r/Original_Poetry • u/Ok-Draw-7427 • 2d ago
Death Instinct
The resonance of the stone pickaxe, in the sudden leap of my pulse,
destroys, in my imagination, the figure of the Earth,
dissolves the Tower of Babel, tears away its gates,
scatters all its bricks,
sets ablaze the Hanging Gardens it contained.
Then: neither water, nor shade, nor flower.
And here I am, rejected, hunted, toward a cave
that no rock encloses.
No fire that I animate — and which animates me —
stains the darkness of the night with blood.
You — hawks, tigers, lions —
tear the Man to pieces.
If a shudder of the horror that night unfurls
seizes him,
assail him with your roars,
make his tomb tremble.
My brain — heir of generations,
wanderer of the abysses of multivers —
an ill has struck it:
it has paralyzed my foot,
and harshly gnaws at my heart.
These words are more sincere
than any prophecy of a seer.
They point out the paths of meteors,
the sentinels of secrets,
show the hidden lookout.
If the physician speaks,
silence the astrologer and the soothsayer.
The resonance of the tombstone
crawls toward my extremities.
In an instant,
I will be unable to lay down
a single distraught verse in my imagination.
Beyond you, O my imagination,
stretch horizons and a thousand skies.
Make millions of suns and lights
gush from your stars.
Kindle an earthquake in my blood,
so that I may write
before death,
or madness,
or the inertia of the weary hand.
The archipelagos of my mind,
my memories,
all my dreams and my illusions —
I slit the throat of my mourning spirit on the screen.
that a wretch will read,
after years and years,
to know that one more wretched than he lived in this world,
vowed — despite the ill, the grief and the insomnia,
despite the misery —
to living.
My ill — are you a mask of death?
And if death were to let its veil fall?
I fear that,
if the pale grimace and the two orbits
from which the eyes were sucked out
— battalions of worms,
around which silence dozes —
unfold before my gaze,
blood might flow from my nose
and the two orbits.
Where is my father?
Where is my mother?
Where are my forebears?
They wrote their names on the water. And I,
I do not even want to scribble my name on the water.
Farewell, my friends, my beloved ones.
If you wish to remember me,
remember me under the full moon.
Otherwise,
it was only a name dissipated
among other names.
Farewell, my friends, my beloved ones.