2022.02.12.
The Verb To Be
I know the general outline of despair.Despair has no wings, it doesn’t necessarily sit at a cleared table in the evening on a terrace by the sea.
It’s despair and not the return of a quantity of insignificant facts like seeds that leave one furrow for another at nightfall.
It’s not the moss that forms on a rock or the foam that rocks in a glass.
It’s a boat riddled with snow, if you will, like birds that fall and their blood doesn’t have the slightest thickness.
I know the general outline of despair. A very small shape, defined by jewels worn in the hair.
That’s despair.
A pearl necklace for which no clasp can be found and whose existence can’t even hang by a thread. That’s despair for you.
Let’s not go into the rest.
Once we begin to despair we don’t stop.
I myself despair of the lampshade around four o’clock, I despair of the fan towards midnight, I despair of the cigarette smoked by men on death row.
I know the general outline of despair.
Despair has no heart, my hand always touches breathless despair, the despair whose mirrors never tell us if it’s dead.
I live on that despair which enchants me.
I love that blue fly which hovers in the sky at the hour when the stars hum.
I know the general outline of the despair with long slender surprises, the despair of pride, the despair of anger.
I get up every day like everyone else and I stretch my arms against a floral wallpaper. I don’t remember anything and it’s always in despair that I discover the beautiful uprooted trees of night.
The air in the room is as beautiful as drumsticks.
What weathery weather.
I know the general outline of despair.
It’s like the curtain’s wind that holds out a helping hand.
Can you imagine such a despair? Fire! Ah they’re on their way … Help! Here they come falling down the stairs …
And the ads in the newspaper, and the illuminated signs along the canal.
Sandpile, beat it, you dirty sandpile! In its general outline despair has no importance.
It’s a squad of trees that will eventually make a forest, it’s a squad of stars that will eventually make one less day, it’s a squad of one-less-days that will eventually make up my life.