eternal pilgrimage (work in progress)

I was not supposed to be in that part of town that day,
but I just followed the musty scent of my loneliness
to those places where I once grazed, social animal,
in the company of ties I had already severed.

Broken Sundays (why did the shops and pubs have to close?
where were people? secretly revelling away from me?)
and nights devoted to wrestling with the alternate worlds
my inner self deluged me with.
Yes, the worst were the Sunday nights, as if Monday
was a terrible invading King, bringer of hordes and terrors,
of challenges unsurmountable by the dozen.

I did not want to return to that desolate bedsit,
stale invoices for pizza and attempts to curate a life
out of unsorted discarded fragments.
A fouling search for the rawest nerve of the early hours.
There's no unleashing any magic in a place like this.
My repertoire getting less and less appealing,
depleting like a well in a poor backward country.

Time has lost any sense of beginning or any relevance
in its passing.
I notice people shape-shift all the time,
learning and relearning their behavioural animal inside
and making sure everyone hears about it.
I tell to myself "I am no river, I am no wizard in the making."

The biggest curse is to not be forgetful, volatile,
prone to tearing with the branches of this dark jungle.
Not to be able to evaporate gracefully into a better substance.
Thus all doors to a proper healing are closed to us.
Is this doomed storm of a life a higher calling?
What rites do I need to perfect? conjuring
(not notes to self, but incantations), trances, overcomings,
devastations, withdrawals, depression, fear and release, finally.
(the myth of catharsis, yes).

Yet I want to take the path closest to the edge
but I lack the nerve. Attraction and cowardice.
As there are no druids in our communities any more
there's no hope of a proper concoction
that enables bravery in me.

At night it assaults, is it really loneliness and pain
the source of wisdom, that eerie bazaar filled with suicide
or would we better head to the banter market,
the ritual simplicity, animalistic life of the contended?

Questions pour into my febrile mind.
The fountain is one of darkness and it seeps bitterer
when the sun shines louder.
I fancy myself a Caligula of sorts, and let myself be ruled
by stampeding horses.
It's become a habit now.

I should have known, by their elastic and athletic
movements, a warning of a disposition
towards a cruel nerve, a discipline in ceremonial dress
where it is easy to conceal daggers.
I should have known that was not my nature,
and I could not mingle easily among their stern faces,
faces sporting the crooked grin of the decade,
the fast pace of tendons that are tense even in sleep.

I remained hungry but meek.
Not the stormy kind, but full of spitting rages.

I sampled - from afar - the streams of lust and dirt
that percolate the human workflow.
Varicose permutations, tortuous and enlarged,
ever accelerating, like the conditioned hunger of
our animal opioid receptors.


It was the eighth month and everything was hot,
bright. More than ever, life looked like a constellation,
sparse, unreachable, hard to trace to the untrained eye.
The emptiness was tinged with the sensation
of a mild danger lying behind the sun, in perpetual orbit.

For you the world is still this bright place.
forgive my having thrown you to a emptiness
that will grow inside, on a yearly basis.
inexorable. A sweat you can only forget about
some time but never wash away.
(unless maybe you're unaffected by this virus,
which I wish).

Bring me back blurry memories from the train window.
Your hand clearing away the condensation,
eyes half closed, endless chatter with strangers from the future.
(the way we are, thinking about being far away from here
when we already are far away from here,
making plans like crazy).

But no, in the end, the night brought no relief.
Found myself once and again looking at distant lights
for a tethering reassurance, feeble or untenable.

This desire to break into something new. All the time.
Constant change of tack, in madness.
No recognition of our being lost.
I look at the photographs for something I know
it's not there.
The tantalising possibility of grabbing pasts
that were not mine to begin with (thief?).
Pasts that were created by other people.
Lived in other places, and I want them all,
(hunter-gatherer, I create no value)
their most tangible carnous flowers.
The colors kept in delicate ornate boxes.

The urgency of decades and worlds
that I imagine would have been amazing to live.
I saw all this traced in the sidewalks of the closed city.
Empty, forlorn and uncaring.
(is this simplicity at work?).

When you will find yourself in this position, my love,
get yourself moving and build your own.

