights,
But we cannot lift the weight of life,
And for sure, not of pain.
And it is amazing how many healthy corpses
They bury each day.
***
Again and again, we finish our unfinished face.
At times we use petals,
At times-autumn leaves,
Because faces say something.
One day they'll finish our face with a shroud,
And with the earth that left us unfinished when everything began,
And that, little by little, will un-finish us again.
***
We are created unfinished,
Because the finished things have nowhere to go. They are finished.
And because the unfinished things go far and everywhere,
And because they have the beauty of something that is alive.
So, we want unfinished statues, unfinished poems and unfinished loves
And yet, in order to die, we have to finish our unfinished tears.
***
After the crusades, and the rebellions, and the wars,
The poor waiting in the cemetery
In order to eat the sacred bread,
And they give them the sacred hunger.
Maybe one day they'll go from hell to hell,
Unholy and innocent.
***
We stand in all the corners of the streets and we wait for ages.
What meaning have the centuries,
When the holy mystery feeds us, and the holy hunger and the holy earth.
And the autumns continue.
***
We don't want to live anymore
And there are many good and bad reasons,
But even the moment before we take our life,
We close all the windows in the house,
Because it is cloudy and because we remember the biblical flood.
We are cautious people. Cautious and sad.
***
Maybe the holy icons
Have to resist the holiness,
Because they cannot move from the wall,
And maybe they wait for a rain of mercy
To wash them from the incense that makes them pant,
And from the lips that kiss them, and the holy saliva.
***
So many dead.
The hands that held us, and there was love and there was strength.
But inside us nothing died, and it harsh and it hurts.
And we need tenderness, urgently.
So we remember another death,
The plumb death of our plumb mother.
***
The gaze that they gave us, makes us mad.
It gathers sad rags from everywhere,
From the side-walk where the strangers sleep,
From the humble, from the fallen leaves,
And from the cries, somewhere in the depth of the road.
So when we'll die, we'll die with a treasure of rags
And with the mad gaze that gathered them.
And maybe this gaze, this mad gaze, makes the humble,
And the strangers, and the fallen leaves, and the cries,
Infinitely visible.
***
The woman of love
Covered the picture of her father and even his memory,
Even though she knew that he used to go to the small hotel,
Where one woman was not enough
To sooth his body and his life.
So, she had no choice.
She had a treasure of sadness between her thighs and she paid his soothing.
***
Someone climbs on top of a mountain
And asks forgiveness for everything,
For all the things that have happened,
From the first moment of the first man.
And he doesn't realize that his life
Is the punishment and the forgiveness
For everything that ever happened.
***
There are these secret things, imperceptible, that save us.
Like putting a fallen leaf back to the tree,
Like asking forgiveness from the animal we eat.
Because we need to save ourselves, always,
And maybe the tenderness saves us, at least from ourselves.
***
We don't realize that usually losing ourselves is not easy,
And that we have to help fate in order to be lost.
Sadly, we help fate too often.
We dream 24-7.
We wear dark sunglasses in order not to see the sadness,
And we listen to loud rock and roll
In order not to hear the cries somewhere in the depth of the road.
So we lose ourselves in a particular way,
We are what they call 'a lost soul', or maybe 'a lost life'.
Maybe we helped fate a little too much.
***
The old woman of love covers her huge breasts with shrouds,
Because she cannot use them anymore,
Not for nursing children, nor for nursing love.
And so, they become a cemetery of tenderness,
And yet, they are tender graves.
***
We sit on the dark grass of the dark cemetery
And we help the dead to come out of the graves,
Because they are curious,
They want to know what happened in the world.
Maybe also the dead saints dig a hole in heaven
In order to see what's new in life,
Because in Paradise nothing happens.
We are curious people.
***
We try to escape all the time,
We don't know when and where,
And we don't want to cry,
But the fence seems like a mother, holy, eternal,
And we cry.
***
The blind violinist doesn't see,
But he has the power to feel, because feeling is a power,
And they say he can play the violin without touching it,
Because feeling crosses the air in order to touch something,
Even the music.
***
In the street and in life everything is aged and consumed.
The newspaper boy in the corner sells news that grew old,
Because the crime of the century happens all the time,
And only the money is new,
Even the beggars refuse the coins from the piggy bin of our grandmother.
Maybe they need always new money in order to purify the old one.
***
There are many reasons to fear the roosters in the morning.
They wake us up to continue to do
From the rest of our life to the rest of our life.
And they are prophets of doom. They see all the destructions that come,
So maybe they'll save us from the rest of our life.
***
The old woman said: I'll pose,
But, with a veil on her face.
And the veil was bright, gentle, like all young skins,
And only the eyes were visible round and dark,
Like an animal of sadness.
***
There are birds with wings of stone,
Like our quiet nightmares, like the cry of the drunk,
And they cannot fly over pain.
***
The small hotel at night.
The sighs are tall, like a ladder that climbs high, like a prayer,
And the small silences paint the air
Like a painting of god,
And the bodies of love purify everything.
***
At times the strangers seem like candles
Spread on the side walk of life,
As if they had a silent light in their silence.
But we don't have matches to give them,
So they remain invisible, infinitely invisible.
***
The sleep-walkers walk at the edge of the night
Calm and secure,
Because they recognize that death is not here, in this place, in this night.
And we, after so many autumns,
We don't recognize the leaves on our face.
***
The birds know where death is,
But they are secretive,
They say nothing.
And they wait, because they cover our death with their body.
The light shroud.
***
Everything is improbable.
A scavenger who finds among the trash and the rags,
The treasure of sadness
That he has lost among lost things and lost years, long ago.
And the people who hold pebbles, like a Jewish funeral,
Just because they found them on the edge of the street,
And they don't know they are the dead.
And most of all, a scent without mystery.
***
Many things remain unknown.
The opaque smell that we remember from the moment memory began,
The flimsy vapor from the breath of a child,
And the laughter of someone who is already far,
It could be us , in the age of laughter.
And it is strange
That the unknown makes us what we are.
***
We could do many things.
We could give simple words to those who are tired.
We could let our dead come out at night
From all the cemeteries inside us, so that they'll tell us stories.
And maybe we could realize that everything is miraculous,
And that it makes life utterly illegible.
***
We exist, but no one sees us,
Because we don't have a name, so we are invisible,
And when it rains over our life
We have the umbrella of the anonymous,
So, when we die, because the rain may be a killer,
No one knows who died and how he died,
Because our shoes are dry, and also our silence.
***
If we could
We would give the sad ones the treasure of forgetting,
And the humble- a chair in the tavern of the poor,
And we would give the ones who run in order to live,
A wallet full of hours,
So maybe they'll plan, at long last, the crime of the century.
***
There are senseless crimes
That happen, just like that,
Maybe there was a knife and there were two men.
And maybe these crimes
Reveal how fate thinks.
***
We sleep deeply, because it is winter,
And because, like the bears,
We need to roam over pain,
The pain of whatever is born, the pain of all the hungers that exist.
Maybe that's how the birds began.
***
We are jealous of those who are not jealous,
Like the blind violinist who has his violin
And it is a friend, and it is the music of his life,
And it is eternal.
Some nights we steal a chord from his sleep,
In order to dream.
***
We bury sometime, someone beloved,
And we cannot cry,
And hours later, in the evening,
We see a fly burned on the lamp,
And then we cry for everything.
***
They arrest the stranger
Because they cannot read his name on his passport,
So, he doesn't have a name.
And in the cell they tell him to give them his shoe laces,
But he doesn't have shoes, his life and his feet are barefoot,
So, they take the laces of the shoes he doesn't have,
And we cry silently.
***
Maybe some dead fake their death
In order not to meet our gaze.
Because some gazes are bigger than any trial, here or in heaven,
Bigger than any sentence. They are a sentence to death.
The gaze whose dream was slaughtered at the wall.
***
When everybody ignores someone
He becomes an unknown desert,
And many die there,
Because the unknown desert is a killer. A slow killer.
***
We hold tight the umbrella
Because we keep there the rain, and the sky, and the birds.
Maybe, the umbrella is the treasure of those who want to cross life alone,
With the rain, and the sky, and the birds,
And with the immense sadness of everything.
***
Hats are not safe,
Because somewhere in their depth, thoughts grow,
And thoughts may be pain.
But, we have no choice, we are Homo Sapiens,
So we wear hats,
And we grow beneath them a garden of thoughts and of pain.
***
We are old and old fashioned,
And we have an old nostalgia for old things.
So we don't understand
The new habits of the words, the new habits of the eyes.
How the moon is not enough to sooth us and we need neon lights everywhere.
How saying 'I love you' is ancient, almost biblical.
***
We wander always more. We are always somewhere else.
