For God or Some Godot

I tally up my sober victories,
Yet parts of me have flaked along the way,
Signaling an indistinct origin
When nothing was ever had
And eveything would be allowed.

In this curtailing of days,
It's as if I'm violently knocking on the heavy gates
Of some estranged or forgotten Eden
To rescue some flickering flame
To interpose edges on the softest night
Taking hold of my days.

I have never been more naked than I am now.
My entrails have all been exposed.
I awkwardly try to keep my organs
In their right and proper places,
But the parts are not always subsumed into a whole.

My eyes are open, yet still, I cannot be seen.
Like a ghost, I fill up the rooms
With the emptiness of my silent presence.

I inhabit the places between places,
In the marginal and liminal spaces,
Waiting for god or some Godot
To signal that this was it,
That the show is over,
And no ovation is to be expected.

Sao Paulo (en)

The signs scattered on the corners
Are marked with undiscernable names.
Defiant graffiti suspiciously adorn
The hidden sides of apartment buildings.
I lack the discernment needed
To distinguish between the comings and goings
In this crowd of distorted faces
Walking so intensely adrift.

Traffic lights have lost their pace,
A chorus of disjointed bursts
Congest the city's arteries
So close to breaking
Into a sudden, stripped chaos.

Steps and pidgeons engage in their plight
Amidst semi-deserted plazas,
Amidst dead-end streets.
Everything takes on a second meaning
Like asphalt over asphalt overlaid.

Avenues intersect without ever connecting.
Another symbol has lost its referent.
A deranged beggar curses São Paulo yet again
In the midst of another empty broken night.

Dragon

Armed with wings, I can touch infinity,
To glide my fingers through the starry vastness
And kiss a thousand faces of God.

Like a serpent,
In cycles and circles smitten,
I shed a second skin
To be reborn in frailer flesh.

In the surrounding darkness,
There is no meaning,
There is no direction.
The beam of light is the path
And the bridge dissolving behind me.

Like a knot perpetually tightening,
Like an unending embrace,
The winged serpent traces its path
In the oblique latitudes of possibilities.

Peeling away the world to find at its core
Only the blind iridescence of desire,
Flooding the streets,
Summoning moth to flame,
Whispering violently the unspeakable
Into the deaf ears of solitude.

The Cherenkov Effect (Phytoremediation)

Hands interlace tightly as eyes open in awe.
People gathered on the bridge
Admire the blessedness of silence
as lights caress the yearning dawn to come.
Fingers close in on the railing.
The static intensity of this moment
Would echo brightly within the thin edges of time.

Children run, smiling,
Through the warm, gray snow.
Everything is invisibly veiled.
Hidden gods linger in midair
Anointing the helicoidal nature of men.

The horizon bleeds impossible colors.
Astonished angels disembowel the skies
Conscripting supplicant hosts
To witness the totality of what here unfolds
For centuries and centuries to come.

Under the bridge between Chernobyl and Pripyat,
There traverse tracks that connect
The present to the sunflower fields of tomorrow
That imprison the radionuclides
That brought them all here
And from here, their fates would seal.

The song of Geiger counters fills the night tinted red and blue.