SKIN

  

Yellow leaves on your skin

Pulled pores of some impalpable heat

Cracked lips and fervid valley of thoughts and nipples

I say are you alone

or time flows away standing still

distant from the conventional clock

 

But I hear on the pale layers slipping out

drops secretion tears wine

yet it is not the first time nor is once

but nonce a perpetual returning back

as you close your eyes

facing the choice that you do not want to take

as this time comes by

this autumn

on your skin

in an eruption of

inconvenient

improper

indecent

spaces.

 

TREE OF WINTER

Cold fire in the forest

rough rinds on the edge of this window

I see

I burst shivering without thinking

in a burning interzone

that restores me

and glows and wriggles

my bones my womb

and yelps without my name without your recognition

a fish from a northern sea

You give me

a grasp of wheat and you spit

a bit of wine in my mouth

You are my race - my unease

turgid seeds

uprooted dry layers

Your

skin

on my feet

 

 

CARTOGRAPHY OF FIRE

 

we are nowhere

we go nowhere

we do not come from anywhere

we are just a lonely drawing at the runway

we emanate our breath at airport gates

we hear deaf conversations on the highways 

we stare at the closed windows in suspended subways 

the trains of silence are late

the flights rescheduled

the days postponed

for never again

 

the wine fermenting on our bewildered lips

at the edges of our minds

our eyes are frozen clouds

our throats blown dunes in the desert

steppe growing on our tongue

humid jungles in our sex

mute precipices in our chest

burning charts after the rain

under the crystal-clear sky

that does not cover any land

 

we leave after our shadows

footprints in the quicksand we are

torn off clothes of refugees with no traces

scepters rejected by invented kingdoms

nails teeth eyes dig up from unwritten histories

lost in the unexplored ridges of our flesh

thrown maps on our knees

yawning tides biting inlets and littorals

on the shores of our cellular yearning

on the threshold of the dead nations

we burn only for that moment

when you know

when I know

you are the defeated Levant

you turn your back on the Eastern wind

you walk down the borders of your freedom

and you leave

but you are no longer a chimera

neither exile

nor you will ever be

for me

a terra incognita

 

 

 

STRANGE BIRD

 

You filled my mouth with solemn words

drown in blurred whispering waters

dark and grey

bewildered and untouchable.

 

You took me to a place that nobody knows

always new always different you

one step above the whirl

one breath above the wind.

 

You showed me sandy beaches in winter

unreachable peaks of silence you revealed me

in this elegant hotel

you slaughtered my fears.

 

You poured me in a glass to drink me ferocious

you dressed me up in purple dress

and tied me up around

your endless Bedouin crown.

 

You brought me to this nameless city

rolled up around myself

you tied my bones in the four corners of the world

and you pulled them out of my throat

 

to prevent me from choking.

 

 

NAMELESS STREETS

 

 

I have learned the names

of all those streets you walked to reach me

 

While I was searching for you

the bakery women were laughing at me

 

I become a murderer of our remote times

Yet only you were above all that unstable

 

I was searching for you in nameless places

In empty bistros eating goat cheese and smoked salmon

 

Everybody felt my perfume

But only pieces of you trembled in me

 

Nobody understands

the solitude engraved deep within you

 

It is six o’clock and the night is deaf

You see yourself on me

I lick myself on you

This city is a predator

 

I have bitten the bitter orange and spit the semen

I wedged my earrings in between your fingers

To be always there even when you will be gone

 

but, you

You saved me.

LITTORAL

 

There is one zone of bounds far away from you

distant in our precipice

in ourselves when we are wasted

where winds are lost

where roads are confused – that is

the sincere zone of your failure.

 

Yet you still smoulder

in the transcendental horizons of silence

You say you think of the future

yet you have nowhere left to go for lunch

in your simple present tense.

 

There is one zone where you do not enter

where you disseminate fear

where you can hear all those answers

that you seek but that you do not want to find

Mediterranean zone –

where red cliffs make love with livid depths

bewildered winds break the compass

white sails rise above the blown hair.

 

You want to determine your direction

and humbly implore to merge your fetters

in liquid red iron

in a vital peaceful oxygen

in a flourished green dawn

but you cannot.

