Alice I

The mornings are always prosperous, it can feel a little sinful even, arrogantly happy, so fresh like the summer ebbing tide; there's this constant guilt about being alive, the guilt of being so trivial, harvesting the produce of the tree, moonlight breakfasts and the loud singing too. Outdoors, even past the walled patio and the garden, the guilt is constantly augmented up to the point where it already swallows the whole world into an orderly mass of stars, visible in daylight. There's this urgent complacency in it, voracious desire to be so simply understood, to transform the time in a living space; unlike the nights, the morning steals away from the fear of one's own death, it might be even necessary and silent, unpoetical, accidental and sudden. The time seems mortal and absolutely eternal, a necessary transition between cycles of slumber, bearably interminable at the juncture of the hours, less passionate than fragile, with a body of its own, unavailable for testimony and clean from the glitter and the animal gaze of inner sunshines.

I enjoy looking at my own image, through the glasswindows of the cars as they move along faster than the smoke escaping the breathing moisture of my mouth; never in a mirror or in the water, but in the movement of the glass. The skin is less deteriorated than the eyes, they look so passively small, unready for love while the rest of the body in unison stands on the asphalt craving for that transformation, rising to the miracle rather than the hopeful expectation of prayer. There's this inner faithful desire to just never stop the night, to continue deprived from sleep in a timeless flight toward a destination, looking at death from closer, without fear or expectation, just letting himself be carried away slowly and in full awakefulness, yet the little pleasures of daytime, the scorching sun or the hide outs from the rain, the pressure of the roof tiles over the gravity of the shoes and the plants, all of this, keeps us from the waters of this flight at the unsafe distance of oblivion.

Through the glasswindows the prosperity becomes a happy possession, an undeniable gift, language of berries and figs, vanquishing the despair of facing up to the stars and imagining stairways that lead up to more heavenly places where there's still daylight, even outside of the earth, carpeted with trees and thrushes, shrubs and elbows, just like down here, an island burning down, flames rising up and the bodies in the thrust of the leaves reaching past horizons of winds and temptations of the cool breeze. But there's always this dispassionate end with the jams and the lines, the carpets of skylights extending along the pitch of the greenery and rising abovewards with sounds and delights, the journeys are wonderful and the trains become livelier than waters puncturing the sand, it is a final act, like a grand finale, the eye folds up and the hand reaches for a telephone in a pocket near the heart. I wish there were these mornings also overthere, when I can find them at last, when the screens will become flights and even if for a sole moment I could trespass the commandment of sitting behind glass, to place a fingertip near their mouths and swim inside their necks with the erratic motions of drowning helplessly into and against the tide, being lashed by the rocks in the silt, the scales of the fish and the sharp nails of the moss in the walls of the riverbanks. Losing the visions from inside and in their stead, floating above the planes from underneath the water, gazing into the smoke, from above, loving the cuts in the flesh, that kind of unlove that begins in the throat and becomes friendly at the level of the cheek, unable to sleep over the chest, it turns to the embrace of hollow grass.