THE SENTENCE
I
don't know where it begins or where it ends but it is certain that I am here
for the duration and can only interpolate the forgone conclusions that drop out
of the overcast production of fictitious rain, whetting my appetite for
darkness, locking my visions in a room full of blindness but I see this denial
as a way out, an opening out onto a dislocation that connects me to the blank
stairs of departing, climbing into the sky like a mirror, like a Miro, like a
ladder, piercing the punctuation of stars that hang out in the darkness,
pulsating commas, pausing in the unknown with a burning desire for morning, for
the silver lining of the next moment to wrap its weightless light around the
present imperfection, with wishes pulling me out of the deep, incomplete
wholeness that imprisons my youth in a convulsive orbit around its own shadow,
swallowing its tongue in a silence that cries out for more silence, understood
only by the gibberish of alienation, blocked by a lack of enclosure, a cell
whose membrane has forgotten its function and oozes with the liquidity of
directionless freedom and
stains the edges of infinity with
a bloodless bath of light and unlocks my broken bones from their futile search
for the flesh that fits their jagged configurations and pulls together the
identical disparateness of me and the future me if I ever escape these
consecutive terms that my own judgments have sentenced me to, here where the
four walls stare at me, a box of 'I's', night and day they dream of tomorrow
and square off for the next round, switching gears in mid-stream of
consciousness as if the concrete has broken the fall, a half empty bottle of
proof cutting through a
red muscle that
lies on ground zero in a puddle of questions pumping
the air for answers to everything in particular, to nothing specific except
gravity, holding down the grave situation, the six feet under the blanket, an
answer resurrecting the foundation and rising above the emotion of stationary
movement until death do I depart, until life joins the opposition to the quiet
dissipation, until evaporation clears the air of broken glass, transparent
dreams that cut out all this nonsense about perfection, surgically removing the
stillness, bleeding like a lamb, innocence overflowing, experiencing the
overabundance of emptiness, pulling its wool over the bedlam until I can find
the rest in a single yawn, in a sleepy awakening, springing forward into an
open ended imprisonment, jumping from the black roller coaster onto a horse of
a different color, a white merry-go-round that rocks back and forth, side to
side in a youthful buoyancy of ignorance that is tied to the earth, constantly
switching allegiance and floating in place, in place of floating which is
perhaps the closest we ever get to being close, which is the closest we ever
get to being and like similes when compared that take
metaphoric leaps into approximation, the unknown rests in these pieces and the
known distorts its certainty, certainly knowing that the anger of knowing what
I don't know anchors consistency to its big bang and constantly begins over and
over for the last time but it is this last attempt, this last temptation to
remove the nails from my handiwork that has me stuck in the repetition of an
historical context, one that gives hope to the hopeless struggle for freedom,
that opens the trap door that closes from the inside and bolts itself open
making escape a two way street travelling along the creases of a topographic
map of convolutions, of folds in the imaginary thoughts of someone else's brain
thinking of me imagining someone else being me somewhere other than here inside
my room, inside the enveloped infinity that squeezes its vastness into a single
point, a point that sticks to the point, a point that is the point, the point
of departure, the point of balance between two lines of thought, one real, the
other, The Other and
in this corner
where these two walls meet I sit and dream of awakening, dream of real
happiness that is open to this enclosure and finds a way out by staying put,
holding my ground in this electric battle of neutrality, rooted in floatation
like the trees and clouds, meeting dreams head on and in the aftermath of these
uncommon fractions, in the result of this division, this separation, and in
addition to this memory, the subtraction, leaving the earth by digging further
into it, escaping the clutches of gravity by NOT flying, by opposing the
impossibilities and going deeper into its principle where the colors
blast the landscape's breast and mad dashes in the distance form people, people
formulating dreams of walking along the purple river where wild beasts sleep on