We lie for hours and we read useless maps on the ceiling,
Or we follow a fly.
So, probably we don't really use our life,
But there is no manual for living.
Maybe, there is a manual for sadness.
***
The temptation not to wonder is strong,
Because wondering is a fatigue and we are old.
So we ask less, we see less, we cry less.
Yet, sometimes when the twilight is immense and dotted with lights,
We wonder and we cry.
***
Each time we cross a bridge
We feel our life more foreign,
Because we crossed to another place of life,
To another place of eternity.
Only the memories cross the bridge in the opposite direction,
Because they have a child to nurse.
***
The stranger under our window,
And it rains, always.
So, his shoes rot, and also his feet,
And only the music of the blind violinist
Lets him float over time and pain.
And maybe, also the birds began with pain and music.
***
We sit in our home and we see nothing,
But when we raise the torch,
Like a modern Diogenes,
We don't find the Man.
We find the crimes in the faces of people,
The crimes of eternity, the crimes of pain.
And maybe we found the Man.
***
In the house, the hours seem to pass quiet,
But we had to choose all the time,
So, the hours were not really quiet.
But in the evenings,
The cicadas leaning on ancient traditions, sang,
And they soothed time, the way only traditions can.
And we chose everything.
***
The moon rises, bloody,
As if all the crimes have already happened,
And only the mad, the children and the dreamers were left,
Because they are moon-believers.
And then, the bloody sun comes, another killer.
***
We are old
And we grow sad from so much age.
So, they save us.
They put us in a house for the old.
It is inhabited by grey winds, grey life, and grey fences.
And the violin from the lost years
Is not heard anymore,
And also the lost years are inaudible.
So, we are saved from the sadness, and from the violin, and from the lost years.
One day we'll die thankful and saved.
***
In the moment after death we cry: don't wake me up.
Because we had to wake up, for years, before dawn,
And it was too early for the sky and the birds,
And it was too early to live.
So, we lost the world, and our life.
Maybe death will let us sleep more,
And it will give us back the sky, and the birds and the world,
And the only debt left will be our life.
***
The common grave of the humble and the poor.
The ones who were a home without a number,
Utterly anonymous and so silent that they forgot they had a voice,
And for sure how to cry.
So, now they have to choose.
To have a common name, or nothing.
***
We live with the window in our hands,
But it doesn't save us, nor the enigmas in the glass.
Because it is not eternal enough,
And because when one mystery ends,
Another mystery begins.
***
We pay death, each day, the debt of living,
And we have no choice, we mop the blood from the floor,
And we pretend that nothing happened, or that the debt was paid.
But maybe, there is another blood,
The blood of those who died for a dream,
And it pays the debt.
***
Tunes that were played, as old as time,
And they are forgotten.
But the blind violinist of all the centuries
Remember,
Because they are their eyes.
***
Some days, the sun throws a yellow shawl over the windows,
Like an old woman with a life too tired to live,
And we feel the sun close,
Closer to our eyes, closer to our sadness,
Because we are sad people,
And maybe, we are the sadness of the world.
***
In the end, the dead always win.
They give us the habits of the eyes and the habits of life,
So, we have something to change,
Because we cannot change something that doesn't exist.
Maybe, one day, there will be nothing left to change,
And everything will be eternal and perfect. Perfectly dead.
***
The old calendar is always open.
The crimes of the centuries are crowded with prophets and with saints.
And we live with them for years.
Maybe, one day they'll add us to the calendar,
Maybe a murderer will kill us,
Because some murders are holy,
And they purify us.
***
We go down to the cellar, and up to the attic,
Because we don't know where is the best place to repent,
Closer to hell, or closer to heaven.
And we don't know how they caught us,
Because we were careful,
We murdered ourselves slowly, secretly,
And maybe, that is how everybody dies,
Murdering himself slowly, secretly,
Because, at times, one life is too much.
***
We grow old. We feel ancient,
As if history has finished,
And all we can do is wash the curtains
That grew black from too much night.
And we are sad,
Because history was the best thriller ever.
***
There are big fires everywhere,
They spring out, sudden as murder,
But nothing is all bad.
They let the poor cook their hungry soup,
And the big shots, to light their infinite cigars,
And the saints can purify everything,
The hungry soup, and the cigars, and the murder and the fires.
***
At times we die, and we leave pages that seem unwritten,
And we forget that we write life with life,
So, everything is written,
And everything is a page or two in the infinite,
And in the best thriller ever: history.
***
We have a strange passion for sadness,
And it lets us live in our life and in the life of others,
Because sadness is an epidemic and it is everywhere.
So, our passion for sadness makes us big,
Much bigger than one passion and one sadness.
***
The old house,
And the old floor that gets consumed with a strange precision.
On day, we'll find the terrible crimes and the skeletons
Over which houses are built and even kinder-gardens.
Because houses are cemeteries of thrillers and of the past.
***
The times are dangerous everywhere.
So, in the towns, the saints hide in old holy books,
And in the country-side, the scarecrows are silent,
They sing no longer to the birds.
And only the thighs of love of the women are safe,
Because they go far, much further than fear.
***
At night, the most incredible journeys sing to us a lullaby,
And they take us far,
To our childhood, and to all the centuries,
Because a lullaby is the first song ever sung,
And maybe it will be also the last.
And it takes us above pain and above sadness, like a flock of birds.
So, a song can take us far, further than the childhood, and the centuries,
And the pain, and the sadness, and the flock of birds.
***
At times, we hold a fly tenderly in our hand,
Because it has the same passion like us,
The passion for light,
And it kills it, and it kills us.
***
The strangers know it well.
The sudden charity works, like a sudden crucifixion.
They give them the holy bread that makes their hunger holy.
Maybe, they'll die hungry and saints,
Which is another kind of cross.
***
Maybe the night is a black market merchant.
It barters our day and all it contained, with sleep.
That is, if we can still sleep,
Because we are too tired, so, the leaves continue to fall from our life.
And they hurt.
***
We never arrive on time to supper,
And also this supper ended before we arrived,
And it is an historical injustice.
We were not there when everything happened,
We were somewhere else,
And someone, far away, carried alone a cross.
***
So many things around us.
We don't resist seeing them alone.
So, we borrow the eyes of someone else,
And we see different things,
Which is inexplicable.
Maybe, it is the things that choose the eyes that will see them.
***
We let things steal from us something,
And strangely, we feel richer.
Maybe even the last ray in the shadows of the evening,
Or a silent candle
That steal our eyes, make us richer,
And of course, when they steal our poem.
***
The long hours are a killer.
We are two hands without a face,
Selling tickets and dreams,
And, little by little, we forget
That we used to have once a face, and a dream which was ours.
***
JACOB AND RAQUEL
After seven years, we call: Raquel, Raquel,
But promises are often stoned,
The way they stoned the saints.
So, we are a saint, stoned day after day, for other seven eternities,
In the tender fields of wheat.
And the tender eyes of Raquel
Are another promise.
***
We kiss a dead saint, and we lose our lips.
We don't know how strong is our hunger for holiness,
So we should be careful.
Maybe, we should remember the things that are holy because they are alive:
Telling the holy legend of a child,
Or kissing the holy body of love.
***
So much suffering in order to gain something small:
Even some humble shovels to dig ourselves out,
When the big day comes.
And yet, we need only one shovel in order to dig out
All the poems, and the skies, and the birds
That we buried.
***
There are strange things,
Like the eye-lashes of the blind.
Maybe they are the feather of a bird and the flutter,
And these feathers, this flutter, let the blind roam over the dark,
And maybe, over the sadness.
***
Our sadness is a blind man
Who feels the birds in the immense air,
And the twilight, when it comes.
***
Poverty is a disease and it is fatal.
So, the poor go to the hospital for the poor,
They lie, taw by raw, because they are many,
Like a cemetery of pain, of sadness.
***
Maybe, killers cry without a mouth,
Like the knife that killed,
Because even the hand that killed,
Remembers the hand of a mother.
***
Each poet has a treasure of unwritten poems,
So, when he dies, he leaves them to the world,
Because poets, more than anybody else,
Have the infinite hunger to be remembered.
***
It is not easy to be on time for murder.
Because there are the eclipses and the twilights.
So, at times we arrive too late,
When the person was killed by the eternal killer,
And we cry slowly,
Because regret happens slowly, and also repent,
And because we remember that this man had a mother.
***
The deserted station.
The home of the lost, of women of love and black arts,
Of refugees from everywhere,
From the places where the world ended,
And the places where it will end,
And refugees from the pity of good ladies, and from the crime of the century,
And from the rain, because it rains always,
And from the enigma of who they are.
And they don't realize that they carried with them
The world that ended and that will end, and the black art, and the enigma, and the crime of the century , and the rain,
Because true escaping is an art, and only few know it.
