Snow cascades down these tombstones
That I walk through this very moment
nveloping their marble in mutism
That leans against the silence of spring
Bulbous in its bearing of winter’s
Cotton sensibility.
As water does in hidden creeks
Smoothing out boulders in secret
That we contemplate without feeling
The passage of time,
Snow slides over the engraved names.
Or maybe a loved one's hand
Has passed by still alive
Clearing syllables,
allowing phonemes to sound through
love, praise and yearning
In between the vestiges of quite
Springing out of routine greetings
That now they believe to be
the only ones who remember.
Snow is falling on my head,
Freezes the gaze that in respect
Should be circling around the buried
Giving the same amount of time
To each and every one of them,
May none feel abandoned,
Asking them lifelong doubts.
Did you also hate losing hours
Spent shaving, doing eyebrows?
Scraping egg stuck in the pan?
Fixing broken faucets?
Did you fear death?
Do you fear death now?
Do you see now
A new spin of the kaleidoscope
Turned by your disjointed wrist bones,
Do colors pierce differently
Now that rot has hollowed you out?
In the snow that curtains
Down black tree branches,
With contours diffused
By the grey winter clouds,
A vision of my grandfather
Slides past.
He has no tombstone
But dreams of his epitaph
"Did you really think
I would leave you all alone
In this world?"
The only condition for his satisfaction
With his death arrangements
Is that my grandmother must die first.
His mother stopped eating
When her hands were too old
To paint away her white hairs.
Aging was her death,
So off she went.
My grandmother
Has no tombstone yet
But knows already
What her epitaph will be
"I don't remember any of that."
She has only one condition
For her satisfaction with death.
Heaven must erase everything
Except her childhood.
Her mother threw herself
Out of the hospital's window.
Sickness was her death,
So away she flew.
In this very moment
My feet crunch frozen grass blades
And my grandfather sits alone
Devouring life through a videos
Of other people's lives.
My grandmother sits alone
Living life through shows
About imaginary lives.
Swaying on guilt's pinhead
I think they already found their death.
I call them from this cemetery,
"Can you hear me?
Is the connection stable?
Hello? Hello? I love you!
Yes, everything is going well.
What did you do today?"
They always answer "nothing"
And I never take the silence
As an opportunity to ask
All the questions I have for the dead.
I keep those for candles lit
In honor of corpses I've met
In my imagination alone,
Believing more in apparitions
Then in the experience of those
Who think they have lived
All there was to live
While their breath
Still steams in the cold.
Can you sculpt a snowman
Off the snow blanketing graves?
When you scoop it out
With your ungloved hands,
It feels like blown up silk
and lively fragility.
Would you think it an insult
to build a snowman
Right where the heads of the dead
Are laid to rest?
If you are still alive
When the sun bursts into death
Will there be snow still,
And if it is will you want
To build a snowman?
If it turns out that you are dead,
Will there be descendants
Of warms, rats, and cats,
Shaping creatures of snow
Named with words
We will never need?
Will they die at their feet
After the sun's last breath?
Trees don't return for they never arrive.
Seeds settle, roots curl,
And propel their beginning,
Spreading, as they tune into each other
Conquering, through intertwined living.
I constantly go back, had countless arrivals,
To the same old houses.
Return has become a waiting room
Where I sit, feel my legs expand with relief,
Cross them, sigh, cross them the other way,
Get concerned about varicose veins,
But keep them crossed all the same.
Restlessly waiting for something real
Inhaling fumes from memories
That used to take my breath away.
I won't allow torpor to take over,
So I get a hold of a magazine
Resting on the coffee table
Hewn from wood, standing silently.
Icons dotted the glossy paper,
And had neon green titles
Labelling their characters.
On the cover:
"The eternal return might be real. Here's why you should worry."
I throw the magazine back on the table.
The terrifying thing is
That the purpose of all this
Could be explained millennia away
Children of our children forever going
Through the relief of revelation
Without ever being able
To return in our aid.
What does a dead paper
know about any of it?
I hope when I'm about to die
I do, in fact,
die.
So loved ones who've come to say goodbye
Don't have the inconvenience
Of returning to their homes
Without tragedy's alibi.
So I won't have to return the gesture
And stand next to their death beds
To hold their hands goodbye.
Trees stand alive through their feet,
Expanding away for millennia.
And if halted by exhaustion
They shrink down so they may spread
Through roots of others like them.
I hope when I'm about to die
I do, in fact,
die.
So I may return to earth,
Become part of a tree,
And keep leaving forever
The floor still smelled like rain
Oozing puddles as big as lakes.
He surfed them, laughed,
Carefree as cherubim.
In the echoes of wet roads
Some questions took their place
Were they looking?
What did they see?
The day lagged, climbing up his back.
On a morning full of sunrays
She was waiting her turn to swing,
When silence hit a child.
As crimson flowed down his face
Some questions took their shape.
Am I somewhere?
Is that pain?
Screeches cut the veil.
Windows down, wheels rolled on
He asked for the same song
Over and over again.
Not because he liked it,
But to reach another's smile.
Is that it?
Was I good?
The noose had taken hold.
Cobble stones under her feet,
Jasmine's scent caressing trees
She walked holding change
That belonged to someone else.
She bought three pastries
Dreaming of more,
And of never being caught.
Will I grow up?
Will it be this?
She lost her step on the way home.
Fisted to a dot
Rolled down onto itself
My head pounds my soft palate
The lady pressing my side as the subway slides home
Has a leather bag of the crocodile kind.
It bites my arm and furiously shakes
I'm sure of it,
I know.
Contour around the scales
Mesmerizes an inner beast
That my eyes fail to stare down.
It feeds on the luxury of metal
Flattened to a plastic cut.
My mouth salivates with just the thought.
My head presses more,
My viscera begin to rise.
Sometimes I dream of using a credit card to
Slit my goat eyes, turn them into moon.
A thin cloud would poultice the wound
Blurring the fountains of night's light.
"Inne bet...oneti..ane..ther olll th....r mi.."
Widen your eyes, stretch your neck,
Open your mind and follow your finger.
Birth and death.
"In between the one thing and the other all the days are mine"
Wrote a somebody under candlelight,
too lonely to think about night.