this is my city, all mine.
the houses, transparent, have no doors
and i see myself inside them all.
i walk down the streets, the streets are alive,
they change shape, keep taking me
somewhere else.
i come to a bridge: the other bank doesn’t exist,
there’s nothing beyond the bridge.
i’m looking for the church, i can’t find it —
the church is liquid and it flows.
a few dogs are running towards the still-bleeding,
still-beating, heart of an angel.
it’s neither day nor night —
there’s only the fascinating ray of death, shining.
a huge word is hurled from the skies,
smashes us to pieces
me and my city.

**Gabriel Chifu

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

share
my last cup of light
before we both
grow blank and
white

Lidia Vianu, from My Cup of Light, Anthology of Romanian Poetry

"my heart, all of me, this tree
turning its leaves
one by one in the wind

fluttering rustling with the call
of your closed lips

mere light can move it
a touch of light
can make it sing

the shell of our lives capturing
the tatters of a song
: a torn veil, the unraveled loincloth
of a wandering god

these sharp caressing tatters
tongues
of a song"

Ioana Ieromin, from *The Lens of a Flame

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

Shrouded in this mystical darkness
The tenderness of fog a good company
The winter silence reinventing its language
The inception of tears suspended
How wonderful to love everything as it is
Like trees love the patience of earth

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

I am black with love
neither boy nor nightingale
intact as a flower
I yearn without desire.

I arose amid violets
at the day’s first light,
sang a song forgotten
in the unchanging night.
I said to myself: “Narcissus!”
and a spirit with my face
darkened the grass
with the glow of his curls.

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

words already written somewhere
in the syntax of time
some waiting to be revealed
expelled through themselves
you
waiting to be caught falling back
into the great wide narrow
open
life gets unbearable
if you feel it en detail
the naked devil in the details
yeah yeah yeah
you are
on the quest for a nymph of the lungs
a never envisioned bride with a maybe smile
moaning melissas not monalisas
softnes curves textures and forgetting
like a work of art
blank canvas for your might in delight
you are also looking for that pain
again and again
more view in between your shoulders
she did it and maybe they subtly pay
the paradox of a black hole
our hearts
fancy yourself
you invent the feminine itself
on the edge of self-combustion
the feast of an unknown body
till you turn into yourself again
and into wildflowers
they taste the magnetic field
its scorch its bustling to give and receive
who gives who receives
the earth wonders

there is earth  in our bones

everyhing has its nemesis
dont't worry
I'll bathe you in my tears
still
I'm writing this poem
with/for a smile
in all fairness

the woodpacker came today
its flight filled with bliss
it flies like a deer
******* in
its desire

neon birds above
plastic souls beneath
I have no choice
but to feed my soul
with the secret of trees

I still dream
in the skin of the rain
I write with my eyes
poems of touch

This summer I chased
perseids
again
I tried to forget all about
this age of anxiety,
or about the eyes with no echo

For a moment I let reality crash
like cloud castles
and
neon birds spring above
my tired city

the quest for meaning, the passsage of time, my hunger for you while I keep myself composed, dream days and reparation, tears of intense wonder, never mind the order cause life is a verb. So many different mirrors of the same passion we were handed over in the hallucination of hours, in the mist of nights, in the depths of cups & palms, or of unborn words.

when I have nothing else to tell you
I'll write a poem or two
strange words for a strange world
as strange as the last day of a year
we need new clothes for thoughts
to dance anew the horror, the splendour

the room of tears was waiting for someone suited for grace,
for bridging the gap between our wounds
a dream of togetherness filled with white smoke
the joy winged and grounded
as the immanence of the divine
tears roll with a new hope to find generosity
in the human form

next to you
the knot of my hands suffer
from the ermetism of dawn
they can be no more than they are
I download fresh dreams
into breathing
it's hard to leave the bed
puzzled by perfume & body fluids

you have some sour cherries smile
left on the pillow
be the one
that easy -
like a premeditated sonata

next to you
Love is enough

The air dances around you and silence looks
different now. The Dead Sea is alive again, stillness acquires a
name, the world quivers on a beach
covered with blind seashells. A giant who has come down
from the mountains is posing for a naive painter. Only
eagles feel
planetary alignment, they are the only ones who can
understand man's amazed look when the woman
comes riding a thirsty gryphon. Whatever is left of life
takes refuge in your dreams. The shade of the harbour is
only generous with the spleeping statues. Every day arises
from the blazing calendar, close to the scream of the siren
out at large. The past blooms out of the rock in the sea and
weighs on your heart. The sand hesitates: I am the
beginning.
In the red cells I see only you. Even the blind see the world
again
through the eyes of their own memories. Doing survey
missions
on the maps of the world, the dolphins ask
the purple red colour of the next eon whether night comes
from beyond words

