Category: poetry

As worn out as a shellac record
and just as brittle, I’ve got my mug shot
stamped in a book of wraiths.
If only I could sound my full voice,
even once, as if the spear-tip horn
of the majestic Victor V lent me
the alluring oddity of the tone,
I might regret nothing.

I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine, I promise. It’s just that I can no longer remember
what it’s like to gently brush my fingers over that brief moment of silence
in anticipation, which, like any attempt to hold on to a long bygone present,
fades eventually. So I guess I finally have to adjust to all the possible futures,
each with its own way of making me feel like a fool, because only a fool
could possibly avoid the time leaking all over the bed.

What on earth were you thinking? That you could live your life
without subtitles, as if you stood at the fireplace, bereaved but free,
burning cocktail sticks and never-opened letters, and all you needed
were writing utensils, a typewriter perhaps, and to be comme il faut,
an etymological dictionary.

I guess it’s good to hang onto something tangible, like seedless grapes
in a disposable clamshell container, for example. In the end, it’s always
been all about convenience, hasn’t it? But you are not listening, darling,
busy with preparations for a picnic to which I would be habitually late
if ever again invited.

You don’t have to say anything. Anything at all. Just slip out of your shoes.
The water is still warm. You know, I tried to remember the last time we had
a bath together. Perhaps you might recall it, although does it really matter?
Sometimes I wonder if there is anything more to protect beyond that lost
memory we once claimed as our own.

Once upon a time, before we were supposed to be happy
— I mean, de jure — we used to be just like that — happy

when left to our own devices. Of course, there were certain
urges, but we tricked them away with a loosely defined sin.

Sometimes we were quiet, lying on the grass-textured rug,
tired after a frivolous grapple over the last bite of croissant,

other times pretending one couldn’t answer the other’s call
of names learned overnight to be forgotten with the dawn.

And I’d like to think we were decent, even if we eluded
being caught only for a little while.

I have never touched the trunk of an olive tree. I doubt I ever will,
since they don’t grow up north, where I live, and I prefer to avoid
the swelter they thrive in. So as long as I stay here, I will not suffer,
except that I will not know the feeling of running my fingers over
the fissured bark of senescence.

If I stayed overnight, allowing myself to see perfection but phrasing it differently,
how cruel would it be? Or if you waited too long, so neither of us knew which part
still deserved to be considered good enough to play, who should call the wager?
And what were we willing to forgive to enjoy that pity game of ours a little longer?
Perhaps we should always have known better, that nothing would ever tell us for free
where the coarse seams joined.

Ignoring unguided fingers slowly sliding over the burnished neck
of Casals’ violoncello in El cant dels ocells, a sense of decorum,
a relentless companion of pity, renders the unnecessary ceremony
of serving a sovereign inevitable. And only the birds, carried out
in cages from crowded squares for the offence of their singing,
sense the falsity of this servile note.