alone
i sit inside abandoned silence,
wonder
how many more
tears can possibly fall
before my body
exhausts itself
of moisture,
my eyes, my skin,
my veins
dry up
and my heart
turn to husk,
a clenched fist made from
four caverns of stone
?
coming of winter
frost fell for the first time
last night, softly threatening
like the absence of touch
after the hurricane of your hands
or the misstep in my soul
after too many sad love songs;
silent.
vuelo del otoño
la primera escarcha del año cayó
anoche amenazando, quieta,
como la ausencia del toque despues
del huracán de tus manos, o
la claridad de mi misma despues
de un exceso de baladas tristes;
callada.
unsounded lyric
Irrevocable
the sound of something dying deep inside me;
a dark rhythm, insistent
pounding of silence
that reads
lasciate ogne speranza,
one language not enough
to assuage
the piece of me
that now lies quiet
on a crag of sunburnt earth
close to the divine.
What remains
rages, essence and flame
spiraled higher because
I still breathe,
hardly knowing how but
I dance
barefoot
over mirror-shards
of who I have been,
defy you
to define me,
pick out the parts of my
blood,
the promise and power I alone
hold
for as long as I restrain
my doubt, refrain
from turning my head and
tripping
over might-have-beens.
untranslatable
A hollow-eyed Sisyphus heaving senseless longings
defined but unsung for a decade,
an eternity;
yearning for the sake of yearning,
I, trapped inside the skin of fantasy,
a starving child on a floor of dust,
a dying woman they will bury in mud
dry-eyed, knowing that
regardless,
tomorrow will come.
Speak of this to no one.
It is my soul they stab–
or, what I think is my soul
when no one else is looking,
foolish shadow the color of blood-tinged clouds
rising again and again to its knees,
sexless and fluid
–without even knowing, hearing
me liplessly plead only
with the idea of you,
never a whisper of desire out loud
to a bitter world, no
not even to you,
to you, strange subjunctive phantom
of my present’s damp sweet dreams;
serpentine, sharp;
your cuts will be no less
exacting
for their ignorance
and this gets too near the subjectivity
of my own truth,
littoral point of no return.
regret
This was the one I wanted to write,
the answer to all the riddles:
an orange nihilism;
a soundless bittersweet poison;
shallow breaths in a wading-pool;
hesitancy in an ocean.
This was my hand, stayed.
My heart, stopped and
hidden
from eyes that should have seen.
This was the song
I would have sung
if I had dared,
and all the dances
the rhythm was never right
to join.
This,
this is the shape of too much silence,
choked answers and hands played too close,
dense fogs of obscured meaning
throttled in surfeit of thought.
This is ambiguity all dressed up and alone,
different, somehow,
from what came before;
this, today, tomorrow,
a riddle with unshaded eyes
perhaps at last
leaving backward glances behind.
