Verbs
I had a verb in my hand. It landed there spit through my insatiable tongue after nights and nights of crouching on the floor, my knees bleeding, a suffering saint, praying, waiting for miracles to appear: like tall, incendiary monuments, columns visible to the eye, touchable by hand. My Apollo certain and languid in erected muscles licking my bones into a nothingness that I adore. I, no longer waiting for the concrete, because you had given it to me through that strong body of verbs that broke my isolation into one thousand pieces. All because of those verbs, of your own making, magnificent words of doing that you let out from the depths of your dreaming entrails, that core covered by skin where the most ancient beings, the bacteria of primal life dance incessantly and produce birds and flowers and stars—and that body of yours, tall, erect and strong that you extend to me in moments of utter certainty and love for all the animals of the world. The bones, the bread, all the living beings. My breathing, darling alphabet.
This love, this light
Bring me the shadows of your own self
Under that kind, soft, insecure light
Where I can dream what you are and decode
All the lymph nodes of your body
Stare at your poetic undertones
The languid calmness of the world
Before my hands and my eyes
A sanctuary for meditation
Bring me the light-dark luminous candor of the thing
That in you murmurs and dreams and loves
Do not show your full self under the crude light of the day
In mid-summer when dreams have no space to be detected
Blind that they are by the splendor of rational shortcomings
Come slowly, in nights clean, at dusk or dawn
When the freshness and incantations of the cosmos
Sing eternally through the porous lines that surround your figure
Bring yourself in cadent, slow moments and movements
Without the harshness of the speedy and the bluntness of the luminous
That affect those days without shadow
Be kind to the mystery that you are: seduce me peacefully, gradually, gracefully
In languid undertones of browns and blacks and grey(s)
The rainbows where dream nests
That mysterious, mystic house where I find myself and you
It is this love that I crave
This light
This possibility
A dreamed grammar
There is a grammar that keeps me down
I read it carefully
Obey all its commas and full stops
Breaking myself in halves constantly
Convoluting my intended ideal
Even if what I want is to be a full unbroken thing
A brown or white egg
Beautiful and stunning just like the mother hen intended
After her hard labour
One day I’ll be able to fully un-write this grammar of millennia
Incomplete and contorted
And commence a treaty of true love
Wearing sandals that make me walk for my own sake
I’ll forget what you did to me
Forget what men like you do to us and themselves
And move on to a new clean sphere
A true treaty of love
Feeling that wind that moves and kisses you on its way
To the intended way of being
One day, I’ll summon the courage to recover
My oval perfection
A new A and a new Z
And all the words that can be composed in-between
That fabulous empty space
Waiting to be written in love, by love
My ideal no longer convoluted
Or confused by the rhetoric that kills
You –
I’ve called you inside me, deep in the furrows of my amber skin
With white open vowels from the Portuguese and English alphabets
That dance in me and sing letters of a future
I noted all the wide sounds and the endless concave caves
Those spaces where being can be stretched to unlimited planes
And I saw the lilies of the valley and the grass petals in the morning
Sitting in love, waiting for the gentle sun to come and soak them up
Diffused love, sprinkled back, like gentle kissing rain
In the rays of vernacular light
And you come in with liquid hands and clean smiles
You swim in me and I in you
We become the things that are meant to be,
That the world constantly calls for with its urgent cry for things,
Real things to be made
I’ve called you inside me, and you called me inside you,
My hand clean, holding onto your poles
We swam, stayed in the beautiful river
And adored the gaps of the babies to be born
You allowed me to speak in songs uttered in the moment,
Born out of a warm water of creation
I woke up with you in my face,
My hands sure that I was myself and that I was not alone
Two different streams, both needed to find sea,
The wholeness that drives us all
I went to the horizon at sunset and sunrise,
Knelt down and prayed to your inner clean lagoon
At night I climbed into our made bed and passed you my rosary,
Imbedded in carnations and hydrangeas, laurels of the old country
The petals of my Bible
Circulating in each of your limbs and creating hymns that enchant the sturdiest atheists
For to live is to follow belief—that patience that calls
I was drunk with pure wine and I collided with the moons of the cosmos
To be united
In the primal, primal thing, that is called you and I and all the rest
And then one day, I looked at you and you had disappeared
Perhaps had never even been there, and I a lunatic of an unfound universe
Imagined the twinkles in your eyes and the dimples in your childish face
There are thing we do not do to Love
Must never do
To ourselves
To others