***
The mad have the tickets for all the journeys,
So, they are the true travelers. Them, and the dreamers.
***
Each once in a while, they open a new Paradise.
Somewhere, sometime,
It was a paradise for simple songs,
The songs sung by the poor and the sad.
But, it was too daily, too simple for the quire of the angels,
So, the Paradise closed.
***
Each once in a while they open a new show.
And somewhere in the depth of the past
They opened a show for simple songs,
So simple, that people sang them for centuries,
And they reveal myths, like the enigma of Jericho and the immense walls,
Because the poet was there,
And he sang, simple and infinite,
The eternal sadness of the ruins.
***
Everything passes,
And then, one day, we find them,
Fresh red stains of blood inside us,
As if time didn't exist,
As if nothing really passed.
***
Maybe the day of revelation happens daily,
Only we don't notice it,
Because only small humble things are revealed:
Gloves that lost the hands, wigs that grew bold,
Surrendered furs of coats.
Maybe, also the prophet comes daily
To sing to all the simple things that were revealed,
But, his voice is consumed, deserted,
Because time rolls also in the time of the eternal souls,
And for sure, in the time of the body.
It makes everything old, the things that were revealed,
And the prophet , and the song.
***
The children of the poor have a treasure of empty piggy-bins,
And maybe when they are sick, they have the golden ICTERUS
The golden eyes.
And maybe it is the only gold they'll ever have. This, and the dreams.
***
We are poor, so we kill our children, even if we don't know it,
Because we have to send their body to the daily Marathon,
So they carry newspapers, pizzas and milk ,
And they carry their tomb-stone on their back, their surrendered back.
***
We kiss the humble urn, and our kiss is simple and therefore, beautiful,
Because there is always beauty in mourning,
And it makes it deep, infinitely deeper.
***
Promises come and go,
And we knew it even before we were in the passport office of the big road
Because passports are a promise, a passport to life, and a passport to death,
Because also death is a promise.
Strangely, they use both the same passport, all the promises in one,
And everywhere, the passport to pain,
And the stranger who has no passport, and his pain and his death are out-laws.
***
We are young, and we curl in the side streets,
Because we love to play hide and seek with life,
And because the side streets are another climate, warmer,
A nursery for dreams.
***
There are children which refuse to grow,
And nothing helps, not the sorcerers,
Nor the infinite family assemblies that are almost biblical.
So, in the towns where it happens,
They noticed an epidemic of dreams,
And of birds in the smoke of the chimneys.
***
Often, we want the unusual, but everywhere the same things happen.
The poor that gather cigarette-buts, like a daily ritual of sadness,
And the old people on the benches
Who gather things for the collection of oblivion.
So, we do also usual things.
We build the labyrinth of the day from daily gestures,
Like the enigma of love that is made of common bodies, infinitely common.
***
Autumn is a harsh time for innocence.
The children gather leaves like the proofs of a crime.
The naked branches are too dead to believe in life,
And the mad men laugh, more madly than ever,
As if the autumn has killed inside them whatever there was to kill,
The last proof of pity.
And only few things remain tender,
Like an old woman who nurses a deserted lawn,
Or like the maimed who jump, gently, like a bird,
Between the rain drops and the crutches.
These and the dreamers.
***
It is not easy for those who sleep unarmed,
Because we cannot kill the dreams that kill us,
And other murderers who make the nights black.
And we were unarmed in the room with the dead body on the floor,
But innocence is one of the most difficult things to believe.
***
We live without an age, like an old dream,
Or like the wide breasts of our mother, an eternal river.
And we realize that what we didn't say-
That's the only place in which we live,
And we never mentioned our age.
***
There are the big feasts,
And the poor who are seated in the low table,
And when everything ends,
They sweep everything from the crumbs of hunger ,
Because they disturb their floor and their truth.
***
Trees are naked in autumn,
Too naked to lie,
And there are no leaves left
For the theatre of hope.
Autumn is a harsh time for truth.
***
We all have to cry slowly and to dream little,
Because we are in hospital, and there is not enough hope for everybody.
And only one patient rebelled . He had a secret garden in his hair,
And at night, the garden cried and dreamed. And it followed him to eternity.
***
Maybe we didn't choose to be here,
Maybe it was the corridor with the remnants of cries,
Or the path full of twilight,
Or a sad song from somewhere far,
That chose us,
Because we are sad people,
And we attract sadness, like a sad magnet.
***
In the corner of the street it is evening,
And the blind violinist stopped playing,
Because he feels the dark.
And suddenly, everybody in that corner of that street,
Became old.
***
At times, the evening has tenderness and the meanings of mercy,
The gratitude for the street lamps that turned on,
And even death is more tender,
Because death gives the flowers meaning, maybe the true meaning,
Because they'll cover, gently, our body.
***
Everybody has something that owns him,
Each mad man has his own cellar,
And each dreamer has its own last wall,
And each poor has his treasure of sadness.
So, everything runs smoothly on its crutches.
***
We know so little about the empire of the bees,
Even though, one day they may rule us,
Because all empires are the same,
The queen-bee, the soldier-bee, the worker-bee,
And the death that feeds them.
So, it is a true thriller. The serial killer, and the dead bodies.
***
We live secretly, like the blind violinist.
His blind eyes closed when he plays,
So that it wouldn't be shown how much he sees,
And how much his music sees.
***
The strange quiet in the room.
All that is heard is the slow crying
Of the old woman of love,
And the rustle of the autumn in the window,
As if they were consoling each other
For things that happened and cannot unhappen.
***
We write simple words,
They are unarmed, and yet, they pierce us.
So, people cry when they sing them, and they are soothed,
Because there are tears that hurt,
And tears that sooth us.
***
The blind violinist in his usual corner.
It feels as if his music look s in the infinite
For something our eyes hide.
Maybe that's why the blind feel more the infinite
In everything.
***
The blind violinist
Gathers all the sounds,
From the sky, the birds, the autumn,
And to play them.
***
Inside us, so many things happen,
So we almost cannot choose,
The things choose us.
So, they lead us wherever they want,
And we lose ourselves, the way one loses himself
In a dream that is not his own.
So, we should be careful,
Because we don't know how strong are the things inside us,
And how they choose us, so easily.
***
There are things that are more irreversible than the usual,
Like the mercy that the sadness of the stranger
Donates to the twilight.
And this moment, this mercy,
Are irreversible.
***
The fear of leaving, and the restlessness of staying.
So, we stand with the boy who sell their smile and their life and other small things
At the traffic lights.
Because the lights are always red,
So, we have to decide nothing.
***
Often, the great travelers are lost in the waiting rooms
For the train, for the ship, for the passport, for the weather.
And maybe all of us are lost in the waiting room of something,
And at times, we find this something when it is already useless,
When it is too late.
***
The restlessness of the burial people,
Because the next moment there will be always someone else dead,
So, they have no choice, there are too many dead and only one graveyard.
They dig holes out of the fence for the poor, because the poor die more,
And they make their holy death unholy.
But the mother of someone poor puts tenderly, infinite tender,
A loaf of bread under his old shrouds,
And the bread and the tenderness purify everything,
The fence, and the earth, and the unholy hole,
And the hunger which was always pure.
***
Some twilights are infinitely peaceful,
Because we feel that the day was enough,
And maybe we are suddenly rich, because we have enough.
***
The enemy is here,
So we use the precision and the methods of the centuries.
We bow.
It could be only the tactic we know, because we bowed always.
And only some evenings we feel we've lost the sky, the birds,
And all the tall things.
***
The woman of love stood in her usual corner.
On her face, the last ray of twilight entangled,
Her breasts sang something slow,
And she gave her body of love quiet, like calm bread.
And only her legs seemed sad and tortured,
Like a soul that was used for too long.
***
All the clocks of the world
Lead the children, the dreamers and the mad
To the farthest legends.
And the old gather them for their treasure of oblivion,
So, everything is fine.
***
All the torches of the world were burning,
And on the roofs of the world
Only the children, the dreamers and the mad could sing these birds of fire.
And somewhere, in the cemetery of the poor,
The bodies sang too, all the score of sadness.
And these songs were exquisite.
***
We dream of writing big things,
The crime of the century, or the biblical floof.
But maybe the biggest poem
Is the poetry of all the daily departures
Everything is made of.
***
There are gestures,
As if we kept in our hand our cry,
But, it is an open secret,
Because the poor, the humble, the beggars, the mad,
The stranger with the strange tongue, the little children,
And the trembling old,
Hear us,
Because they also cry with their hands.
***
The old woman sits always at the edge of the sofa,
As if she were leaving room for someone,
Maybe, for her dead mother.
