Álvaro Pacheco

The London Ballad
                      
                 
Like an old man in love
a sailor without the passion of the sea
an insomnious dreamer
an empty road
empty of humans and machines
a fallen tree
naked of leaves and fruits,
all those unnacepted things, -

and also (because)
many others
you could'nt think
accordingly -

you go
relentlessly
around and around
chasing the sun
light weathers and temperatures,
miracles and mixed smiles
from children and an old man,
dreaming about happinness:

they play cards
you watch television:
someone must dare
to tell you anything
even the true -

the way
the winds blow
a poem in the funeral
the real core of the desert
and its strange beings,
how to behave
in the proper school
only to forget.

You don't know nothing.

I only have small recollections
of foreign people and countries,
books, some money
and a girl who knows me 
but doesn’t love me anymore.
 

I wonder about mermaids
and young poets - you should have been
one of them, but
it is almost extinguished
the fire inside, and
as a matter of fact
you don't know anything no more -
everything
you’ve learned
just to forget,
about young poets,
lost poets
and all about those
terrible hordes
of humans dreamers,
and cultivated people.
 

Call the river

with its memories
of childhood, call
its dark waters in the rain season
and its colorful other seasons:
may be you are not yet dead
inside, call
the trees
and the old decision
you have dreamed up
when you were young, walk,
under the mango tree
among the trees and forests
of old men - that's important:
tell me, do you know the leaves
really
and the forests
of old men?

I'm too old to know
what I am, what's love - Katherine Mansfield
would know. I'd better
be quiet
in the dark rooms
of big cities
very old cities
corrupted cities
like this one,
only wondering
about
the past and the secrets
I don't know
I couldn’t learn about
in this
and in many others
vicious

like vicious old men

very old city.

                                       
                                                                     Londres, 24 agosto 87.
                                                                                   

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 Página editada por  Alisson de Castro,  Jornal de Poesia,  20  de  Julho  de  1998