polaris

i am what i see:

the blank page - mirror of an improbable epiphany,

the wintry february days opening before me like a leporello book

written in the language of the winds - i’ve seen all that

over and over again in my little life.

a peculiar kind of darkness bleeds into old age;

the entropic inevitability of decay and forgetting

invents its own alphabet: tremulous asymmetric patterns

posing as excentricity - je vous explique tout:

these stories i tell so well,

they may have never happened; there were also

many letters from the future, journeys in a haze and

so much waiting for the right moment,

but everything everything everything was

just as the script required.


now words crawl like ants all over the place,

carrying crumbs and lies; they’ve made anthills

from those unfinished sentences i wrote on a piece of paper.

there’s no place for me in purgatory like in the dream of gerontius;

the north star will close its eyes for me tonight;

and during that eclipse

a trail of black roses will show me the way. 


peut être l’oubli

morning’s iridiscent branches spread under the dome of mist; 

frost breaks under my steps as i walk among the tall pine trees in the forest; 

silence tastes like snow on my tongue;

a scream is trapped in my chest - winter’s bird-of-doom

entangled in the hour between sunrise and the end of the world;

why am i following the same trail of mourning, drowning again in guilt and self-pity?

wish i had a home to go to, an embrace waiting for me or a hand to hold mine.

from unfinished thoughts and broken longing, memories fall away like leaves in autumn.

regrets roam, frantic, on the path of new fears.

i’ve got nothing to say to the ghosts hiding in the frozen earth.


i will forget.

i will forget. 

not now. one day.

in oblivion we trust.


footnotes to a blank page

black ink spilling over endless fields. afternoon drive on empty country roads in the winter rain; it feels like being in a fish tank and trying to breathe under water. i stop nowhere; i get out of the car; i listen to the waiting: it is thick as mud; wind whispering, trying to lift the heavy sky just another dream higher; a stray beam of light coils around the trees and makes them glow; i shouldn’t have left home even if it felt like dying under the burden of that silence. where can i go: journeys have left me.


early morning the garden was floating in the air - mist and black earth and camellia trees with cold-burnt flowers and all; I thought it was a good sign: it weighed less on her frozen body in its shallow grave. the flapping of wings among branches must have been the voice of god calling her name.



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