Maria Josep Escrivà

Life was but a battle without victory. 

Jaume Pérez-Montaner 

I seek out silence and the world howls back 

and amidst the noise, I long to be 

in the very nakedness of the poem, where verse 

aches as again I shan’t write today. 

I nestle into the ravaged cavern that are these arms 

and yet still, like a bird condemned 

to fly, each morning I evacuate them. 

I dream I was in the woods, but once on 

the stinking asphalt I awoke. 

It is through verse 

that my world moulds me, but the day to 

day, always observing, swallows its words, 

as if they were but a handful of nuts.  

Desire is always the primary incentive, 

the sole freedom on this path 

to nowhere, even though time gnaws away 

at our tired flesh and thorns of dismay 

prickle our skin. Whatever will be, 

will be, or so the saying goes, and to deny it, 

the primary motive that pushes us: 

to live against prognosis. 

Thus, in the unstoppable flow of time, 

I am the only decisive obstacle 

with permission granted from the rounded stone of the tomb. 

No words. Only pain can describe pain.