still lives

in my last dream of us we were invaded by

a fearful, overthrowing veil of white.

it surged inside abruptly, like a sentence,

cutting through our impulses, until it was clear that

to play dead would be the only option left.

I was made a ghost because of your weakness

and I made you one as some kind of vengeance,

consenting to remain tenants in a colourless room,

while impersonal hands would quietly undo

our place in time, our intersecting lines

and all other details that resemble life.

it didn’t take long for stillness to lurk in,

unruffled by the dream substance

that would subside to white and then sink to black

while, particle by particle, in irreversible ripples,

we would begin to meld with the walls and windowpanes,

the only remnants in the room pulsating existence.

invisible insects

in the end there is only disappearance
and beneath the still surface
of this flow of backwards gestures
there is the unfortunate us,
scared as hell by the lives that we decide to
bury, pressing pain on old photographs,
chasing a new silence as the only possible
comfort zone, harvesting dust.

we knuckle under to the ashes
of those that once breathed
and loved in our bones,
each time we decide
we will not know anything of ourselves,
bodies that never were here.

feral

our night began when we knew
we’d been given too much. it was
bitter enough for an undertaking of lovers
and sharp enough for a task of
human reason, because happiness,
the absence of fear, is not of this world.

the charge fell out like a rift in a
shared appendage, it propelled streams of
innumerable guilts inside both of us,
pulling us like an anchor
to the point where loneliness hurts most.

brutal like too selfish drowners,
we struggled in search of each one’s distant,
uncertain shore, indifferent to
the harsh dryness of sand
that lay ahead, patiently waiting
its quarry.

membrane

time steps with the disaffection of an incurious tourist

in this space we’ve been wrapped in.

this life that’s been stretched on us

has been taking us for granted,

this life that’s been inflicted on us

has been giving us too little air.

we’re the fatigued and unimpressed

lying on the floor in a lobby

that has long ago grown weary of us.

even the walls mock our useless chatter

with their unflattering echoes.

from this point there is no hint of novelty,

no place for curiosity, only tenuous doors

that will close and open and close

until the day when, tired of the uncaring act of waiting, 

we will have left behind

the hostile coats, the burdensome shoes, the panic

and, without knowing it,

we will have finally arrived

inside. 

wound growers

name it culture of madness,
we name it culture of
bloodsucking dreams,
sacred territory,
our skins glued together
in the most beautiful accident
of slipping judgement.

we don’t speak of excess,
we speak of an exile that
unites us, wave to wave,
fracture to fracture,
we speak of
gardens at the frontier of life
where we learn about
the manifold types of death.

because we are made of
the air that we occupy
in possessive surges of love
and the asphalt that we crush
shapelessly,
we will be favoured by the gods.

our bodies will end
in a place where nothing is uncertain,
in some kind of afterlife,
erecting and living
a fulfilling vision
of all the insecurities of the world
made flesh.

sour seasons

I live in a museum not too far from the ocean,

its walls are meager, but there is infinite room for

a dream of unyielding meagerness.

the tenants here serenely nurse

a history always patient enough to repeat itself.
as visitors who’ve forgotten they’re visitors,

we possess the integrity of sleepers.

the weather is droughty on this side of existence.

those who arrive here, always volatile and curious,

they grow to exercise denial.

I wake up each day with a yearning for meeting
those young enough to remember snow,

the elegant disobeyers of false disobedience,

the higher spirits.

there is sometimes too much silence to endure 

in this frame within a frame.

people talk a lot because they can’t stand hearing

the cadence of their breaths, always imperfect.

I’m not much of a talker. I wish I could write thousands of pages 
about the beauty of bruised knees.

I fantasize about the ugliest of souls,

staring into each other.

unreasonable creatures never fall from grace.

uncanny music

faulty one,
I have met fear in many different corridors
or maybe she has been the one ardently searching for me
and this, like love, is one of those things
only the dead are permitted to speak of.
the dead, they always know better.

last night in my room I came across a cold skeleton,
an eerie figure made of
my arms hanging lifelessly around your neck,
severed arms, like those of a mannequin -
head, torso, legs taken away,
nothing left but the sunk obstinacy
of not letting go.

here, right here on these lips that try to crush distance,
an unwanted augury has been playing all the time
and I know it has to do with
an image we’re both disheartened by -
two ghosts sitting at the same dreary table,
silenced and stiff, pouring wine.

I lean my head on your shoulder,
wishing of not knowing.
the spectre of two mingled longings
creeps between your sleep and mine,
unnerved and deformed
by the certainty of loss.

carnivore

how can I be sure I am still flesh and bone
under your constant cutting of limbs?
I have become defenceless in my work as a hunter,
you have lived inside me in thousands of shades
and I have seen the faces of all your racking tentacles,
each one of them incomplete, whimsical,
each one of them right.
kill yourself, tired flesh, and be born again,
brilliant for another,
unbruised, untarnished, undamaged by my constant
digging of nails.
is this what you wanted, this plaguing clash of arrows?
heads rolling on our emaciated playground,
the leftovers of our outstretching vagary,
like greedy insects -
is there anything else that we are made of,
anything else to consume?
to you I could be a hundred persons more or less,
engulfed in skin, all gestures exhausted,
none of us knowing what we came searching for in the first place,
fallling through each other like knives.
our only reality, the need to be alive.