Secrets

Do keep your secrets, especially those you don’t know, those you try to hide from yourself, do keep your secrets in these visceral poisons that take over and tug at your stomach like the strings of a puppet, that’s how it always has been, do keep your secrets in the gaps between your mouth and god, between your mouth and my ears and the street while you tell me life is hard and someday you’ll die, and then all this will be yours, do make it whatever you want, do keep your secrets in your heavy lids in the few words you hear and reject from your hearing aid, do keep your secrets anchored to yourself always to yourself so fond of yourself I do I say I wish I wish, in which crowds will you confuse them, how much of you remains attached to the mirror, and how much you leave in the eyelashes of others, how many dreams remain attached to the pillow and how many will dissolve at the first cynic “I don’t know, then you see I love”, do keep your secrets in the encoded whispers, in the spasms and short breaths, in the flies that always find space in my empty memories, but when you run away where do you run away and then when you stumble does it happen by chance or do you make it on purpose? Or you already know where to stumble, the precise point and the day, do keep your secrets in the clockwork springs that arise from your exact words, the flowers that blossom from the misery of your hands, the rotten roots of your legs that wither and never they hold the weight of your desires, because that’s the way it is, do keep your secrets in your barks in your squeaks in your desire to free yourself, from any hugs, any caresses, do keep your secrets in the looks you turn away when they try to look a little inside, sabotage the wonder and amazement with small self-harms, with small scratches, small cuts, and be perfectly framed and sculpted like origami, do keep your secrets in the punctual escapes from the present, in the disillusions that send every articulation into ecstasy that like cobwebs block, hide love and make it humiliate make repentance you are cain, you are abel you are perhaps also god, always you, you hide everything you have inside the cracks becoming chasms the tremors becoming tarante that the more you hide and the more you show, there is the story of this villager who had returned from Germany obsessed that some Germans wanted to steal the diamond he had stuck in his brain, obsessed he shot himself from his secrets and from someone who could steal them, but they didn’t find any diamond, he had taken them with him, do keep your secrets and pretend that they are things that no one has to know that they are very confidential things and the more you hide the more they are secrets, of the diamond that you have in your head do make dust from it by crumbling it with your hands and it will be dust and when the wind comes to take it away you cling and fly away with it

Francesco Tardio (Italy, 2000), translated in Italian by Slow Words

Of the same author (interviewed also), you can read Hermit and Apocalypse in our Poems section.