40. crimson shade

a voyage round the dead space of my fading projection










in detail one thrives, in stale encapsulation, in spiritual shortcuts

in health oaths, in void journeys, in risible scripture: “toil, slaughter, evil whispers...”

in the veil of disdain for strength, for growth, and for other paltry oozes.



I stood outmaneuvered constrained deferential, my ink blood

in woe, with erratic breathing, I told myself: how can you ignore

the gullies, their suddenly beaming eyes, and instead chew alive

the cloying width of undulant nonentities albeit properly geographical?

no, no; what matters dwells in caves, caverns: weight, momentum, booming room

lurk therein, and decay and blooming risk, and excess and the ghostly beasts.



I had taught myself thoughts, inchoate mysticisms, initiations to

polluted astonishing scholarly analysis steeped in liturgies and spirals

rather belonging to the ticklish realms of the philologist and the hypnotist.



emboldened in my linen clothes I followed into more inflammatory thicker

pearly spawns, indeed into almost bold carnal intuitions

I argued that fakes alleviate the better omitted polemical stutters of distress

that coincidence roughly only insofar as it is redemptive rises above nonsense

that reluctant nitwits, their remote flashes of genuine epistemology

are ontological masterpieces of busy sophistication.



those reams of parody transiently dissolved for me the d of “death”

and the remaining “eath” became a lisping existential echo

a defiant hullabaloo against the elite corps of the spinoff

and the emaciated demons of the tilted yellow overgrown noontime speed.



sleeplessness and coffee plus gawking at the wayfarers to and from

the cemetery shared feathers with the thin edges of my silence.



the mood was often repellent, I was afraid of assurances

of cocky females, worse I disliked the deteriorating departure of my toughness

my rapacity, through the tangents of caricatural remorse.



prolific adventurers of whom I’d heard the prowesses stunned

fascinated the underpants out of me and the erudite documents

the gems of keen soliloquies that bore on the unexplored, the utterly pathological

did nurture the encomiums on my startled no longer flaccid lips.



I took as vapid nuisances the bathetic fondles of stinking castrated phallocrats

whose rusted skirts dropped as a flight of dusty moths

over the damp squib of my sourly scoured codicil.



the wayward weather and the untoward locus of my renowned shivers

waned and evaporated as the tribes that erstwhile sailed the skies

steeped in zest and leftward leanings in the deformed excoriated evening.



but those tasteless metaphors belaboring as the hordes of senescence

at the arid demesne of posterity at length proved worthless, gave no relief.



I wove, as I still (threadbare) weave, an adolescent dependence to heights:

the geographical warts that cowardly though solemnly roughly endure

don’t ever shrink as would a bum cloak submitted to the same abuse of wanton bombast.



in conclusion I’ll say that I ascended full of rigor and gratitude to the estranged

summits where disagreeable witches mourn even now the destroyed pledges

that should have clinched the aberrant conflict of their latent ambiguity.



relying like them on weirdness I selfishly, full of vanity, renounced

in extended snores the earlier flirts with unruliness and disintegration

and damned if wickedly I didn’t cling now to the extravagant tactic

of seeing to notch a few sad surreptitious constructive actions of my own.



in ludicrous streams ran throughout the expectorations that I called

poetry, in revenge against which my ventriloquizing navel lavishly frothed:

infested deluge of graphic noxious gasps where monkey guffaws

and plenty other demerits (later blamed on spies and other greasy foreigners)

grew, with a gently relative ease, at last tectonic

so that I felt even buried before any catastrophic incident had really taken place.



and yet in contentment is, in fine, my conceit that I was (as I am) chosen:

an ambivalent closet introverted inner laureate

whose acute glad obscure schematic keeping-at-it venomous spitting

vexes in its error-prone nebulousness the eye of no denizen

my commitment to realize untold infidelities never given

oh well up until now, a proper, verily plausible, chance.

