With barley juice
and garlic, the pyramids
were built.
Nothing more
does a man need
to leave
behind him
monuments.
Fifteen years ago
I buried my father.
Fifteen years later
I buried my mother.
Today, in her forties, my sister
told me we fed
one hundred and fifteen people.
Today I know that no matter
how long I keep eating,
I will never feel full.
I go from table
to table, for a crust of bread,
a pork chop bone,
and maybe two leftovers.
On Sundays I become a dog.
Deserted streets, shops
empty of customers.
Even the public lights
are few. A dog
barks behind the yard
of a villa. A saxophonist
plays his notes at a street corner.
Yellow leaves dance
around him, far more
than the coins in his hat.
Once again I find myself
in the wrong place,
because I do not share
my time with the one I love,
and everything seems burned
in the sky that froze
while her star tonight
does not accompany me.
I turn the other way
like a half-burnt trunk,
because I know she’s somewhere there,
the fire she lit and still burns.
Even this mouthful of bread
we will swallow alone,
just as our soul feeds,
and then turns
its face elsewhere,
like the cat that walks away
and hides
under the table.
**A man is the whole number
resulting from the mistakes he has made
minus the coefficient of correcting them.
The perfect version of a continuous walk.
An attempt at imitation from books perhaps.
From cinema, certainly. Examples:
the father equivalent to alcohol in the blood.
A blurry stain of uncertainty. An illusion—
a man in the mind of a woman. Of a friend.**
The more poetry decreases, the more
its poets multiply.
The harder love becomes,
the easier appear
the lovers,
the professional lovers,
and the love-stricken.
