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.

otherwhere

I remember your words,

you told me about the darkest of nights,

the longest of winters and how we will arise brilliantly,

winding softly sharpened lines, ten times more beautiful.

inside out presence, my knees are warmed by the reminiscence of hell,

the smell of embers, I hold it in me like a rare possession,

it curves the lines of my lips because I know more than them.

it’s past midnight now, the passing of death, lush dawning,

funny how the whole city lives in our mouths,

faintly a matter of space for one who has seen the other side,

dissolving vanquished by the unlikeliness of our worlds.

...in time you learn the state of breakage comes with velvety perfumes,

in time you learn the vastest part of life takes place in rooms of absence.

new roses

olanzapine tastes sweet
melting on absent tongues.

...sour air. beneath the skin
there is immense room for doubt.

the haziness of a half-formed

comfort zone, of a half-formed 

glance of not aware.

wholesome dispatch, a promise of 

white space, illiterate warmth. 

a lifetime to learn

not to care for what is 
on the other side of sleep.

beauty only exists within contours of defeat

we might have lived centuries of sleep ago
as forlorn hallowers of a damned descent,
defenders of beautifully bleak cities of wreckage,
an army of sullenness.
the inside of our fabric is written in melancholy,
a dictate from Saturn,
to swim relentlessly through spastic dark waters,
drifting into liquid-eyed, blood-eyed, hollow-eyed creatures,
just to find out we are not any larger than
the trembling space between our thin, tired lids.
to shield a delicate canvas for narcissistic decay,
probably the reason we were manufactured in silent undoing,
our eternity hanging by emaciated fingers,
an unfinished projection,
earthen, disturbing dream of opium skies.
the only wisdom is to love the iridescence of ruin,
for there is nothing worthier or lavisher
than the charge of impossibility.

love song

do you remember it? …the arcades
breaking down with the
flood of petrified voices,
the splitting ground breathing
vengeance in immaculate spirals,
the vestal black sky…
and us, for the first time,
we didn’t have a single question to ask.
as I clearly recall it, we were walking
lightheartedly like enamoured ghosts,
hand-in-hand through the millions of shards,
laughing at the burning buildings
with our heads thrown back.
sweet velvet dream.

streamside

shut your eyes,
let me close them with mine,
lightly as we
exchange skin we
exchange confusion.
silence is our drug
and we serve it remarcably well,
the perfect pieces
in the irony of contours -
you slipping fragments of reason and I
not finding it unusal at all
that someday these entwining sillhouettes
will pass each other in streets and subways
like perfect strangers.
...and now you've already begun
swimming towards the cutting void
in intact darkness,
unaware that we, my dear,
we could never really meet
anywhere.
and I smile at the thought
that you could so easily be my feast of vanity,
lovely undernourished body,
that you could carry me wherever you'd linger,
like a stifling and bitter anchor,
while I could engage in the task of killing time,
cutting pieces of you
from my remote distance
with the gentlest of hands.

to live unceasingly in those instants before drowning

people often say too much noise is overwhelming,
but most of us are consumed by the lack of it.

such a horrible irony,
to be ripped to pieces
by the silent, the indifferent, the nonpresent.

such a strange paradox,
that nothing moves more violently inside one
than what one has lost.

screened

hesitant reminders of present,
threads of light permeate the sleep-ensnared room,
embracing diffident street noise
in slow melting of all leftovers of night.

I'm lying in bed at the brink of black & white,
life-disjoined and space-severed,
contemplating the minute quivers of our lurking bodies,
freezing the flashes.

the blurry one

chasing a safe passage in a downpour of anxiety,

I couldn't evade meeting the uneasiness in you.

to all appearances the outside world had overpassed us -

the walls were whiter than ever,

the room unhandleably motionless 

and yet a disturbing buzz was creeping under our skin,

fumbling the bitterness of the not entirely said.

the instant of lost control was achingly bound to happen.

following the distress of your glance,

I knew that shift in self-composure 

had washed away all possible exit doors

and right there, in the midst of the subsequent pause,

the echo of the wavering speech

was feeding the inbetween space on wholesale emotion.

it was withal a strange release,

as if in a lifetime of stasis

on the tangible ground a heart was thrown.

we will meet again, every dusk and dawn

nothing is more present in us
than the past.
knotted to its blurriness,
we suffocate piece by piece
in thicker and sorer textures, 
weaving and tearing up
constant deaths of
self and -
every once in a while,
as if acceded to
an ever-granted possession,
it cleaves another scratch
on our insecure inner walls,
pulling us away from our canvas
to remind us jealously
that we are merely its faint
discontinuous dream.

cryptocardiac

she steps into the chamber senses seeping, eyes half-open,

miles of unforbearing flashes mounting up her veins.

like verging needles, tight languish pulses demand

an inward unlocking for a feast of words.

alone in her atrium of embers,

she starves for the ripple of black on white.

she speaks ventricular language.

dialogue dust

I told you, let's take a seat here and forget,
tonight we'll have an entire cinema of sweet disregard.

