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.

Motive

I swallowed you by mistake, 

as a rather cheap excuse

to dive into the comfort of my own allowing.

Metropolis

The most sickening city there ever was

happened on the inside,

and remained overpopulated with the scum of wishes aborted midterm,

bastard offspring driving wildly through the avenues of his skewed reasons.

Every disturbing citizen rushing towards downtown, where the festival took place

as the sun went down and incinerated the urban maze.

"Chaos bleeding", you would say, but rather subterranean than exposed,

subtle confusion that bled into every wound of asphalt that pulsated,

living organism without a living purpose.

The grand mystery, lacklustre in nature,

inspired not even the mildest glow of curiosity:

how such complex civic structure, in such a terrible shape of inherent disarray,

did not crumble into itself, left to the dust and vermin.

Maybe some fault is to be held against the foreigners that treaded the poisoned land,

with healthy hearts and solid bones to offer, and willing to breathe out clean air.

Still, no effort has proven enough to bring light and stability,

leaving the streetlights forlorn

and the insides hurting ever closer to the core,

before returning to form.

A society is yet to be born.

Geography

If north depends on where you are,

what is ever certain or solid?

Facsimile maps of self are fraying,

flawed rivers not flowing,

landscape broken but

wielding a compass,

still.

You kick feeble, familiar rocks off the way, into a cliff,

for no other reason than to learn.

Is south where you are, or were you

even willing to be?

Salt Water

A walking body of information

roaming freely throughout the red earth.

Its stare bleak, and in it imprinted pictures of death,

which seemed to be always too close to the chest.

Late lunches and heavy silences falling straight to the ground

from the body, the way concrete would fall,

but not breakable like a stone. 

Accumulated residue from weeks and months of 

waste.

The only pulsating light is still there, little life

that blows by like wind and shakes to the wind too,

on red sands.

If someone could capture the scene in a single take,

it would seem to be eternally in motion.

And beautifully so.

Night Vision

I do not take the darkness seriously as I do not perceive skin as it is,

nothing but a string of slightly yellow, bright light

to my eyes.

Neither do I take seriously, or even perceive, for that matter,

the lack of his lingering presence on my back.

Wishful thinking, you might say, but I'd rather dismiss it as gentle breeze,

that just happens to shroud me softly some times at night.

Why being attached to notions that do not entertain or comfort me, in times like these?

There is a math to it all, trying to deconstruct the patterns that entrap and isolate one

from recovering feelings and memories,

or from finding new ones that serve their purpose - 

such as air shaped as him, or the shiny trail left by a lightning bug that may be actually disguised as my skin.

It might still be around, if there is just enough...

Painstakingly

Sucked his cheeks in

but they didn't return

Locked tongue

and saliva

stuck

Cheeks in

his grin

they didn't return.

Pedestal

She had the rare gift of being a god without faith

or believers. Eyes roadworn, physical idol deteriorating,

but still the constant wakefulness sustained.

Sacred and inane.

Sanitary

It pours out of my mouth, silent

Only to hit the ground with a strident cry

and punch me back in the chest,

stomach and liver

Teeth sliding out

into the ocean

Water in distinct waves decoding the struggle

to breathe

through the punch that turns all incomplete

Left on a ground is it:

bundle of organs, open teeth, dirty ocean

and a voice still contained.

Wasted

Youth

Potential

Time

Experiences

Stripes

for

Dots

Ropes for Knots

Methods

Norms

Routines

Bores

Wasteful

thoughts

waiting. for the crash to take place. but disappointed.

will collide tomorrow?

Tuesday

Exhaled smoke is not always as thick as you wish it would be

It gets troubled in between the thick atmosphere

and fades rather quickly

away

Though you can still arrange the columns of dreams

even if they will not reward you enough for it

They are still the most meaningful combinations

And their sense will guarantee itself

throught the nights and the dreams

that are not burdened by physical discomfort

or sudden, killing alarm rings

that kill memories too

Dreams are memories, 

if you are not yet aware of it.

Just write them down, maybe it will help

to build down the better

combinations

of molecules

in the atmosphere

Very Unoriginal Verses and Structure (Whatever Was Meant By Then)

The discussion remains

And the body still lays in between

Outside still screams against the violence and the inside still roars

Against the silence and the waves that insist to come

Looming still is the menace, everlasting and still unsolved

A war still establishes itself, solid and concrete

While, sometimes, distraction itself invades the plot

As if a whole generation of wild nature grew its deepest weed

And broke easily the own structure's weakest spot

But distraction is blewn away by any wind

A claim is made, by the absence of any other,

that the battle is to go on

Soldiers galore, there is energy for enough violence to support

But not enough to lose or to win

Each throw of each blow brings closer the final step,

the death of one side yet to begin

But will any of each survive without the other within?

The discussion remains,

dressed as an angst apparently long knewn by the ones who watch

Though, still, both warriors face the same raging rains,

and living tears will merciless still crush

them both

Dan

The power ice possesses

of freezing each particle and frame

Each second as it remains the same

as before

I feel the same in your blissful, emotional presence

as if our moments were frozen in stone

and preserved for all eternity to see

that there is real bliss to be seen in this still world

There is enough that is not wasted

or tired or yet roadworn

There is beauty to be born

and that may survive

I hope that I won't close my eyes

until I watch such miracle unfold.