oh, how the world really functions
the most unbearable aliveness, pain
so good to have tears to offer to
the god of patience and enduring
I pray for a gentle pain,
a gentle sway of caring
the courage of dawn

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am,
then I can change.*
Carl Rogers


my hands can be so prosaic
uninterrupted in the mechanism of gestures
mindless, blinded, tired
of polishing the edge of the world

your hands and their delicate shiver
are used to behaving
trying to learn how to grasp the meaning,
the contours of the void in daylight
or why haters hate
(was it your fault or theirs?)

you are an unfinished landscape
of breaking points and hopeless moans,
oases of quietness,  turning points and
electrical paths, buds of mystery
I know nothing about

still, there’s something  teasing
written in between
such is coherence:  a paradox
-two interlocking  unwittingly-
irrational at one level
imaginatively reasonable at another
-reality is framed by negotiation with a god of silence-
two singularities conversing,
filling the air with space  
: it is me⁢ is you
Like when you erase me perfectly
with a blink of an eye
tired or cynical
with yourself,
or when I crush you
like a manic avalanche in
midsummer day

-there is some madness in between-

after all
shame and shamelessness
cannot be understood
in binary codes
while humility and pride
are two faces of the same coin

it’s been written  since day one
this matching choreography of turmoil inside
or just the pursued birth pains of self
-switch, twist, push, turn,
run, hide, split,
break, slip, cut
repeat, repeat, repeat –
the vertigo of life
rhyming imaginary possibilities
new gestures,
new proportions of light
and darkness
in the power of my hands
in the clarity of your voice

we approximate the truth of our last breath
grow old in stories within stories within the story
we tell ourselves to survive the crack of dawn

and so it goes:
the hero decrypting sunset
deepens the story
looking for
some freedom
to be

and I cannot look at you
without
the sonorous light
bearing tenderness
within

I set you free
in my blood
without knowing
if you stay
for today

I came home pointlessly
endlessly
that day
the windows didn’t confess
I didn’t recognize anything
no, no more
I nailed myself on walls
-nothing really helped-
I sat on my bedside
facing the voracious truth of flesh
while my dresses were exploding
in the wardrobe
my furious love
erasing sunrise
between me and my skin
an alarming desire
happened that day
to clear the view
the life I’d smuggled
and hid away
the sons and daughters of darkness
were calling each other
in my hips
I put some makeup on my shoes
ready to face the world like this
woman
beast
no need to panic
there’s only this desire
unredeemed
to give away
a heart full of dire

I became one
with the other
another me
while
you were
beautiful
like a free day

don't ask how I am
I might confess with riven words
I am trying out dances for
one thousand and one nights
like a Scheherazade of unforseen
whispers

a protest against emptiness?
the failure of forgetting the beginning of touch?
an unanswered question?
the sky inside the roots of trees?
the desert inside the heart of rain?
the dreams of the heat of the earth inside cold stones?
an uninterrupted dance of absence and semantics?
the memory of photons from the moment of conception?
the steam of bodies in the quiet air?

what if love is this cosmic urgency,
emergence with myriad faces,
a protest against the liveliness of
nothingness?

he used to call me only when it rained
or the light was full of moaning
a smile was drying on his face
like a scammer's top hat
you could cut the mist with a knife in his eyes
he used to touch me like i was a chocolate wrapper
he spoke with chalk between his teeth

sometimes there is no progress between hello and hello

every man has his island,
his hiding places projected out loud
with blood power,
vernacular dreams &
ventriloquist voices.
among other things, madness -
an optical illusion
what you see is what you are
or seeing is believing
insideman and outsidemen
undifferentiated
the room has one view
on patched windows
indesire cutting deserted canyons
for the self-acclaimed King
(indesire wants nothing but to be,
to make room for islands in reality)

“be good, otherwise Haruka will come
to take you away, my child”
(what’s in a name
Haruka is “from far away”)
but children very rarely draw lines
caught in the furious chaotic circles of the world
now that every action has a reaction
reality principle is just a skin
holding the inside out & the outside in.

everyman has his island
of vexed fantasies
look into your eyes from outside in
before you see that fire
or anything else,
see this
-the beautiful war-

what a miracle each morning
to rediscover the symmetry of words
words in flight words in might
worlds of words submitting
to the geometry of dreams

what a miracle each evening
to feel the ripples of certain poems
in the maze of  synapses
a certainty each day I do not count
my naked body is carrying death
like an embryo of silence

what a curse what a delight
to meet myself in flesh and bones
as a road without beginning

a wheat field
love
even death
one cannot speak about
without enormous risks

and yet about freedom
freedom -

save our souls!

