Lovers remain silent.
Love is the deepest silence,
The most resonant,
The most unbearable.
Lovers search,
Lovers are the ones who abandon,
They are the ones who change,
The ones who forget.
Their hearts tell them they will never find it,
They don’t find it—they search.
Lovers walk like madmen
Because they are alone, alone, alone,
Surrendering,
Always surrendering,
Crying because they cannot save love.
They care for love.
Lovers live day by day,
They cannot do more, they don’t know how.
They always leave,
Always going somewhere.
There they wait—
They wait for nothing, yet still they wait.
They know they will never find it.
Love is a perpetual extension,
Always the next step, the other, the other.
Lovers are insatiable,
They are always—
how wonderful!—
meant to be alone.
Lovers are the hydra of the story.
They have snakes instead of arms.
The veins in their necks swell like serpents to strangle them.
Lovers cannot sleep,
Because if they do, the worms eat them.
In the dark, if they open their eyes, fear pounces on them.
They find scorpions under their sheets and their bed floats like a lake.
Lovers are mad,
Simply mad,
Without God and without devil.
Lovers come out of their caves trembling, hungry,
To hunt ghosts.
They laugh at people who think they know everything,
At those who promise eternal love,
At the sincere,
At those who believe in love like an endless oil lamp.
Lovers play
“catch the water,”
“tattoo the smoke,”
just to keep from leaving.
They play the long and sorrowful game of love.
No one should give up.
They say no one should give up.
Lovers are ashamed of all conformity.
Empty,
so empty from rib to rib,
death ferments behind their eyes,
and they walk, crying until dawn
when the trains and roosters say goodbye in pain.
Sometimes a breeze from newborn earth reaches them,
To the women who sleep with hands between their thighs,
Satisfied,
in streams of soft water and in kitchens.
Lovers begin to hum between their lips a song not yet learned,
And they leave, crying,
Crying,
The beautiful life.
