I open the box and start taking them out, one after
another, without stopping. Lighting them is easy:
you hold them delicately between your fingers
and strike them for an instant against a rough
surface – against the walls of night,
the raised reliefs of memory. Sometimes
I wonder where this love for pointless gestures
stems from, if it must be an illness or perhaps
a blessing: to see that it’s of no earthly use,
yet going on insisting, in spite of everything, on
burning the slender matchstick of words that I take
delicately out of the box, one after another,
without stopping. Extinguishing them is as easy
as lighting them: you need only count up to
three, and then wake up. Out of the great illuminations
all that’s left is a handful of tiny, charred
corpses that now spread over the blankness
of the page, and a strange whiff of phosphorus at the root
of the soul, at the exact centre where language is born.