Mariana Codrut
translated by Adam J. Sorkin  and Radu Andriescu

my hands protest today
so they become
don’t know how it started
they were filled with air without memory
nowhere to land, no stories attached
to the sleeves
this body is a history of fights,
wandering weeds,
of fists full of laughter

I was once an empty space with time borders
a true self or a void full of ambition
certain patterns disguised in black and white
milk tears


I met my shoulders today
I no longer hide my thoughts in open spaces
or defeather my dreams
my gestures turn into statues
to be seen from afar
I put my spin into the cup of morning
so I could tell today apart from tomorrow
in time’s bone marrow

time has a savage chemistry
it flows in silence in the depth of life
stolen or borrowed, hidden & fluent
and I am this space for time
to learn how to love itself &
the transparency of mystery

Desire of your hands bright
in the penumbra of fire:
they knew of oak-trees, roses,
death. Ancient winter.

The birds searched for seed,
and were suddenly snow;
so, the word.
A little sun, an angelic halo,
and then the mist; and trees,
and we making dawn from the air.

**Salvatore Quasimodo

Surfer Grandson Smoker
Manager Traveler Father
Daughter Cook Teacher
Mother Reader Lover
Trainer Son Painter
Volunteer Exhibitionist
Santa Claus
member of a fishermen club
tomorrow
or you name it
if you still have air

we left ourselves outside
alone with these explosive days
blind witnesses
have buried their faces
into the desert of time
the concentration of pain
remains a universal constant
the world is a helpless arena
of master plan illusions
what shall I become
or what shall be consumed of me?

and these rupture faults
body-dynamite against ego-dynamite
culture crushing nature versus
nature crushing culture
the soul famine
in the book
of unknown faces

we were all just enlivened cells once

while we feast in our blood
the discreet continuities
remain hidden
identity encapsulated
in the wave length
of supernovas egos

poetry is left with this
apparent nonsense
camomile turns into laughter
and the pride of butterflies
deserves better

this rhythm consumes us
faster than the speed of dreams
the speed of thought
the speed of forgetting
how our mothers
were never healed

to be or not to be simple
that’s a question

she is wearing some chemistry
an old dress for a bluestocking
she turns her face towards a green sea
new rhymes for blazing verbs lurk
in the definition of imprecision but
everything is falling into place
cell to cell conversations afloat
shards of mystery smooth
rounding out the caves of night
mirror wars meanders
mitochondrial Eve confused
into this new creature
saturated with radiance

questions not asked
but answeared
how you love her
do your hands chase
her tango shoulders
is there music inside
the shade of water
waste inside nails
naivete in knees imprisoned
vibration self-asserting

a devious sweeping world
of unthinkable gestures
your hands a seismograph  
for the cataclism of shiver
no need to search for
her selfless sense
as you ravening negotiate
the fossilized song of you
the depth of this tympanum
this membrane
time itself this creature
zoon erotikon
levellling up resurecting
ravaging enchanting

all the rites of passage
for the overwhelm of flavor
she breathes in prehistoric gills
nirvana dance inside DNA
you redefine your sharpness,
delicacy tears & tearing
she dissapears in a snare drum
sanity evaporates as mist
over arched forests
in the pulse of no air
in between skin and akin
in the bewilderment of bodies
searching for their lyric
manna for beautiful beasts
over the sargasso sea

she wails genuine
metanoia, love's dianoia
no disambiguation

suddenly everything has forgotten its rythm
the sky was shouting at the mountains
the wind was shouting at the trees
the sea at a naughty kite
some words were looking for their delta
and their hearts of stone
my sleep was taken away by migrant birds.
it must have been then
when I started to love you
like madness loves its forgetting

Its baroque eyelashes still obscured
By the vapid, nocturnal turmoil,
My city rises from sleep in the morning,
To the acrid smell of taverns
Opened too early,
Where garrulous, ***** drunks
Resume their heated quarrels.