their cold feet and an offspring's fingers pull the earth toward it and shade
the opening from the coming heat where the residue of burning desires feeds the
future and lights the way back, unlocking the gates and letting me in on a
secret, a secret that love tells in its sleep, in its wake, in the dust of its
arrival, speaking in tongues, in the cracks and crevices of the peeling wall, the
wailing gate, the kneeling tongues in transition with language, movements
swaying in the stillness, time alternating its current and on the floor which
is the ceiling which is the wall which is definitely the floor, a speck of
myself spins like a coin, never committing to this way or that, heads or tails,
questioning the answers, turning the corner until the corner rounds the bend
and softens the perpendicular that holds my escape in its embrace, holding me
up, holding me back, holding me in, holding my tongue, my hands, as it lifts me
under and covers me up in a tired shackle that goes limp and lets me go,
nowhere, and once I'm there, inside my cell, my self, I circulate the seasons
of this body of water, disappearing into the sky and falling back to my knees,
my connections to bending, drop by drop wet lips utter the secretions of a
single moment and breaks its word in the brittle context of resolution and
hurls its splinters against the reentry of comfort and settles on the rainbow
of aftermath, the calm of seclusive miscalculation, the frenzy of lying still,
arms frozen in the afterglow of torment, folded across my chest, holding sleep
captive against its will, against the wall, against my will to remember, to
awaken and move on totally incomplete, walking the thin line, tiptoeing through
my sentence like a young punctuation mark, marking the time it takes to pause
and move on, growing into the spaces left by a breath, the infrequent moments
of truth, the silence that speaks louder than words and in the cellular block
that fits my skull like a glove, the fingers flex their gripping pain and cover
the loneliness with an array of light, colors that spell the nuance of escape
and open a multitude of small doors, each a tunnel that amazes my departures,
shocks the synapse and leads the following life, like a shadow that walks
behind me one moment and pulls me forward in the next, depending on the time of
day, the time of night when it disappears into the dark descent of sleep where
reflections go inside the silence and dance to an unheard of rhythm, a flip
flop that breaks into a cold sweat and cracks its liquid knuckles against an
invisible door, crying, "let me out!" "let me in!" and on
the opposite wall a clock hangs onto
its opening line, "there is
no escaping freedom," and so the oxymoron throws this mechanism out the
window and watches it return in a split second, a minute, split second
generation of timelessness passing itself as it comes to its senses, ticking
off the future with its presence of mind, with its past lives that hang out on
the circumference and recur each time the big and little hands play with their
erection of counter-clockwise ignorance, their fingerless stumps pushing the
next moment to its limit, punching
the clock, its shadow on the wall, aging my cell until it
crumbles, sheds its iron membrane and opens its nucleus to the fluidity of a
frictionless world where opposites slide into each other unopposed and
objectives never stop cropping up and are never subjected to the screeching
halt of boundaries but this fiction has its own reality, its own unnatural
laws, its own negative capabilities, its own prism, its own dizzy spectrum of
unharnessed freedom, its own body of blood without vessels, without a wall,
without the embrace of containment to limit and stop the flow of misguided
movement, to put an end to these beginnings that repeat endlessly, going
nowhere but somewhere else, without an inkling as to where it began and I'm in
there somewhere, in the wide open space of an idea, locked into the infinite
confinement of my dreams, a prisoner of freedom, lying on my back, looking up
at the sky, the ceiling, a wall in my cubist room, a slab of concrete floating
in a misty abstraction, unable to tell if I'm outside or inside, untrained,
derailed, misguided, floating up an extreme, my arms flung skyward like
a prayer torn
from its words with flamboyant
strokes of ignorance splashing against the warped edges of the brush, painting
myself, painting myself into a corner, painting my room in blue moments that
swim in the wing of a flightless bird, hovering underground, skimming the
precious stones cast aside by a circle of inconsequence so I swallow my own
mishaps and as they are driven into my fingers I make conversation from the broken
lines of abandon and plant them upside-down in the sky and later when all is
