I already know that I’ll never be a perfect polyglot.
Neither can I try and make the journey back.
The rule of the fatherland is over.
I’m in the middle of the world.
I’m a citizen of cities.

I’ve smeared myself with the mud of many languages.
My mother tongue licks me,
but it doesn’t wash off
the lava of words that carry me away.
And my Babel does not crumble.

Great mangrove swamp world!
I come across ancestral sounds
that connect
without saliva or blood,
loosened,
in solitary wisps,
from mouth to mouth.

And so, I kiss the flow –
flames of the burning word
inside the night of humankind.
But the fire doesn’t cease,
however dirty the sound;
rivers of roots in flames
fix their anchors in the skull,
and go on troubling underground water
suspended in the chaos of the brain.

I’m a tree trunk with many grafts –
I’m a ship made of several trees.

• Throne of weapons

• The light of the paint

• Still movement

• Self-portrait with monkey

• The gaze of the dwarf

• In the depth of the cloth

• At the margin

• The circle

• Ruins

• The burning house

• Plutôt oiseau que pájaro

• 22 June 1937

• To read a language

• And Paris gave me birth

• Dead word

• My mother died in London

• It was my son, my father

• Living from glass

• Lesson on the beach