This infamous painful and choking cough
That persecuted me daytime and wakes me up continuously by night
Daughter of the impossibility, I believe, to speak with my daughter.
Perhaps I longed for it, do you know?

As usually I longed to be ill, the peace of the sick
A stop to the work, if never I worked, or at least to the guilt of not to
A stop to the responsibilities, the duties
The right to stay in bed to read or watch the movies
The right to defer, to think about it later

But now this infamous painful and choking cough
Wakes me up by the night with strange convulsing crisis
And while I choke coughing
The world begins to vibrate, to dislocate
May be… tearing apart for a while the very tissue of reality?
And I need support with my forefront to the sink not to fall
And my body vibrates and dislocates and I cling on the Earth
And I move as a spastic… who is moving my own body?
I lose control of my limbs, supreme feeling
That abandonment… to whom? Drug addict without drugs anymore
Perhaps am I still looking for the high? 
Who makes my body dancing as a broken puppet?
Strange pleasure at the edge of suffocation: how many people already died for it?
On the boundary between life and death: furtive glances to the Bardo Thodol?

Running on boundaries, on the razor’s edge
On the boundary of that arrogant pirate provocation I truly enjoy, that is part of me, that had all my women run away, already
This solitary joy, pleasure that warms up my body and makes it sparkly and daring
This Mirror from which those eyes bloody red for the cough watch at me
This mirror to be crossed without breaking it, without scaring my face with broken glasses, no more bloodshed, no more bitter spleen
Mirror that without breaking up already refracts this world in thousands of contemporary visions, all different, all true
This mirror beyond which I already see shining another world that calls me with the chant of the autopoiesis of my cells
Where I see you I see myself, and the inhalation and the exhalation are a single great cosmic action

Rodolfo de Matteis, México Isabel, 2010 11 02