(seems like centuries ago we first arrived here,
ourselves a flashing sequence of this exhausting air,
inhaling its burden as itself was inhaling ours,
what they call existence pounding on our matter,
dragging us with its senseless turmoil
like heavy clutters of impurity)

like a compulsory eyesore,
this suffocating silly joke,
like years ago we'd fallen asleep on bad television.

I told you, it's dreadful how tiring breathing can be,
how heavily we stick life on us like excessive clothing.

...you said you found it strange
how I could close my eyes to them without a bother
or how rashly I dared to quitclaim myself,
another player of the unavoidable,
for a bleak seat in the insolent audience.

(to care less and less as in a rearward blanking of lines,
to dispatch them all in the other room -
these ridiculous makings of blood and pulses -
as things too paltry to even bother mentioning,
like cheap cigarettes or bad poetry,
to leave them for the others)

I'd say what's even stranger is
how you and I can merge in the same barren space,
mine being an evening of forgetfulness,
while yours - a wreckage of rooms filled
with that of me I keep letting go.

and perhaps equally odd, this frantic presence of yours
and how you're always drifting towards some deserted bottom
while all I'm left is this abiding departure
to draw a blank on you being there and still there,
running for trains you contend to be real,
thrusting yourself towards this voidness of mine
so fiercely it sometimes hurts.

absenseizure

indeterminately
there’s been another winter and another fall
of a sometime-subsequent self and another
pursuit of nothing-nothingness mind.

behind the clusters of dust - our dainty grant of exile,
so deferred and still so ill-defined,
not yet fractiously handled,
not yet weighty and grinning.

before there was fog I remember rushing -
hand-in-hand with us, a flood of thoughts
and strangely ours, a dissidence of unequalled warmth.
it used to be words that anticipated us,
they fed with time frames and deftly with their lines 
questions of space emerged to what was us.

hereinafter non-existence is a matter of delay
and I feel milestones of sleep might have been consuming me,
blank to the their ends, weaving several trails of walking
alongside with dusk and dawns of forgetfulness
in circuits of beauty that dwindles in the dark
and is not beauty.

...

do you ever feel
delayed,
months and years behindhand of yourself,
heedlessly dispatching sequence and sequence of mind?

contradiction

obverse and reverse
yielding defiant clearance
to accidental confluence.

so swiftly a sequence of space
can jolt us into
the mathematics of fragmentary creatures.

as futile as a quest for the withheld,
to think that I could candidly touch
the ironic abyss
between our fleeting diametric pulse rates,
where we begin our untenable exemption -

consenters to a short life
of inane deconstruction,
idle, forgetful actors,
volatile assailants.

the charge of our skin warmth,
my most privileged of foes,
what incoherent coherence.

in the distance

your silhouette, unshaping grey,
open hand of my disquietude.

sleep schisms and new shades

I’d fallen asleep in a theatre hall, it might have been an hour or a month. the seats had been left vacant and weighty crumbs of smoke exhausted the cinerous air. I knew the room well, for it began within me, asunder and shielded, from the red of the curtains to the penumbra dramas. their warmth emerged somewhere at the midpoint my cells, as a binding sequence of exit. yet that night it was vacuous and drained of crimson, as if its very shades had wearied out their hemic performance and abjured diseased to the bleakness of crumbled paper.
my eyes, drowsed with sleep, could hardly tell the nature of the play unfolding before them. rambling, ear-splitting monologues encircled the room in unfathomable pounds, thrashing deepening cracks on walls and ascending up my body in the shape of fever. I felt my feet dragged forcibly from the ardor of my anchorage to some bleak, recondite ground whose contingence I refused to adjoin. till there was nothing but utmost silence, a silence too inordinate for the inflection of my breaths. it was as if the actors consented to quitclaim the unyieldingness of their acts: some left the stage, some remained deadpan, some sat down with their hands covering their faces, some motionlessly looked the other way.
I laid my head on my arm and watched them as, one by one, they stepped back and began to gradually turn to paper... and, as the swelling fever was marching on my eyelids, I could only ask myself which of them would be the first to shatter and turn to ashes.

onlooker of mayhem [sociopath's love poem]

by the time the performers grow tired of this silly diversion
you'll be artlessly heaved in your senseless uproar
while I'll resign composed in my observant position,
irked and disenthralled by this madcap auditorium,
by their turmoil and futile dramatics.

they're all drunk, my dear, I tell you,
how obsolete this language they speak,
irrationally, backwards, plethorically,
how unreasonable their temperature and gestures.

see, one by one, they slide in currents and drink their downfalls,
so unaware of the nature of their entrapment...
and you, well, you quietly and absurdly drink your own,
in your mute innermost twilights
when you run fore and backwards on hazardous bridges
from illusory night skies to nightmarish blood-red dawn.

