City dwellers, at night’s every door, fall into the suspicion of greetings. Unwanted, for some reason unwanted hellos, break and tumble to the ground. On the ground, puckered faces, crushed faces: the heaps are all sticky. Those faces are compelled to enter the new night as if their faces hadn’t been crushed the night before. With every new night, people re-enter circulation.

This is how the soul’s energies and the city’s colorful personalities are produced.

Manufactured eyes, bodies with high maneuvering capabilities… are secretly torn apart inside pockets of the city, even if the flesh has callused. Faces should be kept on the alert, as though there will always be another night. They are alert. They remain on the alert.

You don’t belong here
Don’t look back, you’ll turn to stone!
Stay where you are
In any case you’ll find a way
In any case you’ll exist, in any case you’ll stop

One day when you’re not at the dining table
You’ll cross their minds
They’ll miss you…
You suppose, right?

Don’t look back. You’ll turn to stone!
Don’t speak to them
Shush!...
You could become one of them

VI. HOME

The Explorer’s Tranquil Station

Seven Aches

Once you’ve grasped the games and their rules
The toil of participation grows less and less bearable.
Right after acquiring the knowledge of gain
One must leave the game:
This is not the story of losing
But of not winning

Because:
The city is a woman so forlorn she can’t say “no,”
Who makes love because she doesn’t want to speak,
The city is a badly beaten dog
That no longer responds to pain,
The tonic words that touch the hearts of urbanites
Can’t handle
The aches that burrow deeper as the city dwellers sleep,
And for this reason
Every conversation in the city is a little bit in vain

Every ache sleeps in a particular position. In sleep, the
body that becomes itself as it forgets itself, discovers this
position through trial and error.

The body knows how to soothe its own ache. It constructs
soporific angles, hills for its aches. Every hill conceals an
ache. This is why thousands of aches settle in the hills of
our flesh, of our insides, where they find their sleeping
positions. This is why it is dangerous to budge people, to
demolish their hills.

To tug at cities, and at urbanites, is to awaken the aches that sleep on the hills.

-S live in every house; people
Build hills to put their aches to sleep.
-S and -es, the adjacent suffixes,
Will begin new days for new aches

People who make people ache
Will collide again tomorrow, without ointment
Then return to make others
Lick their aching spots;
-S and -es
Shall survive by licking and biting,
By making people lick and bite…s

Whereas saliva wounds the flesh:
If you press your soft mouth for very long to a body,
If you briefly glide your sharp mouth across a body,
In both cases…