My city awakens at dawn,
In the suave perfume of flowers clouded by dust;
Those tender, resigned cupolas, waiting
For the midday summer sun, to ooze over them.

Bent backs and furrowed foreheads,
Large crowds trotting on the sidewalks,
Greet each other absent-minded, on the fly,
Hurrying on, forgetting their pitiable heritage, their history,
When, thirsty for blood, their ancestors,
Greedily slaughtered each other,
―In the name of mother country and of different Gods―,
Under the shadows of rival cathedrals.

It took me a long time to be able to discern
The time corroded voice of my city,
But today I understand its madness and its error;
I cross it lovingly, with a lithe step,
And I am saddened by the sight of lifeless, white kittens,
Lying on the pavement, snuffed out by the spirits of the night,
Red poppies blossoming from their muzzles,
In the morning light.

Flavia Cosma from * Bucharest Tales

the weight of tears leaves no traces. apparently. pain has no axis of symmetry, but petrifying meanings. everybody must be afraid. there is no point. there is no point in the scream of windows, in the continuity of doors.
in a turbulent ray of light. this destructive force, the orphan desire of a child. its autistic strife. pain, the silent witness of unlived lives. streets keep their rhythm and pretend all is forgiven. rarely is. there are more pains than people. hear the steps in the geometry of desire.  reinvented desire to love. to let live.

every full stop is an abyss of breath.

I am a suggestion
between workings of brain, the solid ridge
of spine ― a curvature
kin to *******, hip, *****.

Almost touchable,
I tender flesh, still, in old acquaintances
who might have been
something more.

To a subtle fingertip
my nap is velvet ― in some strangers
I am a lily’s stem
geisha-cool.

I glow under moons
beneath the wedge-dark, am back door to eyes ―
those hogs of the bone-glint,
of the brink of sharing.

Eased aside, locks
reveal me: curtain raised on my milky
opening night ― or slightly bowed,
offered to the axe.

Mario Petrucci from *love sends itself flowers

Distance is the cog wheel
on the haunted axle of my hearing,
grinding fine the deadened mind
of that unborn god
waiting to be caught
by the earth's blue speed,
and carrying in a handled urn
the plucked heart - ours,
it's beating, it's heard, it's beating, it's heard,
a sphere in wild growth -
the roads are wet with tears,
memory frail and elastic,
a sling for stones, a gondola
drowned in childlike Venices,
a tooth yanked from the cells with a string -
down the empty socket of Vesuvius. And you exist.

*Nichita Stanescu

somehow
you accelerate me
to the heat
of ripe apples,
to a brand new smile,
to the pressure of an ocean
in my veins,
to this raw primordial dance
-when you run I follow
when I stay you pray-
to the purity of a winter’s day
naked of illusion

somehow I let you in
ravished by white pigeons
drawing ineffable circles
in the depth of a sky

there is light in this silence:
you accelerate me
beyond myself
and I could die
like a woman

the streets are full of hours
the hours filled with a labyrinth song
our faces risk a strange engulfing
we are so benevolent with lying to ourselves
my love has a dervish spin,
my mind is on a nightwatch
down the rabbit hole
so loud the world its disparate pulses,
unbearable conundrums

we should learn more from tears
what if my love is the worm
inside the apple
what if your love is oblivious
like an empty womb

all I have is this feeling
like a spine. of course
certainty is not in fact possible
especially on untouched
lips