39. bole perforated

cheap potshot








pertinently unsated with the vivid wakes

the jeweled variegated volumes that run triumphantly

toward my untoward posterity.



overnight rapt with the mundane predicaments.



enthralled at the windows, the eyes chronicle collections of bedrooms

aspects of succulent exception, of superabundant prurience.



but now the sudden fright of the customary monster intervenes.



listening twice to the same thug, the same cancerous witch

telling me (and the darker barrel of a shotgun pushes at my stumpy nose)

to tackle manliness, or else.



opulent enervate themselves the chapters of such ornate anathema.



my wood, with the same negative alacrity, the same slow cadence

always striven for in the unparalleled wood of every tree

breaths in diminishing prolixity.



i’ll repent tomorrow, I insinuate, too cool, when the bullet flies.



once resonant, my wood, now crammed with portions apocryphal

sedulously, diligently, cracks, combusts, turns to ashes.

38. bloodied pilgrim

my wife my harbor










for there where syrian television cannot be picked up

even if

the hostel master told me “over there, sir”

and there is nothing that I can find over there

and certainly not the proper tv set where one can pick the syrians

that are the only ones

I was told yesterday

that would carry the soccer match I would gladly see today...

there then I’ve been sent

on my own as if on a crazy goose chase...



and over there is all crowded up already

and even if from a door a bold strong man

appeared and he must have heard me

because he asked me in catalan

if I were a catalonian

where I answered beaming in the affirmative

upon which the herculean man acknowledged the answer with a nod

“me too” he said

not dourly just matter-of-factly

and left me with my right foot in the air

for I was taking a step toward him

but he’d already gone inside closing the door...



and then shrugging I went down the corridor some more

and must have found the other “there” there

where I must have been supposed to be

but always so crowded the nook

and the room I thought was mostly meant

already with two guys cramming it somehow

in such a tiny room with such a big mess of thrown things about

with each of the two not too fine smelling guys flopped

on two narrow hammocks hung in the middle of the tiny hole of a room

one hammock over the other

and no room for anything else

certainly not for another bloody pilgrim

and no bathrooms anywhere that I could see

and me already with the ominous stirrings on my lower bowels

and their minuscule television set set not on the syrian channel and my match

but set on mute on some silly varieties shenanigans

and me saying to the one guy that looks my way

the other probably too pissed with booze or hashish

“listen, sorry, but I was told by the steward that this is my room

and listen, tell me, do you get the syrian television channel on your tv set?”

so the fellow who could listen jumped over the slop

a slob over the slop

and came my way

pushed me a little so he could go through the door-gap that had no door

and went directly to the kitchen with me following him...



communal, crowded, and with nothing edible about

the kitchen was a bigger mess yet and the guy got hold of the steward

and asked him “was it true were I assigned to their tiny nothing of a room

already so crammed?”

the steward saw me as directed by the slovenly guy’s gesture

and told me forthwith “sir, I told you your room was this one”

showing me a not too clean corner bench over there on a corner

of the kitchen itself

no privacy, no curtains, no bedding, no nothing on it beside filth...



so the slob went back proudly to his shitty room

glad maybe that my “room” was much shittier than his

and the busy steward had disappeared meanwhile

and I was left standing there in the kitchen

the stewing kitchen

with children and women semi-naked all and doing

their necessities, culinary and otherwise

inside stinking cooking utensils...



I threaded back my way to where my wife had her room assigned

I knocked softly on the shiny mahogany-colored door

I pushed in

she was in the dark

the curtains pulled over the window

she was on the bed inside the sheets having a nap

her bed was quite capacious and the bedding quite well suited

and I saw immediately that she had in a corner of the neat room

a quite proper tv set now off

she was smiling beautifully at me

I said “honey, can I use your toilet? they have put in a corner

of the kitchen with nothing about but noise

and lots and lots of people cooking and shitting in the same pans

one almost would say indistinctly...”

her smile a little bit wider now she said “be my guest

and after you are done come and crawl here inside besides me

there’s space enough

and you’ll be warm and cozy

and maybe you’ll even be able to pick up your match in the syrian channel

if you don’t put the voice on

and you don’t get too crazy celebrating the goals of the catalonians...”



my beautiful beautiful beautiful wife

always the one also with the best room of all!