insect's clock

fixed eye on the beetle’s fragile flight

announced in the air briskly

hind legs arched with all their might

and a protective belly

still pulsates its opal mystery

across the living room to a window

person-shaped

shortened route to a sheltered grave

its wings still defy

a shell, engine and its swift soundwave

still timidly high-pitched

if only it could beat its wings back

and learn how to reach

the solid armory from a long-past breath

as long as it avoids

nights filled with sleepless whims

and days shortened of their death.

a sliver of scenery

I thought of a body stretched across the pavement

breathing distracted by the wide picture skywards

waiting in its own terms

for a limb or two to be crushed into stone

without pause or resentment

communication with the world

through touch and tongue

or skin and bone

under clouds’ shadows to hold

a stare overgrown

like weed through rock for miles

stitched along the road

I felt a body stretched across the fabric

two hands, two arms, twenty-seven bones

and a burial of seeds

for lilies untold.

Parasitism

The water spits back.

Its stare, abstract and opaque, does not reflect the face,

a field of blossoming grimaces and tombstones

that ooze with breathlessness and catharsis. Black and green,

miles of milestones never twice visited.

Measurement not only of distance traveled or battles raged,

but especially of the losses and convulsions that pave the path behind, 

a trail of defective genetic material never to be

restored to the damaged source.
Brittle surface of glass over simmering, dark mud
awaiting.

This well-worn dance with water, repeated to the exhaustion,

is the limbo posing as a ritual of passage, the reliable constant that entraps and isolates, hypnotizing the dancer with a life simulacrum:

undiluted stasis that floats on illusions of growth and survival.

Each step, a swift punch to the stomach - the dense oil

that rushes back from the clock engine to meet the impatient partner in crime.

The all-absorbing water moves to the music

of this intimate exchange of fluids, thickening itself

and spitting back,
-ticking-
humid constellations on the cheeks.

Pictorial art is also born: thousands of ephemeral figures

on the aquatic canvas, or maybe just a single ever-evolving painting, 

its running colors dressed by the rain.

The dancer's hidden knives are the brushes on his sleeve,

stinking of juices unspoken.
The dance simultaneoulsy draws and colors.

An approaching coda holds a mysterious answer: entropy? A shift in movement or perspective?

The water does not dance by sheer will -

it only reacts to gentle, violent swaying.
Curtains claim for an audience, someone to bow to,
but the canvas remains devoid of dialogue.
It refuses to reflect the face, or the heartbeat,
or the heartburn -
stubborn shades of watercolors do not grin at an admirer's eyes,
instead only returning the kindness in its purest form.

Thick water rehearsing its way back.

Illness of Appetite

A sigh translated into a plain dismissal,

reaching outwards from deep into the wreckage.

Signals breathed out far and silent, decodified by the one and only

soldier in charge.

What is it that muffles the ink?

See grey spots paving roads on the lip, 

and the cheeks swollen with seeds of afterwards.

 The mind remains obsessed with a discrete taste, seasons after

binging on it - 

unvarnished intellect through its unquenchable thirst for dust.

Enlightenment

"Is it a cave or is it a tomb?"
She threw the question in the air, a small and round vernacular grenade, where it dissolved and hanged on heavily. It was poisonous smoke, invading each and every pore with certainty and defiance.

He felt it hitting him in the face, a slap from his reflection (but one that was consciously taken, this time).

Both the sanctuary and the prison, it was consecrated ground - the rarely used television, the bed strategically positioned by the window, the most constant and ancient piece of furniture. It might as well have been made of stone.
The history of him and of them breathed with vibrant life, though softly concealed. Memories survived buried under a slight layer of grey sand, underneath the carpet. The symbols were both origins and materializations of devotion, as brightly colored infant rabbits gently placed on the tallest shelf, staring straight at your humble believing eyes. He was, after all, a believer at heart. 

There were tons of people accomodated in the bedroom, looking at each other for years but remaining strangers. It was very crowded, but not uncomfortable. The people were dead, so no physical issue was ever pondered in that matter. Dead are also the saints, figures of worship and objects of wonder: unreachable to the touch of a living hand, but ever so present in the mind's eye. Their absence just as present. Their words of wisdom and guidance echoed lost somewhere in between the earth, for the earth held too many voices at once, all of them equally nourished by the perfect ammount of humidity and warmth, chosen with the personal touch of the mother herself. Still it was confusing, especially when the sudden flood of silence preyed on him. The saints would not shine any light on those nights of skeptical distortion and muffled doubt. The reflection menaced, it was the discrete imp within working its way toward the end.

Warm and moist, welcoming, like the uterus, it was a church of the child and the jail of the grown tree, precocious but aborted. He blossomed in ecstasy only when faith filled his lungs and the clothes were no longer heavy and wet from the secretions - sweat, lachrymal waste, water. Because it was still earth, there was no space for those oceanic habits, the contradictions were harmful to him.

But how deep in the ground, exactly? He wondered how permanent the nature of it all was, the imprisonment and the praying, as he started to see instead of blindly swallowing. It was the single grain that separated the hermit from the corpse. The budding sapling from the poplar. So he exhaled the poison from the question, without a resolve, but with a clearly formed path to follow.

It is not a cave or a tomb; it is for him to discover.

Rivers Met

Restless head full of insomniac tenacity, 

I think of what kept your towers high and stone-cold on those many nights,

when only heavier drugs could lend you the peace needed to dive

into the lighter sheets of deep sleep.

Or did you ever reach such depths?

Times were such that they could only remedy the enormous waves in your head,

but never reach any clear cure to your ailings.

Numbed seas that could never be silenced.

Which currents drew you into waters so troubled and violent?

These doubts run through my own mysterious currents, at least tonight.

Maybe we fight similar shrouding tides of past burdens

that won't settle with being left ashore.

Or, even more likely, I'm reading my own miserable patterns into

what you will never have the voice to explain, your own tales of hardship.

It is only certain that our streams cross, more than once, 

sharing this incredibly uncomfortable and crippling ocean of a mind

that never shuts up.

Spontaneous Exercise

Dipping this napkin into cold water,

and reading into the urgent drawings that start to infect

the paper.

Then pressing the much softer former napkin

in between two fingers, feeling the product of such spite

disappear,

pressed onto skin, filling in the blanks.

Finally, removing the now slightly frayed and torn paper, which has also dried quite a bit,

whatever sensations or drawings experienced left recorded in you, but forgotten by the canvas.