Desde los Catorce Años

--
no hay eco ni refugio

en el pabellón de impacientes terminales
cada moribundo enfrenta sordos muros

¿cuántos me acompañan insospechados?
imposible hacer un cálculo razonable

un infinito número de celdas
un infinito número de vidas pasadas
me agobia la imaginación

ronco de clamar desde mis catorce años
no hay eco ni refugio
--

Kisses to Krist & Liz & Bob & Nick

--
I never realized
my heart has gone blind
(no blood on the tracks in the snow
on the ground, no ground in sight)

since I blew to cliché
since you walked away
since we played the game
since I puke cliché

I never realized
my heat burns me up
(no spark for the flue for the flow
for the tide, no tide in lust)

since my fly is undone
since I slowed my run
since I stumbled home
since my cramp is done

I never realized
I am not a ghost
I sting like a hive
since our tears tingle dry
since your bite shut wide

since I drained my pride
and my juice ran dry
since our fears ran dry
finally
finally
finally
since our hopes have died
--

Too Late the Valentine, take 2

--
love from a tender age
seemed but a pretext
for endless unresolvable argument

fuel for the duel
of literary genre
not much more
--

Writing Tips by Max Sebald

      'The present tense lends itself to comedy.
       The past is foregone and naturally melancholic.'


--The future...?
Is an exercise in absolute omniscience:
a willful, hubristic beating down
of anxiety-generating uncertainty
by a pointed grammatical (syntactic?) tactic:

'Max & Mimi were going to die-- of course.
At some poignant moment
they would know when, but when their paths
crossed Herrn Doktor Fehler's that blustery Berlin
evening, they were not yet privy to the fatal insight...'

(I believe I remember Milan Kundera having
used this kind of omniscience & future tense--
in 'Life is Elsewhere'? Or 'The Book of Laughter & Forgetting'?)

You may laugh, but...I forget.
Just as I have forgotten where my convictions
of a well-lived life were mislaid.
--