It’s very dangerous to know
too many words.

Each of them has its
flip side, which
also has its flip side
and so on ad infinitum.

Returning to the very same place,
let it be a hilltop
with a view of the night city

I take the books left for free recycling mainly for their smell,
I stick my nose among the pages, into business not my own,
then stroll around someone else’s home,
peeping into their kitchen and their bedroom. But once
their smell has faded and the book’s imbued with mine,

Sadomasochistic rain in Leipzig. It slaps the sidewalks.
It sticks its fingers down their drains. It relieves itself
in the city center, then washes away the evidence, so that

Over rooftops, over time
the rain washes. And walls
that had watched men die

I never imagined
him buried thus,
to the din of trolleys

It had to be some poet from Brazil
not one of the greatest, more likely to make a fool of himself
shuffling around somewhere in your vicinity or aspiring to dwell there

It’s the small package
I’ve carried with me
these dozens of years

He’s inside, he must continue, at an infinite
rate, like a word
discovered with other words

A child pointed at the sky, made it his,
and then he points at the one he loves
and suddenly it’s his sky,