Double entendre

An empty bottle of enjoy! Coca Cola

Washed by the surf on a lonely coast

Shouts its promises to the jungle beasts

Sic transit gloria mundi

História em Haiku do Kingdom of Wa

Yamato Haiku

King of Japan
A rough ruffian calls at
the Yellow Throne







Haiku Heian

Deuses e budas
Caminhando devagar
Desdentados




Haiku Sengoku

Mosquetões
Arcos quebrados, manchas
Uma mulher morta




Haiku Tokugawa

Quatro putas uma
Espada quatro brigas
Quatro cadeias




Meiji Haiku

Iron tracks
smoke, noise,
fleeing rabbits




Haiku
Showa
Gojira meca
Spectreman manga
Tezuka Sony

The libraries of dream

1 Haroum al Rashid's fancies: A library of slaves. Each slave has tattoos indicating what book they hold, and has to teach it to a new slave. A library made out of carefully trained and bred songbirds, who pass the songs to their offspring; each clutch holds a chapter, each book is a cage.


2 A library of burnished steel sheets. The sheets make noises as the wind rattles through them, and by this noise a patron has to find his, as no one with sight is allowed inside. The words are embossed upon the steel.
Why it is that only the blind are allowed is unknown. Some think the glow of the steel would blind men; others that the get of the God of War stalk the library, padding soundless after men.

3 Libraries in Middle Earth: Orc libraries made of carved bones - and by ancient custom, each subject for a book needs the bones of a specific beast. Refutations must be carved into jaws, bestiaries in shoulderblades, original books in skulls. Elf-libraries, with codexes made of spider silk, beautifully calligraphed, but never illustrated, with hoops around the spine so they can be hung on tree trunks.


4 The Titanobibliotheke - A vast, fallen building of marble and basalt. The shelves, taller than a tower, are made of ebanon. The books are scrolls, eight times the height of a man, closed in cases of whalebone and dragon's ivory. They are made of papyri and written in gold. A community of scavengers stripes the gold letters away from the papyrii. Sometimes, they will trigger one of the titanic spells - this has made them deformed, and the land around blasted, so that they have no other choice at making their livelihood than keeping to their mining.

The library of the Gods. - Downwind from the library of the Titans, sits the library of the Gods. It's a small library. The gods don't read much. They only have uses for practical texts - for spells curing godly ills, for recipes to filters of godly love, for exorcisms and texts which teach how to turn gold into lightining. The crown of the collection are the texts stolen from the library of the Titans. Those are set in the middle, in a great pillar of levinglass. (The gods have forgotten how to read the Titanolingua. They adore the books with superstitious dread. Some fear their owners will come back from Tartarus to claim them.)Beyond the pillar, broad avenues of marble, with many trees on their sides, radiate outwards. Pegged to the trunk of each oak tree is a bronze tablet. Those are the books, written in a close script. Longer books have oak copses to them.

The gods do not lack for space.



5 The library beneath the sands. -They say Genghis Khan dreamt of a world devoid of cities; where barbarian children would not perceive any boundaries, riding through the emptiness. Some say Temujin, Lord Absolute, dreamt of destroying the very mountains, of turning the world into a vast Steppe.

What they do not know is that Temujin's lover, Farrukhnaz, a Persian princess, extracted a vow from him. That if someday the children of the steppe ever wanted to return to civilization, and buld anew cities more glorious than those he razed, they would have a library ready.

This was a solemn oath. It was made by Genghis Khan at the Boundary of Heaven, and over the tomb of Khan Kaigalak. All his descendants were bound by it, world without end, even to after the Doors of Felt were forever closed and the vault of the stars fell. It forced them to build, under the sands of the Gobi desert, a great vault, vaster than any treasure-trove ever described in the thousand and one nights, and to it add everything ever written by men, and more.

The books flowed in, quick and thick as the arrow-storm of a Mongol invasion. In the first years, the cavernous walls were filled with precious ornamentation. Books inlaid with ivory and diamonds, written in fine Byzantine porphyrovellinum, comissioned from the finest calligraphers of Baghdad and Hangzhou. As the Yuan dinasty, the Golden Horde, Chagatai, all met their fates, the descendants of the Throne Absolute got poor, but they kept their vow - all books that were written were added, and more. Now common print editions were added, now note paper scribbled copies. Organization was not forgotten - the order of librarians Farruknaz created laboured on, eating of subterranean carp, drinking the waters of a still lake, serene morlocks.

A tenth of the library's shelves, steel between diorite vaults, have been filled so far.


6 The best hidden library. - An old beggar pushes a supermarket cart around. The beggar is Auberon, the cart holds the fine vellum scrolls wherein the souls of the fair folk are kept. Thus is Hell fooled.


