POEM

 

A Claudian sunset

a punnet of fruits on the windowsill,

a white nag can be discerned

grazing afar along the horizon:

beacons of light in a benighted world.

Undulations of shaded valleys and reveries.

A moon-caressed gnomon

as the phallus of some forgotten god,

god combing the goldfields of memory

where, naked, cavort 

all my past and imaginary loves.

Susurration of willows over the gleaming water,

stentorian voices of rivers that swell in the night,

the night coming down like a wound tiger

who stares, melancholy, the orange gloam of dusk:

beacons of light in a benighted world.

The dreams I didn't dare to make real

have turned into crows.

THE BREAKUP

She turned up all of a sudden

as a broken fingerpost announcing

the safest path to nowhere.

And she smelled so good

 in the summery breeze

as the poems I have no written yet.

But she glanced at me like someone

that scrutinizes a face 

of a missing person in a wall flyer.

On the tarmac, kissed by the rain, 

still glistened the shadow of her last word.

POEM

In military fatigues, the poet

trains his metaphors

to survive banality, transcience, void.

Unfazed by the noise of defeat and rain.

Inebriated by his own daydreams.

Though the golden spark, lost,

and the undertow of sadness, stronger:

he does not raise yet the ad digitum

to the shadows.

He still dreams of swanning off

with a mermaid, even brushed by age.

A belle dame sans merci

Enthralling the path without path,

the preordained beauty of love

with deathless death and no love.

                                                                      

*

His uncertain voice

besought to a certain night:

'What's the smell of the hours passing?

Has the touch its own memory

as Keats said once?

Why am I here in the same muddled being?

Why am I not the others?

When i shall be basking in the sunshine

of my true self?

When I will stop stampeding 

like horses through the fog of time?'

DEFINITION OF POETRY

A beam of light

Rainbowing through 

The handful of marbles

Some kid holds up

To the sky.

DRUMROLL

 

My life is somber

like those blues of Picas

so

so

I will treat you

to the most beautiful 

of my suicides

I already hear

the staccato laughter

of Rimbaud at dusk

and Giorgione

playing the luth

to a Venetian maiden

and my father a sudden barfly

singing guarachas

to a jiggy Silvia Plath...

May I have a drumroll

while entering

in Hell?

DREAMSCAPES

 

Dusting off the shrine of a goddess 

I forgot her name.

She blessed me once

 in light blue robe, golden nimbus

and myrtle blooms

when I was an outcast 

in an outcast country

(I forgot its name too)

*

A woman in the nude dances

on top of a beached whale in summer,

massive whale as the full moon

on the horizon. A sitar is playing

some kind of monsoon ballad

before a bonfire and silent gannets.

It's eventide. The full moon in yellow dress

dances with the naked woman.

*

 

I come across a top hat

in the middle of the street

dancing with a stray cat

in black fur and yellow feet.

The top hat hops me a scowl,

the cat spins me around a smile,

and the moon waxing awhile

in the golden eye of an owl.

The stray cat nimbly runs away

when some foxes bark to the top

hat now flying up on his way

to the hand of a whistling cop.

* 

 

Under an opaline sky

a wolf not famished 

but philosophical

strolls along the beach. 

Likewise an odd man

 in golden raincoat

 and black beret.

He's the poet of the village

 and never speaks

except to the pebbles, 

the rainbows

and the wandering wolf.

* 

In fine fettle the old lion

Still holds up the sun

with his mane at dawn.

POEM

 

What saves me of topping myself today:

my cat doing a handstand by the window,

Dalida singing Bambino at dawn,

the last spoor of kiss you left 

on my unmown stubble,

the beauty of contrails streaming along the blue sky,

the smell of horse manure in the streets, 

the fulsome warbles of a thrush in the morning,

the siren-cry of ambulances that carry not my corpse,

the rain-scented beams of the sun,

that William Carlos Williams' line:

the night passes, and never passes,

the loud laughing of mum in 1978

while sawing at her Singer,

the last smile you blew like a feather

into the air before waving a fond adieu,

the last spoor of kiss

 you left on my bristly stubble...

Love passes and never passes.