misconstrued I drink a sub-culture of evaporation and two by two my
judgment is impaired so
while I can't see my way clear to
execute the sentence, I do while away the time by scribbling my name on the
wall, scratching a misnomer into the stone, the maybe, the might have been, the
decor of my next step, the context of my text, the surroundings of a square
root, an origin buried in calculation, a mirror, a self-portrait, a thoughtful
reflection of the future of what has just happened, hung by the clock, a canvas
shouting colors and spewing figuration, large black swoops and spirals and
loops, my glass face staring out at the
inside, the outside of my room staring in through the intermittent solidity of
the membrane's bars, the parallel grid too small for me to fit through, but big
enough for light, for air, for music, for noise, for conversation, for
intercourse, for insects, for fingers, for liquids and all thin dimensions to
slip through the boundary, an osmosis of information and food and stimulus
licking its way to the nucleus, the center of my gravity, the top of the line,
the head of my class, the CEO of my functions, the box within the box, the cell
inside the cell, the ceiling of the
floor, the wall behind the wall, the me inside of me, the reason behind the
dream, the absolute truth, the doubts, the Thomas, the Hill, the inclination to
accuse and deny, the absolution and the problem of its solvency all encompassed
in the four directions, each in turn, facing the walls and, turning into each
other, becoming unbecoming, inch by inch, the true false perspective, a point
of view, the view outside an opaque window reflecting the blind spots of an
upside down vision, a brainless prediction, the language formed in the mouth a
moment before the voice, a dumb forecast, an addiction to the future, of keys
to the future, to the escape from my cells, scaling the wall and jumping head
first into a lack of color, free to be lifeless, without conviction, an
ex-conviction, an excavation, a digging out into the mysterious past, in memory
of myself, lying here in the truth, in my room, alongside the table that is
turning, turning to the familiar, the cells of my wife, my children, my siblings,
my parents, locked into the familiar embrace of genetic proximity, of cohorts,
of similarity to oneself, running on at the mouth, the sentence, the one track
mind running the gamut into the ground, rounding out the extremes, a
circumlocution where stillness and movement, freedom and confinement, black and
white, right and wrong and left and life and death live happily after life,
beside the point, near the end and on top of the situation, fucking me over and
over until I beg to differ, to pardon me for living and let me out into the
widely closed space of chaos where I float endlessly in the beginning……………
FOLLOW THE BRUSH
1.
some infirmity of age
an absurd impression
slumped solemnly against
a nest of wrinkles
staring at the coffin
a choking sob created a kind of
intimacy
because the ache shook hands
with the silvery black gashes in
the road
it was a musical exhaustion
while tugging on a trail of little
drops
and lounging against blocks of
stones
a plateau of yellowish pebbles
in clumps of imperceptible
smoothness
he clenched a blade of vivid light
the red glow hovers in his fingers
while big flies wedged between
a fat matron and his voice
the Babel was echoing on the bare
walls
without a hitch
the scaffold had guillotined
a man's imagination
as the light turned green
and was beating out
of its natural groove
"it's true I killed a
man," he said
"I wasn't going to waste it on
God"
these words shrugged
as a night of dreamless sleep
stared at his shoes
and with that crisp
whip crack sound
it shattered
the balance of the day
2.
As a polite excuse was burning
in the flames of melted ice
an unconscious fidelity
envisioned the complexities of vice
and like a peephole in a false nose
a downpour of decorations
sheltered the pains of childbirth
aristocrats then seek a rift
between sorcery and the barman's
art
jealousy precedes love
dwelling in a clumsy affectation
prolonged by a secret
some lie about
the simplicity
of noble sentiments
like some superstition
rejuvenated by contact
a petrified silence
a tenuous link to family spirit
the inclusion of a third person
inclined to be a fresh vowel
without knowing
their thoughts
were identical
love can reconcile this
the shadow of reproach shines
on this slumbering emotion
amidst animated fingers
isolating the collapse of
sentiment
laughter cuts a hole in a thousand
details
he might perhaps suffer
like a frenzied creature
talking to a statue
leaving the room backwards
as in those dreams
which end
in a fall
3.
