Rising from the dead a pure star crosses

over earth and like dust falls on warm bones

under a mantle made of gold, the sun shone

was resuscitated, lived for a day,

to die once again, these are its verses:

My pious soul calling me to my tomb:

the sparkling light of January stars

that passes through the castle of my chest

enters its ruins where my cold remains

which once voraciously lived are bartered.

Oh magician! filled with truth’s doves, Spirit,

purity, light, tenderness, footless bird

human noise alarms, Oh black-haired lady,

this deadened verse surges in your presence

as the gold sun rises over the dark

sea during the sweet dewed hours pulling

itself over its mantle and gaining

speed, reaches you, descends and paints the earth’s

colossal forms a majestic purple.

I kissed your feet and saw you pass, woman,

at last, the earth was perfumed and lighted!

That verse that the hardening of daily

living that wasted ate away at me

and by harsh bits from dried and greedy lips,

were exhaled, triumphant and bubbling.

And like ocean waves over peaceful seas,

the spacious blue sky rolled becoming foam.

Oh magician!  Oh lover magician!

Standing at my rough bedside everyday

is an executioner.  As the sun

shines, exilic airs harm the brain, a sad

eagle, my white eagle, that every night

is renewed in my soul, stretches its wings

toward the dawn in the sunlight’s path

and starts to fly.

(inserted blank white space)

Between bleeding and broken feet, without

clear path to the regal sun, the eagle

goes seeking one grain of it to drag back.

Oh night, sun of the saddened, and the breast

whose force revives my heart, endure, discharge

the sun, take the form of a free and whole

woman for me to anoint your feet

with my crazy kisses, I will circle

your entire forehead and warm your hands.

Free me, my eternal night, from the killer

or bid him at the first light of the dawn

to bring a clean and redemptive sword

You ask what should it be made of?  Starlight!

It’s fine.  Yes I know that Death at my side

is coming and cautiously toward me

her cries nor love don’t rush to defend me

a father and son live separated

I return from my sterile work frowning,

dark and morose, I isolate myself

through winter, and verse crosses the yellow

pages, in the fatal hand of a dream,

and as black death touches down its wingtip

is able-bodied, everyday trembling

I see Death watching my doorway.

I think of my son and the dark figure

flees with sudden weakness, and the chest

is devoured by a frenetic love.

There is no woman more beautiful

than Death! Just one of her kisses exudes

dense forests of numerous laurel trees,

oleanders of love. I have the joy

of remembering myself a child

…I think of my son who my guilty love

brought to life and sobbing for my arms

lost hold of my beloved: further still

By the ageless aurora I enjoy

my security.  Goodbye oh my life

for one destined to die walks around dead.

Oh the ache of the shadow! Oh settlers

of secret worlds in outer space!  Oh great

giants who raise alarm in the people,

and move, direct, deride and hasten them!

Oh conclave of judges, blind to virtue,

that a gloomy cloud thickens with layers

infused with gold, as harsh as a sentence

that grim enough demands a surrender

to battle anew– like a fruit its fruits-

on peaceful production people depend

and from its divine wings!  of the newly-

planted tree that collects sad falling tears

gathering their juice, and in the deep dens

that tigers and snakes enter, and the new

fortifications that love of people

will build up! Here is a young woman,

a king, a nation, and the primary

attraction an arrogant sex worker

who awaits her course captor and master

crying in her deserted brothel-hell!

This is of saint Salem, and a death house

for modern persons.  One cannot spill more

blood than one has!  No problems for those who

don’t hate love!  Unite swiftly love’s soldiers

all people come together! All of earth

rise up to conquer the king and mister

the sky is witness!  Vile!  The traitor

who betrays his duty dies a traitor

plunged in the chest by his own vicious

weapon! Watch how the drama of life does

not end in an episode of darkness!

See how after the marble rose or the bland

curtain of fog and vegetation wakes

the drama’s portent!  And see, you vile,

as the good, the sad, and the mocked change place

with you and they become your tormentors!

Some feed off of musical chords or blood:

Not me!  Not me!  I knew the murky

spaces whose features I saw as a child

of sad and penetrative eyes: the awe

of a happy hour if judges saw

in this manner, and I would love life

because from the painful wrong of living

like this I’d be saved by living again.

Happily I’d cast the weight of

accident off my shoulder:  it is in

hunger and satisfaction that colors

comes and go, and veers away from pains

so savory belong to virtue, I’d go

in confusion to the cold and grim judge

for my sentencing like a cowardly

soldier who abandons their noble arms;

and the judges whose booths refuse mercy

condemn and speak spitefully adding hate,

that returns the love of battle again

in the suffocating arena pit!

