LANOYE’S ENVOI

Future generations
– if you still read
and peruse
this petition:
be ruthless.

I fell short in everything I did, judging by
the star-filled sky I would lose myself in
even before I knew how to tame it to a dance floor.
I had wanted to feel it beneath my bare feet
as I waltzed with the sun. I still make the mistake
of believing every horizon to be beyond reach.

If I hate myself it’s because of this: I know no limits.

Always: too much, too loud, too crude, too big, too eager and never
enough. A trio of souls in one chest. The jester, the nerd
and a doubter who sought salvation in silence.

Future readers
– if you still read
and hear
this prayer:
be forgiving.

These are not patents of nobility that I can submit,
nor writs of execution, nor begging words from crooks
with nooses around their necks. I ask for nothing
and have no secret protocols up my sleeve. 

If I touch you, I hope for this: at most that my voice,
whose intention it is to exalt our destinies, even without god,
despairing of each, will do so all the more
compellingly for it. At last, the cruel closing act
after the opera: no echo to be heard, let alone cheers.
Only billions of lives silenced. Once existent,
lived in full, finished and now flown. Mud and dust again. One

again. This is what will become of us too.
  I am only you.
  And you are me.

l’envoye de lanoye

l’envoye de lanoye