She will give her childhood, the infinite childhood,
To add it to her treasure of oblivion.
***
Suddenly, the floor breaks,
And the crimes of the centuries are revealed.
The bones of killers, of rapists, our deae ancestors.
Maybe, heredity is everything,
So, when we come home, we should be careful,
We should rub off the stains of blood from our coat.
***
The woman of love was dead,
But the man who loved her
Painted eyes, infinitely tender, over her closed eyes,
And on her silence- a sigh,
And he continued to make love to her body of love,
And this love-making forgave everything.
***
We run out of the rain,
Like the last survivor of the biblical flood,
And we forget that the path of the rain is everywhere,
Also inside us,
And when we drown, we drown inside us.
***
In the street, empty chairs, empty bottles, and consumed flowers,
As if the celebration ended, and we were, as always, late.
And when we think of it, we were late for everything.
Maybe it is our nature,
Or maybe we want to postpone age, pain, and everything else.
And the autumns continue.
***
The dead die naked and alone,
And they leave on the table of the kitchen their mask,
Because they don't need it anymore,
And maybe they want us to guess who they were all these years.
***
Night.
Yet, the blind violinist is awake,
And his hands touch the eyes of a stray dog,
And they touch the eyes of everything that is blind:
The streets, the drunk, the late passer-by.
And the stray dogs don't exist.
***
Slowly, we realize that we lose less time forgiving,
And we are in a hurry to live.
So, when the seat us in the low table of the poor,
We eat all the food, up to the inglorious end,
And we close our eyes in order to forgive.
***
The blind are not lost easily.
There is always in the street the barking of a dog,
Or a song
That give them a hand,
Because mercy is not blind.
***
We trust nothing, not even ourselves.
We find the eyes of our killer in all the eyes,
And the threat of a word in all the words.
Maybe, we know no longer how to live differently,
Because danger is addictive. And also fear.
***
The immense twilight,
And all the lights that turn on and tremble,
And we don't know where to go,
Because we want to go everywhere
And to be here, in this place, in this hour.
***
We say big words,
And our hands use big gestures,
Because they are the only big things left,
And even our dreams don't forgive us.
***
The rain sings, like us,
Always in a different voice,
In order not to remember.
***
The cross roads petrifies us and the animals,
Because we all feel the danger of choosing,
And of those who chose,
And the rain washes off the blood stains from the stones.
***
Even the prophecy of the end of the world,
Is not enough to change our habits,
The lunch at one o'clock, the sleep in the evening,
And the visit at the hotel of love once a week,
Because also the body of love gets used to habits.
And maybe after the last man, there will be still world,
And the habits of the rain, and of the wind, and of autumn.
***
We die naked, like a man from the lost tribes,
And they draw on our body a tree,
So the birds come and sing,
And maybe they'll eat our heart,
And the whole tribe will cry, because the heart is holy,
And our death will be miraculous, infinitely beautiful.
***
The small man from the hotel of love
Stands, opaque and sad, at the eternal entrance,
As if he wanted to take the whole guilt
For the new night and for the ancient fear to sleep alone.
***
Each once in a while we open a drawer
To touch the tender childhood feet that we keep there,
Even though we know
That one day they will kick us.
***
At night
We have so many deliveries to addresses in hell.
The shoes of a child, the clothes of a memory that is too tight,
And the hat of a dream,
Because we have to survive, each night, the night.
***
It seems strange, but the dead need money.
They come to our dream with their piggy-bin
And they wait.
We look in our pockets, but we find nothing
Because we sleep naked,
And because who thinks of bringing money to his dream,
And we don't know why they need the money,
Maybe they still buy love,
Or maybe chocolates to God.
***
Because the kicks in our shins are, as a rule, an act of fate,
We have to know always where we stand.
And like the blind, we don't fear a few shadows more.
And we continue to live, utterly quiet,
Because we wear sun-glasses always,
So we don't see the ones who helped our departures
To the tomorrows, and other places of time.
***
At night, the blind violinist
Hears suddenly a distant cry,
Maybe a child from another world, or from a dream,
Which is , at times, the same things,
And he touches the cry, infinitely motherly, infinitely tender,
And he brings the cry to his arms,
Because his fingesr see the sounds,
And because mercy had a mother.
***
Inside us we are many, and we don't know whom to choose.
As a dreamer, we don't know if they'll believe us.
As a poet, we don't know if they'll love us,
And as a man, when we die and time remains empty,
We don't know if they'll feel it.
***
THE INQUISION
Some were not demons,
And they believed in the mercy of God,
And when they burned, the centuries jumped into the fire,
And time remained empty. Empty ash.
***
Justice is not enough,
And not even clemency.
Maybe, being poor among the poor,
And humble among the humble,
Is enough.
***
At times, we feel the meaning of things,
Like the music when played by the blind violinist,
Is the music of the poor, because life blinds them, and the hunger.
Or like a woman who grew old
Because there is not enough paint to cover her sadness.
And we feel we are dreamers,
Even though we don't have a ticket to anywhere.
***
Maybe we can own the world
Only when we surrender to it,
And maybe, we are not strong enough to surrender,
And this explains many things,
Because we don't surrender also to life.
***
We turn off the lights in the room
In order to have another adventure, to live in the dark.
And maybe, that's why we sleep ,which is another adventure,
Because we don't know if we'll be able to forgive ourselves,
Alone, in the darkness.
***
The algebra of rage is simple.
It is the sum of those who eat their hunger,
And those who eat,
Like hell and heaven on earth,
But, there is no God here,
There are only the ones in hell,
They are too many,
And they cannot forgive,
Because the hunger never forgave them
***.
There is nothing out of the street of evolution,
Because everything goes there.
So, we mop the stains of blood from the cave of the stone- age man,
And we continue,
And the blood continues, and it goes far, much further than death
***
In the street, the man with the candies.
He gives them to the old children of the poor,
Because they grew old before they were a child,
And the blind violinist plays, infinitely tender, a children song.
They cry, and they don't know why they cry.
***
We grow old.
Our slippers make a sleepy noise, utterly lost,
And we call the care-taker: mother in law,
Because old people,
Guess the shadows behind the hand, and they guess love,
Like a child.
***
We embrace a girl, and our hand arrives to her mother,
And it is not strange,
Because the girl has enough past in her,
Enough to be her mother.
So, we have no choice. We love them both.
***
Maybe sadness is a door
That sings from both sides something different,
And maybe we all sing like that.
So, we should be careful,
We should check both sides of our doors, and the songs.
***
At night, our dead father speaks to us,
Utterly calm,
And then, one day, we find in his drawer
His cut tongue
That protected him from his cry.
***
We had always big dreams,
But, punctually, in the last moment, something happens.
We loaded on the train our huge luggage,
And it left, a moment before we were ready,
So, we remained here.
And maybe we are still not ready,
Because we buy only second hand dreams,
And maybe also second hand lives,
Like the poor, or the stranger from the side-walk of life.
***
It is so cold,
As if the holy Sabbath never happened,
And nothing forgives us,
Not the cold, nor God,
And we need their forgiveness,
Because we don't know how to forgive ourselves.
***
Often we light a candle, and there is always a reason,
Because each moment is the moment of death of someone,
A man, an animal, a child,
And we need to cry for all these someone-s,
Because we don't want to cry for ourselves.
***
If we die suddenly,
Who will remember the biblical deserts
And the quick-sands in which we were lost, and our poems.
And poets, more than anybody else,
Need someone to save them from the sands of the centuries,
Because the sand of the centuries forgives nothing.
***
We are sleepless
Because we are superstitious,
And because we feel the one who doesn't sleep, is awake.
So, each night, it is a struggle,
And even when we win this night, this next day,
When we get up, we are never the same.
And anyway, no one crosses the night and remains the same.
***
No one really knows us,
Because mystery is a private affair,
Like dreams, like the treasure of pain, that anyway, no one wanted.
So, we should be careful
Before we buy some treasures, or other mysteries.
***
Some people are voracious.
We give them our hand, and they uproot it.
And it is a sad, because we love to give our hand to people,
Utterly simple, utterly innocent,
And because we still write poems.
***
The blind violinist hits his stick on the continent.
Maybe he heard that elephants hear water in their feet,
And he is thirsty,
Because the blind are thirsty
For the infinite water of the world to wash the shadows.
And when we think of it, often there are shadows in our eyes,
And we are thirsty too.
***
The blind violinist hits his stick on the continent.
Maybe, he gathers the sounds:
The road of ancient autumns, or the path of the gazelles, somewhere far,
That will pass through his violin and his infinite fingers.
***
The first woman wasn't naked, she wore black.
Maybe the gods were trying the best colors for mourning.
Maybe they also painted the blood in red,
Because they were trying the colors of murders and other small crimes.
