I LIKE MY BODY WHEN IT IS WITH YOUR

I like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
I like your body. I like what it does.

I like its hows, I like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
firm-smooth ness and which I will
again and agaim and again

kiss, I like kissing this and that of you,
I like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is.it comes
over flesh. . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly I like the thrill
of under me you so quite new

PIECES

I didn't
want
to hurt you.
Don't stop
to think. It
hurts,
to live like this:
meat
sliced
walking

RHAPSODY


515 Madison Avenue
door to haven? Portal
stopped ralities and eternal licentiousness
or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness
your marble is bronze and
and your lianas elevator cables
swinging from the myth of ascending
I would join
or declining the challenge of racial attractions
they zing on (into the lynch, dear firends)
while everywere love is breathing draftily
like a doorway linking 53^rd. with 54^th.
The east-bound with the west-bound traffic by 8.000.000
midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland
where is the summit where all aism are clear
the pin-point light upon a fear of lust
as agony's needlework grows up around the unicorn
and fences him for milk-and yoghurt-work
when I see Gianni I know he'sthinking of Jonh Ericson
playing the Rachmaninoff 2^nd. or Elizabeth Taylor
taking sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley, and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire
and my eyes water anchingly imitating the true blue
a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle
multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth
Cnada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building
I am getting into a cab at 9^th. Steet and 1^st. Avenue
and the Negro dirver tells me about a $120 apartment
" where you can't walk across the floor after 10 at night
not even pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs"
no, I don't like that " well, I didn't it"
perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to
work
a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the
gods
You were there always and you know all about these
things
as indifferent as an encyclopedia with tour calm
brwn eyes
it isn'tenough to smile when you run the gauntlet
tou've got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or
Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains
of Madrid
as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the
Menemsha Bar
that is what you learn in the early morning passing
Madison Avenue
where you've never spend any time and stores eat up light
I have always wanted to be near it
though the day is long ( and I don't mean Madison Avenue )
Lying in a hammonck on St. Mark's Place sorting my poems
in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island
they are comming and we holy ones must go
is Tibet historically a part of China? as I historically
belong to the enormous bliss of american death.

ARS POETICA

A poem should palpable and mute
as a globed fruit dumb
as old medallions to the thumb
silent as the sleeve-worn stone
of casement ledges where the moss has grown;
a poem should be wordless
as the flight of birds a poem should be motionless in time
as the moon climbs leaving, as the moon releases
twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
memory by memory the mind;
a poem should be motionless in time
as the moon climbs
a poem should be equal to:
not true
for all the history of grief
an empty doorway and a maple leaf
for love
ahe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea:
a poem should not mean
but be.

THE BALL POEM

What is the boy now,who has lost his ball,
what ,what is he to do? I saw it go
merrily bouncing,down the street, and then
merrily over-there it is in the water !
no use to say  'O there are other balls':
an ultimate shaking grief  fixes the boy
as he stands rigid,trembling,stgaring down
all his young days into the harbour where
his ball went. I would not intrude on him
a dime,another ball,is worthless.Now
he senses first responsibility
in   a  world of possessions.People will take balls,
balls will be lost always,little boy,
and no one buys a ball back.Money is external
he  is learning ,well behind his desperate eyes
the epistemology of loss , how to stand up
knowing what every man must one day know
and most know many days,how to stand up.
And gradually light returns to the street
a whistle blows,the ball is out of sight
soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
floor of the harbour ...I am everywhere
I suffer and move, my  mind and my heart move
with all that move me,under the water
or whistling, I am not a little boy.

JOB

Job, horrible and indistinct, his head full of bubbles,
watching the noon accrete disease, with dog's eyes
licks at the daylight, and then gouges his side.
Woe,
fleshed of the human solicitude, corrodes him
in the half-way murk and sad kingdom of pain
he calls louldly on his Maker, he scrapes an ulcer,
sits in a green evening indistinctin and dim
the merly accused, the pitiful, not the accuser.

FIRE AND ICE

Some say the world end in fire,
some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
to say that for destruction ice
is also great
and would suffice.

DUST OF SNOW

The way a crow
shook down on me
the dust of snow
from a hemlock tree
has given my heart
a change of mood
and saved some part
of a day I had rued

THE PASTURE

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
( And wait to watch the water clear, I may ):
I sha'n't be gone long. You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
that's standing by the mother. Its so young
it totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long –You come too.

