Over a falling agony 
Melancholy rises
Nobody will ever feel or see
the distant grace 
of a splendor
that never was   

So all the sodomy upon which the human beings enjoy their disgrace
Becomes a paradox
We try to be invisible, but in fact, we’ll never be
So many distant planets are tired of us
A complex diagram of fragile behavior
Delineates our sour existence
Now it is evident

We will never become
We will never feel   
The solitary presence
Of our ghostly demise


​Wagner

If we fall
Altogether
Nobody will ever promise rescuing us 

Sincerely, I will never see
I will never feel 
The lightness density of life
Over the horizon 
Of your eyes again 
 

​Wagner

Unrestrained 
By a severe darkness
Nothing in this world could be forgotten
Easily 
Except for your kindness 
A sensible intuition

Everything remains unrestrained 
A desolation that could be manipulated 
Through a forest 
Of consecrated brains  
Shattered illusions of false memories
My shadows remain obliterated 
By a horrendous  
Disposition of time


​Wagner

Now we feel
One thousand skies
Falling over 
Our unspeakable desolation 

Into the vicinities of our splendorous discontent 
Life never manages to be an instant fortuitous glory
Into the graceful, but somber distance of a moribund solitude
A breathtaking rudeness 
Consolidates the painful road 
To desertification  

And we never feel the risk of monotony
Desolation – by itself – strikes us indirectly
Blank faces never stares at each other  
Only an empty universe
Will be allowed 
To understand precisely 
the vibrant and cold  
eternal darkness of the night 


​Wagner

A hazardous density strikes the most introspective thoughts
Ambiguity rises
as poverty reduce silences 
Nothing seems proverbial, children cry cities made of dust and agonies

Your soul will be questioning a sincere alliance with the downfall of melancholy 
Anything but emptiness would be justified 
Towards our own sad propensities, we relentlessly feel that invisible universes explode in absurd angles that strikes incomparable levels of miserable existence
As the endless rain begins to fall in the night
intrinsically     

Nobody has conceived the fugacious
Elements 
of its own
Convoluted anxiety 
We live in miserable solitary grains of empty splendor that nobody has ever seen

What we all want to desperately feel – the night guardian has irreparable expectancies that retain humankind’s morbid delusional inclinations towards an endless sleep  
Shadows move, but nobody has seen anything beyond the infinite desert of stones that is everywhere to be seen 
Saturated by an epigram of desolated cruelty
The dark cosmogony of a persistent life
Armies of shadows march towards the dehydrated pyramid of its own destructive essence
Suddenly, a million sun rises – the unexpected return that nobody has ever admitted
In a peculiar instant of cosmos drudgery 
Everything is calcined  
Cemeteries disappears 

Maxwell Bodenheim – whose birth name was Maxwell Bodenheimer – is now a relatively forgotten American poet and novelist, who achieved great fame in the jazz era of the 1920’s. His mother and father were German-speaking European immigrants who settled in the United States by the 1880’s, and Maxwell Bodenheim was born in May, 1892, in Hermanville, Mississippi. It was in Chicago, however, that Bodenheim had started his literary activities.

There, with the now legendary writer Ben Hecht, Bodenheim founded a periodical, where several individuals that would become major icons of American literature have collaborated, like Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg, amongst others. Nevertheless, it was in New York City that Bodenheim would become a more renowned man of letters.  
​
Sadly, fortunes drastically changed after Bodenheim found fame in New York City. Only in the twenties and in the beginning of the thirties he remained regularly productive, after that he wrote and published only sporadically. Since there is absolutely no reliable biographies or documentaries about Bodenheim, everything that concerns his life, in overall, is largely obscure, and only a few facts about the writer are positively known with veracity. 

What can be said of Bodenheim for sure is that he was married three times. First, to Minna Schein, then to Grace Finan – to whom he became a widower – and last, to Ruth Fagin, a woman twenty-eight years younger than him. A little after the mid-thirties – for reasons that are largely unclear – Bodenheim’s condition and personal circumstances severely deteriorated. He even became a miserable beggar, asking for money in the streets. Despite the fact that by this time he was a published and moderately successful writer, he resorted to mendicancy for a living, and he was generally unrecognized by the people who gave him change. He was arrested by authorities several times for vagrancy, and even arbitrarily committed to mental institutions. By this time, Bodenheim had also become a chronic alcoholic. 

