The Death That Perfects Me Poem by RIC BASTASA

i like the way you show your back to me
i see you and you do not see me
that is the principle of my secret.
my world changes when you face me
in your being disinterested
nothing matters
i do not wish for more,
i do not need some stars
in my heavens.

my gaze to you is enough as
i go home again
incomplete,
like two hands opening to the sky
asking for light
or even rain and nothing

comes
to fill what my palms are longing

i close my hands again to cover
my face in shame.
For i have not changed.

No matter how,
i will never change.
i am this child and
i am the father of this man.

in my old age,
i am still my own child
the child whose mouth not any milk from any mother
can satiate

it is written in the skies
my name.

It is the name of dissatisfaction
and it wants to have a body
which must be reborn
until it finds what it has been searching

where is true love?
have you found it?
if sometime i find it,
that when i kiss i am also kissed back

when my fire is burned by another fire
when all of me is a forest
and consumed by wild fire

what can i ask?
i will not ask even for a dropp of rain
or a pinch of salt
or a syllable for understanding

i have enough.

But i do not have it now.
I know what is enough.

I have long defined it
in my series of deaths.

i know when it comes,
i can recognize completely its face
when it arrives.
when i hold it, i shall die
but i shall not
ask to be born again.

for by that time,
i am rested as a stone
beside a hill

i do not wish to be rolled again
neither shall i ask
Sisyphus to put me back to that same
place on top

for by that time
i am dead and so complete.