Oh! What mortal who observes a life wants

to live again!  Death moves anxiously, well,

on foot over dried leaves and waits for me

at my threshold each turbulent hour

of a fall afternoon, and silently

knits me icy yarn for my funeral.

I answered no to any forgetting

Love weapons are not of any color

but the purple of my blood. Open arms,

Mother death I’m ready to see the judge!

Son!  What image do I see?   What tearful

sight breaks through shadows with a blinding light

as of the stars that illuminates you?

Son! What do your open arms ask of me?

Where sick at heart do you find yourself?

Why show me your feet bare without wounds,

your pale hands return to me shaken

by extreme sadness?  Stop!  Quiet!  Rest!  Live!

A father shouldn’t die until fighting

the arduous fight with ample weapons

strikes a child!  Oh, come my little child,

your white wings be lost to the arms of death

and from her sentence of death set me free!

I have earned my bread; –go on write the verse–

and employ my hand in its sweet commerce

like a fugitive entering the dark brush

or a person dragging a heavy load,

who of late counting totals confuses

figures. Bard, would you like to be counseled?

Unload from your pale bloodied back,

the harp take it down, quiet the sobbing

of the furious sea that will beat your throat,

from rich wood cut feather-ink pens for your desk

throw your bursting chords to the blowing wind.

Oh soul!  Oh good soul! what bad work is yours!

Bow down, shush, surrender, and lick the hands

of the powerful, exalt,* excuse faults,

keep them well — better that you forgive them,

and timidly and obsequiously

celebrate their vices and vanities:

You will see then, my soul, who deals in rich

golden platters for your poor, barren plate.

Beware, oh my soul!  Gold has been cheapened!

but don’t wince for they also fashion gold

into jewels of villains and elites

not weapons, weapons are made of iron!

My wrongs are brusque and the irate city

is eased in the immense countryside more so

with an immenser one! Then the darkened

afternoons call out to me, as though their

expanding shadows were my own homeland.

Oh friendly verse! I die of solitude

I die of love!  Not of its vulgar form

but for a love that poisons and dazzles.

It’s not a woman’s fruit that’s beautiful

but her star.  Earth should be a source of light

and all living things should regenerate

flames of a star.  Oh the displayed women!

Oh cups of flesh! Oh servants of rich men

who they bejewel then empty out,

trembling! I tell you, oh verse, that my teeth

would ache from eating of that kind of flesh!

It is an unspeakable death I die,

the sweet necessity it possesses,

like a newborn child in cautious hands,

my eyes have seen much beauty and sadness.

That unhappy dreams don’t restore themselves

and if they are not happy ones, or are sad

and ill-tempered types who enhance fatigue

I jump toward the sun as though I am drunk

I grasp hard at my face with my two hands

and from my wild eyes tears fall flooding.

And look how beautiful the sun is

my deserted cave and inept virtue

and the forces that throng the hairy flames

leap out of me asking to be of use;

I touch the hollow air against the wall

denuded and cold I support myself

and in my shaken skull thoughts transported

in agony, wedged and shattered pieces

the rabid sea spews on the burning sands!

Only the flowers of my fatherland

have scent! Only my motherland’s ceibas

provide shade! As a journey on a stray

cloud that travels over a strange land

even eye contact offends and the sun

more than mere happy heat rages in flames.

Not of welcome cries does my echo sound

in the air of other lands: and they don’t

flow thickly from their arboreal boughs

the thin spirits of all my loves ones!

Of living flesh and of most profound fruit

a person must live!  Ay and even more

an exile feeds off his entrails.

Tyrants! Banish any who have honor

enough to hate you! You’re already dead!

It would be better oh savages! That

on the verge of throwing them from their homes

instead you plunged deep in their honored chests

your most cruel assassin’s toughest of blades!

It’s great to live and awful to live dead.

No more!  No more! Happy are those who

have mercy for sad unfortunates who

don’t know how to overcome it.  Human

nature destroys its best people: iron

fertilizes soil– The iron hits!

*exalt from the Spanish exalsar

My verses twist and ignite into flames

like my heart that better in the river’s

viscous flow than in the brook’s gentle grass

is unwound:  Oh! for as the water bursts

freely then drains from the mountainous rock

chasm that destroys it rolling against

the tropical sedimentary stone

amidst logs and blunt edges before splashed

into streams.  Now spilled how will

it like a trained dog, play submissively

in a garden decorated with flowers,

or in a goldfish tank swim happily

just to love a lady doused in perfume?