***
Each night,
We carry up to the end of the night, up to the end of ourselves,
Up to the end of dreams,
All our belongings,
And in the morning we find ourselves with a treasure of sadness
That we don't want, we don't need,
But, we have no choice. We take into the day.
We are sad people.
***
We quarrel with everything,
With the clerks in the offices, with the bus drivers,
With the coca-cola that is hot, and with the day that grew too long.
And it is sad, because no one forgives us,
And in the evening, when we are alone,
Our anger doesn't forgive itself.
***
People are surprised,
Because we embrace the first person passing.
They don't know we need to lean on something,
They don't know we have left all the sticks of our life
In lost years, in lost dreams.
***
February misses two days, and it is nice,
Because, like everything else we are sun believers.
The stones wait for the sun,
Because the lizards will come
Carrying their cold blood and the centuries of the glaciers,
And stones love history.
And some painters paint suns even on flowers,
And if we are not careful, they blind us.
***
The women mop our floors from the biblical flood in our house,
Because everything repeats itself, the flood in the bible and in our house.
So, these women save us.
But they don't have a face, because they tame the flood kneeling.
So, they are utterly faceless, utterly nameless, in all the centuries.
***
We eat our happy soup
And it travels in our entrails deep, deep and far.
Maybe it tasted like heaven,
But there is no God here,
Only the entrails, the weary workers
In the factory of our life.
And we don't know if they forgive us.
***
At night, we don't count sheep anymore.
We forgive people, and we count the forgiveness.
And so, we sleep,
And we let the sheep graze their own night,
And maybe they have to forgive too
For the knife in their cry.
***
Somewhere sometime, we look back,
We realize how many things we did,
And we feel the terrible sadness
That we didn't know it.
***
We want to change people everywhere
But they don't want to change,
And when we think about it, also we don't want to change.
And we forget that change is the mother of everything,
The big breasts that go far, much further than death.
***
We forget how important is a birth certificate,
Because it is not just another paper,
It is the first contract with life. But we forget.
We become a scavenger of lost time, lost days, lost years.
Only some nights, we remember the contract,
But we close our eyes in order not to cry.
***
In order to be modern
We need to have our own opinion about everything,
And it is important, because when we don't have an opinion,
We have to invent it. At times, we have to invent even ourselves,
Which is not all bad,
Because we always wanted to be someone else.
***
Maybe we didn't find the mother, the infinite breasts,
Anywhere, not in life, nor in ourselves.
So, we are orphans.
And all the great citation of the great people don't help,
Because they may have been orphans too,
And because there is no manual for love.
***
There are days when the divine inspiration is a beggar.
We cut the written paper,
And we feel we write more poems.
And we remember the loneliness of a child,
Who has cut toys and felt he has more friends,
But we don't have the courage to cry.
***
We adore the trains, the ships and even the tired buses,
Because everything happens somewhere else.
A somewhere we don't see, so it doesn't exist.
And we don't know why this immense sadness is here.
This, and the dreams.
***
Our pity is strange.
We pity a killer who is an orphan,
Or a magician who dismembers himself in his own magic,
Maybe because we are all orphans,
From the first moment of the first hour.
And because we don't know how to dismember utterly and completely
In another magic. In the thighs of love of a woman.
***
We are new born.
They wash us, they comb the hair we don't have,
They dress us with the clothes of a doll
And leave us at the window.
So, we see in the second moment from birth
The street, the beggars, the killers,
And the blind violinist with his tender violin.
Maybe we forget, because we are only new born,
And maybe we remember only the things that forgive us.
***
The humble remained humble
Because they always served in the ground floor of something,
And there was no holy ladder to climb up,
And because they grew old looking at the ground floor ,
So, lifting their head is pain.
***
The humble live quiet, without questions,
But their lowered gaze sees, in order not to forget.
And maybe this lowered gaze, and what it sees, and what it remembers,
Don't forgive,
Because life never forgave them.
***
We are a man without age, a maniac for loneliness,
So, we work in lonely things.
We repair a road that was forgotten for centuries,
Or the path of the gazelles that were murdered long ago.
And only some evenings
We see the flock of birds over the roof,
And we cry.
***
They throw us out of our house,
And they don't know about the tunnels and the caves
That the mad dug under the street.
So, we are not homeless.
And maybe, they dig also under our floors,
Because we cannot survive life, or pain , or death,
Without a cave of madness to curl in,
And there will be also no poems.
***
We didn't accept the whistle of the train,
We are not a child anymore,
And it can take us nowhere.
So, we grow suddenly old,
Just because of a whistle.
***
We plan a murder, and we don't need much,
Someone sick or old, and the invisible autumn.
And, of course all the lost years, and the dreams help us,
Because they were the first shooting ground.
***
We have to feed many secrets inside us,
And for sure, many crimes:
The years we killed, and the dreams,
And the stranger in the rain, and we let him melt alone.
So, we sit in a bar, and we drink in an invisible corner,
Because only the wine forgives us.
***
We are still caught in ancient cases, and it is normal.
We hardly forget a property or a land that used to be ours
Centuries ago.
And maybe nations have a collective memory,
And it becomes a national monument,
And also a monument for the dead,
Because people often die for ancient things, and for the holy earth.
**
We are strangers with a strange name,
And in the town hall they refuse to register us.
They don't register mysteries,
And they don't know that their lists could be the lists of a wizard,
Because behind our name, we are, each one, a mystery.
So, we don't register, because mysteries are a private affair.
***
One day, we'll stand at the cross-roads,
And we'll regulate the traffic, and time.
We'll make it slow and gentle,
So that people have time enough to choose where to go,
And they'll cry, because they'll realize that in this time, in this place,
They made a choice, and not a blind moment.
***
When they humble someone, the day light is stronger,
Maybe, because also the sun is humbled each evening, each winter,
So, it feels the tears in the bowed neck .
And maybe we use scarves in all seasons,
Because the tears in the neck are huge,
And they don't forgive us.
***
The true mysteries are the stories in which we are also in,
And we never knew it.
And maybe that's why our life seems foreign,
And some evenings we feel we were always in the story,
And the terrible sadness that we didn't know.
***
Slowly, our second life , the terrible forgetting,
Covers the first life, the one we lived.
And the oblivion is so immense,
As if it were the only life we had.
And we cannot even mourn our life,
Because we don't know we are dying.
***
We lie on the floor of our house and we cry,
Because we are grateful,
Because it keeps the footprints of a child,
And it knows the steps of a drunkard,
Of someone who murdered, without an alibi, his life,
And it forgives everything.
***
At night
We close our eyes and their crimes:
The murder in a gaze, the crime of not crying.
And at times, alone in these eyes,
We forgive ourselves.
***
We don't bury only the tears.
We bury also the eyes that saw, and what they saw.
So, there are no witnesses,
And the crime doesn't exist.
***
We could clean our whole home with our confession,
Because we forgave ourselves,
And we want the house to forgive us.
So, our home is clean, and yet, we have to forgive ourselves again,
Each night.
***
We decide to rest a lot and to do little,
So, we lie on our one legged sofa
And on the other side it is held by the eternity of lost years.
Only some nights we think of our one legged sofa,
And of the other leg,
And we feel the thousand legs of our sadness,
Like a Hindu god,
And nothing forgives us, not the one legged sofa,
Nor the eternity of lost years, and nor the Hindu god.
And the lost years left us too lost to forgive ourselves.
***
Often, at night, we sleep on the floor,
And we leave the bed for the dead that visit us,
Because we have too much past inside us,
And we want the floor of our dreams to be here.
In this night. On this floor.
***
At times, we try to make our suffering unbearable.
Maybe, we have something masochistic inside us,
And maybe it is contagious,
And each one plans at night, how to suffer more.
***
We dream of a better world,
And often, we embrace people on the street with so much sadness,
That they see us, and they cry.
So, maybe the world is better in this street, in this moment.
And the blind violinist plays the embrace, and the sadness,
And the eyes that see, and the cry.
And in the evenings, people sing it.
***
We grow old and wobbly,
So, we hold tight the rails of the balcony,
Because there is no forecast for the weather out and inside us.
One day, they'll have to cut the hands from the rails,
Because the fear and the hunger to be safe
Go far, much further than death.
***
They dig a hole and they bury us,
And they don't see that we knew where we wanted to go,
For a journey, for a lesson of poetry.
They bury us against our will, against our wishes, and against our life.
But, we have no choice. There is no democracy of death,
And also the autumn doesn't ask the leaves to vote.
***
We learn our story from rumors,
Our birth, our death, the drunk parties in the between,
And the years of dreaming when we were not here.
So, when we write our biography,
We write the rumors that are us,
And all the rest are foot notes.
And it is sad, because we trust whatever is written.
