Two Poems

Hotels

I’m thinking about those zero-star hotels
Where angels stay,
Sharing a building
With traveling salesmen and country merchants
Who after a hard day of trying to please customers
Splash on a lavender after-shave
And put shiny gel in their hair
To go out to bars
For a one-night stand;
First they call their wives
To tell them that business was good
And they’ll soon be home.
 
But angels descend to cities
For other reasons:
Messengers from impenetrable places
Or like guardians of people invoking them.
Perhaps they’ve been kicked out
Of heaven for political reasons.
 
Angels prefer to stay in their rooms
Listening to the radio or watching TV
Trimming their toenails
Or ironing their enormous white wings
That they then drape on special hangers
Next to the clothes they’ll wear the following day.
 
They’re disguised as humans
Not to be found out
And have people make fun of them.
 
In the loneliness of night
They recall the past
And regret finding themselves
On a crappy planet.
 
They call room service
But no one at reception picks up
And they go to bed hungry
Convinced they come from paradise
Where there’s loads of toilet paper
And no drunks scream at each other
or roaches scurry down corridors
of cut-rate hotels.
 
Dejected by the day’s ordeal
They stretch out naked in bed
And before falling asleep
Their tired eyes gaze up at the ceiling
As if the heavenly sky were a field
Ready for plowing.
 
But it’s a cracked ceiling
in a decrepit building
Many believe
Is about to collapse.
 
The angels look up in silence
Feeling sorry for themselves
Because these cracks remind them of people.
 
 
 
Godless Angels

Back then the mirror said to its disciples:
no one will reign over anyone.
The world was full of whispers and emptiness.
In the distance horses galloped.
Nothing existed.
Here only a smothered bolt of lightning
and crickets chewing the leaves of time.
 
I imagined a global brain
where the vestiges of a previous era
were ruled by imagining
an even older and more diffused time.
 
But on a long moonless night
I understood that light doesn’t flow from the sky,
but hides out in its own cave.
The twilight, however, is a fallen angel.
 
Deuteronomy prohibits images
even the naming and mental representation
of an imagined Father.
The only way to represent God
is gazing into a mirror.
In my fused dreams
I saw rushing angels
battling against huge calamities.
An unjust God can’t be perfect, emphasized
the bravest of them in my dream.
A god cried where rivers end.
 
Fact is they were alone.
without hope of talking to the Father.
Mr. God, who abandoned them
As he abandoned those who fell into the Vale of Tears, wasn’t there.
 
A now broken silence
took hold of the mirror’s lips
and sadness went on dampening
leaves until daybreak.
 
There’s a time to die in fireplaces
where conscience smolders all alone.