and I can only immovably measure the vacancy of this desert,
in my cold, divided hall of mirrors,
while we humor ourselves in this heedless actor status,
in the microscopic simulacrum of existence
between those two minute, cut off extensions
where you begin and end on my resolute orbit.

so strange that you spread yourself in this draining convulsion,
because I can merely assume to grasp the unhinged nonsense
of an alphabet I've forgotten how to speak
somewhere ahead of time, ahead of sense and axioms,
of a certain slip of hand and uptight voice tone,
of humans and their fickle absurdities.

how derisory, Image, how pointless and strange...

theme for a blackout

a lighthouse burned today.
noosed in the breaths of the life-absorbed night, a wandering ship sunk to imminent blackened bottom.
in the strange inertia of petrified hands covering eyes, the drowning seconds surged in crippled flows and tiny explosions, clashing on the board with the deluge of a shattered chandelier. opaque sequences of space consumed themselves before the passengers' surprised eye grips. some clenched their hands into each other, others cried, others laughed like madmen.
somewhere in the midst of the death-inhaled screams, the wearied arms of a last survivor cleaved the charcoaled waves, angling on the needlelike thread between his unwieldy entrapment and tight limbs of inexistence. the fading terminus of the last burning lamp cast his spectacle with the delusion of flames on black waters.
he died by dawn, as I feared.

23.5ºS

it might have been that fickle temperature of your dreary being
or a yielding vision of wontedly-merging fragments
that stirred me to bewilder you and draw you towards my surface.
and I thought I could nimbly close my eyes before you
and fall asleep in mild threads of skin,
logical and discharged of my weighty chaos.

yet somewhere the pieces blacked out in discordance
and I quivered as if clashed by a mid-december nightmare
of a late night traveler madly knocking at the doors of my dwelling,
a dwelling I'd left a long time ago
for the shielded seclusion of my own winter.

I thought it might have been those three long nails
savagely thrust at the vertex of my spine,
burning to drag me down through erratic dark waters
to the inmost core of your silence
where hell begins
and we're stripped of skins and tongues.

but I had you there, weary and unshielded,
and thought a meager grip could cling me to your wrappings,
all succumbing, mouth, neck, skin and ribs,
dispossessed of that immersed something that entwines them
and weaves your cells in their fucked up logic.

yet it was the very angle of your eyelids
as if death itself was drifting through your lashes
that cleaved the warmth of my skin and its coherent ways,
fixing me deep down a concealed chamber
and I could only back away in defense
from you and your nervy december limbo.

intermission

I said tonight I wanted to be air again,
the red has etched me to racking sections.
by dusk the assailants will be marching home
and long tired breaths will absorb the charcoaled radius,
where I will walk open through the wreckage,
backwards like a chimera in a deaden movie scene
contemplating its petrified avatars
strewn in dissevered quotas all across the compass,
interspersed,
plagued,
lacerated,
like blacked out chess pieces on a bloodstained board.
my eyes, vermilion and stripped of lids,
my mouth, corpselike and desert,
my throat, numb and wedged with embers.
a blood ingrained nail,
a severed arm,
an ear,
two,
three,
four,
my awareness, hardened to endemic edges,
my memory, punctured by arrays of scalpels,
my logic, consumed by its own weight,
my aims, naked and aguing.
I close the door and they dispel like luster.

in my dream I'll step into a vacant room,
denuded shadow with half-closed eyes.
the neon lights will have been long time shut,
all faces swallowed in muted penumbra,
and words will float around me somehow mangled
that they'll no longer impair my feet like glass.
 
there, next to an opaque window,
my monster and I will sit side by side,
like silhouettes in contre-jour,
disarmed to each other through distant gazes
and conjured in a mutual sealing silence.

my goodness, I haven't slept in months...

miscast

maybe I'm merely a projection in a black & white cinema - 
moved by concealed machinery I wade through manifold shades of gray,
dragged from frame to frame I dissolve in pixels and shadowplay,
unfolding in small beginnings and endings
before each evening's new listless audience.

and from my high-angle shots
I can tell the precise shades on their faces
or measure the seconds between their finger twitches,
as they distantly assess the semblance of my acting
or absently dwell upon their daily matters.

from time to time I try to spite the director's composition,
so I fix a face and attempt a subtle grimace,
hit my shoe to the floor
or alter my voice tone,
yet each time they remain aloof and disconnected,
tapping their feet,
holding other hands
or checking their watches,
while I'm rushed by lines and gestures which I have not chosen
or swiftly abscond dislodged by tour de force characters.

then, with each evening's denouement,
freeze-frame, I watch them grab their coats and leave their seats,
as, one by one, they dispatch my fleeting performance
to redeem thoughts of events, friends or lovers,
while I remain shut down behind the aged screen,
watching crumbs of ashes cover the empty seats
and waiting for some stranger's hand
to appear and trigger my machines
so I can begin and end one more evening.