Sunday, March 23, 2008

The same poem, always

Hasn't he tried to write the same poem always?
hasn't he ended up writing the same poem,
always?
Of those dull looking bars and shrill songs
outside dirty fast food joints, of love that sometimes
hangs outside cheap cafes, boys smoking, girls
hanging out till sunset merges into pain.
Always the same refrain, the same words really,
of loneliness, night, exile, the moon, the same
stuff you see, till he runs out of sad words
and usually out of cigarettes, usually.
And never running away, from poetry, from
a certain palpitation, but useless, these poems.
Of course, he does wonder about distances
and the certain melancholy of faded sepia photographs,
and realize that there could have been time
that brings a kind of rhythm, a kind of meeting,
or rather some time that should have,
and yet the incessant love for the song
which she used to hum, and this new hatred too.
And inside the deserted cemetery outside town,
where fugitive lovers used to meet after dark,
he found the same poem, always, after promises
and sunsets were exchanged, and never has he reached
yet the farthest point of poetry, but always the same,
the same poem.

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