If one night the song werethe inkling of sound made by bowels, knives, psalms and slices of the staid city; if one night death were an incandescent Orion in the entrails of tears of steel, were the stale stench of exhaustion from the empty abyss; if one night you and I framed the scene, and split a black flower in the beauty of weightless ecstasy; if one nightwe lived out the finezza of raw love and where we arewere all there is in a silence that would grace the room; if one night in the heart of the night, there were no hinge between you, me and the cold; if we were passing by, the unyielding mist, the persistent rumble, if one night.
The Artefact of the Edge
A body never senses the limits of what it says. It reveals itself in the cut of a verse, fills the holes that fuel it, becomes addicted to the terror of the void and to the barbarity of saying too much.
A body having worked miracles to possess deceit, knows it craves more than the white of the book. And chases the space that slips through the margins, ash from a sublime darkness, perhaps. It scratches trees in every graveyard, and seeks out, behind every door, another body another kiss a clue of some memory and all the infinite stillness of the world. It searches ever further, because the world is a meagre thing and the corridors of truth choke like the hands of the Ripper.
The body, in a harrowing final attempt, seizes the chance to be the hope of a real frame when the miracle finally arrives: to see itself as a canvas and be written from top to bottom, so that no-one can even again mistake poetry for virtue.
Caro data vermibus
Deny me peace if you want, so that my eyes, having slept, blink falteringly, seeking you in every worm that will devour my insides.
Deny me rest, so that even once dead and buried I still urge to discover you every day, to capture you in vanishing points with my eyes, ever more aged, flabby, soft and rotten like fruit peeping out from the basket of every memory.
Deny me indecency, deny me thrice before the dawn cock crows itself hoarse and give me some small passion as my heart comes apart in every afternoon sun.
The body won’t muster the strength to crave you, but fingers and flesh will, all those secret tactile parts that cannot live without this putrid taste; the opened coffin will reveal the flawless eyes of someone who still bears your face like the sound of a lighthouse in broad daylight, like water bursting out through holes bored by worms:
a dead body with rhymes and vices that can only repeat your name, lifeless eyes all too alive, a piece of what I once was, begging for a smile as a pledge, eternal rest in paintings of joy and decay, your hand caressing desire;
calcified bones begging you to step out of the frame and the photo, to place your body next to mine, together till death do us part, to prepare for all eternity without you but with your taste embedded in every inch of what is melting and melding with me.
Deny me peace: eternity is a rhymeless song, an absurd party dress if not with you.
Impulse
I write blood and suck the paper.
They don’t heal, the things they tell you, because the tongue wants you and clings to the windows of a night with no threshold.
I write bled dry and the vein soaks you up, while I taste you on the rim of the Grail and bring my eyetooth to my lips.
I am so thirsty that I write fall and tumble down the edges of what could have been our memory, and I fall apart like the aluminium particles of the Challenger shuttle.
Fire impresses, but light can kill. And reaps, in the end, like the blood that makes you present, as I write loss and everything I experience collides.
As if blindness were possible.
In the Mariana Trench
Oxygen, emulsions and nickel reflecting the existing logic. Unicellular life, the sand of verses, the obsession with dissolving the soul in the darkness that leads to the belly:
you know the cuts.
You know the reason why, because you confuse reason with necessity, and cross boundaries, havens, you, who slake the Never, edge of darkness, and cut across the hoe that severs the seminal heart of the Earth.
There is nothing, but everything reveals itself.
The cry of denied eyes that can’t stop believing in the impossible.
Endurance
Unshoe life while ever thirsty. Wrestle the alphabet like bread. Stain hunger with walls between seas. Flee from tyrants and unhealthy worms. Believe in guerrillas of the ephemeral. Expel people from pain. Return the arm to the guarded heart. Be an empire in excess and passion. Load revolvers with fingers. Shoot bundles of flaming vipers. The shipwrecked freedom of the call. Persist, always, until ardency is won.
Song
You belong to a world of spirits.
The rest is noise.
Selection of poems fromFosca límit (Edge of Darkness). 2015 Translation: Tim James Morris