A sound is lying between my sight and my hearing,
mornings strung astray,
noisy, lonely streets, indescribable,
only posters ― whole or torn
of some extraordinary concerts, long forgotten ―
in which lustre of the world? ―
autumn has come over the botanical garden,
her trellises have forgotten to support any leaves,
she is singing herself to me in my eyes
in one poem.
Diligent, my heart surrenders to an elegy
like that thought descending from Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gellu Dorian, from *It might take me years

life needs to destroy
itself
a little
to become
Real
like the center
of our atoms
mixing
crushing
falling
into each other
to the depth
of mystery

poetry
a blue snake
stretches from one to the other
it breaks the shop window
it coils insiduously
around those driven
from the street into the house

it binds hands and learns to cry
the utterance at the service of power
don't throw the mantle of clouds
off my shoulders
remember
in the beginning was the word
in the last night
distorted

eventually
there remains poetry insinuated
like a blue snake
into the cup full of tears

Carmen Firan
*translated by Andrei Bantas

obscure the radiography of the sky
night clouds and vertigoes in my feet
the waters of pain just mirrors for enlivened souls
this spark is roaming adrift without the north star
what is love what is pain
these charming games this chasing of a mirage something deeper
beauty is the warmest colour
you are beautiful you don't know it
day after night night after day
we repeat each other's name devoid of time
of mind of touching hands and of and of
this skin that contains us when we awake in a dream
betwen regression and progression **** meanings
I hold on to breathing you deeply wildly
as deep as an uninvited sea at midnight

A blossoming intensity
Invisibilium
One day I’ve felt: to be who you are

the urgency of feeling alive
the quietness of the waving at the end of the road
That’s how it is: I am who I am
An intense inexplicable tautology
or  a certain taste in my mouth,
a lazy hand on the morning pillow.
the salt of the earth in my tears, so many, uncountable
young staring in the mirror- to have someone to watch my scorching sorrow
the conundrum of why to keep dreaming

iridescence of silence in my gaze,  unpredictable tones

To be, to keep it simple.
the elements and their transmutation cannot explain it:
each and every antientropic pulsation
the eyes of fire see through me
I am unrecognizable inside out
Cause I am you and you and him.

I weep, I smile
there are seagulls

out of the blue
my hands turn into themselves
and so does the dust of leaves feeding
the soil of a mysterious skin
we are passengers through blissful omens
cruel visions of a ravished anti-time
so treat me like fire

Before me, nothing is what
it used to be; all seams getting ready to be;
a child with a hoop runs by, as in De Chirico's paintings
- in the distance the sky's still red, but in the poem it's gray.
I feel the words growing inside my fingers
and for the first time not for my benefit.
In the quiet of evening
the town seems a game with toy bricks
in which matches are struck and flare brightly - music cavorts at
                                                                                                       the windows -
in the distance the sky's gray, but in the poem is red.

Gellu Dorian, from City of Dreams and Whispers
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Doina Iordachescu

this pain in the middle
spinning, dividing, spinning
there are two points of him

he howls in my dreams
with cold hands in transcendental spaces
like a long absence in an imaginary present

his eyes - two black boxes
recording all the right data
everything more real than necessary
performing the body with toast sensations

he pauses naturally in the dark room
the man with the moon
swallowed
in his heart

your trainers full of dirt
next to a Christmas decoration,
the woodpacker self-absorbed on a branch,
a pigeon floating on a current of mystery
I emptied of an I in the tenderness
of this fleeting moment

We came here to fly
in the height of our breath
don’t let the plight block the sun
I listened to my hands till silence came
staccato in my words
your flight is my sea of stories

I settle not into sight
tomorrow is a palimpsest
with its wise owls, the birds of fear
while sensuality is pouring down the windows
like rain in December
and there is something breathing,
a self-absorbed flower of flesh
and the tenderness of someone
to carry the “winelight”
for the flamingo me

your lips taste like morning.
I am redrawing  the horizon inside
for you to bring your pulse
in flight in case you might

What if love was invented by mothers?
I have to ask

I am sitting everywhere like a stone
struck by lightning
my nerves spinning their electricity
in new revolves
this vibration is transformation

of of of of
something into anything else
syntax into the golden ratio
fingerprints into enlightened wax
lungs into vertical love
craving into silence
desire into root
immanence into
transcendence and
the other way round
projection into
introspection
nihilism into redeeemed
despair
music into a theorem
of sunrise
hatred into pain
pain into
violet mourning
bread into singing
oxes' thirst into the art
of the earth
secrets into tangible
translucent pictures
rivers into the dreams
of the sky

