solitude comes into your life one rainy day and 
never leaves 

it hounds you and waits for you at every turn 
of a downpour, covered in a white sheet like 
children asleep or even awake in broad 
daylight, for children know how to build forts 
with nothing but a rectangle of fabric 

solitude, better than anyone else, knows how 
to win back its prey, and you pretend not to be 
lonely, not to mind it, the reclaimed isolation 
we think we love, well, what can i say, i had 
wrongly imagined this brokenness would 
disappear with time, yes, the imagination can 
be wrong, rightfully so, i had wrongly imagined 
my solitude was appeased, disappearing the 
way everything disappears with age, but my 
god, the age stayed the same, identical to that of 
the torrents contemplated through the window, 
and oh how the little girl i used to be drives me 
mad for succumbing to hope, so passionately, 
like a lover of the future, with time, nothing has 
changed, the eternal confusion of rainy days when 
showers of stones lapidate the hopscotch courts 
we stubbornly draw to defy the sky, in vain, the 
same chalk condemned to erasure, how could we 
waste our love on these deluges of the tender age, 
Monsieur 

it is high time, as at any given time, to pray for 
my prisoner, surely in the light of his desert, 
begging the void to hold him in its arms, but 
once night falls, no one can take themselves 
into their own hands, a strange solitude that 
plays tricks on you like a perverse child re-
incarnated in the calm child you love, he who 
walks beneath the fabric of his unravelling fort, 
sheltered from others, without actually getting 
lost when he loses himself, at most he wastes 
his time voluntarily losing his way, unimpeded 
desired solitude, the comfort of being both your 
inner self and your own deserter, oblivious of 
your own anguish 

now that i sit on this barricaded childhood i 
pray you to accept me for the hours that have 
been granted to us, after all, this is just a book 
and you will read plenty of others, and those 
others most certainly will not have my insolence, 
there is always something better out there, that 
is what you must not believe if you want to be 
loved properly, yes, those others will look better 
and will shatter neither your imagination nor your 
reason, i couldn’t come up with anything better 
than this somewhat long sentence to hold myself 
together, but this is all just additional clatter 
produced by the bricks that fall from afar and 
knock down my reason 

oh Monsieur, how i lose myself, how i lose 
my way in astonishing trails when all i want 
is to find you 

i meant to believe in you from the beginning of 
my madness, one day, i don’t remember when, i 
realized i was senseless and on that day i decided 
to love you, yes, love is a decision that forbids 
bubbles from bursting into oblivion in the depths 
of a bathtub, and perhaps you closed these pages 
before this exact spot, 

perhaps you will never read me 

the unfathomable paradox of writing words 
without knowing if anyone will read them, 
and never having a stranglehold on your eyes, 
that’s the way pens go, subtle but faltering with 
uncertainty, if my sorrow ended up on this table 
it is because i needed to have it in my face and 
out of my hair, i wanted to make it more approach-
able by dressing it in words just to lay it bare, 
another paradox, admit that there is good reason 
to lose your mind, and if i was right before your 
eyes, right under your nose in the middle of your 
face, if this sorrow took the form of a table for 
two, you the Monsieur, i the deserted chair, your 
table for one across from mine, surely it would be 
impossible to pardon myself for this king’s 
speech, more imposed than the homicide of the 
tree, and if love is a decision can we back out, 
don’t tell me no, it is what madmen refuse, what 
senseless fools recuse, and just a moment ago i 
prayed you to accept me, but i forgot to include, 
in my absence, 

i wait for time to hurry me but it’s no use, 
the blade of hours goes over my head like 
a knife at my throat and vacuum packs 
me into a constricted diving suit hard 
of heart, in the bathtub the bubbles bend 
over backwards without bursting, half-
heartedly rending their own hearts, and 
as i curl up and peruse my arms with my 
fingertips, i picture these untravelled paths 
in the event they aren’t real, a swollen blister 
that refuses to pop, i lather my shivers, for 
lack of composure, for instead of being under 
the weather i am over the moon of an eccentric 
cosmos, a moon different from the one that 
reveals itself to earthlings at night, and with 
my head stuffed in an envelope with no stamp, 
i float in the absurdity of those bathtubs we 
burden with boiling water to fill the blueness 
of our void, the disconsolate vacuity of drowsy 
beanpoles, the pitiful self with its hands blue 
from timidity, a blue straight from the sky, in 
other words filled with absolutely nothing, 
where some poets untroubled by oblivion lose 
their way, in the bathtub i tell myself stories in 
a low voice, yes, as i corner the bubble in my 
vacuum-packed diving suit, besides, these stories 
come so naturally to me in english, i couldn’t 
find a better way to feign their otherness, and 
when i babble in monodialogue on the moon, i tell 
myself surely someone somewhere must hear me, 
surely surely surely, some of my aberrations will 
remain unsolved before the eternal, forever sealed 
in letter bombs under the table, and when i dream 
up a world, why is it always in english, for it takes 
two to justify a lullaby, 

