My first symptom
was to stop protesting.
Nothing but afternoons
of futile presence.
Being there at the exact time
to drown
in undeciphered silences.
If the experts couldn't
who will make abdication speak.
The neon lights on the way
say more about my everyday wreckage.
Since then
I have stopped prowling
in the past.

Your parents watch you.
They live in your ravings.
They remind you of dates,
birthdays, anniversaries.
They rot your dreams.
They conspire in old photos.
They announce you will soon be free.
Your parents say:
There's a solution to everything
except death.
But I know that my nerves
will never again be quiet
and I will sink in my symbolic death.
With no further definitions.
I remember the most harmless details about you:
the way you cool your soup,
your Florsheim shoes,
your American taste.
Your Dunhill collection,
your liking for expensive tobacco,
Fred Astaire and the Bridge
over the River Kwai.
The rest
was shit.

I have seen a poet writing
about the uselessness of poetry.
At the end of their lives
they become chaotic and telluric,
they reflect on the cosmos,
they revile poems with good reason
while their hands twitch
on a glass of whisky
and they go back to the initial torture
which now extends to dedications.
They snooze on the covers of their books
but no longer conspire, like others, at receptions.
Kind visionaries,
they never confess their downfall,
they're above the end of the world.
They weep because the word has become stupid
and they wonder if the wait has been legitimate.