Pierre Alferi, p.13
Seventh room. At home where one never was,
closing a utopia with walls. It is here, do come in.
But you’ve always come here, you’ve penetrated every possible
path of return, marked every neighboring fork.
Why haven’t you lived here? My room does not sum up
all the others, whose copied keys are found in its closet.
There is only overprinting, familiarity, resonance. And, if there is room,
theatre. The curtain opens to four rectangles of roofs
and to sky maculated with droppings, an African scare mask,
a pre-Columbian severed head, several machines,
three pictures without color and a tattooed torso under glass,
two red and brown rugs, upright books covered by
lying books. Black dominates. The furniture,
the visitors have been replaced, sometimes by themselves.
Nothing is certain except disorder, its occupation slowly growing
like that of your voice in mine. Only a wish.
Some things scatter on the floor, papers, mail, a mattress
that a belt keeps from unrolling, but signal
a foreign room of one’s own, a vacant center,
a temporary lodging. I orient myself in relation to this room.
I like to go towards it even when I’m not going there.
Like a lighthouse, its window properly speaking illuminates nothing
other than itself. Its anteroom is in the cafe; its territory,
to the north. Around it, moats from three roads and a garden.
Yet you constantly locked yourself inside, jealous of this closet,
of this free zone to which you have no more right
than others and where you did practically nothing. A verb
that would be both the frequentative of to have and its opposite.
Thus I lived. The seventh act is to redraw the place
where one left oneself. I let myself be led by you,
through a long corridor, up to this ambiguous floor.
We stopped on the threshold. Then I closed the door.
closing a utopia with walls. It is here, do come in.
But you’ve always come here, you’ve penetrated every possible
path of return, marked every neighboring fork.
Why haven’t you lived here? My room does not sum up
all the others, whose copied keys are found in its closet.
There is only overprinting, familiarity, resonance. And, if there is room,
theatre. The curtain opens to four rectangles of roofs
and to sky maculated with droppings, an African scare mask,
a pre-Columbian severed head, several machines,
three pictures without color and a tattooed torso under glass,
two red and brown rugs, upright books covered by
lying books. Black dominates. The furniture,
the visitors have been replaced, sometimes by themselves.
Nothing is certain except disorder, its occupation slowly growing
like that of your voice in mine. Only a wish.
Some things scatter on the floor, papers, mail, a mattress
that a belt keeps from unrolling, but signal
a foreign room of one’s own, a vacant center,
a temporary lodging. I orient myself in relation to this room.
I like to go towards it even when I’m not going there.
Like a lighthouse, its window properly speaking illuminates nothing
other than itself. Its anteroom is in the cafe; its territory,
to the north. Around it, moats from three roads and a garden.
Yet you constantly locked yourself inside, jealous of this closet,
of this free zone to which you have no more right
than others and where you did practically nothing. A verb
that would be both the frequentative of to have and its opposite.
Thus I lived. The seventh act is to redraw the place
where one left oneself. I let myself be led by you,
through a long corridor, up to this ambiguous floor.
We stopped on the threshold. Then I closed the door.