A MINOR BIRD

I have wished a bird would fly away
and not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
when it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong.
In wanting to silence any song.

TO THE STONE-CUTTERS

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore-defeated
challengers of oblivion.
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
the square-limbed Roman letters.
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The paet as well
builds his monument mockingly –
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
the honey of peace in old poems.

From HOWL

Carl Solomon!  I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockand
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pug on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straitjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you go bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and inmortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelie bombs the hospital iluminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shocks of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.

PORTRAIT D’UNE FEMME


Your mind and you are our Sargasso sea,
London has swept about you this score years
and bright ships left you this or that in fee:
ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you – lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
one average mind – with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
and takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
that might prove useful and yet never proves,
that never fits a corner or shows use,
or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
the tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
these are your riches, your great store; and yet
for all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
in the slow float of differing light and deep,
no! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
nothing that’s quite your own.
Yes this is you.

N.Y.

My city, my beloved, my white! Ah, slender,
listen! Listen to me, and I will breathe into thee a soul.
Delicately upon the reed, attend me!
Now do I know I am mad,
for here are a million people surly with traffic;
this is no maid.
Neither could I play upon any reed I had one.
My City, my beloved,
thou art a maid with no breasts,
thou art slender as a silver reed.
Listen to me, attend me!
And I will breathe into thee a soul,
and thou shalt live for ever.

THE TEA SHOP

The girl in the tea shop
is not so beautiful as she was,
the August has worn against her.
She does not get up the stairs so eagerly;
yes, she also will turn middle-aged,
and the glow of youth that she spread about us
as she brought us our muffins
will be spread about us no longer.
She will also turn middle-aged.

CHICAGO

Hog Butcher for the world,
Tool Maker Staker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nations's Freight Handler;
stormy, husky, brawling,
city of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I belive them, for I have seen your painted
women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the
gunnman jill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and
children I have seen the marks of waton hunger.
And having answered so I turn ance more to those who sneer at this my city,
and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive
and coarse and strong and cunning.
Fliging magnetic curses amind the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold
slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against
the wilderness,
bareheaded,
shoveling,
wrecking,
planning,
building, breaking, reluilding.
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
laughing even as an laughing that under laughs who has never lost a battle,
bragging and laughing ans laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and
under his ribs the heart of the people,
laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Yuoth, lalf-naked, sweating, proud
to be Hog Butcher,
Tool Maker , Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

THE DAILY GLOBE

Each day another installment of the old
Romance of Order brings to the breakfast table
the papers flowers of catastrophe.
One has this recurrent dream about the world.

Headlines declare the ambiguous oracles,
the comfortable old prophets mutter doom.
Man's greatest intellectual pleasure is
to repeat himself, yet somehow the daily globe

rolls on, while the characters in comic strips
prolong their slow, interminable lives
beyond the segregated photographs
of the girls that marry and men that die.

CROSSING THE WATER

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
they are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astouned souls.

DESIRE FOR SPRING

Calcium days, days when we feed our bones!
Iron days, which enrich our blood!
Saltwater days, which give us valuable iodine!
When will there be a perfectly ordinary spring day?
For my heart needs to be fed, not my urine
or my brain, and I wish to leap to Pittsburgh
from Tuskegee, Indiana, if necessary, spreading like a flower
in the spring light, and growing like a silver stair.
Nothing else will satisfy me, not even death!
Not even broken life insurance policies, cancer, loss of health,
ruined furniture, prostate disease, headaches, melancholia,
no, not even a ravaging wolf eating up my flesh!
I want spring, I want to turn like a mobile
in a new fresh air! I don't want to hibernate
between walls, between walls! I want to bear
my share of the anguish of being succinctly here!
Not even moths in the spell of the flame
can want it to be warmer so much as I do!
Not even the pilot slipping into the great green sea
in flames can want less to be turned into an icicle!
Though admiring the icicle's cunning, how shall I be satisfied
with artificial daisies and roses, and wax pears?
O breeze, my lovely, come in, that I mayn't be stultified!
Dear coolness of heaven, come swiftly and sit on my chairs!

THE WIND SUFFERS

The wind suffers of lowing,
the sea suffers of water,
and fire suffers of burning,
and I of a living name.

