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The Promised Land

To live is to flee.
To live is to flee and bounce off your hesitance.
To live is to let go of your hesitance.
To live is to name the escapee.
To live is to wait.
To live is to feel the breeze in this moment.
To live is to wait for this moment to come once more.
To live is to deny.
To live is to deny that anything can be once more.
To live is to learn to say this.
To live is to place a face we can no longer recall.
To live is to name them.
To live is to walk.
To live is to set limits.
To live is to sketch walls rather than vaulting them
and to make spreadsheets with predicted errors.
To live is to stop seeing.
To live is to make.
To live is to make the word meet its worth.
To live is to shelter in the word’s shade and listen to it.
To live is to dance.
To live is you waiting to dance with me.
To live is to walk into a hall of golden sloughs.
To live is to accept your pressing body.
To live is to get dirty.
To live is to get your hands dirty.
To live is to breathe in dust.
To live is to feel insatiable wanderlust
To live is to clean yourself and head back to the mud.
To live is to cry out while wading in this immenseness of muck.
To live is to pray.
To live is to have synchronised faith.
To live is to face the fate of once more.
To live is to dare to live.
To live is to write down this silence.
To live is to live tidal waves, certainty, insomnia.
To live is to hesitate once again
and to name the world you perceive.
To live is to laud the small things.
To live is to survive.
To live is to break free of the rail,
to write the blank page,
to sate famine,
to clear your throat,
to grasp the here and now that rocks you.
To live is to jump and never land in the same place.
To live is to cross over the continuous line.
To live is to not win.

Nostalgia for the Light

A poem is a comet:
as it combusts
it speeds beyond the sky, unreachable,
its mane facing the wind.

Up close, though, there is only filth.
The closer you get, the more repulsive
its contents become: the mistrustful comma,
its undetachable tail
like an idol it cannot be free of.

And you cannot stop looking at it,
now that it glows with the light of astonishment:
such is its frost, it appears ablaze,
such is its energy, it is wholly inexistent.

Yet you will never see it again.
Such is poetry: the mistake that drifts in the void,
void of rhythm (as if) weather-beaten by lightyears,
void of a place to rest, void of Itaca,
void of you, yet filled with the end
of a today which is everything and nothing at all.

Halley

I confess:

I imagined you as fire making the firmament bleed
and it shows me how to be part of the coda
-this shadow you that fades away.

I confess I live
to wait for you once more.

Rio Grande

The train reaches the cliff.
It tumbles down the screed slope.

It explodes.

I wrote a poem about it and now I am unsure
what to do about it all, these smithereens. It’s you:

scrap metal.

Accelerated Expansion

I stopped in front of you.
There was
the shadow.

The shadow that dances behind the hips of this now I name,
the shadow of a fist punching for life,
the shadow whose eyes betray its lovers,
the shadow hiding in musty wardrobes,
the shadow between the writhing of maggots playing at divine hunger,
the shadow under our rafters, in our sinks, between boxes,
the shadow that lives in the soul of every sun-exposed smile,
the shadow who strokes its cats at night, while the shadow melts
into a ray of evicted light.

This shadow
of mine, in this silence.

I stopped in front of ourselves.
Our faces, ablaze.
Us, in the shadows of a fire.

Fabula rasa

Every poem should aim for translucence,
and only as a last resort to entertain,
clear and precise, open-minded to its audience,
god-sent, the face of the world’s hidden domain,

like a daisy’s pistil regrown and come alive
it may slice open guts, paths, heels and hands,
or take a sniff while the dew drains our life,
and so on, a white lamb treading the way’s milky sands,

projecting the mantis’ choked prayer,
and regurgitating eternity’s chart,
to resolve the enigma of this narrowest affair,
and be the chimney to a chided heart.

Archetypal Scenario

A sterile family in the suburbs
-halfway between the periphery and the hostile –
picks up the poem
and with it fashions the stuff of fiction.

By the end,
the poem is a bucket
and this verse
a complex
chimera from the future.

That Kind of Silence

And then, there was silence.
Like when pain comes to its end
and you stand at the vigil’s edge
before dream, sleep and death.

A silence like one found in a chamber
like the moment you lay the table
for an unshareable intimacy,
a noise that echoes
in the nothing found in so much solitude,
in the extasy of love,
in the way nature holds itself.

The silence that never ends.
For an instant, home.

A silence that touches itself,
in that nook of drawn-out pleasure,
like the hand that tickles reason
in the din of existence.

The silence of knowing yourself:

blessed is the fern
that survives all this cement.

Supernova

I am Nobody
-and that’s how I want it

a man who searches for stakes, crushes grapes,
distracts the monster and tenderizes trickery

always cluded in the fit of laughter,
in their parched flight.
Nobody, in the tedium of insult,
synthesised in Prometheus’ flames
while you all raise your hands into the air:
be quiet and do not name me

to be Nobody
is to be Everybody.

HORIZON OF HAPPENINGS, small selection of poems on the space-time intersection
Translation: Jacob Rhodes

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