These poems are unlike anything else I have ever written before or since. They come from a brief period in a now quite distant past but dwell morbidly yet hopefully on an infinitely distant future.

Back in 2002 I led a troubadour-like existence around a supposedly dangerous favela in the Northeast of Brazil. And, of course, I was writing a lot, in notebooks, on napkins and toilet paper, even on occasion on my own body, when paper ran out and I was especially inspired.

The only literature I had with me at the time was an issue of a Brazilian literary magazine on the French Oulipo movement and a pocket-sized collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I read these through over and over again as I watched my own life and that of others disintegrate around me.

It was the only time in my career as a poet that I have felt the need for some kind of guiding structure or form and I duly set about writing sonnets, often based around mathematical, theological and economic themes. Still, incorrigible rebel that I am, I could not confine myself to the strict sonnet form. Although most of what I later put together as a series called Unholy Sonnets –in homage to John Donne—follow a fairly strict rhyme scheme, with a somewhat obsessive emphasis on what the French call pure rhymes and Anglo-Saxons repetition, the length of the lines varies greatly, creating a constant tension between expression and form, like pie-filling spilling out over the crust and the cake-tin and burning acridly on the metal plate that covers the fire that fuels the oven.

These poems, despite or perhaps because of the effort to pack feelings into form, are the most personal I have ever written.

I post two of them here.

A special prize goes to anyone with a cryptic-crossword-puzzle-solving type of mind who gets the trilingual pun in line 13 of Unholy Sonnet #1, which is the abysmal center of the poem.

Unholy Sonnet #1

I have exactly nothing else to say.

You were the light and reason of my rhyme

and now, uncloaked, with nothing else to say,

I cannot claim you left even a sprig of rhyme

to cover up the lack of link between us.

Blind to the likeness between unlike things,

those senseless things that I remember meant us

are now reduced to dry and brittle nothings.

There is no longer feverish correspondence

between things. No sense in all that nonsense.

All things of everyday importance

are drained to a mundane significance

now there’s no us in them.

The sap of truth is spent; the bloom of meaning snapped at the stem.

Unholy Sonnet #17

When God hooks us up like fish out of oblivion

in a trice – a trick with prime numbers – we

will see each other for the first time again.

We will know what it is simply to be –

one another. Qualms will not part us and our God

will smile to see us meet infant again.

And we will reap the profit then of being odd

in this world, when all the all too even reasons then are gone

to Hell. And I will love you as I loved

you at first sight and I will love you as

I always wanted; and we will then have proved

that love is constant and irrational as

the square root of two; and we twin primes; our numbers

matched in this lottery that spares us an eternal slumber.