7 The traveler's library No one knows who the librarians are, or how they move. But a few people, those to whom travel is a mode of life, will find a library card to their name, be it on the floor of a cargo wagon on which they've hopped or next to the glass of Mumm the stewardess brought them.
Afterwards, they will start finding books. These books are most useful, or completely useless. They have one thing in common, though - they are all books about places. Travel guides, atlases, itineraries - some of them have been published by people who don't exist. These books will appear as mysteriously as the membership card, and the travelers know they can be returned by leaving them at the counter of an airport bookstore, or that of a diner off the expressway, or at the feet of the railroad guard.
Sometimes, the books will feature places that don't exist. You can travel to these, too. The price for a Lufthansa ticket to Ruritania (from Frankfurt) is 567.€.


8 Vagina Dentata In an old temple to ninhursag, there is a cuneiform library. I do not know what is there, for any man who steps in the entrance has the sides of the temple close about him, crushing him to death. I have seen the librarian; she is a tall woman, her skin is white as alabaster by moonlight and the colour of burnished gold by day. One of her breasts has been cut off, and she put out my eyes.

Inverno

Era uma vez um homem que sentou-se, sozinho, a comer frango frio num dia cinzento, e viu em quinze minutos se passarem quinze décadas.

De onde vieram estes ossos
assim tão quebradiços
tão doloridos.
Frágeis como promessas?
De onde estes olhos mortiços
baços vazios tristonhos
tão tristonhos.
Que catam pêlos e manchas?

De onde essa tropa de medos
de gentes dores e bichos
de próprios e outros.
Que se atropelam e acoitam?

...e estas memórias vastas
fumarentas e imprecisas
de uma primavera imaginária?

The Ogress

This city eats - her children!
Festoons herself in their entrails
Smacks her lips on soft flesh
Lights ten million cigarettes
with ten million lungs.
(A thousand myriad pinpricks
of cancerous, beautiful light.)

This city - traffic-heavy, full
of the smoke of cars, of buses,
of pizza ovens and barbecues.
Its air acrid, its sunsets glorious.
And in every gutter a drunkard,
under every roof a beggar, and
the beggar's companion - the policeman
and the policeman's trusty baton
lover of beggars' heads.

This city - ah!
Like a lover or a spider
will eat what she loves and
in throes of murderous ecstasy
leave her mark on you
heart and soul
lung and spirit
time and
space.

Gramática

Com ti, aprendi nova gramática
Desapareceram tempos antigos
Criaram-se novos. Formas
Nomes, cores palavras

Contigo aprendi a mudez
De amar em perfeições de futuros
Em teus olhos, uma dulcíssíssima embriagues
Descria e recria cada um de meus cansados ossos

Mariliamente, me vejo
Dançando entre as esferas
Afogando o mar e o Tejo
Queimando o Sol e as eras

Mariliamente chamando
A mim meu desconsolo
De só ter para te dar
Um corpo, uma alma, um mar

Pouco

De ti, me bastam poucos instantes
A eternidade, pra começar, basta.

Teus quero apenas, ocasionalmente
Todos os momentos.

Não peço muito - apenas tudo
Nada além disso.
(Se não for pedir demais.)

E prazeres negros e mornos
Venenos baudelairianos
Vertigens insuportáveis
A paixão de um momento.

A ti peço, tão somente, apenas
Tudo.

Pain

it's an old companion,
pain-
almost a friend.
pain is closer than your bones
throbs like a heart
follows your steps.

it's less than a lover, pain.
(if faithful to a fault, for sure.)
it keeps watch at night, all by its lonesome
it plays with you at noon, be the day cold or warm
it's there for you.

it's yours, of that no doubt at all.
it can don many masks, play many roles
soft as a courtesan, hard as a whore's lips smacking on crack
but always there, somewhere.

your dog will never be as faithful as it,
pain.

Réquiem

No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place.


Instead of a Preface
In the terrible years of Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
— Leningrad, 1 April 1957


Such grief might make the mountain stoop,
reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells
crowded with mortal woe...

For some the wind can fleshly blow,
for some the sunlight fade at ease,
but we, made partners in our dread,
hear but the grating of the keys,
and heavy-booted soldiers' tread.
As if for early mass, we rose
and each day walked the wilderness,
trudging through silent street and square,
to congregate, less live than dead.

Where are they now, my nameless friends
from those two years I spent in hell?
What specters mock them now, amid
the fury of Siberian snows,
or in the blighted circle of the moon?
To them I cry, Hail and Farewell!

-Anna Akhmatova

The Caravan

In the desert
it is cold
and a great mass of sound hits
you like an angry fist to the
stomach.
Again.
Again.
Jarring bones.
Shaking stone, it
is the tread of heavy beasts.
Their dim shapes like mountains at evening
capped with mahouts robed in dirty snow.

Amid those grey columns of heavy sound
flits the silver jingling of bells.
Laughter climbs their sides
festooned as they are with creakings and chortlings.

Again.
Again.
Jarring bones.
Rasing dust.

The caravan and its sounds pass you by.
You, who are
alone
in the desert.