 

There is a zone

that renews you

that gives you birth again

that shapes you and calls you

where windmills grind your remote past tense

where sailing boats knit your future tense

where gulls weave the travelogue of your flight

 

but you only keep silent stealthily

you only wait quietly

and you prey and

you refuse to split

far away above you.

 Argeles-sur-mer / Collioure, 2017

 

vagabond wind

 

silba el viento dentro de mí.

estoy desnudo.

dueño de nada, dueño de nadie, ni siquiera dueño de mis certezas,

soy mi cara en el viento, a contraviento, y soy el viento que me golpea en la cara.

 

eduardo galeano

 

 

at airports I am the traveler

examined for several times

random check they tell me

but I do not travel

nowhere

I tell them

I do not go anywhere

I do not even return

I am not a barbel in extinction

neither fardel which will determine the directions

 

they seek and scratch my bags

but I have nothing

nothing which will throw a shade on their fears

they ask me where do I go

but neither myself I do not know

which is the hotel address

what is written in the invitation letter

do I have a returning ticket

 

I am a fish on dry soil

I tell them: I want to move away

but I feel fear

cannot you see

I do not have north nor south

I am the runway uprooted from your royal land

and still, I am the absence of land

of your time

I am the hourglass

you cannot wait to trickle

nor to seep you

but you still seek

for the crumbling time

to your royal beginnings

to take you back

 

sans-papiers

 

I am blowing the air around me

I keep silent in their eyes

and they are running away

 

yes: they are probably running away

to relieve the turbines that I have drifted away

the lacuna carved by my spine

they hit me with the pendulum of the space

they look at me with suspect and fear

they scratch me in their mind

and then they leave me

without seal without stamp

without humanity

 

then they send me beyond their borders

where I was a foreigner

but I did not remain:

 

well, I did not even

have a gamble to lose

to calm down my bones

and save them

 

from insanity

 

homeless

 

I live in foreign spaces

among foreign people I shift my body

strangers which do not imprint my existence

but only my shadows

 

I am the seized passport

in sideboards at hotel receptions

lost signals pass me by

in the ether of the radio stations

 

from public phone boxes I call

I am seeking the voice of my father

it gurgles in the echoes of the distance

the glass sticky with breath is separating us

 

I call myself with many names

and I belong to many nations

but only this body belongs to me

even though is moving away from me

 

to return back to myself

to my father

to my fatherland

to my land

which does not exist

[which has never even existed]

to the name which is gone away  

except the one that

you have imposed me:

 

nailed from the heart

on my broken bones

 

 

laissez-passer

 

 

I do not celebrate the victories of my homeland

the disruptions within me are harmoniously woven

and that is fair enough for me

 

I do not mourn the falls

my home is built from me

and I dwell inside there

 

I kneel down with closed eyes

and I wait for the sentinel to let me in

to cross the straits which are not mine

I wait for a storm to blow me up

to clear up this exile

thrown into oblivion I sting

I count the meaningless existences

which pass by and beyond them

everything rises and everything falls apart

and again and again

as in this household

as in this life

 

as horned viper I am sneaking in

and I wait for the wind gauge

to turn around my place

 

while somewhere in the world

deaf winds are roaring

in my inner field to stand still I wait

to pass to the other side

to be aligned in a queue

to be called somehow

it does not matter how

I am waiting

however:

 

to be marked

by the border

policeman 

 

roman palimpsests

 

I hear my father's voice

in the Jewish ghetto by the synagogue

peeling through the ocher-orange facades

passing through between the cobblestones

 

not captured

not even indignant

the voice is solitary

homeless and mute

like a tsunami wave

like an unexpected winner

lovingly approaching the historical justice

 

at night the seagulls land on the cobblestones

they secretly peck grains between stones

and bring back to the sky the voice

the dust from a light beam:

 

there is too much beauty in this world

it is inevitable

it is unavoidable

but the voice of my father

can no longer

whisper it

 

 

*

 

 

the world has left you

spring blossoms but not anymore mesmerized

and you will no longer taste it

your rosemary gardens ask why are you missing

the april sun shines on your frozen and cracked shutters

but you will no longer rejoice under the bulky suns

and not even under the poor ones setting behind the moon

and yet there will be no more moon at all

except this needle of solitude

a crystal strayed over the deaf forest

a mirror of the past howling

like a pack of hungry wolves at midnight

and breaks up

sad and pale

like a sun lost

from its orbit

pushing the thread

the axis of my agonies