not today

I still don't understand why
I started writing poems.
and why poems
rather than
novels?
ah, I've heard the stories that life writes them for us.
and I believed in that once.
I even believed that there's one
perfect poem hidden in all of us,
the one in which we'll be able to fit our entire life.
but I'm still looking.
still searching for it.
and I can't remember when it became an obsession,
the dependence on finding spontaneously devastating words.
an obsession as real as drinking
to a broken man,
inhaling smokes of cigarettes
to a penitent sinner,
sex without discrimination
to the masochist.
something like masturbation to the climax
of the last word in the mosaic.
and each new poem
in a unique way
becomes a new thought orgasm. a miracle.
but I don't understand why
when I write
it has nothing to do with the actual words,
but it's all just the sigh of the storm.
I don't understand why those words are sometimes
like ghosts in the fog
that speak a foreign language.
maybe it's all a matter of projection,
black and white film, a negative
awaiting processing to be converted into the
positive image.
and maybe one day
it will make sense, but today
I don't know.
I don't understand.
I can't remember
why.









© Tom Del Braco