The Price

So long was the dream
when the money had gone,
years went by pale grey
in one column of smoke,
the bruise she thought brief
never lost its purple,
so long, it painted her bed blue
and left it in the sky.
Eyes shut, lips sewn
under the goddamn wings
of hope, she held her
lover close, her newborn
dark-haired child,
uncertain whether god
had finally brought them back
or, as morning taught,
the last glass of cheap wine.
So long was the dream
her slum became a house
full of colors, sounds
the sea left in a blast,
salt healed, taxes melted,
the joke went on and on,
knowing nothing of reality,
of the harm it had done.
So long, so long, that
when the angel of light
told her about the lover,
the child, not hers, not there,
her eyes turned to grey
even more grey and silent
than these forgotten pearls
no pulse awakens.

East Room

There’s no room for me anywhere,
I’m cut off from the rest of the world.
I stand in that room we never had,
with your voice, your lips, your arms,
the room of what is not,
but should have been,
the room of years that piled invisibly
and the child who hasn’t been born.
I see deserts in the sky, burning blue,
and the wind whispers to leave everything here,
everything that touched me, everything
that shocked me, You —
so instead of going to heaven,
I stay here, saying my prayer wrong,
all along, the sky can go fuck itself.

Yet what I wanted seemed so simple.
A foreign country, a language not mine,
the most ordinary days, experiencing
a new kind of belonging, you within,
you within — That room must have
existed somewhere, like an island,
with soft walls of sunlight and desire.
Of all my memories, this is the one
beyond oblivion, the one that never fades.
Neither the sea, in which I believe,
nor the horses, that will take me away,
can separate me from that flash.
To the sky I do no reverence,
I would leave everything here, cities,
friends, starlings from the gardens,
but not you, not you —

I stay here, saying my prayer wrong,
all along, with a pair of broken shoes
and a few poems. I stay here when
the wind asks “Who’d be the fool to stay ?”
hoping you would find that room,
hoping for the sky to lose.

 

Blindness

On this side of the blue,
eaten by light,
lost as we are under
the blooming stars,
the sun’s white beat,
I should pretend we see each other.
It’s a lie.
In the perpetual noon of summer,
I begin to dream of cecity.
That at the touch of a fingertip,
we would lose sight
of our selves.
All colors rising up new,
the calvary of otherness
turning from crimson
to azure,
and the warm secret
of hurt and desire
altered, switched.
It’s so dark, so silent
on the other side of the blue,
I don’t want my wish
to fall into my mind,
only to find myself caught
in you as in a fishnet,
my vision forever
adjusted to your
sincerity.

Listen to “On The Origin Of”

Lost Away

The truest things can’t be true,
they live apart in a silent world,
incandescent and cruel,
able to mingle with nothing.
Not pure but uncompromised,
their incessant pounding
like the flash of an ember
in the center of the chest.
I own that kind of solitude
that keeps reds from fires
extinct, I own secrets the way
only animals or criminals do.
Language can’t grasp them,
its net of light invariably
returns to the lips, torn —
the truest things can’t be told.
I sit in the garden at sundown,
a perfect flamboyant time,
knowing I can’t say it right,
knowing you won’t believe me
— have you, even once ?
Petals whirl in the air like lies
around our bastard hearts,
stories bleeding from their cracks
to keep us sane and proud.
Two months ago in a café
we smoked red and green
cigarettes, colors of passion
and hope — and my blood
turned to lilac wine. No.
These things can’t be true.
Just the stars vast silence.
You are the note no one can hear
since flesh dissolved into word.
The sigh never perjured.
You are all that I have.