Poetry is

poetry is evanescence

poetry is life sentence, release
	on words, liberté sur parole

poetry is a blind guide to an ancient
	enigma, to an inaccessible
	secret

poetry is an argument
	dynamic and jarring

poetry is a rag tag cos-
	mology we can 
	raise and wave, 
	it's a small (abregée) cos-
	mogony: unaware, 
	seamless, unstitched, 
	breathless, in tatters

poetry is to forget
	forgetfulness

poetry is to separate self from
	self

poetry is what's completely
	left out

poetry is emptying without
	exhausting

poetry is constraint to the remote,
	to the not yet, the not
	now, the not here,
	the not there, the
	not before, neither not after,
	nor not now

poetry is breeching

poetry is to burn and give birth
	in the same vocal gesture

poetry is being-there multiplied
	by not being-there, remembering
	to trans-be-there traversely
	like a watershed

poetry is a misunderstanding about
	what I don't know exactly,
	but a misunderstanding

poetry is infinite impotence,
	limpid, lucid, hallucinated

poetry is intersection
	interjection
	intersession
	interruption

poetry is a low blow

poetry is transit and exit

poetry is infusion and trans-fusion

poetry is memory of what is not
	and what must not be; that is
	the culminating, liminal Self
	the Self as an incomplete cosmos 
	never to be completed

poetry is tying—untying 

poetry is the ritual scene of
	infinite uncertainty, of the
	inaccessible Infermity
	(Infirmitas) 

poetry is a streak
	a swerve
	a splay
	a spade

poetry is crib—cradle
        it's nook—needlei 
	of the Trans-Organ
	of the trans-organic
	of the Indistinct
	of the In(de)terminable

poetry is ash

poetry is diagonal
	it's ramble
	inside the manifest body
	of Universal Inexistence
	of Global Entropy

poetry is stiffened laziness
	an arm hanging from the 
	branch of the Tree of the Knowledge 
	of Good and Evil; that is 
	a Monkey in Brazil
	always hanging by an arm
	from the branch of a tree (it's the Preguiçaii )

poetry is terrorism in the domain of speech,
	a bang in the cloister of language 

	it's terror in the depths of rhetoric

poetry is liberation from knowing
	escape from the known
	a release from mechanics

and at the same time it's falling, sinking 
	into repetitive, obsessive, iterative
	mechanics, which are also the
	mechanics of hinting, of the
	norm, of ritual (of strict 
	obligation, of rhyme, of number,
	of essence)

poetry is the implosion of zero time 
	and in(de)finite degree

poetry is unleashing, un-phrasingiii, a potential 
	threat, breaking, robbing,
	destruction

poetry is smashing, shattering, shaking

it's a clash between
strength and restraint
that tends to erase.
We are truly
infinitely mad

poetry is almost everything: that is everything, less
	what it really is

poetry is impermanence crossed with
	trans-manence

it's impertinence

poetry is counter and encounter (spontaneous
	and predestined) between neurosis and unconscious,
	between archetype and Self

a monotonous and perpetuated ring between
	impulse and obsession

poetry is aggression

to write poetry is to cut slits, produce cracks,
	point out filaments in the
	curtain, in the Barred
	Wall

poetry is a fight against the night

poetry is night against the night

poetry is a rub against the voice

poetry is friction against the Dragon's skin

poetry is this
	it's this and that
	and so be it

ⁱIn the original Italian, this verse literally reads: it's cell—eye of the needle. Villa may have been thinking about the passage from the New Testament "It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19: 23-24)
ⁱⁱPerguiça literally means "sloth" in Portuguese. Here Villa uses it in reference to the mammal that dwells in the trees of South America, specifically those of Brazil, where he lived for three years.
ⁱⁱⁱSfraso might derive from the verb "sfrasare," meaning to disrupt the phrase. It is, however, one of Villa's many neologisms and the interpretation offered here (un-phrasing) is merely hypothetical.