Winter

Where have you gone Father, how far ?
Here, in the solid snow, the seven-days snow,
your shadow walks ahead of me.
I wear your thin lips in mirrors like a whore
and your brisk smile like the shape of a war.
Time finds no asylum in me,
the past strangely grew roots of light,
nothing’s dark, nothing’s buried,
I haven’t slept for years.
Between the madhouse and the grave,
the massive drugs and plastic knives,
do you remember me ?
Does any music bruise your lethargy?
Did you unlearn all the songs
that multiplied like cells
in your daughter’s body,
before the schizophrenic detonator
convulsed your steel-blue eyes ?
You should know, you have to know,
they play silently at your door.
Every day, I watch the wooden arms of trees
dance in the cold air, and what my hands
want to say to yours, they let go.
You lie, unawakened, immensely dead
in your double-edged cruelty,
guilty of nothing, devoted to no one.
In your sleep, you drool like a baby,
while the photographic chamber of night
develops pictures you don’t recognize.
Oh daddy, where have you gone ?
How far ? To which dark address
have you sent your heart ?
Even the night cannot tolerate
such senseless black.
See, I wear your lips bright red in mirrors
and swathe your blood in my veins
like the loud noise of impossibility,
Hoping one day, the space you dissolve into
will take forever this version of me.

Magdalene

Would you like to throw a stone at me ?
Here, take all that’s left of my peach.
– D.H Lawrence.

It gripped me by the nape
in the night’s red shade,
faceless, like another reality
waiting behind all things.
It came to me, it filled me,
warm as molten wax.
Before it had me,
I saw it in a distant mirror
its silver skin gleaming,
its extravagant reflection
pervading the room.

And I knew something lived there,
closer to the bone, closer to death,
fundamental as a secret.
I knew one day this familiar beast
would bang
my untouchable heart
as against a wall,
till blood dripped from it.
And of course,
I was nobody’s fool,
I was not a lily,
more the center of a depravity.

Not at the first blow,
but the last, I felt drawn
deeper within darkness,
deeper within pleasure,
down to the blackest joy.
Here at my feet,
the seeds of my womanness
split opened in a sigh.

I fed myself to the strangers,
they became my makers.
Beggars, each night,
exhausted themselves in my bed
until the light turned to flesh.
My heart was a swarm of insects.
Pain and pleasure
flowed as milk and myrrh
between my breasts.
Scarlet stars of lust
spurt out in the morning sky
like severed arteries.
The planets knew me,
the wind and the rain knew me,
everything that had a body
and a touch sighed with me.

At noon, I walked unashamed
in the burning streets,
voices hissed
I went out everyday like this
with a clear smile,
after a bath of sperm.
My only motion
in the bluest air
messed up their clothes,
dirtied their shoes.
I could see through
the cold metal of their souls.

My lovers called me
Purple Haze or Eden’s Slut.
One I remember most
ended up on a cross.
His kisses were whips.
He understood more
than the rest of them.
The day he left,
I smashed a bottle of perfume
at his feet, and wiped them with my hair.
He said to the crowd
“Leave her.
She does it for the day of my burial.”

He didn’t care if I knew vice,
He didn’t care if I knew greed,
the scent of sex pleased him.
He came from a place
where the only thing
that outlives us,
the only thing
to remember
is touch.

Numbness

Maybe in some otherworld,
where no blood drips, and flesh
is just one flash from a derelict past,
where tears lie silent and dry
as placentas of salt,
where everything has a soul
but no nerves and no stomach,
men could find a form of ecstasy
in this awful stillness.

Maybe if we were all mad,
hysterical and naked, howling
like sex-wolves of the sixties,
but not inert as plants
retracting in a triumphant mist,
if we were not provided
with vacant eyes and defeated hearts,
a horizon could brutally break
through computers’ screens.

But we return from drunkenness
with no dream, no vision.
We’re immune to revolutions,
the past runs in our veins for amusement
and future eats it like a tumor.
Today has once again been cancelled.
It opened gently like the fist of a baby
eager to grab some brand-new toy,
now moves, blind, a blade above the wrist.

Hope floats like a gigantic organ in a jar,
with no way to sink
into this salt-saturated water,
bitter as sorrow, bitter as the Sea of Asphalt.
There’s neither end nor awakening.
Memory continually bumps against defeat,
and awakens cold
as though she slept with someone dead
— lusting for a bed she has never been to.

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