As stone suffers of stoniness,
as light of its shiningness,
as birds of their wingedness,
so I of my whoness.

And what the cure of all this?
What the not and not suffering?
What the better and later of this?
What the more me of me?

How for th epain-world to be
more world and no pain?
How for the faithful rain to fall?
More wet and more dry?

How for the wilful blood to run
more salt-red and sweet-white?
And how for me in my actualness
to more shriek and more smile?

By no other miracles,
by the same knowing poison,
by an improved anguish,
by my further dying.

PRAYER

If I must of my Senses lose,
I pray Thee, Lord, that I may choose
which of the Five I shall retain
before oblivion clouds the brain.
My Tongue is generations dead,
my Nose defiles a comely head;
for hearkening to carnal evils
my Ears have been the very devil's.
And some have held the Eye to be
the instrument of lechery,
more furtive than the Hand in low
and vicious venery - not so!
Its rape is gentle, never more
violent than a metaphor.
In truth, the Eye's the abettor of
the holies platonic love:
Lip, Breast, and Thigh cannot posses
so singular a blessedness.
Therefore, O Lord, let me preserve
the Sense that does so fitly sense,
take Tongue and Ear - all else I have -
let Light attend me to the grave!

TRIBUNAL OF WAR

Love was captured at war! It was seized when It was burying the head of a boy who died in the last bomb raid. Since its message had not been received and its sound had been overwhelmed by the cannons, Love had decided to engage to the battle field, and actively participated in combats. Both sides had been looking each other for a long time already, because It had been declared their enemy, and due to the fact that its participation had caused considerable damage to both sides. Taken as prisoner, it was judged by a tribunal integrated by officers of both armies. It was requested to tell the truth, and requested about its nationality, there was no answer. Requested about its age, there was no answer either. Its silence onfirmed it was not innocent. It was accused to be a spy to both sides, and It confirmed to have counted, as a spy, a million deaths. It was accused of hoisting both nations' flags, and It confirmed to have hoisted the flag of Peace. Shouts and more shouts, and It was accused of so many other crimes: disassemble mines, rebuild bridges, set fire on napalm warehouses, encourage desertion of battalions of both armies; besides It admitted assaults to general warehouses and distributed their contents among civilians. Moreover, It accused to weapon manufacturers of speculation with troops' lives. It accused to certain merchants to use nations' armies to support trademarks. Judges were irritated by its insolence and It was requested to reveal its secret.

It confirmed that its profession was to go against war. Then, It was condemned and executed in neutral field. Its remains, abandoned in the field, were collected at night and honored by warriors' children and wives, meanwhile, in the sky, stars burst as grenades.

X

It makes no sense to establish there is no Poetry in math.
Science of the amounts.
Because even its rigid has a teendon
of sensibility.

Brotherhood of blind beggars.
Knot.
A hug of trees with no other way to hug each other
but to go across each one.
Old time staggering lovers
who support each other.
Shipwrecked people about to surrender with the last wave.
Multiplication sign!

Marriage.
Actual and indivisible love
that lives in order to have a peaceful existence,
to help each other,
to procreate.
Multiplication sign!

PROPRIETARY LOVE

This is not the introvert, subversive love of that time,
underground, paganish love that alloved writing its sign only deep inside.

Today . . .a victorius centrifugal love,
monopolizing: proprietary Love,
that atracts your attention by signing flags from this side of the river.
Leader of your body, captain of your skin.
Leading Love.

Thundering love, I stand at the window of the boulevard
and loudly proclaim that I love you.

It is so immense. . .that it has its own geography.
It compass, poles, a volcano and even its very own star.
Sometimes I misplace its maps and plans,
and then off I to search for this love:
archeologist of my own memoirs.

Hardworking love,
with its urban sun
and its sand clock.
Relaxed country love
of hammocks, guitars and poems

Mahtematical love
of barely two signs, to love you + and +

And x our lineage.
Love with its very own codes,
strategy, mechanics, logic
and sorrow.

