whip, cage or sword

when you're ready
to do or say
what you need to forget
then it means that you're ready to give up what you love

all men kill what's dear
but how hard it is to just let it go and hope no one else
runs on by whip, cage or sword

Overheard in a bar outside my body

"...And I'm handsome.
You're handsome.
You're very handsome."

"So why don't you love me?!"
"Why? Do you love me?"

"Well, yes, yeah I think I do."
"Oh..damn, and and why?"

"Why?"(hesitates)

–She lowers her eyes and expects the same she's heard tens of times from lovers that had been turned down. The last flip of a fin of a dying caught fish on the banks of a river. She consoles herself with the fact that the agony will be shortlived.

"Because it's easy. Because your beautiful, you're smart and you're righteous. I love how we talk, I love how we meet, I love when you smile and look away and I love how you're strong and stubborn and lazy. I love being the person that you rely on for wisdom or for things you know but you just need repeated. I love making you laugh and I love how your eyes light up when you're surprised. I love how you plan: that wacky confused way of tackling problems you have. I love your dark side, I love how you let yourself be dominated by it with no fear of succombing. I love when you're drunk and I love when you're groggy and critical. I love that you're so easily offended. I love your hair and how you move. There's a certain encompassing movement you do when you reach around to hug your legs. I love little, diametrical things about you: the childish innocent nail painting and the womanly stares you sometimes give when you don't agree with me. I love going places with you while we drink coffee. I love how you're determined, but I love how you more than once relied on me to confirm it. I love how I feel important and needed when I'm around you. I love how we would be the best couple, but still lead our own lives. I love how we once closed our eyes next to each other on an October bench and with the blessing of a dying sun you said: "I wanna stay here forever." And I said: "me too."

You're the color yellow, you're a rhyme, you're the dark gray after a fire and the turn of November.

But thinking about it, I really don't know why I love you."

for S.L.

One Dawn

Having been woken up by someone else's alarm clock, I laid in bed staring up for a while. I went through all the usual worries of lying in the dark--will I get my work done, will I escape the monster from under my bed, what will I be when I grow up--I decided to sit cross legged on a chest of drawers aimlessly looking at daybreak from my window.

I had seen cats do it in movies, in grandpa houses and especially I had seen them from the outside. This was my best impression of a cat, and after some time I finally understood that it wasn't about looking out, or even staring out. No matter how concentrated they looked, cats were really focused on listening.

From my position I could not see much anyways. The thermometer had been slowly, but steadily descending back were one would expect for these northern latitudes. Two in three leaves on the tall birches lining my street were going yellow, making streaks against the tough remaining green. Either way, they'd only diffuse the light from the opposite building; I imagined them projecting their shape on my building's wall.

But as soon as I stopped concentrating on image, far away muffled sounds started to paint an infinitely detailed blind picture. There were planes flying, taking dads away from their sleepy eyed sons that awoke in turn to banging sounds of heating pipes. Someone on the floor above was rushing out; she lived alone and and was going to work. I could hear her somber heels as she stormed from one end of the house to the other. She wasn't afraid of waking anyone up and she never closed a door. The pipes kept banging hinting at the inside air warming up. The covers pulled a squeaky bed on the other side of the wall, while the week changes a Sunday doze to Monday strain.

The heating flares, bubbling the water lukewarm before it flowed. Clumsy pre-breakfast hands undressed, and dropped the shower-head on the cheap tin shellac bathtub. I thought I heard a man's voice, but maybe it wasn't true. Opposite to what one might think, far away sounds are easier, clearer; as if they shed any uncertainties while they travel the distance between their origin to my ear.

The highway churned and hummed in the distance to the south and east, where the grey of the sky turned into a pinkish diffuse glow before fading once again into light blue. The cars trumpeted their repetition loop into the metal side rails as if to send a sonar signal to know where they are. They might as well ring endlessly around the city, around the buildings and the houses, encircling everyone's hopes for the day, leaving everyone's mistakes in the past and levigating people's preoccupations for the week to come.

There were radio hisses from downstairs and kitchen utensils tingling on tables, there were baby cries and parents' sighs. I remembered when this time, these (and other) sounds, meant school and meant small problems seeming large. I imagined the blond boy across the hall, as he stared at the wall in silence while his mom put a sock on, then the other. How bigger and weirder and unknown must all these noises sound to him. But, they are indefinably a part of his world, a part of the whole. He was born there, born into it, born into the clanging and the rushing on the stairs, born into the rain ticks and door clicks, the ringing and the humming, the brushing and the flowing.

All around him is the life of the city waking up and gaining consciousness of a new week, or a routine week. But as in every awakening and every gain, there is a loss slow and dark of what has passed. We remember it in silence.

for S.L.

Songs

great sad-eyed song of the everglades
to wish someone had stayed
to warn life, however it may go you'll still cash your ticket
so let's sing all to that dawn that was supposed to
shine, but never did

for b.h.

starting again from zero

the night fell
secretly summery air
still as an invisible blanket
kept my thoughts in as they floated on a roof
relentlessly those digits looking
for you making mystery out
of silence

the idea is to run away
never look back and sit down
next to the ghost i so tremblingly fear
the idea is for you to miss me
it's for you to fight at least once
for what is only my love
and your magniloquent
absence.

for b.h.

on your birthday

on birthdays we are reminded
of how small and quick
is our mark here

365 days, sometimes 366
fall like slow leaves
but only on one
we know the difference
between hind and foresight.

today you were born:
what a stupid thing to celebrate
–as if it was a conscious thing.

what an unbalanced world made you
what a tipped iceberg brought us here
but still. we are.
and it doesn't have to happen only once a year.

for b.h.

what i wait for

what i wait for
is a green line
a go--
a way out
a new old
a perfect tense
round two places
two doors
one life, two paths
what i wait for
is for you
tojours
what i wait for
can never become
an easy ticket, an arrow
to an action
but it can easily fail
as we're both in this together
and we've been known to make mistakes before
what i wait for

for b.h.

three floors up

dragging in time
i expose the weakness of
seeing you here and now

the shadow hit your eyes
as i was compelled to turn around
it's morning when we surrender
to each other's lips

it's morning again
when the sun's angle matches my eyes
with wires and cloth
left in remnants of time
chalk lines leading maybe
to a seamstress's pattern.

for b.h.

Ah, Venezia

ah venezia, a place where both the architecture–enclosed little squares and putrescent alleys–and the geographical location allow for nothing else other than death or love, whichever appears first. as a symptom of a sort of static malady, time laps gently on the moss walls, as days and years go by; unperturbed by seasons, weather or camera flashes.

no one is really from venice: silence is the only real local inhabitant among those canals. once there, you can't help but feel the gloomy temporariness of existence, or of your money. burdened with a feeling of waiting, one can only wallow with the idea of meeting someone while effortlessly falling in love. of course that someone will inevitably be a traveler, a ghost, or a blond Polish teenager in a sailor suit. often, all of the above.

there's nothing dynamic about venice, it stands fast and holds ground, motionless and redundant.
and cloaks you as the fog cloaks her.

farewell

so i drop you
from a branch arm that remembered
more than gravity
pulls you wind far from me
because i did nothing to keep you once
you can never think
i'll stick through winter this time

so i'm just left here
bare, reflected in hurt
and forever regretting what i did
and what i could've not done.

for n.s.