Suddenly, words visit me
and, when they do, they come all at once
and, sitting here, I’m nowhere.

Sometimes I give up on life, then,
to tell you the wondrous story
of what life couldn’t 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’m leaving a single flower by your grave,
as you would have dome 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’m 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’m still sorry,
as if I could cry again
the damnation of knowing too late

that examples, set to follow,
shouldn’t 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.