The death of Maxwell Bodenheim – which took place on February, 1954 –, was a particularly tragic one, and the main reason why his fame somewhat expanded; the incident supplanted his notoriety as a writer. In 1952, Bodenheim had married a woman – his third wife – named Ruth Fagin, that shared her husband’s degenerated, miserable and completely destitute lifestyle. Bodenheim did everything he could to survive, including marginal activities, treacherous, though innocent scams, mendicancy and he also wrote poems for changes. Most of the scarce money he made, though, were spent with alcoholic beverages, that Bodenheim somewhat used extensively to alleviate and anesthetize his suffering. His wife Ruth sometimes prostituted herself, to have an income, a degraded activity that frequently enraged Bodenheim. They were homeless people, used to sleep and live outdoors. 

On February 6, 1954, an acquaintance of the couple, a man named Harold "Charlie" Weinberg, offered to Max and Ruth the opportunity to spend the night in his apartment, to which the couple agreed. Once they were there, apparently – the veracity of the story is debatable – Weinberg tried to have sex with Ruth, and she was indeed predisposed to have an intercourse with him. Bodenheim was drunk, and appearing to be sleeping in the couch. Nevertheless, he was seeing everything, and suddenly stood up, enraged, and challenged Weinberg for a fight. Weinberg then killed Bodenheim with two gunshots, and stabbed Ruth to death. Weinberg shortly thereafter confessed the crime to the police, and tried to minimize his evil deed, by justifying that he had killed two “communists”, despite the fact that there is no factual evidence implying that Bodenheim or Ruth were communist sympathizers. Weinberg was arrested, considered insane, and locked for life in a psychiatric facility. The writer Ben Hecht – his friend and former literary colleague – paid for Bodenheim’s funeral expenses.     

Six months after Bodenheim’s murder, his biography, My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, was published. Bodenheim himself, though, was barely involved in the project, whose work was commissioned by a publisher named Samuel Roth, and was ghostwritten by a professional writer named George Plotkin. Apparently, Roth had requested and paid in advance for Bodenheim’s account of his life as a Greenwich Village bohemian and respected literary icon, an assignment that Bodenheim – in this period of his life, mostly depressed and despondent – was barely willing to commit.  

Unfortunately, by the time of his death, Bodenheim was already a largely forgotten writer, and since then, his work has never been properly revived, analyzed, studied, republished or appreciated. Bodenheim remains scarcely read and debated in literary circles today. His poetry, in particular, has a peculiar charm, a picaresque and sometimes quasi-surrealist beauty, that explored in the density of ephemeral and frugal moments the most obscure and fatalist resentments of life. Never really compromised or preoccupied with form or metric, his poetry was prominently modernist, and celebrated the arbitrary agonies of existence, in a constantly candid and moderately vibrant melancholy, that, it is suspected, were typical of his behavior.  

If you want to know better the work of this marvelous – though unconventional and undisciplined, but mordacious and genuine – literary icon, the website Black Cat Poems is the perfect place to start. There, you can read more than one hundred poems by Bodenheim, for free. I hope you enjoy, as much as I do. 


Wagner

The unforgettable glorious ocean of infinite winters is the pale endless extension of a cold anesthesia, that seeks between the worlds of a ludicrous barrier the solid eyes of justice that perpetuates a lonely calmness within my soul, easily conflagrating worlds of undefined reason over a conscience of undying virulence. Nevertheless, these winds never flow over infamous temples of occasional glories. 

Parallel to these monuments of stolen voices, ignored statues of confused chaos swallows laws made of lethargy, the static apathy of an infamy produced by late storms of anger and drowsiness. Where they will go, and with what specific purpose?  

Since these days of infinite deception forgive the impetus of the black wind declining over the dying repentance of my mortal anxiety, I renounce the anticipation of my general irritability. Resounding over a dark sentiment of incongruous stigma, my position will be forever restored by the dark winds of my eyes. 

In all of this tiredness, the evasive subtleties of an ineffable cold keep worlds of unreality distant of a sincerity that never existed. And what can I reclaim, besides the fact that today is incredibly cold? And has always been so terribly cold and perpetually empty. 

Horrendous days of tumultuous forgotten beauties from sleepy times were ostensibly obliterated by the simple exhaustion of existence. Rationalizing in the evident storm of an invisible possibility that keeps my mind dormant and distant, the shadows in the vicinities of an infinite horizon soon demanded the world that I inhabit to be converted to smoke. If I align myself to the exact intolerance system that is inherently attached to my life, I will never be the same person again. But I certainly don’t have to think about these ordinary ambitions. I would never see the spring of a lifetime attached to the essence of a primitive deception again. 

The sky that I hide behind the oceans of my fears would never be taught in public schools.   

Virulent days always begin in a sordid discrepancy of nature. 
What am I doing here? These reckless days soon will be distinguished in the vicinities of my overwhelming sickness, where there is no peace, and the painful intensity of my improbable journey are eager to be fulfilled by dark and violent impulses. 