***
We are in hospital because of one epidemic or another.
We lie and we study the map of the ceiling,
And it is fascinating, because each eye carved its own continent,
And the world was big, big enough for all the continents.
And it is sad that it was only a map on the ceiling and the eyes of pain.
***
We repeat ourselves and what we say so many times,
So, it is useless.
But, these things sooth us, they have a smell of something daily and safe,
And they are addictive as habit.
So, we have no choice. We are addicted.
***
We grow old, quiet
Like the birds that are hardly a dot,
Because we realize that all these years,
The things that were really useful
Were said almost in a whisper.
***
We go to the doctor
Because we are worried about the world.
But, it is useless,
Because he knows everything about the body,
And nothing about the world.
Maybe we need the wise men of the tribe.
They may say nothing, or they may heal the world,
Because they know people, and animals, and leaves,
And the touch the immense sadness of everything, and life.
***
Because hell is the first place they'll look for us,
We went somewhere else, to a hell of our own,
With the demons we chose: the poems.
And maybe each one chooses his own hell
Because it forgives him.
***
Women lose their body little by little.
The nights of love steal their thighs,
The child takes the belly and the breasts,
The years of kneading cut the hands,
And age dissects the tortured feet .
And all that remains is the gaze,
Because it feels the immense sadness of everything, and the life.
***
The judges are on holidays
And justice is suspended for an indefinite time.
So, the murderers and the rapist have a feast,
And the poor from the dangerous continents mop the stains of blood,
And they don't forgive,
Because their life never forgave them,
And maybe, also the justice.
***
The city is close to God, in its own way.
The skyscrapers hide the holes in heaven,
And the ambulatory vendors sell sacred Sabbaths and feathers,
And the umbrella of someone holy.
And the blind violinist plays the bodies of love and their life,
And it purifies everything.
***
Often, the city is a dangerous place.
The skyscrapers are tender nests of vultures.
The ambulatory vendors sell alibis and shovels to dig the earth,
Because the murderers need to hide
The evidence of something from God.
And only the girl that was raped, holds softly, her belly, and cries
Because she doesn't know if the child will forgive her.
***
We dream for so long,
That miracles seem natural,
As if they continued our dream,
And it is sad,
Because there is nothing left except the book of dreams,
And even the immense twilight dotted with birds and shadows,
Are only a foot-note.
***
We grow old, and the miracles seem common,
The punctuality of autumn and other seasons,
And the seasons of pain.
So there is nothing to surprise us.
Even the miracle of death comes too late,
And the dead remain unsurprised, forever.
***
The musician died in the cellar, alone.
And when they found him, they saw he ate his book,
His Song of Songs,
Because he couldn't go on without it, even to death.
And the blind violinist plays the fate of these Songs of Songs,
And maybe he plays himself.
***
It is a harsh winter, and everybody forgets us.
And yet, it was so easy to find our scarf
In a cold house, the unmistakable cold of the poor,
As if the scarf were a flag of the sad, of those who are cold,
And of the forgotten.
***
We are addicted to love,
So, there is always a woman in our mind,
And this love is exquisite,
Because we make love always,
In the street, in the office, and of course, in our dreams.
***
We live too little, because we write too many letters,
To arrange a bargain, or small details: a favor, a murder and so on.
And only some evenings we write a letter to ourselves,
An alibi that will forgive us.
***
Someone throws his coat on the floor,
And the child beds and bring it up,
And he doesn't know it is the first lesson in humbleness,
Because the small details are exquisite teachers.
***
We get up to speak,
And we realize that whatever we have to say is private,
Because many things are a private affair,
Like the mystery of who we are, or the mystery of the thighs of love,
And for sure, the silent lines on our face, when we try not to cry.
And only the mystery of death becomes an open secret.
***
Maybe, we let the other humble us,
Because being humble is better than being a killer,
And maybe, the one ladder we had,
Knew only how to climb down.
***
At times, in broad day light,
Our beloved dead visit us.
And we are all there,
The fence that let them flee from life,
The dogs that didn't bark,
And the tender grave
That let them remember everything.
***
At night, things are smaller.
All the big events enter in the palm of a child,
And the old dogs, with immense tears in their eyes,
Curl in the dream of a puppy.
***
Maybe, the problem is not to save the world,
But how to save ourselves tomorrow,
Because tomorrow, the world begins again.
***
When we go out of the house
Ten wars have ended,
And the crime of the century has already happened,
And only the blind violinist remembers,
Because he has to play for the dead,
So, he is eternal
***.
Maybe, one day, we'll trust ourselves,
So we could trust also the others,
And our gestures,
Or even the way we are silent,
Will be the confession of everything.
***
The dead are not afraid,
Because no one can kill them,
So, they go out to the street of the murderers,
Quiet and composed.
And it is sad that we have to die
In order to live fearless.
***
We may die any moment,
And everything: the habit of living,
And the keys that are the keys of the house and not of life,
Stay there and they cannot save us,
And nor the body of love, when the poetry of love ends.
***
Again the massacres and the screams and the wailings.
An hour between life and death, like all the hours,
But for sure, closer to death.
And only the mothers are mute from so much mercy.
***
Often the body of love and the love
End empty, useless, pitiful,
And we think of our mothers
Whose belly was full of eternal sadness,
And they had no choice. They bore the sadness.
***
Mothers are always the first woman,
With the blessing of bearing sadness and blood,
And they have no choice,
Because their womb is full, and it cries.
***
We are born,
And the women, crying, sew our shrouds,
Because the belly of a woman is earth,
And it feels life, and it feels death.
***
Maybe, premonitions
Are a shadow in a distant night that maybe we saw,
And it waits for us,
Because shadows are patient.
So, we sleep with all the lights on,
And all that left is the fear,
Which is another premonition,
Infinitely more fatal.
***
We age, and we cannot count as we used to.
So we find more and more old people
Everywhere,
And maybe the old find our eyes.
And we compare our treasure of sadness.
***
Maybe we have to live everything,
To endure everything,
In order to answer one day,
Why we try not to cry.
***
We wear clothes, and we use them
Like the people in the past, and the saints and the prophets,
Because we have to hide carefully
The one who will betray us,
And we wouldn't have to betray ourselves anymore.
***
We say 'I am here'
Even though there is no one in the room,
And yet, it is the deepest truth.
***
Maybe, it is better to postpone things,
To be late for everything,
Also for the appointment that was closed
The moment before we were born,
With the immense sadness.
***
The lovers, and the immense loneliness after love.
Maybe, they are the first man and the first woman.
They tighten again, the snake that fell, around their neck,
And they leave the sad paradise, each from another door,
Thousands of years now.
***
The deep horizon where people go without a name.
And some go quiet, natural,
Because there are the mad, the waiters, the poor, the strangers, the beggars,
And they lost their name long before the deep horizon.
And only some evenings they remember they used to have a name,
And they try not to cry.
***
And always, the rapist and the girl, one night,
Take suddenly the same street.
Maybe rape is a kind of murder,
But it is important who dies for more times, more alone.
***
False testimonies never saved anyone,
But, they let us hide from ourselves,
Maybe even for a life time.
And only some evenings we miss ourselves,
And we cry for the testimony, and the falseness,
And the hiding, and the life time.
And nothing forgives us.
***
We carry, each one, his own victim,
Maybe, the one we murdered.
It is night, and it is cold,
And we have to find a place among the graves,
And they are many,
Maybe because we are all victims of something,
And for sure, of ourselves.
***
With each step we sink into another Odyssey, or maybe, another sadness,
And there are infinite odysseys and infinite sadness to sink in.
So, we have no choice. We learn how to limp.
***
We love the silent shows of life.
To look through a glass how people shout,
Because it is the stage of a silent movie,
And even the cemetery
Where the dead nod quietly,
Like a gentle theatre of shadows.
And we look at everything,
And we teach our tears how to be mute.
***
We are a child,
We climb to the attic,
And we never come down.
They call us 'a lost soul', a bump, a dreamer, or even a rebel,
Because we write revolutionary songs for children.
***
One night, the serial killer surprises us.
He slices our body,
And things fall from our entrails:
Children toys, all the keys of our life,
And long stories about short dreams.
We are not scavengers, and these things belonged to us.
And it is strange that we gather, from a whole life time,
Only these things.
***
MOSES
Maybe, seeing the promised land,
Even without entering,
Is something that happens to few,
Maybe the big dreamers, or the big Prophets,
And it is infinitely terrible, infinitely beautiful.
***
The stories of an evening.
Things that happen a moment after we grow old.
How we learn to love the journey up to the veranda
And the immense twilight dotted with birds.
And how there is nothing big except pain,
Because it teaches us how to die,
And saying 'good night',
Because it is a lesson in hope.
