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.

balloon

cars rushing heavily down the street,
indifferent noise obtruding itself,
fear creeping in
under small coffee stains.

salty taste
growing on skin,
foreseeing absence.

stretched on faces,
a different morning fog
and between two adverse gazes,
a projection of myself
running away as fast as possible.

estranged bodies
losing their heat,
killing time
inside a short dream
waiting to expulse them.

iridescence

strange unhandy feeling of rushing through doors 

that open and close in a flash 

as reality undoes its filmlike texture

to let the mind become tied up to a single moment.

lurking in a state of surprise,

the desire to reveal the unutterable sequence 

between the bliss and the accident,

when pleasure breaks down and the killing begins,

the iteration of the unavoidable sting.

the wish to wander attentively, just for a while, 

in that cheerless setting, both beautiful and vulgar,

drawn to wistful faces on the brink of attack

and panicked at the recurrence of sweet useless music

and perfectly imagined cityscapes that promise nothing.

and, instantly, 
the outburst of not wanting to go back, 

when all that lies ahead 
has been breathed, soaked in and worn out.

the protagonist is a nameless figure in a long line of unplanned guests.

he/she waits at the end of black and white,

full of doubts and oddly eager.

anemic

there is no escape from the desolate circle, we all know
and might as well laugh at our silly hands.
the world which opens for us is but a hungry vagrant:
this morning, more than ever,
I felt its smell of flesh, its wrinkled skin,
its endless arms like sullen tentacles
pressed upon our bodies.

lately wherever I go I know death is present:
in the skyscraping buildings with empty contours,
in the paper-like silhouettes caught in inane routine
and all their stupid distractions, death inhales everything.

sometimes, walking alone, I see the picture unfolding:
the horizon, clear and helpless, still renders space
for a short dream of alienation,
under the tired breath of the city
that will go on tomorrow and the day after.
and us, we're caught between the draining machines,
and burn like candles, nameless, joyless, with no direction.

wolf

abandoned, deep-rooted thirst of mine,
pull me from the vortex of silhouettes
that have been resting here all this time,
each of them pretending to be mine,
and bring me back to my own undefiled sun.
my mind yearns for it with the voracity of an animal,
beneath my impulses I find the somnambulist’s quest,
a vision of a space where all veils become disremembered,
the empty ones, the tired ones, the innominate ones.
in the orbit of instincts, before my half-open eyes,
with burning claws, I project myself puncturing the black,
crushing against the swarms of ants that have swallowed the days.
biting flashes cut in from a misty, frightening distance,
while I step forcibly inside the memory of a future
which awaits suspended.

desertion

in another time, perhaps miles of anguish

and tunnels of panic away from now,

our bone breaking pursuit will finally be over.

absolved of our stages of shared guilt, 

undisturbed by our candid stitches,

we will have found the safest nowhere,

the perfect place for abandonment.

there, a grey empty shore will open for us,

the way death greets its chosen ones

with the relief of a long-expected departure,

and all our stories of love and hate will find their awaited sleep.

without a word, without a glance, we will sit next to each other,

the coldest shoulders faintly converging in softening void,

empty yet free from the illusion of separation.

as our own sentenced hands will drown the terrible masks,

we will no longer be flesh and bone, but unreachable ghosts,

marching away like pale disarmed soldiers.

in another time, in a scene of petrified wilderness,

beneath the stillness of perfectly pure black water,

our hunting blood will finally find home.

ouija

no touch of daylight can completely erase

the traces of the hands we abandon our heads into

when present tense dissolves to mute denial

and all that’s left is past and uncertainty.

none of us will speak of what happens

in loud corners in the midnight of mind,

when strangers with features like ours

direct the chalk on the blackened board

and the unfamiliar starts dripping from our warmest place

with the weight of a saddened identity.

as if confined to a recurrent accident of a play,

we're nothing but puppets in the eye of time,

puppets to the voices that sneak in our ears at night

puppets to the untiring daggers that hunt our blood

to set in motion the tides of memory gongs.

it’s the law of weaknesses, that we will always meet at the round table,

rehearsing fears and longings and all those vagrant pledges

love speaks of from the dead.

before our eyes, a dear world burned to a matrix of unreality

and all that happened after the apocalypse

was not more than a quest for whatever might have been. 

fault condition

my image is cut off, I am covered in ice.

from this angle of night I have no mouth,

no ears, no pain, no gestures,

only a gaze that draws blood backwards,

through tunnels of ruffled sleep.

wrapped in confined space, in light twists of seconds, 

incidences of past swim through your mind

as darkness merges with the lines of my body

and once again I turn to fields of frost.

between two walls of memory,

winter takes over all heart territory.

distressed by the sound of breakage,

we fall back on the thieving thoughts

that push us separately to the old house,

only to find it vacant.

throughout the black

possess anything you can find, but you’ll never really possess the mind,
placate the guilty, painful room.
some things hardly change: I go home uninvited, I leave uninvited,
days and weeks slip me like vapor trails,
I turn to shadows for acceptance.
the picture is settled: our tall, stony bodies, walking without us,
oblivious of what resides in their hands,
our connection, scratched out by its own aching edges,
oblivious of our small actions and their cosmic consequences.
sometimes I lean on the skeletons of words I use to fill
the long evening of solitude that opens up between us,
other times I turn wayward like a disobedient clock.
the shell closes in anticipation of another rift.

starless and unending

as I recall it, love happened

like an erratic, hallucinatory film.

(the loudness if it piercing through

with its city lights, literature, medication and blood)

(the dire shades from a flashback of running on burning bridges,

unexplainable yet warm like an ingrown memory

from a night out of this world)

(the impalpable texture of a certain darkness,

a screened world bound to die under silent daylight,

leaving behind nothing but the longing

for that inarticulate thing that has been taken from you

and will forever remain elsewhere)

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.

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 presence is overwhelming,
but most of them 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.