Three Poems

As Pessoa Says

as Pessoa says

there's nowhere you can ever be
without yourself, your irritating presence
interminably interposed
between an impulse and the lively scenes
of life beyond your eyes,
where you are not.

And Pessoa might have asked

if you thought the soul-subduing
indigo slopes of unattainable hills,
shouldering the burden of sunsets,
incandescent, night after night,
the small villages bored by day,
at night miniature Manhattans of promise,
where you also never went,
...