inside a stranger

I

the night has invaded me

like a scared animal seeking refuge.

I travel anxiously from sleep to sleep,

trading my home with ghosts who forget to leave.

uncertainty, the black beast, has taken over flesh.

raw and defenseless, it creeps in

like the sudden ache of a missing body part,

feeding the distance

with the texture of a fractured caress.

it projects a break in our usual crimes,

the urge to go back

in instants of sweet hallucination

to a noisy suffocating cinema

where actors distort their lines

and lose their gestures.

it lulls me with a false feeling of belongingness

to a secret place far from the sun

where I don’t cover myself

with the radiation of a new skin.

familiar rooms mislead me

in their own private language

as I run into the skeleton of a memory

awaiting to be dragged through new layers of doubt.

II

the city opens like a wound.

everyone is sleeping and I am awake,

a pale structure of bones

mapped in heavy veins of yellow.

tiny volcanoes have grown under my skin,

swollen and sore from all the needles I’ve stuck

in our sad rupture of dialogue,

wishing for you to find me

deep down in the joyless cell of your mind,

scratching its walls like a fierce stubborn cat.

I can’t reach you where our broken tissues once met.

you hide behind a fake act of disappearance,

privileged in your position of observer,

you dream of planes that leave and never come back.

there is nothing else here that reminds of life,

only our maps of regrets,

stretched, stained and spread all over the streets.

our deceitful atoms

fixed in their nervous light.

glued to an unfinished structure of pain,

you are as awake as I am,

returning like a thief to pay his debt.

I meet you for the last time

again and again, in another story

where you and I sit together at the slaughterhouse

and talk about whatever one can talk about

in the last minutes of life.

III

now the stitches have been rearranged,

they cover the evidence of absence of absence.

machines split in halves direct what we have become:

static smiles in fake equilibrium,

isolated gestures and their formless fruit, defeat.

exhausted by the narcissistic feast of disjointed egos,

by all explored stages of guilt,

we chase a different kind of fog

in pursuit of abandonment.

the morning will have its revenge on us,

cutting in like the touch of a non-human hand

that will cleanse the blood

and draw new faces and limbs,

polished at the edges

and perfectly designed not to merge again.

it’s the last hour of our trial.

I come home to find

an intruder defending his territory.

cast out from the slowly abandoned dream,

warm silhouettes run into decomposition.

I give in to sleep.

nobody lives here anymore.