***
Behind the coat rack of the visitors
We hide the dreamers,
Because they come without a coat and they shiver,
And because it is autumn in life, so dreaming is not safe.
So, the leaves are cold, and the dreamers are cold, and the dreams.
***
Happiness is not so important.
After all, we accept the clowns when they lose it,
And the drunkards, when they lose it,
And even the poets become great when the suicide,
Or at least, when they are deeply desterate.
***
The marathon we run in order to live,
Which is a killer,
And in the evening we return heavy, infinitely heavy,
And we are not sure if we carry our bust,
Or the head of someone the guillotine took care of.
Maybe, we were guilty.
***
We push our way into the house of the old couple.
A prehistoric theatre of spiders.
We are not sure if the woman is dead, because she whines,
And she used to whine also alive.
And we don't know if the man is alive or dead,
Because he still hides the money he needs in order to forget,
In the small bars of forgetting.
And the wall between them is infinitely sad,
The true Wall of Wailing.
***
The poor old women bend, if they can still bend,
And give food to the stray cats,
Because they love animals,
And because they are shy and silent,
And they know that the only ones who wouldn't bow
And would say nothing, are these small tigers.
And it is the ideal charity.
***
There are the ones who have nowhere to go.
At times, they find home in a gaze that sees them,
And it is strange, because the homeless
Often have a gaze that is home.
***
We don't look often in the mirror,
Because what we see is the grave of a child,
And only the tombstone is missing.
***
Often, the nameless ones cry in court,
Not because they condemn them, which they usually do,
But because they remember they have a name.
***
SOLOMON
Some evenings, we realize, suddenly, the vanity of everything,
And we feel as if we were the first poet who wrote
THE VANITY OF ALL VANITIES.
And it is sad that we write the poetry of vanity,
Thousands of years now.
And the autumns continue.
***
A day like all others, the useless gestures, the useless hours.
And suddenly, a man, consumed and opaque,
Tells us: I am lost.
And we cry, because someone found us.
***
In order to be loved
We can do mad things,
But the maddest things
Is to love.
***
Prison is not the cell or even the key.
It is the thought of the key.
***
We enter a room, whether we have a key or not,
Because we are lonely,
But later, we think of the key,
And we are even more alone.
***
They bury us
And the cover they cover everything
With a mountain of earth and a tomb-stone.
And there is the blind violinist in the corner,
And his sadness is so deep,
That we come out, and we embrace him, the way only the dead can,
And he plays the treasures of people: the treasure of sadness, and of death, and of love.
***
We sit at the table,
And on the floor:
The mine field left by the talking and the gazes.
And everyone leaves slowly, carefully, alone.
***
The blind violinist, and the violin plays
As if it were trying to cure us from all the unfinished.
And maybe, the unfinished poetry of life
Is the most exquisite. The most terrible.
***
The family is pure.
But, in the sleep of the old,
Small incest-s play, like a child,
Because the evening comes.
***
There are dreams that are home,
But, little by little we lose them.
So, we are homeless even in our home.
***
We buy our dreams in a second hand shops,
And they are enough for our second hand life.
And only some evenings, when we are alone,
We try not to cry. And the cry we didn't cry was our own.
***
There are dreams that are big,
But, little by little we lose them,
Maybe they were too big.
And yet, we continue to sell what we lost
In the second hand shops of everything.
***
Something protects our life, alone, and even consumed,
Maybe, our treasure of sadness.
And we sell this something in second hand words
And in second hand shops.
***
There are many crimes in our home.
The loneliness that kills us,
And the dreams we kill,
Not to mention the patricide in our youth.
So, we mop the stains of blood from the floor,
But the blood continues.
***
Someone knocks on our door,
And we answer: there is no one. Everybody is dead,
Which is the truth,
Because the loneliness kills us,
And we are afraid to kill it.
***
At night
The city is a prehistoric stage.
Men hidden behind their biblical beards,
And women who offer their ancient milk of love,
And their motions are strange, as if under water,
Because the night drowns them, and maybe also the us,
And because the Great Flood repeats itself each night,
And the survivors are few.
***
Some nights, maybe in a dream, we go back.
We moved freely in the forests,
Because they were owned by our ancestors from the stone age,
The way a nomad owns his steps.
And we shared the fruits and the animals that the forest owned.
And we loved the way we never loved before,
Because no one owned the hour of love.
And only the death was unchanged, because it owned us.
***
We try to avoid fatal things,
But, the death of a child happens,
And it goes far, much further than most meanings.
So, we dig a small hole in earth,
And an immense hole inside us.
***
When we write the poetry of life,
We give it our treasure of pain and the one of sadness,
And people sing it,
Because these treasures are priceless,
And yet, everyone owns them,
And people love to sing themselves.
***
We have an aversion for empty things.
Often, we tie the laces of our empty shoes,
And the old men knot their eye-lashes when their eyes are empty,
And it hides them,
Because old men know that we live where our gaze is.
***
We have, at most,
Two parents,
Two legs, two hands,
And one body of love, in the best case.
And with these few things,
We have to invent our life.
***
When we put our head in a small hole in the fence,
And it comes out,
We believe there is something that let us do it,
Something miraculous.
And we don't realize we are the miracle makers,
Because we do more wonderful things.
We walk each day on the tight rope in order to live.
And there is no 'something'. We are alone.
***
Little by little we learn the natural phenomena of the world.
The day-break happens always above the wall where they shoot us.
And when they don't allow us out of the cell,
There is always a prehistoric cave to crawl out.
And the murderers know all the corners of shadow by their small name.
And death too, knows us by our small names
***
When they humiliate us
We throw our bones in our sack,
And we don't know how to kill the words that killed us,
Because we are not a killer by nature,
And because they humiliate the humble.
They feel it is safe.
One day, they'll bury us with the sack of bones, and with the humiliations,
And with the words that killed us. So, there is no hope.
***
If we could send roots in the smell of the happy soup
Boiling in the kitchen of our mother,
We would become an eternal tree,
Because the smell continues,
And it goes far, much further than the soup, and the kitchen,
And even our mother.
***
We become poets
When we have no choice.
Like the blind violinist
Who was born with the violin, wrapped in the same membrane,
And there was nothing to do about it. He played.
***
There is a moment, late in the day,
Which we all feel,
Because there are steps, distant and opaque,
That bring the twilight closer, and the black shadows.
And there is nothing we can do about it.
Yet, at times, we stretch our neck, if we can still do it,
To see a star that tears the shadows,
And we feel that also our eyes tear the shadows.
***
From the ground floor,
The smell of chicken soup,
Has the whole motherhood in it.
As if the smell had the plump breasts
Of a plump love.
***
The corridor in which we wait for everything
Becomes longer because we are tired,
And because each moment is another life,
And we need at least a few lives in order to live.
And we have a choice.
To wait, and lose something,
Or to leave and lose something.
***
Our enemies die somewhere else, somewhere far,
But we have the talent for guilt,
For feeling the immense guilt,
Because the feeling of guilt goes far, much further than innocence.
So, we are guilty.
***
At night, the twisted corridor, has its silent way to return to the past,
Because it passes along the doors, and the secret past behind each one,
The past of the person, the old newspaper that still loses old wars,
The old sofas that lost their war with time long ago.
And maybe the world has too many pasts,
The yesterday of each person, each animal, each leaf, each thing.
So, history is not a safe place. It may be a mine-field.
***
We don't know how to explain our presence
In the house, among friends, in the small hotel of love,
Because we don't know our role in the life of others, or even in our life.
We don't know who really needs us, and whom we need.
But, we have no choice. We go on living, and the roles choose us.
***
All the interesting things that happen under the table.
The note of the traitor and the vial of poison.
And the young soldier who hide his hands, because they killed and they hurt.
And the leg of a man, and of a girl who is too young, entwined.
And our whole childhood played under the table, so, we left it there.
***
We cover the body of a woman of love
With the old dress of our mother,
With the table cloth that aged with dignity,
And with the carpet from the living room, that loved us.
And it is sad,
Because it is the only proper home she'll ever have.
***
We are shy,
So we become a whisper which is hardly heard,
Or a gaze that knows all the floors,
And little by little, our whole life is a shadow,
A good place to hide.Forever.
***
Mirrors are a souvenir from the time we were two,
But, little by little we become many,
And there is not enough mirror for all our faces,
And ,for sure, not for what we want to see.
So, they are useless.
***
For the blind violinist
Music is his dictator, his sleep,
His eyes, because he sees the sounds,
And the biography of a sad man.
***
We part from our friends, in an evening like all others,
And we don't guess we'll meet again
In the next biblical flood, or another historic disaster.
Maybe, disasters bring people closer,
Because they don't want to die alone.
