English

Inkling of Exhaustion

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 from Fosca límit (Edge of Darkness). 2015
Translation: Tim James Morris