and what do i know 

and what does it matter, 

the french language does not have the answer to my 
questions 

*** 

i’m going to stop talking for a moment 

if i’d stopped talking without warning, you 
would never have known, a writer’s silence 
is the very essence of the unrealizable, the 
impossible in all its glory, yes, the impossible 
is especially glorious, silence is the unofficial 
wooden language, it tears you apart for un-
expressing the crux of your truth, and despite 
your infinite declarations, silence goes nowhere 
near words and leaves you powerless, revolted, 
implosively mute and inescapably speechless 
before the world’s cacophony, yes, alone in this 
world where bursts of bubbles alone can annihilate 
the indulgence of the unsaid 

the burst of a soap bubble is enough to unravel 
the certainty you’ve been knitting for centuries, 
bursting your eardrums when it explodes and 
deflating your secrets like those birthday balloons 
that, despite the burst of their pigment, simply 
contain children’s sighs, this is the story of 
those whose stifled remarks have been blown 
to smithereens and pulverized from within, 
leaving room for nothing but the spaces between 
each word, 

but without the words 

besides, none of those bubbles will have ever 
travelled into space, one would think they fear 
the void that locks our stars in an embrace, and 
there you have it, Monsieur, i exhaust myself 
nailing my eyes to spheres that vanish into thin 
air, fixing myself like a nail in the soapy globules 
that falter as i sit and stare, the silent symphony 
of soap leaves you to your grey water, weary, 
washed out, exhausted, wounded cracked torn 
in all your fine lace 
for one day all bubbles will burst into oblivion 

and on that day you’ll join them in their resting place 

i think of you so i won’t miss a word, for nothing 
could be more tedious than assembling the ashes of 
beginnings that have woebegone up in flames, i 
dream of you who aren’t there, that’s what i made of 
you, Monsieur, a dream, grandiose and incoherent 
the way all my dreams are, that must be what we 
do with absentees, turn them over in our minds one 
hundred times, make them laugh an immaterial laugh, 
hang them onto the crescent of a moon and possess 
them at arm’s length, and while our immobile hands 
tremble and interlace under a table, without asking for 
permission, yes, despite our wishes and beyond any 
calculation, simply resting there, locked in an embrace 
without saying a finger, abandoned on thighs and 
forgotten in entanglement, completely torn from 
the outside world, that’s how it is, solitude un-
knowingly interlaces your hands without warning 
or anyone noticing, and forces you back into 
the pitiful gesture of self-embrace,

***

i offer you my vowels in vain, the way i 
do all kinds of things in vain, but the more 
i enunciate you the more i squander you 
and lose you even more, even though reality 
sought to remove you from the moment you 
were never there, my voice rambling between 
your fingers is an endless letter in a torn 
envelope, the asymmetrical correspondence 
of mourners, like a widow i picture your face 
as you read me and i sully the whiteness of 
desertion, the filth of virgins is red and that of 
widows is black, and that is my vocation, yes, 
i, the incorruptible atheist, tarnishing the integrity 
of a virgin page, the self, cloaked in fabric darker 
than its shadow, tighter than a spider’s attire, 
that is all i need to recognize you, to stroke 
you stronger than those who crudely caress in 
promiscuity, i love you for being so distant i must 
write to you just to cross your mind and finally 
uncross myself, and finally, my absurd reader, 
my imaginary persistence, you my blue sky, the 
madman in the desert of my hours, catching 
a glimpse of love as the only answer in your 
eyes, 

it’s almost loving someone who abandons you 

my tyrant of absence, in other words 
missing from all places, except in my mind, 
how could i love you for abandoning me 
like that, you who yearned to possess me, 
before this table i sit and unburden myself, 
surrendering my unaddressed letters to an 
utterly deserted sky, to my restless reasons 
for remaining in this world, i hate my fruitless 
restlessness, how far will the paths of oneness 
lead my unscheduled rendez-vous, a sad un-
orchestrated meeting, you, my longest strophe, 
the tiniest crumb of my feverish obsessions, 
love is a disaster, it pushes you around and 
breaks down your flood barriers, love wreaks 
havoc like nature when it panics, undeniable, 
uncontrollable, i assure you, a nature more 
panicked than mourners, that is why love 
dominates us, Monsieur, because it is free and 
i am the opposite, and you, my catastrophe of 
captivity, my most uncontrollable cataclysm, 
i fully comprehend the answer these words will 
never know, other than a chance to catch your 
eyes in my illusions and that’s all i can hope for, 
yes, i can only hope that my lies will brave my 
irreversible impiety, the amorous verbs of my 
firmament, and after all, is uttering the inaudible 
enough to survive 

i prefer you as a reader, this is all part of 
my asinine renunciation, bookworms never 
reimburse you for your words, they stay silent be-
fore the eternal and offer nothing in return, loving 
or hating you from afar, an onlooker, that’s how i 
prefer you, without knowing whether you love me or 
hate me, at an infinite distance from your thoughts, 
from god in his absolute silence, from women in utter 
uproar, i’d still rather desert this world where i search 
for you in vain, there is nothing truthful about this 
world other than a writer’s grotesque refrains, well, 
there you have it, Monsieur, at the risk of renouncing 
the universe, i prefer, true to my emaciation, love as 
a first draft of the imagination_