They were waving goodbye at me. Mute.
As I was falling down, falling down.
Sometimes I feel like an abandoned fish.
Sacrificed for nothing. Discarded.
Its beauty inherent despised, the most heinous blasphemy
there is.

my belly kept making gurgling noises

my belly kept making gurgling noises
at night, like a restless jungle.
Some people suggest it's the wine and pills,
but I actually think it's the air.
That sooty haze is not pollution,
is the threat of violences that the future augurs.
They kept saying it's the diesel fumes
so we dismiss it all the easier,
but it itsn't.
It's the weight of all the promises broken
and threats made, premeditated or
otherwise.
This halo of violence seeps into our bodies,
permeates our thoughts,
and it's most present whenever you are alone
or in a new place.

evolution

death strolled among us
drenched in the faded afternoon light,
when the sunlight heavily filtered
by tree branches looked already
like a remembrance in itself.

nobody seemed to take notice
and even I was surprisingly serene,
as if its presence was a natural and flowing
guitar melody, strumming its poetry
and beauty,
its natural pulse,
one you could abandon yourself sweetly
like a child surrenders to play.

in moments like these one could just let go,
the gentlest of waves, motherly,
let go happy and calm,
with a sense of satisfied closure,
relief maybe,
and off we went, off we went
as in the song,
leaving the fake solemnities of our flesh behind,
filled with an inmense love
that happened to always have been out there
and we just did not take notice at all,
busy as we were with our non-eventful little lives.

death was there and nobody was scared,
there were these tiny specks floating around
when you look at the sunlight, you know,
and children were playing.

I shed a tear only, but of pure joy,
I wanted to run to her crying "mother, mother"

untitled

Your life must have tasted so bitter,
always harking back to a childhood and a land
that were left behind when the adult years
presented themselves with their irrational demands.

Water, music, Nature and seasons.
Wretched sailor banished from his small kingdom.

Your letters came bitterer everytime,
god only knows how you must have tossed
and turned in your foreign beds at night.
It pities me so.

And finally die out there.
Far from the consolation you'd have desired.

questions

sorrow is the timeline, the pencil streak
that draws the perimeters I inhabit.
Most deeply, one is always alone
lost in a maze of meanness and small minds.

The burden is not to be shared.
Only a dark useless wisdom
to be gained from all this.

Configuration by scars.
All decisions look bad in hindsight,
and the nights grow riper with regrets,
and the shell of loneliness
we acquire with years.

every single day, bit by bit,
inexorable,
like Chinese water torture,
the awareness of old age and its bitter jagged edges
grows.

we will be left behind.
Together in a hole. Yet so alone.
Silent grief shattering us quietly.

the words "younger", "stronger",
once my natural habit, trigger now
a quiet barrage of a sad despair.

they will call this maturity.
I wish I could know
if you have the same thoughts, my love.

And you, my daughter?
Will you feel life this way?

he awoke every morning

he awoke every morning
drowsy and brilliant
from these limitless futures
lying under his bed,
trophies unclaimed yet hoarded.

A circular tank brimming with sagas
that leaked something every night
- time is an unassailable thief,
a great authority, then;
'twas the most natural thing in the world,
reptilian in its surreptitious workings,
just like breathing.

A knob that turned many doors,
open or shut, never mind.
Altered is the new normal.
These limitless futures,
one realizes only too late,
are like a crashing wave,
quickly subduing and swallowing themselves
in their hasty retreat.

poem about a suitcase

he drags this suitcase everywhere he goes,
with those cloggy wheels, tired,
because dirty stone is dirty stone, everywhere.
His walkging in fact hides no purpose worth prying into,
but he persists undying. There are minor bags
under his eyes, his saggy lids, to be filled.

No one is sure what's inside that trailing appendage.
Only the rattle of the container is a tell-tale sign
of a besmirched legacy. One he was never asked to accept.

Fellow so tired now, I think he's on nodding terms
with death, which he meets casually on the train every morn.
Death herself has to commute everyday,
since city centre steep rents have pushed the less well-to-do
to the uglier parts of the commuter belt.

haiku 04

fresh blooms cut fresh off
boys petal their jackets fresh
festive songs resound

haiku 03

day farts to an end
suitcase and gaze autumn grey
workers pilgrim back