obscure kings spread their long
undoing
in a city within other cities
sunlight lapping the rock's sky
the black lake suspended from a
cable
perched on the blades of windmills
the opaque dimensions leap
with ingenious pantomimes
and fall into a net
the Great Kahn might be reflected
in a zodiac of emblems
Polo explains to himself
that his past is a possible future
in the branches of a negative
mirror
where scraps of eyelids shine with
dialogue
the hanging garden walks in a
semi-circle
where the shadows of ropes
are filled with dead bones
they have no thickness
like a sheet of paper
a widespread hazy glow
swells with conjecture
and occasionally bubbles
with twisted spires
the quantity of things
blossom
in an outpouring of networks
4.
the properties of windowless
buildings
are illusions contemplating
infinity
and the firmament of hunchbacks
are all diluted in the vague spaces
that make a broad gesture
toward aggregation the windows
wrinkle
the double sheath
wrapped one within
the other
goes deeper
into the mounting tendency
to be confined
fools in the grass
lie as if they will touch
the world's edge
whistling curses
and polishing doorbells
trudging aimlessly
out of the ruck
a picture of perfect
delicate rhythms
this little round star
sends down a flat glare
as flesh falls asleep
by the stiffened exterior
as hours pass
and the moon guffaws
delusion convulses
and the great silence
ends in a dance
this force makes a sleepy president
of the wrong color
and strokes a mirror
with an elasticity of attention
sooner or later
the leaves scrape themselves
upon each season
and in the half dark
count the foolish wings
of perfect stillness
instead of yielding
to a butterfly of logic
5.
this character suffering from
reckless duration
always requires the pretense of
speculation
monsters of flesh maneuver
expectation
and regulate the triviality inside
us
nothing is more impossible
than consciousness in a strange
head
stupidity and arithmetic extinguish
the puppet
whose delirious personality has no
opinions
life seems personal
and consists of being silly
with undeniable clarity
going from zero to zero
this pain is essential
and all that seems like suffering
is just the feeble laugh
of a circle closing
a teste realizes that dreams
are condemned by passion
and fundamental sufferings
diminish the calm possessor
of the moment before
then that new dance
the natural true death
will think that everything
is made by an angel
my solitude disheartens the bitter
lips
swimming with sleep
the irritation gets muddled
but the impossible haphazardly
dreams of windswept mountains
every hour
a mixture of puppets, clowns,
expectation and truth
moments of intoxication
accelerate the senses
and astonish
the senselessness of a candle
the extreme audacity
yawns with ineffable happiness
persisting like a habit
the malaise implies
a deathlike whip
the sort of thing
that communicates a wet secret
or a child's despair
that breaks into tears
under the trees
like an unintelligible world
an unexpected splinter of bone
a dream of total dissolution
an aftertaste of ashes
the death of a logical wind
6.
our eyes swarm
with flowers breathing
our skin flickers like a magnet
and insinuates the muscular sea
we are tangled in our limbs
exhaling sleep
our hair is hinged across our gaze
with lips of wind
and the ovoid hub of the interior
bone
our porcelain eyes begin again
to love
our opposite tempers
knowing the plush density of
passion
under the lids
the palpable roundness
circling in your secret cylinder
two threads in the bursting void
secrete a liquid
mumbling
a stain of moonlight
coming toward you
always little vagabonds animated
in the phosphorescent breasts
of the moon and the hill
unfortunate men
must not know love
or the inevitable dispersal
of inert things
a full sack
a box of molecules
and an eggshell of voodoo
a euphemistic allusion
to the birth of Dzadza
pretty globes swallowed like
medicine
fibers of children thrashing
in the voice of the bells
crashing in the dust
of lousy luck
twilight bordered with melancholy
and tinged with trees
adulthood kept in an old cigar box
like bits of glass
hammered out by a clock
vertical knees stepping back
destined to cause suffering
and poetry free of language
theatrical theatre makes a scene
satisfying the robustness
of the remains of an alchemist
fish bones flapping their wings
in the sunlight
ennobles everything
pointed elbows
curiously splashed with ink
and dressed in mirrors
and bunches of blue roses
on the verge of a violent death
a big club, a rock, a wallop
a cane, an umbrella, a butcher
knife
stuck in an open mouth
on tiptoe
the crowd cried out
"who are you? who are
you?"
