Alice I

The mornings are always prosperous, it can feel a little sinful even, arrogantly happy, so fresh like the summer ebbing tide; there's this constant guilt about being alive, the guilt of being so trivial, harvesting the produce of the tree, moonlight breakfasts and the loud singing too. Outdoors, even past the walled patio and the garden, the guilt is constantly augmented up to the point where it already swallows the whole world into an orderly mass of stars, visible in daylight. There's this urgent complacency in it, voracious desire to be so simply understood, to transform the time in a living space; unlike the nights, the morning steals away from the fear of one's own death, it might be even necessary and silent, unpoetical, accidental and sudden. The time seems mortal and absolutely eternal, a necessary transition between cycles of slumber, bearably interminable at the juncture of the hours, less passionate than fragile, with a body of its own, unavailable for testimony and clean from the glitter and the animal gaze of inner sunshines.

I enjoy looking at my own image, through the glasswindows of the cars as they move along faster than the smoke escaping the breathing moisture of my mouth; never in a mirror or in the water, but in the movement of the glass. The skin is less deteriorated than the eyes, they look so passively small, unready for love while the rest of the body in unison stands on the asphalt craving for that transformation, rising to the miracle rather than the hopeful expectation of prayer. There's this inner faithful desire to just never stop the night, to continue deprived from sleep in a timeless flight toward a destination, looking at death from closer, without fear or expectation, just letting himself be carried away slowly and in full awakefulness, yet the little pleasures of daytime, the scorching sun or the hide outs from the rain, the pressure of the roof tiles over the gravity of the shoes and the plants, all of this, keeps us from the waters of this flight at the unsafe distance of oblivion.

Through the glasswindows the prosperity becomes a happy possession, an undeniable gift, language of berries and figs, vanquishing the despair of facing up to the stars and imagining stairways that lead up to more heavenly places where there's still daylight, even outside of the earth, carpeted with trees and thrushes, shrubs and elbows, just like down here, an island burning down, flames rising up and the bodies in the thrust of the leaves reaching past horizons of winds and temptations of the cool breeze. But there's always this dispassionate end with the jams and the lines, the carpets of skylights extending along the pitch of the greenery and rising abovewards with sounds and delights, the journeys are wonderful and the trains become livelier than waters puncturing the sand, it is a final act, like a grand finale, the eye folds up and the hand reaches for a telephone in a pocket near the heart. I wish there were these mornings also overthere, when I can find them at last, when the screens will become flights and even if for a sole moment I could trespass the commandment of sitting behind glass, to place a fingertip near their mouths and swim inside their necks with the erratic motions of drowning helplessly into and against the tide, being lashed by the rocks in the silt, the scales of the fish and the sharp nails of the moss in the walls of the riverbanks. Losing the visions from inside and in their stead, floating above the planes from underneath the water, gazing into the smoke, from above, loving the cuts in the flesh, that kind of unlove that begins in the throat and becomes friendly at the level of the cheek, unable to sleep over the chest, it turns to the embrace of hollow grass.

Changeling in 4 Instances

Only at the expense of the clumsiest exhaustion the gifts of daylight, transparent and sterile, seem to rain from above but without any particular source; he might well stand outside for the hours in between half inebriated by the chaotic demeanour of the floortiles that resemble more a palette of colors protruding in greys mixed with reds, there is this sterile sense of clairvoyance obtained from the sequence of the days shoveled by patience into one continuum of light, afterlight and the indoor purple muteness of the night. The skylight showers the first rays of sun seen in a fortnight and he is surprised to feel warmth on his decolored shoulder other than the alternating changes of temperature in the most varied forms of recoiling, kneeling and suffocating from cold itself.

There's no other feeling through the hours but the absence of worded imprecations on the part of an intimate distant acquaintance, but he is somewhat comforted, the yearning itself is far more pleasurable than the complicity in this reckless plot to unearth beauty from some place, from some space in which they stand, barefooted, sensual and yet childishly loving; it seems to be inappropriate to think of love without the impeding dragging of risky casualty, perhaps it is a good thing to be exiled from this friendly imprisonment and instead, to enjoy the silence and the rather dull company of this icy chunk of memory. There's this total unrest, coupled with a certain aesthetic satisfaction but the abscence becomes an empty space filled with his own flesh, and as if in olden times, the other body, and not even a body, but mere expressions and wrinkles, satisfaction of lips and language of hands, covers the whole geography of yet another motif; an impossible messianicity that tiptoes on knees and knuckles, on the palms of the hands and the forehead, it is allowed no further.

But then again, it is this beautiful skylight, broad like a river at night, trying to pierce through the earth below and reach him by the ankle, beautiful, the light, but just as helpess, tardily enunciated, unletting go of the big vault of heavens, a feeling so intense, never a sentiment, running deeper than a grasshopper's jumps into the void mouth of the rattlesnake, more like a sense of discomfort at the height of the bellybutton than the purer and sterile infatuation of poets and others that looks for lips where only brushes and papers are set aside for viewing. The tiny room seems to contain everything vaulted within, the cheap reproductions of lifeless paintings, the table maps, unused drawers, pencils and papers, the distant litanies of a family, written after the style of prayers but anchored far away, where he can't reach them, where they are to no avail. There are other days, higher up the scale of the historical forces, but they are quietly inferior, less distinct, less formless and just as vague, but never bordering on palatal pleasure.

