I can write the least romantic lines tonight

or not

I try to write you a non-poem and it doesn’t come, 

I let the fever pass to see if the paracetamol 

will cure my sentimentality

and it doesn’t

despite the sheets being soaked by covid sweats

and the hypoglycaemia of my diabetic body

caused by the gliclazide tablets I took 

when I realised

three doses late

that theraflu was 84.7% sugar,

despite all of this, I don’t change them

(the sheets, I mean, not the tablets)

I sprinkle the text with names of medicines to remove all its charm

but even pharmaceuticals seem poetic to me today

dear gliclazide, seductive theraflu

the pills and the powders stretch out on the sheets 

where I confused my foot with yours, ambifootstrous, 

and I only realised when I tried to wiggle my toes and they wouldn’t obey

and I, with all my self-control, 

thought I’d been paralysed

until I realised that 

our skin is almost the same colour

I inhale you from the delirium of the double red lines 

where I haven’t yet lost my sense of smell, or taste,

and I tell myself that I would put up with all the nosebleeds

all the chairs falling from the sky

all the quarantines

to survive yet again

even just in my imagination

the brackets

in which we wrote

together

poetry by non-poets

not autobiographical, of course, 

because we are not always us,

well, you, yes, you are always you

without respite

and I don’t know if it’s the fever

or the pills

or sugar, poison, 

but I feel that you’re here

still

and not just because of the sheets

the sheets from which I did literary analysis

of the whatsapps

of two literature teachers

who underestimated

with great pleasure

the reading of the other

and I try once more to write

a text you will call a poem without my consent

and I’ll say how can it be a poem if I’m not a poet

reflecting you

and we’ll have the same argument as always

if ‘always’ means 10 days

that were like

10 months

a decade

or more

an always where I saw

for the first time

and infinitely

intimately 

writing as the pulse of life

and I asked

“do you write with your left hand?”

and plagiarising peri rossi

with a soft ‘r’

and a few changes

like every good plagiarist

I tell you that as I write to kiss you

I know that we live many times

each and every one

anti-biographical, anti-romantic, 

and without expectation.