7.
a rusty choir
followed by half a breath
a precise noise that knows darkness
ripped from chaos
the pianos squint in an oblique
notion
a raucous alarm delegated
to a frozen block of arthritis
a blade of cold flames
surreptitiously caresses his
beardless cheek
the small apparatus is without
a doubt a remembrance
of the margins
of an imaginary museum
a backward, awkward memoir
of an arrow juxtaposed
almost inverted
a magnificent rectangle
entering through the map
(diamonds of light
close the eyes
as he explores her skin)
a grid shrinking
the darkroom of memory
found in a toolbox
the ocular muscles light up
with the pain of a mute word
a map causing the remoteness
of becoming less and less perceptible
the construction of earthquakes
embroider a long vocalization
ra ri ra la la ta ri ta ri ra ri la
we retrieve these clamors
the sonorous body crushes words
to a crackling of dried ink
a crumpled paper
the echo of an instant
without light
riddled with a texture
of signs
8.
the cats
when the wind blows hard
simply become proof
of what you are
light, warmth, moist cruising
clouds
romantic expectation and delectable
fuel
(irrelevant dreams)
in spite of withdrawing unwrapped
landscapes
a city intersection whooshes upward
between the treetops and a
post-Pythagorean zero
perhaps this explosion holds such
satisfaction
that it left me vulnerable to death
reacting to insomnia's sleep
like closing your heart to the
reformation
which lay closed on your table
solitary abandon
is no smaller than the universe
dangling
in
midair
regret is no more difficult
than the frozen gestures of statues
a day without stars is a stone
the woman's belly is a wild beast
where the most beautiful shadows
are born from thorns
and caress the hair of poets
the valves that open
hear a useless secret
plunging into the appetite
of blind fish
birth and the salt of stupidity
can best be compared to silence
the degenerate fairy favors all
fours
like those contortions that shut
the doors
of vast black buildings
like the handcuffs of a smile
that hatch the eternity of wheels
like the little untranslatable
flower
like the deceptive horizon
that arrives on stilts
leaving everything to perish
9.
two monoliths swaying in my innards
move slowly down a staircase
a fantastic clock clings to the
yellow thunder
while filthy birds wade through
the deep red blood of wounded
animals
a jungle of armchairs swells with
noises
an electric catastrophe seized by
pirates
desires a long, wet, delicate kiss
and clings to the last step
slowly slipping to the bottom
in a single gulp
that was midnight
when the idea lay slumbering in the
corner
like a train at high speed
and not far away
a woman rich in secrets
raises the vain hope
of a horizon of white stone
the word lay in bushes of lightning
and whisper some mysterious
adoration
thick with frenzied insects
and huge hooped barrels of animal
movements
the bottomless precipice of air
swells with dark arrows of
direction
and at daybreak the reconstructed
universe
blinks its worn-out eyelids
exposing the battlefield
leaking with colors and
metaphysical diagrams
the warm streets
beneath the dome of a vagina
rush in through the fingers
and the word gradually became
the slanting edges of a pyramid
every night
the cage fills with birds
pelts the cheekbone of a sacred
object
a positive proof that invisible
hands imagine
two unknowns wrapped in a garment
crunched beneath the sun
beneath the traveler in yellow
boots
beneath the shadow of an aurora
vanishing into the mist of broken
clouds
the yellow stars float
in the soft pinkish tinge of blue
straw
the nauseating instability of
things seen
wandered the streets behind the
windowpanes
of alcohol
the bestial laughter
closes the gates of fantasy
pulling out the dazzling death
knock
in the palm of destiny
the friable knucklebones of life
disguise the truth
the circle of our metaphysical
destiny
will have been squared
with a lesson of silence
its silent ravine
is a cry of delirious purity
from a woman's throat
with an aura of a flax of thought
a tiny black speck
like a spasm of a hiccup
a pyramid tinged with blood and
flames
and on my chest
the last leaf to fall
10.
