A Sudden Sky

There is a point in the city
where I take a bend in the road
and suddenly emerge to sky.
There, the city slopes down, away from me,
to dip its morning feet in the sea below.
And it is all the more surprising,
because, until that bend,
I have walked huddled amongst the smoking hills,
the close, coughing buildings
of the human hive.
To arrive there, out of a tunnel of sleep,
and see that sky, endless, untethered,
it is as if someone had poked a hole in the suffocating day.
And I breathe, or it feels as though, at last I do,
or it feels like my lungs expand
with those slowly trotting clouds,
while the tendrils, the discord,
the discarded cans and loves of this city loosen from me.
And I realize, how I was never a single thing,
a voice against another voice,
or a blue flame lighting my own dreams.
I realize under that blueness
which surpasses every animal thing,
that there are birds of sleep, who without our asking,
weave such skies behind our closed skin.

Young Couple

Already in their eyes
a secret knowledge of smiles,
of new sweetness,
of the not yet completed.

And their voices,
which speak of mundane things,
of mornings, of childhood,
of the disappointment of rain,
conceal a tremor of bursting stars,
and tomorrows lost in endless sheets.

This precarious dance,
about the stamen of breathless youth,
could yet fail,
could burn in a conflagration
of jinxed guitars.

But, from body to body,
the night is the unspoken,
the necessary ache
that already spreads its roots
to open their brief mouths.

Feast

The streets go on expanding into holes in the night,
the waists of women become horizons of ruin,
and a mouth with a soured tongue
that fingers a land burning with the scent of animals,
consumes the innocent roots.

A tongue that invades the quiet thighs of lovers and dead storms,
that smothers deserts wounded with oil,
and dwells in vineyards of dry teeth.
A tongue that drips globs of lime in black seas where rain forests die,
where flowers, afflicted with flame, crawl from the trees,
to bury their faces in the soil forever.

Tongue, like a parallel sky, sleeps with a catatonic girl,
whose belly is a globe of burning ants,
whose eyes are sockets of broken rain.
Beyond the wreckage of my feast, a cicada, dark, like a warship, abides.
In its eye is a mouth with a flavour of ashes that outlives me.
And I taste, in the sweetest orange, in the ripened dawn,
a bitter pip, a murdered branch.

Ink

Naked, you are a perfected flame of truth.
And there is a storm of dark ink in the bowl of your being
that leaves me alone, that disrobes my intent.

Naked, you are a broken flame of longing.
And every part of me is a cloud divided in the roots,

and our bodies are entangled in a hedge of ribs,
are like a squall braiding and un-braiding the hills,
while our savage ink surpasses us.

And we return to our solitary heels, with a skin of memories,
with a still impenetrable need, with a still deeper loss.

Spring Day

A warm wind of copulation
disrobes itself in the trees.
Days of the frenzied sun
show me a shadow of guitars.

A silent blood
courses through the streets,
filling the flanks of the men
and the breasts of the dead,
with a scent of watermelons.
To taste this overflow of flesh,
reminds me of the death of insects.

A cloud of copulation parts the valley,
where a wounded town lies,
soaked in a music of vagrants.
The pines there are an unreachable breath,
a loosening of spring,
a sadness in our necessary seed.

Midday strokes the thighs
of all the girls,
and brings a memory of thirst.

The Insects

I

Without a heart, they cannot break as we do.
And without dreams, they love the way that soil loves,
lacking enemies.
They are the warmth of movement in our decay.
But we are burdened by a thought and an image
that expires in a sad flame.
We are what they diligently tear and scatter
in an undergrowth of dead years,
our years,
awaiting the mouths of their relentless love.

II

I gather about me a moss of need,
sentiment, dream and craving.
Like the rock of afflicted mollusks,
I am a burden of sea, a salt trailed by wounds.
The clay of accumulated sorrow spoils my form.
But they are nature’s perfected coil,
the smooth and frightening form of life without remorse.
Everything else is unrequired.

III

I do not want a bone of song.
I no longer desire a midday loaded with light.
Beneath a country of moist leaves,
I seek transformation, like you,
to outlive the skeleton of my death,
to be a raw and glistening nerve under the moon.

IV

On a bitter leaf, I struggled from
a chrysalis of memory.
Everywhere, wings were blooming.

I

Making your way through the blossoms,
the world is in love with you.

Bright and unapproachable ones
repeat for us the play of the bittersweet branch.

Who doesn’t hurt in their outstretched blood,
in the presence of these sleepwalkers?

We would have you in our sleep too,
the way the spring has you now,

the way it wraps longing around your shadow,
and holds you in its jaws of wind.

II

You, girls of becoming,
forever breaking forth into new branch,
becoming youth’s glistening barb,
the burning in the defeated flame,
and messengers in the ear of summer.
There are blue distances we cannot break,
and there is a sadness in the hollow of love.
You, girls of becoming,
who leave through the rooms
burdened with a sand of bliss,
you are becoming, at last,
a refinement of shadow,
a birth of moss.

III

Each one takes from me something,
blade, foam, the sheath of saltwater,
the seaweed of my solitary joy.
Each one takes their share,
so that it might become them, or not.
Am I so easily exhausted?
For those who slept in my night of open windows,
a loam grows in the blue pit of their need,
and is a thread of messengers,
and a wind of return.
Those who fled with my blood at dawn,
are never beyond the salt of my caress.

IV

Tonight I become the solitary bull,
the defiance of foam.

Above the nearness of your bone,
I am an invariable flame of necessity.

The hours become my bottomless appetite,
my blood a devouring wind.

I gouge shadows from the hollow of your body,
and scatter the spiders of your waist.

I topple bones and floods and a frenzy of insects,
the way the bull breaks the corners of its hold.