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.