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To the Veiled One: An Ode
Amare non te possunt 1 You left a promise under my doorstep To remain urbane under the white walls and white ceilings of distant Seas I shall not know; handwritten in the creamcoloured paper you have in Reams; intimate; pleading; yet I would rather believe the adage From a fortune cookie from a London Coffeehouse…
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5624
I don’t want to be one of those people who write about themselves in the third person. Remind me of this day, Mischka, should I ever become one. I imagine that is more probable than I would ever like to admit.
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November 2019
From the diary of Gustav Klimt, esq. *********** Le vent se lève, &c. I. Prayer I would have loved to have a name like John, or Matthew, or Philip,—a name at once meaningless as all things that have become too common, and too encumbered with histories and connotations no man can and should be burdened…
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Elena Patterson, virgin and martyr
I am tired of looking for heroes. —CHOMSKY, misquoted HAMBURG, 2008. It was always raining in Hamburg, at least in her dreams. And she dreamed a lot of that city where she first met Manu her first love. She first saw him in a film about the pianist Glenn Gould, saw him scurrying in his…
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Confissões de Guilherme O.—
Escreveu estas linhas nos seus últimos sete dias aqui no mundo. Ninguém sabe se ele morreu, e o seu pai dizem a quem quer escutar, que «ele andou com Deus como Matusalém» [sic]. 1. O sofrimento deles é-me estranho e incompreensível. Imagino que seja simplesmente meu egoísmo, meu incapacidade a simpatizar com ninguém além de…
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Joaquim Moura na terra do sol
Ele é fadista: nasceu na Madeira, cresceu e envelheceu no Porto, tinha também, de acordo com o que diziam os relatórios desse tempo, os olhos de Deus. Depois nada. Nem sequer uma notícia da morte que toda a família sem eles saberem esperava. Ninguém sabia do que ele estava a fazer os dez anos que…
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“Hatinggabi” ni Jiří Karásek
Karásek is one of the main figures in Czech modernist poetry, particular the Czech Decadent movement of the early twentieth century. Below is a Tagalog translation, rather unfaithful, of his poem “Propast” (“Abyss”), which appears in the collection Sodoma.
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(How she disturbed us—)
How she disturbed us, Touching her little breasts with her white little Hands that smelled of perfumed water, a Queasy reverence made almost nostalgic by the heat Of afternoons like this before, irrevocable, calamitous, Which we tell ourselves was a glory worth the while. Shouldn’t we have stopped there and then Before we became impalpable…
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(There but for the—)
There but for the flicker of the halide lamps that Line the streets as if to define them, in an hour as Unholy as any other with no witness but myself And a homeless geriatric making do of what the Day had brought him—I whisper, with a voice Trembling like hibiscus leaves in an April…
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Yoga, etc.
I. Everything is sacred The heat was the first thing one remembered. The manycolored buildings fading silently in the dusk, the shirtless bigbellied men roaming the streets, the scurrying yuppies afraid of being mugged, the cars, one after another. Then a phone call. II. Hail to the thief Listen, I shouted. III. Noon Three in…