MOTHER

I was always afraid of her. Now and then
she'd go walk downtown Guayaquil,
flaunting her huge belly.
To any person who saw her,
at first sight, she was just
another pregnant woman. However, to us,
who knew her for many years, she was an insane woman.
Her insanity, was the insanity of desiring
to have a child. Her sterility was
the cause for her insane state of mind. It was
an awesome insanity. She walked, with the pride of
a pregnant woman, but, with such impetuosity
that her fiction was obvious. She was so
captive of her own aberration
that she despised all women. I had the
impression that her, out of pure pride,
wanted to even spit on the floor.
Suddenly, she'd stop and sang a lullaby.
It has been a while since I saw her for
the last time. After death, where do the
souls of the insane go? Will their spirits
remain unbalanced? God have mercy, and,
when she dies, let her have the company
of the imaginary child that she carries in her
mind.

SECRET KISS

It is so easy the instinctive kiss
that touches your perfect organs.
However. . . my favorite kiss
is the reflexive kiss
which allows me to adore you because of
the common, even the hostile and the imperfect:
the toe finger of your foot,
your nails and your hair.
Sometimes I would like to have the chance to unfold you
and so to kiss you inside!

PALM

Cosmopolitan palm.
Proud on the beach; slender in the swamp,
cocky in the prision of a flowerpot.

Forest of outgoing palms.
Solitude of hermit palms

Frugal palm.
Your waist is made of a sun, wind and water diet.
You have the vocation of a nun
and sleepless wait to conform the shipwrecked persons.

Ornamental palm of the urban avenue.
Real palm. It is your tuft
a 12 points green star.
Palm,
your fruit is a fist of red,
white, orange flowers.
Warrior plants. Chonta.
From your wardrobe I take spears,
to defend the pureness of the wind
and attack the corruption of the water.

Hospitality palm.
Juggler, from your sleeve a stick,
a hat, a mat, a basket come out.
From your storeroom I take the vegetal egg of the fig.
From your sewing box I want Tagua buttons.

I am the refractory monk knelt before the landscape,
which has the stars for bells.
(In the rustic mug of a coconut
I receive the host of your pure flesh
and I present the briny liquor of your sunny cellar).

Palm
from your awesome nut I will take out the fragant soap
that washes the blood drop that I carry on my lapel.

RED POEM

I do not want to begin. . .
Because I know if I touch you. I will love you forever.

I know this caress, that beats in my hand.
Could be mortal;
since it is forbidden to us.

This passion lives in solitude and feeds itself in the shadow.
It is an invisible river, which does not reveal itself, therefore
it flows into itself.

However, sometimes, this passion is haughty
and wants to reveal,
though it could seem in pain and bleeding
in its desire to strangle and
vanish imperceptibly.

I cannot surrender
this love is such a burden in my veins it inundates my mind.
As it is reciprocated, knowing that fact,
it grows bigger, greater, fortified.

It suddenly blossomed in the crevices of my watchtower,
in my scarves.
My life is its nourishment.

A swirl of anguish drags us into its center,
and I do not want to know where it is leading us.

I cannot give up. . . I am getting closer to you.

If I do not tell you now, one of these days, on any given day
I will tell you in front of those who should not be listening to us;
I will walk mumbling, I will call your name again and again;
and I will answer with your name to any given question.

I will discover intact emotions in your skin
and you will shake with new splendors.

Because for me, you are still a virgin.

I will be the sinner. . .,
and in my sorrow,
from the beach of my island, in the red planet,
my soul will talk to you with fire signs.

CLUSTERS

Every morning the outskirts listened the proclaim of the fruit...
The bare-foot girl was pushing her golden cargo,
and it was the victorious march of her small cart.
"¡Casera! ¡Casera! ¡Caserita!"
The boys, the girls surrounded the small cart...
The bare-foot shoe shine boy, and all the little children
heroes in the resistance to the hunger, to the epidemic, to the fatigue.

Punctual presence
to the morning party;
flapping of mutilated
angels, without a chapel;
bare-foot little ladies,
searchers of sugar.
"¡Casera! ¡Caserita!"

The best bunch was not for sale:
the small cart girl gave it
in the box of her clean hands.

Then she went further into the city,
and corners measured her working day.

In the distance, the yellow and shining fruit
the small cart seemed like a lamp
in the hands of a guide girl.
"¡Casera! ¡Casera! ¡Caserita!"

During a working day, in her civic fight,
the small cart girl passed away,
everybody took her white coffin
to the cemetery in a knot of arms.

The graveyard looked like a stone flower vase;
the word injustice
was written, with school chalk, in a wall.

