Chaos

If you leave,

stay gone.

I will open the door for the

same butterfly just once.

I'm a woman

and a Gemini,

I have just the 

decent amount 

of chaos in life 

I can take.

That's enough 

vertigo.

Burn the message

You leave my life much before 

I can learn your smell.

You borrow 

someone else's metaphor

to buy me an excuse

instead of a smile

to buy me distance

instead of  coffee.

You leave before we can
make memories.

I stand alone.

(Read part 1: Kill the Messenger)

If I had no fear

A series of jumps
into the unknown.

Have a one-night stand.
Morir in a mojito glass.

Get a peek into my own mind.
A conversation with my ghosts.

Learn to fly
as well as to fall.

Tell my love to your face
and allow the passing of days

to erase you from my path.

September

September keeps stealing
the people I love away from me.

There has been too much heat
and too little shade these days.

You find neighbors in their porches
talking politics and having lemonade.

We now plant people like trees.
They grow arms as long as branches

which still fail to touch the clouds
but make great hangers for hopes.

Bring the canary back into the house by nightfall.

- says your last note

forgiving the creature for it cannot sing.
This is the lesson you leave us.

A separation

I chase impressions of emptiness
with my eyes closed

and almost forget you're always saying
our uncertain feet

belong to roads
which only cross this time.

Yours and my shadow were close
throughout a slippery year

now I lose sight of you
before I can embrace your shoulders

you forget me
before the dust covers my footsteps.


De olhos fechados
persigo impressões no vazio

e quase esqueço como dizes
que os nossos pés incertos

pertencem a estradas
que só se cruzam nessa época.

Esteve a tua sombra ao lado da minha
por um ano escorregadio

agora afasta-se dos meus olhos
antes que lhe possa abraçar os ombros

paga-me antes que a poeira
me cubra os passos.

The touch of dust

Dear M, I was there
when you left your coop
for the first time

a latent desire to
raise higher flights

you flailed your wings clumsily
and only sustained yourself in the air
 for a few seconds if that.

What I meant to tell you then
is that a body is a traveling cage
bound to the ground by the law of gravity

there is no freedom
in the tangible physicality

it's the touch of dust which
teaches we are made
of the same thing.

To go into the world

To find your soul
a safe place on someone
else's cupped hands

and balance 

and words

and again a way.

Damaged as we have been,
broken as we are,
pieces of our bare selves -

It's for you,

the clean smile I wear
when I leave my body and

go into the world.

The naive juggler

A fire torch, an apple, my heart.
one after the other
the juggler tosses them up.

They revolve around him
at the same interval of my pulse.
A club, a serpent, a book.

He throws them behind his back,
he twines them around his neck,
one after the other

I watch them as they fall.
The things heaved into the air
sometimes are missed on their way down.

Twenty-four

Because I can't sing you to sleep
I lull you with twenty something questions
and learn you in five hundred words.

There is a name for your first child
and an unknown favorite smell,
there is a lexeme I might never say.

There is an irrational fear of death
and a wish to live in a poem,
I write your soul a temporary shelter

I know you cannot stay.

Twenty-five

The night before your birthday,
when the last quarter moon lights up in the sky,
I'll be standing outside in the dark on my tiptoes trying to
glue all of my wishes for you onto Thatcher's shooting stars.

That there are as many ways as there are hours,
that you're dear to my heart even lacking superpowers,
that you won't ever have to hide your tears,
that I will love you for many years.

That I'd let you win in musical chairs,

that I will still be there when no else cares,

that you are beautiful with all the scars,

that I will always hold you fondly in my arms -

I am forever wishing you the very best.

(Lyrids meteor shower peaks on Earth Day this year. The morning after, one of my favorite people on Earth celebrates his twenty-fifth birthday. This is just a silly something from my heart to his. I will love you for many years, you annoying little thing.)

Behind your resting eyes

I escape the poem while you sleep
and watch you from such small distance
that my chest nearly touches yours.

Who are you, bearer of my meanings?
Who am I when you move above the lines
on my palms and alters my destiny?

The world I know
vanishes, little by little,
behind your resting eyes.

(Written for Taking it to the streets, over at the Imaginary Garden)

How wolves change rivers

You came into my life
to change my course.

You caused my beasts to
stay away

and brought songbirds along
so my soul had a chance to sing.

You've saved me a place
in a better, simpler world.

You've engineered me into
a river more adaptable to swings.

On a boat headed North down the waters of Leathe

Three generations of women in my family
had embraced oblivion
before my mother lost her sense of smell.

Let me tell you something
about the process of forgetting:

it starts
with car keys
you don't know where
you've placed.

Then
there is the repetition of
ordinary stories which,
on lucky days,
are heard just twice.

The next big thing is
losing the sense of smell,

being unable to tell
your favorite perfume
from the stink of a dead cat
across the street.

When I was little,
the house would
always smell
like pineapples
on my birthdays.

The smell is a bridge
to the memory of
having been there and
because I remember it,
I can always go back.

My grandmother lived with us
for six months before passing.

She smelled like soil
but she wouldn't remember.

She is the one to be held responsible
for me starting to put words together.

So here is the answer to your question:
In a few years, I may not remember -
this is the reason why I write.

Because although I hold you high,
I don't know your smell.

But I will always find you in the words
'mouth', 'waterfall' and 'bassinet',
my bridge to you may never be
other than the written code.

This is why it's
so important to me
that you remember.

(To M.)

(This poem is an answer to an argument around a question on who would or wouldn't remember the other in ten years) 
(Shared with The Imaginary Garden)

On the fair use of Huxley's repetition truth effect

I don't love you.
I don't love you.

Since it's important for you
that I believe it and that it is true,
I came up with a plan
while you were out.

I don't love you.
I don't love you.

three nights a week
for four years,
one hundred times,
I don't love you.

I don't love you.
I don't love you.

Sixty-two thousand and
four hundred repetitions
to make one truth:
I don't love you.

I don't love you.
I don't love you.

(But hell,
the true truth is
that it's too early.
Tonight, I still do.)

(posted to dVerse Poetics)

Lie to me

I ask of you
to lie to me
if it means

when in a dream
I see your face
 
you're so dear
I wake up crying
because you fade.

(Shared with the Poets United)

To love him in his sounds

It still feels
like a song, even when
it is not

even when it's
a laughter, or silence, or
the sound of

a busy street
my feet won't touch, he
wants to share.

Sole survivor

They sent a boat
to collect the parting debris of me
among the floating pieces
of broken sureness. 

I learned it from Icarus,
the importance of knowing
how close from the sun
is too close

how one can survive the fall
by breathing slowly
and avoiding questions
on the nature of living,

on the nature of dying.

On the risk of meaning nothing

When you focus on what I say
you miss everything
I carry in silence.

There are distances in me
your eyes don't meet.

I have heights and depths
you feet might not touch.

But I lose purpose
when you don't
take the risk.

Fortune

Of all things we own,
why do we insist on
time spent with the ones
we don't?

The water in rivers,
the top of the mountains,
a place in someone's bed.

how fortunate it is
death comes to some
sweetly through your lips
crawling slowly
down one's legs.

Kill the messenger

You come into my life
too late
to understand
the pulse.

A hundred times
this world
laughed
at my dreams,

a hundred times
it surrounded me
with pain
to toughen me up.

I stand alone.