GEORGE LILLIS

The know-how to lock words
 
 
Frozen words, crystals or snow flakes in free fall.
As you join them you observe how the voice is fitted together
of humans. 
The core locked up, language a sword piercing you,
a passion for precise comments: the key you’ve swallowed
is rusting in your stomach,
while the doorways remain impregnable. 
Look! No amount of reconciling with the dark signs
of the deceased forest,
will ever get you perfectly well acquainted
with the night’s metaphysical discourse. 
It’s the animal which, wounded, searches the world
for a restful place,
protected from the judges’ harsh light –
charnel houses that preserve
the secret of motion. 
The colours’ sadness, as they are worn thin by the wheel
of the days,
memories seeking offspring amid the lynched centuries.  
Medals of maturity behind the backs of tomes,
someone gazing at you compassionately from inside the swamp. 
The glass-shell contains in its inner wilderness
the forgotten debt of inventing a bank within the flow. 
Words’ unbelievable sorrow, once their realism
is transfused, like a sign, into your visions,
a sky that docked inside the room and is now hurling stars -
you can still see it inside the veins. 
The seeds you sowed in your eyes. 
 
 
 
Bounds of the labyrinth 

Ear-shattering actions, soundless retreats, utterances fused
in the silence
Everything that did not eventuate, was spoken of and met with no response,
while no one negotiated over the losses. 
In the book of mirages my image ricochets off the labyrinth. 
I am an object of observation inside the hourglass
where the sand forms sand-dunes obstructing
my consent to be free. 
I forgive you… That is all I can do inside this ambitious arc
whose bounds remain uncircumscribed
and whose four sides are guarded by the Ecclesiast -
no, not everything can be futile. 
How can one save up a whole lot of strength
in whose every step nestles the fear of impasse,
who is dogged by the whispering
of his cowardice?  
You follow the trail primal forces carved out
with dawn’s cruel beak
savaging you in the now
holding on to the score of the timeline. 
So, then, listen to me. I was never a hunter of visions –
all the things I loved
first mortified my selfishness, then settled inside of me.
 
Latched on to this unfathomable planet
your life is the curtain of your action
fiercely vouchsafing the momentum
in the midst of uncertainty,
as when looking in the mirror
and all you are is that part you’d imagined
would bear through. 

Verisimilitude of reality
 
 
Cloud-bow. The clay adolescent behind the window pane
is wounded. 
The ruined world cannot be restored. 
Place me facing the image of my shadow,
to whom you allowed to exit without me present. 
I want to pit myself against despair,
as when you explore a new homeland
and the unknown is still a box tossed in the void. 
Yet, I am remote from that peaceful lake,
suspended like the astronaut swallowed up
by infinity. 
I am not through. I would not have liked to be through. 
The dazzling days follow on my footprints,
for as long as the light lasts. 
If you return,
marble will melt away like snow  struggling against the sunrays, 
as when you weld yourself onto wilfulness
and manage to turn into stone. 
 
 
 
 
The know-how to unlock words 
 
Voices were sanctified in the mud,
accessible to chisel from within you
their need for expression. 
Like the value of assimilating the crying
of  the one harshly defeated by indifference,
the one gambling away his talents in a game of dice
as the only revenge
for the narrow margin left  to  make an escape
from himself. 
You part with the cocoon in pain
consenting stoically to the vise of the days
studying the breadth and width of human dignity. 
Under the reign of nameless things. 
 
 
 
 
From „Bounds of the Labyrinth“Kedros ed. 2009, translated by Kostantin Matsukas