Writer Between Worlds

you don't know rain or trees, 
while I am certain rain is sometimes 
coarse-grained and it burns like a match. 
this night is dark: 
you will have already forgotten 
that I understood evil too late. 
had we known 
that a wolf was wading through this poem, 
that a wolf was waiting for us at the end, 
we would not have been here when it ended. 
I'm just a vagabond facing the sea; 
now I can tell you things, 
now I can name the place 
I go to say good-bye, 
the place 
where life breaks down, 
the place 
where memory now lives 
alone. 
I'm crossing a sea of uncertainty - 
you should know - 
you, wailing woman, scribbled in the margins of my poem, 
(you can count the pain, oh yes, pain counts) - 
I used to go into rooms crying and then, 
one day, 
carrying a pain as old as a toad, 
my fork tasted dust on its coldest side... 

(cento based on verses by Fernando Valverde, Poems, 2026, Casa de editura Max Blecher, with slight changes for meaning, prosody and intelligibility; a cento is a literary device and creative technique whereby one creates a new literary work entirely from other authors' collated verses or passages.)