I’ll flood the perfumed palace with curses

my verse would savagely enter the jeweled

cabinets where bards and abbots sew silk

into tender cinquans and pleasing rhymes

with silver needles. And supine ladies

seated on fraught and disheveled sofas

would lift their feet from the soft rugs–

then the water charging, convulsing

as all that is false expires, humbled

kisses a cast-off slipper and by great

spasms of its own persecution dies.

Alone, all alone, here comes my friendly

verse like a dutiful husband attends

his ruffle-feathered turtledove’s calling

and like the high mountains of thawing snow

over the scrub brush and across valleys

from copious threads of ice is falling–

soothing love and celestial avarice

spill from my oppressed entrails

and the vast blueness covering the earth,

which by the virgin soul of somberly

bloodied humanity becomes perfumed

while the stars pour their benevolent light

in the mating of silence with flowers

and which the aroma off the air lifts

for me both completion and perfection:

as though in a drawing by Angelo

the sword and the fist of a Cellini,

more beautiful than immanent marble

nature laboriously carved itself

of august head where ardently were born

Universal Hamlet and the fury

of the tempestuous Moor–brings to mind

an Indian girl from old Chichen who bathed

at the walls of the gentle river’s edge

in the shade cast by a pompous plantain

from his own body hair, while her svelte bronzed

skin played in the open air.  Give me blue

skies, give me the pure, ineffable, placid

eternal soul of marble at the Louvre

that famed Milo made foam and flower.

Here I am, all alone and torn to bits

the sky roars while the clouds accumulate

they tighten, they blacken, they fall apart.

Evaporating seawater stains the stone.

Sacred anguish and horrors my eyes breathe

To what, ravaging nature, what sterile

solitude is sent one who anxious

for love is overcome and perishes?

Where, cross-less-Christ , will your eyes find their place?

Where, enemy shadow, where’s the honored

specter that will receive my countenance?

And for whom do I throw my life away?

I have fitted a veil in the size

of the clear blue sky with a canvas shaped

to the structure of a famous shadow,

the sad man sees the rocks in the lovely

tropical country, where there are white men

with black Venuses who crowned with fetid

and murky flowers all begin dancing;

with each new swing, the earth springs beneath them!

When the huge kiss without flavor of worn

and hardened lips trembles closed out will fly

birds of death dyed the color of bile.

Homagno without a quest whose pale

hands massage his hirsute and unkempt head

–I am a mask, I am a lie, he says,

this flesh and form, this body and these beards,

the memory of being a beast,

that is like a chair on a horse’s hump

placed on the oppressed soul, to be tightened

and adjusted. For a ray of sunlight,

that my soul exchanged for its shadow.  –No,

Homagno, no you aren’t what you say!

Only my eyes, only my eyes reveal

my disguise for they are mine and they burn,

they burn me, they never sleep, and they pray,

and in my body I can feel them and their sky,

they talk about me to him and of him

to me. Why if merely holding a grain

of bad seed the creator has wrongly

placed a stem on my colossal shoulders?

I travel and ask, amidst the ruins

and cemeteries, I spasm and shake

with the delirious effects of poems

the mother of my thousand breasts, fountains

of life I inhale, bite and torment

the blistered hands of the stone I break down

in rages of love; the invisible

head that my dry hands caress and un-braid

then throw myself guilty to the ground

and bathe my confused feet with tears and kisses,

and in the middle of the night, beating,

while in the widely burning orbit

of the  voracious eyes inside my head,

I tremble, curl up, and hungrily wait

for the daylight to bring me responses:

and every new light–by the same mode

and decline, as life appears in droplets

of milk for a tired breast, I order

him to come forward, he hesitates

as the load the ants carry or a cup

of stale water in a finch’s cage

By bites and breakages, as stems of grapes,

blackened and twisted seem the hands of sad

Homagno!  And while the earth becomes silent

the beautiful voice of my heart, replies.

Poetry is fierce and capricious,

When I tell her let’s go honorably

to the town, I upset her wildly.

I tell her the complete truth and don’t abuse;

I don’t dishonor her while she’s sleeping,

quietly dreaming and spent with my love,

as I plead with the sky for some strength;

I don’t paint her with saffron or amaranth

like those revolting poets; I don’t brand

her with a hot iron on the bare breast

not even rhetorical strings would bind

her golden hair I’d loosen  to the air.

.

No, I won’t place her in fancy vases

where she’d die; I will pour out the world

for her to grow be fertile and expand

and after release her seeds in the wind.

