Suddenly words visit me
and when they do they come all at once
and, sitting here, I am nowhere.
Sometimes I give up on life, then,
to tell you the wondrous story
of what life could not have been.
I sit again by your coffin, mother,
and talk wordless to what remains,
still evaporating from the body
and appeasement comes at last
from colourless sounds and images
anchored in thin, dim air.
Sometimes, in the dreams I never tell,
I am leaving a single flower by your grave
as you would have done to me.
The flower lies, seen from the distance
of different unblinking eyes,
like a pulsating living heart
and the single gesture carries then,
a single purpose that is painful,
slow as the conscience of things to come.
Sometimes I see you again
standing by your deserted body,
I am telling you about motherly love.
I tell you how it can be a prison,
a poison that blinds and contaminates
robbing from gestures the carelessness of birds.
Words amongst us were never free,
they carried the weight of ancestral rules
as if the god of time fought us.
Sometimes, though, I am still sorry,
as if I could cry again
the damnation of knowing too late
that examples set to follow
should not be fought but dropped
before fighting becomes another restraint.
I mourn you so that the night closes,
I mourn myself for the dead birds
still in my chest, still seeming to fly.
Sometimes I just sit and stare
as if listening behind the sounds,
as if writing was more than writing,
I sit down and write out of time,
filling with passionate and angry words
the gaps between the bricks of my house.
Quietness spreads then, and I see
that experience shaped my heart into a pump
that time and rust will eventually stop.
