Autopsy
Las palabras
no hacen el amor
hacen la ausencia.
Alejandra Pizarnik
I expected stillness and cold where I find movement and warmth,
but this skin is not yours
and I freeze.
Back.
My hands and yours joined together, a knot that supported the universe.
Then.
Your dinner:
cold and untouched.
Holograms of your bones:
broken.
Nausea.
Serum and O negative blood.
High-grade fever.
Cold compresses.
You couldn’t even wake up in the whole day.
Tears. The wheelchair. Hands sanitizer.
Tissues and meds.
Television filling up the silence.
Me, repeating the routinary walk to work at 6am,
crossing empty streets in the dark,
knowing that there will be no kiss
before arriving at the high school’s fence,
just the headphones
&
your absence
Taking more space,
-it’s getting late in this cannibalistic reality-
more space,
-meanings are rotten-
more space…
.
.
.
.
until I drowned,
drowned in our songs,
drowned like the gypsy girl
in Federico Garcia Lorca’s
Romance sonámbulo.
Romance sonámbulo.
Pero yo ya no soy yo, ni mi casa es ya mi casa
And there is just a case left,
it resembles a body,
my body?
-a dried daffodil-
your body?
-an apple eaten by worms-
We are just a blank page now,
a webpage that didn’t load.
And words linger around it,
naked words, clumsy words, orphan words:
unable to touch, to bring your voice back,
to evoke your smell, to shelter me.
Those green walls again.
No.
Those lowered blinds.
No.
The nurses coming and going.
No.
A total lack of privacy.
No.
Your golden curls gone.
No.
Some weak, solitary hairs where your beard used to be.
No.
Small talk.
No.
Nothing more to say.
No.
Our empty house.
No.
Those plastic veins
keeping you away from me.
Rage.
Our future bed & breakfast in Lisbon
destroyed by the bulldozer of reality.
No.
We won’t take the train at midnight
or wait for its arrival on the benches
with our backpacks full of chocolate bars, chips and a few clothes,
our intertwining hands
our hands...
I don’t know what to do with my hands anymore,
they were designed to hold yours,
so useless now
hanging like wet socks on a balcony,
getting dry and losing their color.
No more sunsets at Alfama, in that magical viewpoint
-free of tourists, noises and souvenirs-
covered in the decadent melodies of fados,
where the gardens gave us peace
and the bridge looked like a red ribbon
in the river Tejo’s messy wet hair,
where we drank Sagres and looked at the rose sky,
that infinite playground for the swallows.
No more freshly baked pasteis de nata and coffee in the morning,
no more green wine and sardinhas at night.
All beauty gets blurry,
loses definition:
there is just a series of low quality photographs left,
endlessly swallowed by the monstrous passing of the time.
These are not your hands.
I am not myself.
I have been devoured,
ripped apart by sleepless nights,
my chest is an empty nutshell,
my eyes darkrooms
where the past,
our past
doesn’t develop,
it slips out.
"When I am not with you, I am without me"
Remember?
I made them write it on your funeral wreath.
You called me the poet of light,
you can't see how dark my verses are now.