Holding their hands the children left
in a tight and quiet procession,
experiencing their sorrow.
The poor children, broken,
in the common denominator of poverty,
would push the small cart from now on.

The brotherhood have learned the lesson of the fruit:
the plant's outstanding renovation and slenderness,
-relief for holding the torch of the fruit-
the intimate and vigorous unity of the Bunch.
------------------
Note: "Casera":is the buyer. "caserita" corresponds to its diminutive. Both
terms refer to the people who usually purchase in the small cart.

ATOMIC LOVE

I am a particular member of a new cult
that proclaims love as a multitudinaire holocaust.

Life is a tiresome beauty contest. A contest of resistance.
A visual orgy.

A crowd of women gets undressed in magazines
and they have turned the library into a gynaeceum.

At the movies, in the bar, the crowd experiences a simultaneous
and mental intercourse with the actress.

We must stand the cruelty of such inaccessible beauty.
Exhausted by the frenzy of an always voracious hunger.
Permanently exacerbated, up to the delirium.

On the television, the propaganda is always playing an exotic card of
prodigious women.

The vehicle takes us swiftly to the nudist beach.
The radio broadcasts the joyful morn of the orgasm.
Jubilee hips loosen up through the sounds of a record.

On the plane and in the train, tourists, on the ships,
We saw without knowing the ones who could make us happy.
But our itineraries hit as irreconcilable swords.
Dozens of millions of splendid beings
cross, pass by, but we cannot understand each other.
Our obsolete and ideal love may have been among them.

We are indefatigable seeding beings condemned
to sow and banish.
We will never see the fields bloom
because the crowd pushes us into new ones.
In any women I unload, as any thorough stevedore,
the unbearable burden of my incommensurable desire.

This is not the time of the singular love,
of the innocent and wise love that believes to be endless and unique.
The human being has been multiplied, stunned, ravished,
by too many alternatives

This is the century of the tumultuous love.
of the giddy love.
Our era has produced an avalanche of portentous,
beautiful, efficient, honest, competent, kind human beings.
Everyone is a good fellow.
This is the era of the multitudinary love,
of the massive love.
Of the apocalyptic love
atomic love! Explosive, expansive, devastating, irresponsible love.
Inexcusable love if this not illuminate the frightened night of our solitude.

ALBATROSS

Amongst the blues of the Sea and the Sky,
the birds seem like dots far away.

The mighty albatross ... A magical flock
Sailing on the Wind
with unhurried rows
and keels of bone.

Brotherhood of travelers
improvised in the sky.
Exemplary Society
of unspoken agreements.
A spontaneous Order, a Capital Letter
adopted by a poet, and included in a Verse.
Serious fishers,
tireless Voyagers,
improvising Brotherhoods and Ports:
the ignored rock, the controversial star,
the buoy left behind by a sailor.

Amongst two blues, indecisive,
the birds seem like dots far away.

THE VOLCANO

Condemned to solitude for its stature,
the outlaw lights its chimney of ice.
Its throat contracts a sinister cry,
and in its lung of stone
fire seeds crackle.
Its mineral blood boils
in the arteries of its dykes.
Immobilized by the fueling heel of its pride,
its metal glass offers the ashes of exile.
(Underground and subversive brethren,
Brotherhood of arsonists
they are the volcanoes of the world).

SPIDER MUSE

                                                              (The spider is a better Muse than the Moon:
                                                              because it has life)


Seamstress...
weaver of strange webs;
geometric webs of the silver spider,
conic nets of the black spider.

Nomad spider:
Traveller,
attached to the wind
by a belt of silk.

Yellow spiders,
red spiders,
green spiders, black spiders.

Sedentary spider:
Climbs the beam
to swing,
acrobat in its web.

The male dances and drums;
and, midst her veils, she surrenders.

In spite of your weakness for hunting butterflies,
the warrior envies your strategy,
and the mother admires your cradle of silk.

GUARDIANS

I am surrounded by guards
in my fortress.
Slender, agile, strong:
With the stature of athletes
They seem numb,
but it is only an appearance.
(They lead to mistakes, their incorruptible hearts of wood)
Any given day, they are capable of bowing
if a beggar or a child
beg at my door.
When I wake up at night,
I hear the breathing
of their torsos filled with wind
and I know they miss the jungle.
Powerful, stark, standing
always alert.
I am a safe man
with my squadron of Palm trees!