I into the other I
in you and him
and them
in the mycellium
of syntaxes, synapses
enchanted
ephiteliums
into a choir of selves
in love's eyes

time creeps between waves and broken seashells
the trance of a hunter, the soul of a shipwreck, the indifference of naked bodies in the sun possess my heart
the force of the sea rises inside the eyelids
everywhere you look a cinematic aloneness
the wisdom of sand in a fish' dream
now and then two embraced shadows,
the ardour of water consuming the beach

awoken by words
so many words to write
shout, cry, turn into
something beautiful
the storehouse of whispers full
I lend my hands to the wind
I rehearse conversations that only
the moon can have
some words are wild
as the grass or
the horses that quietly
smell the traces of birds
through the air
other words weary
for the lament of time
there is no remedy

words,
crazy worlds
in which
we were

it happened in an instant
like an eternity of wonder crushed by a wink
night is a prophet, I often think, for better or worse
with its truth of immensity, its molecules of light  and
dreams' oscillation. there are nights and nights
when I feel the ripples of spacetime moving with the speed of desire

some poems are unreadable since I taste the power of words
biology dreams of giving herself to waterfalls in an embrace
chemistry can be caught dreaming to break the symmetry
of its isomorphic structures
physics refuses to disentangle the fields, the particles from their resonant selves
a tender savage disposition is collapsing time, is playing hide and seek
an Irish band sing for someone

my knees feel the earth, the dreams of tundra
I am still myself when my mind is shattered
there is love, there is death in the centre of something
indescribable

familiar this bubble of emptiness
comfortable as a womb
pain plays hide and seek
my hands are free to write
this hybrid creature that is me
fantasy and reality share a reciprocity
I am metabolized by my dreams and so I become
the aperture of the heart open as ever
to catch the murmuration of silence
of longing and forgetting
circles inside echoes inside circles

we didn't invent love
love invented us

tears are
weight
taste
colour
music
they are in love with
the gravitational attraction
I tried their speed today

tears are full of
heartbeat
screams
interrupted gestures
helplessness
the god of sweating
the dance of life
the unknown of the sublime

my tears are full of
the broken world
in their eyes
the sea of time spinning
its fountain of hope and despair

these tears are
full of me, of you
of us & them
again and again
full of  "creative ambiguity"
true wholeheartedness

this manic song
of my feet with your feet
the quest for our names
our bodies without fence
my fingerprints like unburnt stories
on your skin
I have no alibi
you invented my desire

the whale-song of
my shoulder with your shoulder
I'm falling apart in your palms:
I invented your desire
and you have no excuse -
you hold down the night
for the next you, the new me
the unforeseen smile
at the end of the day

you and you and you live
inside me like unknown songs
you sometimes throw me words that
make me forget I am language too
I dream the dregs of mystery like an inocent deer/apple/bird:
we are beyond categories we are elementary natural
we vibrate the nets of wonder with our finite fingers

the world is self-referential in my poems, so
when the sky is full of milk it becomes silence
when the sky is full of continents it loves its silence
you must reinvent the cycle of reciprocity if you want to feel the earth in between your dreams
your thoughts have paths of fire, mine are water slides
you sleep I dream you run I pause you sometimes sigh and I dance
oh, I allow only the mystery to preach for you in me not to forget
all words

finding our way back again. to what? this is a steep question. I am drawing this map of words, today we should speak of what is, the roots of words, this silence their soil, these words vehicle for the inexpressible.  Gaza strip, day 52, Jordan foreign ministery says Israel is busy with genocide. what else is trully new, for sure not pain, a fundamental law unrecognized by physics. the paradox of time that goes deeper into words when we feel them. the center cannot support itself exposed in cruel eyes. fall and rise of a time we lived in sometime like in a house with no windows. reality is and is not in the same spacetime simply unreachable, untraceable, incomprehensible. someone speaks in a low voice, another speaks more with the eyebrows. the door opens to the dance of life, and who is riding the dance. brave minds and collapsed bodies, I didn't want to be here today, she says. one feels disgusted by the expulsion from eden. I am looking for the secret garden where the mind of the body grows, but I don't know it. I am looking for a theory of absence. this is a story about the impossibility of story.  we have to listen and forget so that life goes on

we are here because of the trees
what about the climate of our mind?
too many versions of alternative realities
and we've killed the spirit of oceans
in our souls
our bones don't grow roots anymore

we exist because of the flowers
and we are dying in the most stylish way
wearing Dior mascara, high heels, oh,
the latest Zara shirt

we are here because of the bees
it's not to late to ask ourselves
what is the climate of our hearts?

