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the night slips by addicted to
the dream of ending too soon,
lifeless are the plaster faces solidified
in the damp, apathetic, bitter light
of this conditioned reflex
of these discrete lives: the I, the stubborn
eternal desert of repetition:
throw forward the name, headlong,
stick it into the belly at every turn
of the hungriest and most merciless days
and say I, I, yet again,
with the short breath of a dog trying
to speak but the voice doesn’t come out,
and reaffirm it once again in writing
with one’s own expression of consensus
undersigned several so many times, my name
is poured into waters hot and cold
by the angelic Temperance of databases,
corals in which I will collapse,
I cell, animula or blastula:
plasma transfused into recent veins,
from behind enemy lines in Udine or Ellis
Island, from Sidi Barrani, from Omaha Beach,
always trying to make it last
without shedding a drop: this is what
excites the organs of life,
certainly not the erotic arcadia