I dwelt in the corridors of come and go
In the boundless dismay of tacky colours
Nothing's still true, no sun splits open.
No son will ever speak in this handful of life
In this error that no one suspects.
I lurch into the evening and confuse the birds with the rain
And footsteps build and break on my petrified voice.
Repeated by nostalgia, ambushed by memory
I evaporated in tropics that no longer exist.

I count my centuries, the days that surround me, and peer
Lost beneath grotesque vaults, at the slides
Of all the chalk gardens where I was not mentioned.
In me the lie, the explanation moves
That takes issue with my word, with a truth
That respects no one and breaks or echoes
With the countless subservient shivers of my restlessness.

Very lazily and slowly leaking the journey slides
Past the landscape, past the sleeping of the ferns,
I feel my hands frayed, no taking tonight.
I try to unclothe the finest moons, the horizon,
And escape my own expectations, a spring that burns
A shudder that freezes. I extricate myself from the rays
I hear my shadow, the sinister signals slink
And scared I speak to doors, sad and shy
My eyelids close, I sweat. I undergo.

Translation: Paul Vincent