death can be so
just so asymptotic with our obsessions
so asymbolic on golden shoulders
and climate just another
hollow word
sent to Mars

Poems like bread, you say
rough and sweet
like the bread for those
who plough and harvest

bread like home
bread like far from home
the bread of communion
of survival

bread to feed silence and darkness
feed the beast’s hunger for beauty
and blood

wisps from Ariadne’s ball of red fleece
poems
across the void

their promise
their echoes that keep us walking
in the dark

Ioana Ieronim from *Ariadne's veil

in the middle of seeing islands of fog
the roots disconnected fom the branches of thought
was it like this: you do not deserve to be
the vitality of forms, do not exist
we were told while breathing
do not exist in your bodies do not exist in your minds some dreams are just silly
dumb as that daylight
throats are full of words of unshed thinking
of noise so loud that the world might have imploded
dark circles of impossible pain contain our ribs
why are you here you were told, we don't want you
we  can not witness the joy of life with our teeth full of something we don't understand
our eyes are holding the light captive
like a knife full of strife
why are we here why
the fog obscures the echo
why are we here why

In my native land where some have bread
but others hold the knife, and a rustless
chain of interest links the one to the other,
in my resplendent and sad country,
I'm an aged raven, wingless,
an inconsequential pariah with a white star of distinction on his
                                                                                                                       forehead,
a bottomless vessel into which all would ***** -
all - their bile and powerlessness, their hatred.
And since in my land
I fear nothing,
and since in my land nothing
can happen to me except my hopeless
love of Mary,
I suddenly feel overwhelmed with unfamiliar joy,
by unbounded happiness in my heart's
thought, by limitless ecstasy
like death in gold and blood. Like radiance of flesh.
So, in my native country of murdered thoughts,
of guilty silence, humble elation within,
I admit responsibility and affix my signature hereunto -
Liviu Antonesei.

Liviu Antonesei, from City of Dreams and Whispers
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim

this endless procession of luminous shapes of darknes,
of blindind lights full of dark stories passing through
everything my mind can envision
thoughts slowly growing like trees with imaginary roots
to dygest to recycle the unbearably bearable
a true psychic cosmology cause life creates
by destroying, destroys by creating
I need to examine my dreams, not the alphabet of dreaming
-symbolic transformation, not equation-
the terror to be so alive in an unresponsive world
it is pain that turns my thoughts into wax figures
I want to deny that words have a heart of stone cause they might deny their nature
in the beginning was the word, or the emotional field, the primeval soup of vibrations
you are not what you know, you are not what you perceive, you are the one to be felt and let go of
we are all that is unbearably bearable

I love you
when the day exhausts its grace
when you wear my pious silence
in you nails

I refuse the touch of morning
just to breath your sleep in

you’re my axis mundi on a Wednesday
yeah,  it’s so natural and crazy
I shudder with this feeling
I search for my roots, I find you dreaming

I love you  
when you stir the ***** blues-smitten
the jazz, the blood
I’m your prophecy, you’re my bane
my lips won’t refuse the spell:
love you whenever.
I have died
again.

sleepless forests
in my dreams
embracing the shape of you
sung by the pine trees

When
night fades
a little before the springtime
and of a rarity
someone passes

a dark colour
of weeping
thickens over Paris

on a poem
of a bridge
I contemplate
the boundless silence
of a slender
girl

our
ills
flow together

and how, borne away,
she remains

I can hear violins, violins
Give me all of that ultraviolence*
Lana Del Rey

only you can explode gentle supernovas
in my hands
when the space is forever expanding
between us
until the night comes out of its womb
pure