***
Maybe, the world is, by mistake, a poetry,
Because nothing intended to be a poem,
And everything does what it is supposed to do.
The water flows, the flowers grow, the leaves fall.
And pain and death are everywhere, like an epidemic.
And they are not a poem.
***
We stand behind the ruined houses and the ruins of ourselves,
So, it takes us a few life-times
Until we enter home.
And maybe, it is the longest journey ever.
***
We look at our socks
And we remember the child who wore them on his hands,
Because he knew they wanted, like him, to be a bird,
And maybe everything in our childhood wants to be a bird,
Also the loneliness and the silences,
But their wings were cut, from the start.
So, we learn how to walk,
And how to use the socks properly.
And we grow suddenly old,
Just because of a pair of socks and the birds.
***
We let people exile us from everything,
In order to commit a crime,
Bigger than the exile.
Because everybody wants to go to heaven, even the rough guys,
But, they need forgiveness,
And the exile doesn't forgive.
***
We buy a ticket for the bus
Because we intend to travel,
And because we have to prove to ourselves
That we are not afraid, and other million things.
So, we buy ,moment after moment, a ticket to ourselves.
***
There was never a place on the bench,
So, we had always to stand in front of the others,
Like a servant, and like all the humble.
Maybe, one day, we'll die standing.
***
Maybe, what we call pity,
Is the hand of a good lady,
The moment it destroys us.
***
Maybe, in the country-side, the loneliness is more bearable,
Because in the evenings, the birds come.
But in the city, there are no birds, because there are ceilings,
And there are no people
Because there are doors that forgot how to open.
So, the loneliness is everywhere,
Like an epidemic, or a biblical flood.
***
There are too many truths, and many that hurt us,
And the only protection is the refusal.
So, we refuse.
Yet, each thing has some truth in it,
So, we refuse everything.
But one day, a moment before or even after our death,
We'll have no choice. We'll have to believe in death,
Or in the soul and in the after- life.
And it is sad that we have to die
In order to believe in something.
***
When we say that we leave,
We have left already,
Because that's how departures work.
But, we don't know how to leave completely,
Something of us, a hand or a leg are left
On the other side of the door,
And at times, we take even the door with us.
***
We used to write a diary,
But we realized that our talent for masterpieces
Is somewhere else.
Maybe, we'll write the diary of a circus,
A circus for all seasons,
And it will be a masterpiece,
Because the circus is everywhere,
Also where we don't expect it.
***
Now, the whistle of the train
Lets us travel only in the room,
And the conductor asks for a ticket,
Because only children can go free.
So, we lost the child, and the whistle, and the journey,
And the memories are locked in a suitcase under our bed,
The one we prepared for the voyage with the whistle.
***
We visit our family,
Because someone has to recognize us
And to say we are us.
And it is important to know it,
To know who is responsible for the sadness
And for the little murders,
And who will forgive us.
***
We sit at the table
And we eat only one spot of the door,
As if one spot were enough to leave,
Or maybe it was enough for One who knows all names, to enter.
***
We buy a second hand screen
And we take it with us everywhere.
So, it hides the spasm in our silence,
Our scarred gestures,
And the shroud we wear for special occasions.
And people love us for our pleasant nature.
***
We don't know why we don't love ourselves,
What we forgot, what we should not remember,
And we have no choice.
We have to wear the face of someone else,
And to try to love this mask, if possible.
***
We are strange people, or at least weak.
Because our eyes take us wherever they want,
To a key hole, or to a circus for one clown and one child.
But we have no choice. Our eyes take us.
And maybe it is not strange ,
After all, where our gaze is- that's where we live.
***
Night,
And the distant steps that go somewhere,
Halt for a while
The purposelessness of the world.
***
The rain is a harsh game for the strangers,
Because they lose always.
Slowly the passport melts, and it is the only thing that knows their name.
So, they lose their name.
And when the rain is a biblical flood,
There are not enough umbrellas in the ware houses up there,
So, they lose their life once more,
After they've lost it in the places where the world ended.
***
People are lost in the streets of the city all the time.
The children, the old, and also the lovers lose each other.
Maybe their steps stranded in parallel streets,
And maybe also their love.
And it is useless to look for lost loves in parallel streets,
And maybe also for other things that were lost there.
***
For some obscure reason
Children love to play with stones.
Maybe the stones give some of their eternity to childhood,
And all the child knows is that the morning was eternal.
***
We use a whole life
To save someone from drowning,
Or we spend a few life times
Deep in a body of love.
And it is nice to know
We have enough lives for everything
***
The silence of the cypress trees in the cemetery
Is suspicious.
Maybe they know something we don't know
Or we don't want to know.
Maybe they hide the cry of the dead.
Maybe they sense, deep in their roots, that pain goes far,
Much further than death.
***
The clocks have their own climate.
They don't grow cold in winter when it rains
And there is no portico, or at least an umbrella of mercy,
And when we are alone,
And when we die.
***
We age. We grow old on the stair case,
Because we cannot climb anymore,
And because people pass there always, day and night,
The drunk, the murderers,
And the women of love who sit by us,
So, we don't die alone.
***
The humble wear always a hat over their head and the ears,
And maybe they are born with it.
So, the ridicule of the others remains in the hat.
And they don't know it, but this hat is holy.
***
We have to protect ourselves from ridicule
Even when we are a poet.
So, we write something heroic,
And the others bow,
And they don't guess that it ridicules them.
***
We see a dream that is too beautiful,
And, like the Promised Land, we cannot enter.
So we mop each night the dust from the dream and from the land.
Maybe we don't know it. But this dust is holy.
***
Poems, like everything else,
Are written on the sand.
Maybe that's why they are unique.
Unique and true.
***
Somewhere, sometime
We look in the mirror,
And we don't know who of the two
Betrayed us,
And who will forgive us, one day.
***
There are things that make the black dreams familiar.
Like the nights when it is too cold to live,
And the child of the stranger clenches in his fingers
The last toy.
When we realize it was not a dream.
***
Sick people rarely speak,
Even though there is a spasm in their silence,
Because pain doesn't use words,
And because they don't want to cry.
***
When we were a child, the dark corners of the house
Were home for us and for our imaginary friend.
But, later, they are a mine field.
Because someone else hides there,
Someone who knows all the dark corners
In the house and inside us.
Maybe it is us, and maybe the Unknown,
And we don't know who will forgive us,
Because we don't know how to forgive ourselves.
***
The things we valued too much, for years,
Are dangerous,
Because these things are too high,
So when we grow old and we want to see them,
Maybe for the last time,
We stretch our neck, if we can still do it,
And all we see is the sky and the birds,
And it is beautiful, and it kills us.
***
Sometimes, at night,
The distant songs of people around a distant fire,
Assure us that eternity is still here.
***
The humble pick up from the floor
The napkin we threw,
Maybe we didn't notice, and maybe on purpose,
And they look at their hand, their silent hand,
As if all their life was there,
And all the rest is noise.
And they try not to cry.
***
At times dreams are light:
A poem, like a gaze that lets us float over the panic,
Or the feather on the hat of a woman of love
That lets us float over everything,
Or even a girl that risks her future in the mirror.
But in the morning the gravity is different,
And nothing is really light,
Because we have to run, on the ground, inch by inch,
The marathon, in order to live.
***
We sit in the veranda ,
We go nowhere, and the night goes nowhere,
And a flock of birds flies silently
Out of the purposelessness of the world.
***
We grow old. Our body is a twisted thread,
And this thread twists more and more,
So when we die it is a knot. And no one can break it,
Because there are no Great Alexander-s in death.
And maybe, the only great thing are the knots
Because they are made of the lives of people, the thousand Sagas.
***
We dream of a clock that wouldn't chase us away,
Like the game of a child,
Or like the play of the bodies of love,
Or like a night in a deserted street,
When the only time is the time of the stars,
And it lets us stay.
***
There are some things that postpone the hang man.
Like the morning coffee,
Or like the illegible laughter of a man and a woman,
And like the journey to the Promised land,
Because this journey goes far,
Much further than the travelers can imagine,
And the hang man is patient, at times.
***
The stranger from the place where the world ended
Grows old, or maybe he was always old,
And often, he doses,
Like someone who is again somewhere else,
Or maybe, he is already somewhere else,
Even though his slippers are here.
***
At the table,
The gazes are like wine, they postpone the betrayal.
And the servants
Who bend to pick a napkin we threw, maybe on purpose,
Glimpse the truth hiding under the table.
And it doesn't know it hides in a mine-field.
***
There are things that accept us,
Like the deserter who cannot kill anymore,
And the twilight lets him stop the running, and it lets him cry.
And maybe this twilight will forgive him,
Because his hands and his gun don't forgive.
***