And, yes, I would take care the air is pure;

musically, its pure bed is fitted

with soft fabric for shelter in sleep.

In clean fragrant clothes, when she goes to town,

she returns wounded, dry-eyed, and estranged

with her cheeks sunken-in from her terror:

both of her lips thickened, softened, and stained,

one and then both of her pure hands and  heart

grieving and muddied as though a basket

of burning thorns beneath a broken breast:

she always comes from this city like this:

more even than this is eased by the air

of the countryside in the serene night

a tonic that erases injuries.

Lift up oh my heart!  Who calls out to death?

I do not imitate my poetry

Never would I wake it from wandering

nor am I bothered by its long absence.

At times it arrives terribly!  It takes

my hand and places its burning carbon

and it forces it up to the mountains!

Others and so few! come happy and well,

to caress my head or talk of sweet love

and invites me to share a bath! We have

one another, she and I, a certain

modesty that turns deep within my chest.

Tangled up in fragrant entanglement!

I say that I won’t force or adorn it,

though I know how to adorn I don’t dare,

even if I’m swept up in tremendous

shadows as it sometimes happens with me,

I wait for it crying down on my knees

I will free what is within me of rage

and horror.  I run away from others,

in alarm and flee their presence.  I roam

over my life in a boat and suffer

with nausea and seasickness:  a hateful

anxiety eats away at my gut:

Who is able to simply come and go

and leave their life behind!  No this painful

solitary song is written in pain:

I will never again write in such pain!

To be sure this world is like a giant

to a pretentious ant who puts a yoke

on an exiled poet:  I write now

after having spoken with an old friend,

like the wine aged in noble wood barrels

good conversation fortifies the soul:

I feel the agony inside my bones.

Oh, my ache is a cadaver surging

edging, no good is the sweet sea to me!

Not even one pore of me is without

its wound, a nail was driven under

my fingernails, it reaches my feet

my heart has been coldly eaten by them:

and in the great game of life I’m fated

to give my blood as feed for an owl.

Empty and dead, I will float on the wind

entwined inside of my own intestines

raising my fist and cursing all malice!

It’s not that a woman’s been disloyal

or that fortune denies me its favors.

Over what doesn’t she swoon, my dear life?

Who would want my life?  I have known people,

and knowing them well I’ve seen they are bad.

If a child passes when I’m weeping

I touch them on the head and say bye

like a captain who waves a festive flag

at the sea from on board a white ship.

And if you say that I am blasphemous,

I will tell you that you are blasphemous.

What have I ever been given to live

where tigers feed but wings and no sharp claws?

Is there a law that says the silk-winged tiger

will need be fed? And its wings made of light

may well be as radiant as the sun,

a wonder!  Oh tiger, drive your sharp teeth

harder. Nurture yourself from me.  Eat me.

Dig your tap deeper into my shoulders,

peel off my skull and take a painful bite

of me watch as my wings go to pieces,

flames falling to earth!  Happy is he who

would die for the good of humanity!

Kiss the dogs of murderers on the hand!

As a father feels for his daughters when

a corrupt gentleman passes nearby

my ideas concerning what will happen

to mankind –to those for whom I’m dying,

I guard them as carefully as I would

my own sins, in a frozen chest!  I know

people and have found them to be evil.

The best are to be found in the pyre

nurturing the flame of eternity!

The fewer the better for the many.

Crucifixions are for those crucified!

Jesus was nailed to a wooden one.

Today people are nailed together.

The wisepersons of Chichen, the pure earth

of aromas and where the fruits are grown,

with high rituals and beautiful songs,

in depths of heavily scented cisterns

would seek out the most beautiful of them

and discharge of their loveliest virgins.

From the dreaded wall she rose to perfume

florid Yucatan as a soft petal

against blackness ascends into perfume:

It’s what the creator does to the good:

to perfume, to balance: Come winged tiger

Drive down into my shoulders: the vicious

go to feed while the good come to nurture

others through themselves. For the mystery

of the cross, no parchment theologian

would lower himself but the virtuous

do. A candle is effaced as it burns.

Smile like a virgin who is dying

a flower torn from its stem!  A good soul

suffers greatly in the world. In daytime

appearing courageous and at nightime

crying into their own arms and later

sees the horrendous sun rise in the sky,

and livid not to exhibit itself

so as to not scare people with the sight

of seeing the blood that’s shed from its wounds

and conceals its miserable body

in the shape of a skeleton taken

to walk for its decency in pink leaves.

December 14