obediently
the pipe delights in going white
then flashing dull red
the pressure matches
the whirring machines
the oratory in the corner expects
the swinging bulbs of liquid soap
to spit against his cheek
upside down
falling through
thousands of feet of space
the stiffness leaps out
the slight shock that secular
things love
the strands of hair comfortably
sagging
across the treacherous furry
softness
of the boards
something leaps up inside him
as he watches the woman pouring out
an elaborately dressed pedestrian
a small dot
trying to remember
a different purpose
trying to remember
where the living corner slept
bedraggled
spread along each wall
overburdened with water
sharp as bullets
it accentuates the whiteness
of the red canoe
a neat closet of forgotten waves
that tremble hysterically
the sticky cling of his right
shoulder
turns his head sharply
with a sleep walker's rhythm
there is no laughing
only endurance
and the fur of hissing raindrops
11.
it flames up with black windows
innocently he breathes
the arguments against vivisection
the pad of white sheets
hang their ephemeral spark
rooted in a closet with a mirror
nothing exists
but a bundle of spirit
his blue cheeks
bulge with an intolerable sense of
loss
lost debris glimmers
between these walls
satisfaction runs from taps
bastard trees with crutches
think about tomorrow
their obedience is idleness
a red rag of dust
dragging the bottom
of living things
plunged into flowers of dignity
his body slowly oscillates
and begins to walk
the essential thing is contingency
to be there
a delusion being beyond colors
a movement accompanying
circumstance
a great white worm
almost black
nameless, congealed
irreducible
it speaks of God
outliving itself
a memory of a noiseless body
of sharp, unintelligible murmurs
not knowing
the thought of an empty evening
his imagination
invents perfect friends
especially one blanket
and a reasonably good attic
he confuses familiarity
with the gap that disappears
he bears good manners
and finds crumbs
small mouthfuls
riddled with open pores
too insignificant
he vanishes in a voice
that has forgotten temptation
lost in a keyhole
the window tucked down
into his trousers
he can hear footsteps
in a raging headache
his wretched room
pounds in his wrists
enameled glass
decorates the index finger
and a few pages shiver
in his miserable cry
he puts his hat on
his private life
and says goodbye
to his balance
12.
the unexpected kick
of the threatening fatso
the trolley wires crepitating
against no particular opinion
the fakir on the edge of the bed
squeezing curves
with one cheek swollen
in close proximity
to the conjured-up hubbub
of the disturbing feminine sweat
quarreling sparrows
fly off in a blue rectangle
their muscles arranged
in the abstract epitome
of a tranquil life
this monument
desolate remains of an exhibition
nostalgic and weary
hits the roof
above the knee
over the blowhole
and in the horse
that performs gestures of despair
the planes catch fire
and make an extensive
terrain of identifications
and with a lithe, loping step
the solitary man
removes the tablecloth
and finally shows his face
a vague breath of fresh movement
the summit of the invisible
uniting earth and heaven
obliquely resembling the bottom
the skylight managed to invent
absurdities
climbing the zigzags of
far-reaching consequences
a singular wind between ideas
travelling to a particular language
of celestial mechanics
a first approximation surrounded
by a convinced majority
lines of curvature penetrate the
shell
the privileged moment
surrounds
the island with audacity
the lung's elasticity
absorbs
the excess symbiosis
the horizon gulps snow
that is riddled with water
and calmly awaits dispersion
exploration of intellectual flesh
falls from the system like baggage
and one thing after another
vacates the brilliant successes
the mountain mutters and chuckles
dripping with shade
and dangerous afflictions
"holding the terrain in
place..."