Some days could be higher, but my soul is lower than its antagonistic paradox. Only a few days before, and this system of inadvertent sleepers, on the colorful tangential zone of a never-ending humane sagacity, would definitely fade away. And this eyes, impregnated with
genuine vivacity, would soon demand real life over its horizon of false condolences. 

The different days can only make sense when survival is on the crest of a wave that never sleeps. If I survive on this rainy day, how can I be deeply distinct from everybody that I know? 

It's cold outside and it rains. These falling achievements of mine do not contribute to anything, to revive entirely the integrity of my soul. Thus, this falling world is restricted to several zones of dying rivalry.    

Every day empires in my eyes contemplate ruins and precipices of no absolute value. Impregnated with deterioration, in every empty day, an immense darkness, and the most horrifying silence of all, is afraid of everything that I consider essential to keep living. So, silent days gets stronger, and silent days pass away, at the funereal corridors of all the empty hours. 

I do not want to contemplate anything, but I can always remember sincerely the corrosive unhappiness of the intermittent days of obliteration under my eyes. And I only forget the primordial suffering and the monotonous silence that seems to be everywhere inside this invisible line of misery. Everyone is expected to control the situation, and eventually, every day will be contemplated by surreal flames of agony and flagrant declarations of hostilities. But a cold darkness engraving abysses in foreign territories will acknowledge the deleterious campaign of a defying allegiance of barbaric truculence, for all of us to see.  

The days do not come out of nowhere, and as I proclaim, we can expect normal principles to die first. And they shall become the engine capable of virtually expanding the rise of exhaustive memories, the bad weather of all the things that I could forget without leaving home today. Maybe I should not have left home.

All this rain is the phantom of a soul that never goes away. And it seems that the days, in their inability to remain irresolute, forgot to soften the spurious inclinations of the variations of all seconds which does not allow the maintenance of a machine that never ends life in a human scene. Or the trail of useless days that never inhabits the empty ruins of my heart will only listen to the prejudices of my words? As a matter of fact, before this day is finished, I have to recollect the dubious certainty of my invisible existence. 

The hours of my exhaustion simply persevere against everything that is out there. 
I get out of bed more tired and exhausted than ever. And among the major things I’ve learned in life, there are no human beings capable of understanding my tiredness, which transcends everything that is the most fateful in this world, and outside of it. 


For others, perhaps I'm just a slacker. Pernicious ignorant individuals, they will never see me in the highest days. They never heard of anything related to the scream of my animosity, or anything consecrated to the sentimental exhaustion that I have left from this point onwards. And I just don’t want to teach them this eccentric effect of the human nature. Obtuse individuals are mostly irrelevant defenseless patriarchs of nothing. 

I understand the pathologies that hurt humanity, and makes existence more degrading, precarious and difficult. The human being, by a legitimate evaluation, is a machine that is always collapsing, be it physical, mental or both, but the vast majority of people are not able to understand this, because they are all irrelevant and ignorant hordes of lethargy, completely devoid of any reasoning ability. One of the fundamental truths about human beings is that, although they consider themselves to be superior, they’re not. For the most part, they are simply animals driven by lust, instinct, primitive conditioning skills, or by the weaknesses of emotional impulses. 

This is depressing because a lot of people don’t have the ability to learn to act as a decent human being, with potential to exert the ability of rational thinking, or to develop their mental and cognitive potentialities. I understand very well the pathologies and infirmities that hurt humanity, and the abnormal integrity of its deficient functionality, while the vast majority of people are completely unable to do so. Of course, this is also due to the fact that I have a superior point of observation, unlike the vast majority of people. It is very easy to criticize me because I look slow, lazy and silent.

The gray eyes of the citizen of dust are looking towards the sordid conflagration of a mindful spirit that is never tired. The criticism is never intended to defy the ordinary principles of a prominent degradation. Everything becomes a latent description of sanity. The universal axiom of stupidity that gets close to the human eye invariably meets the sign of irreverent intransigence in an interesting question of resistance.  

But I became speechless at the end of the everlasting night of my dreams. The rest of this industry of human remains cannot even confirm how pleased I became when I’ve decided that I simply wasn’t there.

All human beings, without any kind of exception, are ignorant? Not only the night was repulsive, the most disgusting of these repulsive attitudes closes the night in an eternal alliance of mortally wounded vicissitudes. But what I think is the most disgusting aspect about human beings is how ignorant they are about their own ignorance.

Well, one thing is certain: after I erratically became stranded in the overkill of my nightmare disbelief, the night and its shadows definitely closed its curtains on me. And I never became the subject of any criticism again. 

This point of my life could have been better explored, I think. But in the end, they never accused me of anything. I was just a shadow in the wall, a visitor from anywhere, an incongruent individual that simply vanished in an ordinary day, destined to go to a place nowhere to be found. This wasn’t me, after all.