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Selected Works of Manuel Maples Arce




Paroxismo


On the way to other dreams, we went out in the afternoon;
a strange adventure
spoiled us in the bliss of the flesh,
and the heart fluctuates
between it and the desolation of the journey.

In the agglomeration of the platforms
the sobs broke suddenly;
later, all night
under my dreams,
I listen to their lamentations
and their prayers.

The train is a blast of iron
that hits the scene and moves everything.

I hold her memory
to the depths
of ecstasy,
and
the distant colors of her eyes beat on my chest .

Today we will pass the autumn together
and the meadows will be yellow.

I shudder for her!
Uninhabited horizons of absence!

Tomorrow will be all
cloudy with her tears
and the life that comes
is weak as a breath.



Prisma


I am a dead center in the middle of the hour,
equidistant from the shipwrecked cry of a star.
A handlebar park snaps into the shadow,
and the ropeless moon
oppresses me in the stained glass windows.
Golden daisies
leafless in the wind.

The insurrectionary city of illuminated advertisements
floats in the almanacs,
and there from time to time,
an electrician bleeds out on the ironed street.

Insomnia, like a vine,
embraces the scaffolding of the telegraph,
and while the noises open the doors,
the night has weakened, licking its memory.

The yellow silence rings over my eyes.
Prismal, my diaphanous, to feel it all!

I shared her hands,
but in that
gray hour of the stations,
the wet words were thrown around my neck,
and a locomotive
thirsty for kilometers tore her from my arms.

Today his words sound more icy than ever.
And Edison's madness at the hands of the rain!

The sky is an obstacle for the inverse hotel
refracted in the dark moons of the mirrors;
violins rise like champagne,
and while dark circles plumb the dawn,
bony winter shivers on the coat racks.

My nerves spill.
The star of remembrance
shipwrecked in the water
of silence.
You and I
coincide
in the terrible night, leafless
thematic meditation
in gardens.

Locomotives, screams,
arsenals, telephones.
Today love and life
are unionists,

and everything expands in concentric circles.


Saudade


I am alone in the last stretch of the absence
and the pain is on the horizon in my dementia.

Far away,
the cursed panorama.

I left the Confederation will sound from his flesh!
Sore all his voice,
shattered
between the tubes of music!

In the interdicted garden -
unanimously agreed -
the frozen auditorium of the moon.

His memory is only a resonance
between the architecture of insomnia.

My God,
my hands are full of blood!

And the airplanes,
birds of these aesthetic climates, will
not write their names
in the water in the sky.



Tras los Adioses Ultimos


Afternoons camphorated in stained glass windows of sick,
after the last goodbyes of the locomotives,
and in the heart palpitations of the handkerchief
there is a tearing of spasmodic phrases.

The electric elevator and an intermittent piano
complicate the system of the 'apartment house',
and in the purple scream of the last trains
I sense the distance.

Behind the absence the telegraph is demolished.
Emotional dispatches bleed my interior.

Suggestion, L-10 and newspaper clippings;
Oh my painful one,
you are so far from everything,
and these falling hours make life yellow!

In the wireless fru-fru of the automatic dress
that entangles its sectional pattern around the house, I
strike an ecstasy of sunshine on the stained glass windows,
and the city is a spectral hardware store.

The domestic songs
of coconuts to the street.

(She was a swoon from supreme prestige
and Catholic ailments from perfume wrapped
through my fingers!)

Accident of tears. Last
engines blackened by dint of shouting goodbye to us
and she in 3 latitudes, acidic with whiteness,
poured out in silence on my heart.




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