Batman

Batman

I put my hands where my gloves wanted,

my face where my mask could reveal itself.

My only feat, not to be true, to lie

with the awareness that I am not telling the truth.

I have used the word love as a scalpel,

and then I have seen the greenish scar that remains

in the beloved and in the lover,

and the scar shines in these words, and in my gaze

I stroke the fleshy, thin edges of the scar.

Night passed, took my old statues,

erased the bubbling silence of conspirators,

heroes who lost their heroism at birth.

The great veil of the tropic, like a body adrift, falls upon us.

Falls with slow waves of insects, and heat is the obscene language

that licks the bodies of the living and the dead.

From the sea, the last birds return. From what face,

could I pull my mask to test the fabric of my life,

the great wrapping of what surrounds me?

Night sinks into faces, the tropics spread their hot, damp blankets

over my heart. A slow breathing of rotten water, a fresh sweetness

of toads, envelops everything. It's the fog of piety, the great religion

of disagreement with love and with massive explorations of hatred

turning on its veiled lamps, its veiled phrases, its veiled caresses.

I touch what corresponds, what feeds, what devours:

I caress the hardness and softness of other souls, not with my hands

but with my gloves, my phalanges of leather, my chamois nails explore truth

like bats flying out of a cave. I'm surprised. The waters of history 

come to my lips, they raise my eyes, are the proper breeding ground

for interrogating God from within.

The mask will transplant the face, gloves will oversee

the creation of hands, the lie will open a tunnel under what

we announce as real. Only then will my touch be more alive.