Like Skin




Window orphan with habitual hairs,
Cries of wind,
Atrocious landscape amid crystal rock,
Prostituting living mirrors,
Flowers clamoring in shouts
Their innocence prior to obesity.

Those caves of venomous lights
Destroy desires, the sleeping ones;
Lights like cleaved tongues
Penetrating bone to arrive at flesh,
Without knowing that in depth there is no depth,
There is nothing, only a scream,
A scream, another desire
Over a trap of vicious poppies.

In a world of wire
Where forgetting flies under ground,
In a world of anguish,
Yellowed alcohol,
Feverish feathers,
Rage climbing to a sky of shame,
One day the arrow will surge again
To abandon fate
When a star dies like autumn to forget
       its shadow.



Luis Cernuda