Note to Pessoa

"I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice."

-- Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet)

If it were indeed so, my dear friend, it would be the greatest act of cowardice I've ever known in my life.

Augury

Verona. Venezia. Roma.
With Homer, Calvino and the Bard in tow.

When my gods come for me, let it be said
that somewhere in the slithery gravel of my past,
when the moon shed its ivory on waltzing tides
and silences fractured into vermillion streets
as time fell, like voile, like rain,

I was nowhere to be found,
forgotten to the amniotic lure of Mnemosyne's song.

Zeitgeist

Life happens
this very moment, in lightless living rooms
under dewy birches, curled paws and unassuming honesties
over ashen hills, dusty alleyways and postmen's desks
through desolate sandcastles

It never pauses

unlike
lines in poems
or daylight on windows, or witches in fables
or calendars on festivals, or things in the fridge
or fire on matchsticks, or reason around religion
or boredom at schoolbells

or me, or you
or this malaise we so passionately endure,
the unfailing burden of being young.

Icecream

Summer stroll by the lake.
5:41 pm. May. 23 Degrees.
Mom's calling out.

His slender fingers hold
a tangerine argument
that can't wait.

She'll be angry soon.
But sometimes what we want is all we need.
Icarus would've understood.

Another of those late night cravings

It's not so "normal" to wake up sometime in the dead of the night, a few hours after you've only painfully put yourself to sleep, with an inexplicable craving that you struggle to decipher for some chaotic moments but which thankfully builds up soon enough into a mini-epiphany, instantly translating the unease into a desperate need for a certain song. But admittedly, I've never been in the business of being "normal". (Very few of us ever are, so I always have a problem with the semantics of that word, but that's for another day.)

Bob Dylan. The times they are a-changin'.

The floor's a little cold (Paris has an eerie habit of mirroring my moods. It rained today.), my sleep-deprived eyes cringe at the laptop's audacity in the dark while the blanket I have around me is half-trapped in the bed corner but who cares, really. The night's pressing on, unrelenting as it always is, but I'm not really there anymore.

Oh how fleeting and soulless, how terribly prosaic our nights would be if it weren't for our cravings, those quirky little knots of redemption.

Dear Diary

There's crass football on tv, a darkly painful hole in a tooth,
dried ketchup on the nightstand, that compulsive boredom of youth,
a flight of stairs in delirium, and a half-burnt receipt for truth.

(Is that Mahler I hear? Wagner, perhaps?
They sure don't seem a cheery lot, these dead chaps.)

Ah yes, the writing, I almost forgot. Just a moment, honey,
I seem to have misplaced my finely-tuned sense of theatricality.
It must be here somewhere close by, surely
awaiting my cue, rhyming in loops, rehearsing endlessly.