We learn the world from images! He muses for himself, trying a hand at less singular thought, something less personal, that shall require the imagination more than this difficult skill of human trust. It's difficult to feel unhappy in such moments, the sheet replaces the skin of the tree, the mud and the fly, meandering in a woodland of false touches of the hand, unmolested by the geographical lie. There're still some sounds that manage to pervert the harmony of the ebbing tide, no serendipitous waters reaching from below, there's nothing mad in the flight, just the soft and sweet surrender of the fingerprint to a different order of joys, less honest and also less interesting but not as crude, not as indifferent, not as solid. Somehow he is fascinated by the daylight, wondering, pondering on the whereabouts of legs and limbs, of the other; not entirely uncomfortable with the newfound solitude, with the transient pedantry of the silence in the chamber, there's still so much a person alone can do with a piano and the yearning seems prettier than the overweight of extant telegrams. It is so strange, all of a sudden, for a character in a novel to go missing, just like that, he can't remember any particular details, deliberately almost. Oh, he's at last relieved from the curious ignorance: It was not a sanderling, it was the changeling! There's no anxiety in his waiting for the right lines to come up, it's more like the sort of sympathies one has for the fatherland he left, they're not quite dead but neither real they are.

Iceland (old journey)

Sint Maarten (old journey)

Out of Time

Slow, throatsore, painless the spine

A cold in the hand, low blood-pressure

It is just a night, fragilemost

Opulent handshake with the hour

Hoping for a ceasefire

Between the wind and the time

Rain pouring elsewhere

An umbrella within the chest

Sheltering turbulent words

They run through the wrinkle lines

A coffin for two, in the mornings of life

No more coffee, he is asking for love

Not for another crutch in the sand

Faithful summers of the past

He might fly to San Francisco next time

With no other luggage than your eyes

In an amber box full of padnotes

Of paradox, an assortment of postcards too

You haven´t missed a train alone

The abandonment runs deeper

Deeper than papercuts over skin

Oceans of dead lullaby

Winters and falls

A yesteryear!

A bloodtorrent of letters

Plaster without walls

Misunderstandings, conversations, pain in your chest

Embedded solidly, soundless, presences

Another traveler yet

Will find your letters, the knowledge of the hair

He might be a better storyteller

His pockets of grain, the skin less decent

Suitable for loss, gain of porcelain

Rustier than your shoulders of grass

Without headaches from jetlags

It is not your fault, wanderer

You have never been precise

You never sleep at night

But you can write!

The travel log of the city sleeper

That will live out of your luggage

And bleed out his heart

Helpless you are

That chest is not thine

You are out of time

Skin

So often I am overcome by the older thoughts about illness and my peace is then broken piecemeal again, stolen; the quietness another type of well known madness, more powerful than illness, than body and word, than soul and world, in the constant flow of the innermost tides that inundate the joys of earlier days and the imagined faces of beloved men, with poisonous unrest, in a swift and constant flight, they all begin to vanish, recede with the waters in tenfold pulsations of fingertips and for a moment the lips become dreamy, the flesh less bruised, the limbs covered with sawdust, twilights as words, cityscapes overflowing with darker shades of colour folding up into the most primary greys of morning moonshine. They begin to loosen their bodies, losing shapes and turning into lines, jotted down at haphazard into the risky night, vertical endeavours reaching up to the most distant slies of heaven and the power of contentment limited to possible dreams alone.

Just as often I miss the mornings, time after time, inebriated from the fogs in the night outside, raining upwards into the streetlights, bathing the fickle warmth of the yellow hearbeats in the glass; it becomes impossible to face the days as they break into hours of noises, demands and constraints, into unfamiliar old bearings in this language so distant, so unloving and often so silent to the inner desire of yearning eyes, searching for blue and grey, also for weaker greens, cerulean and emerald, a merit land of oceans passed unter water, falling from a canvas, breaking ranks at last, like a sanderling, traveling through strands of the most foreign skins, so utterly changed by this slow movement of the arms. Precarious minutes, like odes, navigation plans for a boat anchored inland. The simplest pleasure denied at the expense of a stanza, looking into the void, performing for a last time the lines that could keep these ghosts afloat for yet a day more, even if only for the peak of the hour when a word is needed to unwind.

Eyes wide open into the pitchdark, fueled by the anaesthetic spitefulness of silence, drowning in the leaves as they fall from the books and the windows, unimagining the trees and other elements of the universe outside, refusing to engage with the smells and the fruits of their hands; the day sleeps away into endless vacuous time, hours of shipwreck into the exile of calm, death yet so far, the world so alive, rustling and joyful, nothing is changed, no decree is revoked, no indictment passed. There are chairs, floortiles, long threads of hanging clothes, invisible rooves, mosquitos as rowers and the taste of snow in leftovers from food, maps of foreign lands, the smooth sounds of hair, nothing is bloodied, everything at rest, it is so wonderful, this beauty, destructive, stale, untouched by motion, by decay, by the most fickle and superficial moment of love, it contains everything, like the morning, except the writer, the instructions, the beloved man and the light.

You can´t be sure anymore whether this is illness or absence, what overpowers you, it is a metaphor of images, a puzzle without riddles that you might not want to complete, least you discover callousness in the other end of the line. Failing to reckon, to acknowledge, it is a lot easier, makes you less guilty, your thoughts unhampered, you´re free to choose, friend or foe, for yourself. Anything can be written, anyone destroyed, wiped from the vessel of fragile impossible future thoughts, cleaned as dust, replaced, painted over again, without colours other than grain. Reading becomes impossible, asfixiating, you only want to hold tightly, to give in, to reach abovewards, oh set the time aright! Prayer is to no avail, the only refuge is without, in the open, beneath the flux of earth and rain, of bodies with olden flesh, new memories, reckless nails, bruised chins, cuts in the lips, a bitter flavor in the arm. You feel grace in the illness, it keeps you from the dream.