by Ionel Bota, translated by Lidia Vianu

"I am you only when I am myself"*
Paul  Celan

night comes like a wave
with eyes full of stones
and your pain is left outside
no earth in your heart
the air blocks the flight when

then
all you want: this old fight
to push everything against the clarity of darkness
push yourself against everything
keep up with the buds of pain
emerging and disappearing
like an unkept promise

somehow
it seems like
the wind in your gaze knows how to
empty a room full of people
but not how to learn new ways of learning
since the mind is a deaf alley
some truths transit the night
to shed their hearts
like stones in a pond
of unknown tears

and
the night comes again like a wave
with blue screams
this stereo pain
this graffiti of anxiety or lack of syntax
and you cannot fill the gap
between self and self
limb and limb
with the (t)error
of having to
die

still
there's much road ahead
and we'll keep loving you
please let the night
carry you
to this strange silence-heart
to some whirlful gravitational words
your own -

in the blindness of night darkness is a form of light falling into itself
there's so much to be seen but the eye has blue limits
I watch how I am pushed inside
by the centrifugal force of breathing
these women in me, known and unknown
they insist, whisper, shout, smile, dance, cry, they carres the echoes of shadows they want to tell me
what love is in the dreamed language of the blind
I say to them: no, you don't know
what love is
Yet

"If the truth can't be found through love, wherever it might be, it doesn't interest me"*

incessantly still
discontinuous
I will fall without name
I will fall into the restlessness
of your thigh

I will build my home
in the gratitude
of your palms

I dreamed these words
instead of you
one night
like any night

I will let go
of counting the hours
the faces, the tears
white corollas
sudden transformations

I have seagulls in my mornings
I have words of you
and the shores of memories
there’s you crumbling in my place
passion’s hidden crimes

I shake out the night
from my hair
and you are still there
to teach me
why

the social pace manic in its self-absortion, possession facing possession and what if
the world risks collapsing under the weight of its own irony:
a hedonic frame of mind so devoid of the ******* of life
the tyranny of desire is teaching **** to the naked eyes
a culture stops breathing if it can't let go of its desires to find them again
nothing to be destroyed cause everything is dismantling slowly

going right or left it's the same but not in any corner of the world
the leftovers of God, tautologies in a straightjacket,
cause one has meetings all day but no sleep all night
He/She/They colonize you with the scripture of profit
everything has its price on the expence of being enlivened
some don't have water, others too much of an illusion
some don't have peace, others have haute couture
some haven't eaten, others have molecular cuisine
some have the shelter of the sky, others listen to the echo of Big Bang
this logic of contrast is dreaming of the creativity of decay and
what if politics has become a narcosis, a  drunkenness of words,
while the wisdom of trauma is hidden in billboards,
the text says Politics of Happiness or Diserotica

the depressive society fools itself with the financial ****** of disconnected bodies in search of the last noise of the day
the space of the mind  broken by narrow horizons
the flesh and bone might turn into a virtual dimension

yet
the soul of the world flickers, it covers its solar plexus until we meet again as brothers and sisters of the trees
just because you feel good doesn't mean that
the world feels good too

night is falling with high speed on my shoulders
it has a strange elasticity
I ask your skin to give me some memories,
a superconductivity for sonic pulses & tactile waves,
quantic waves are collapsing into a strange synchronicity
the air might survive untrapped but not in my cells
a torid torrent makes your moves catch gravity
I can't be prosaic cause desire might ****
all the singing birds of the blue nights
that were rarely seen losing their tension
between silence and pain this emotional upheaval
that pushes the skin to the frontiers of asphyxiation
we are in Plato's cave right now burning down
the shadows with the magnitude of
you and I inside we are or just this
reciprocal dislocation
there is no I, no you, nothing less than
an infinite field of mutual recognition
a blazing simplicity unspoken

Uncover our heads and reveal our souls
Fever Ray

to the east desire, to the west dying, the south is torrid, the north is quiet. no map can contain a wild abandon. hic sunt leones.
your arms compete with the wind, your eyes scorch me. my fingers are mad with the sweetness of dried flowers.  the roots of days are electric.  only to the night I confess my devotion, this transition from my skin to yours

It happens
more and more rarely
in my ankle
run, run, run
catch the streetcar
named desire
(I cry with you Tennessee)

decanting the hours,
a rush  into nowhere
in honeycombed memory
the dregs of days
set my teeth on edge,
deepen the archway
of naked irises
hurled into midnight

It happens
lighter and lighter
in my left shoulder
pierced with sunset
lost in a sparrow

it is just enough,
too many in depth lessons.
pain always asks for something,
fear has run out of options,
joy wears light dresses
loneliness refuses dinner,
despair sits at a crossroad.

these are just contours of events
obliterating "the vital impetus"
as in a probabilistic game
or in the second law of thermodynamics
blissful equilibrium is just a special retreat
some form of inner spacial homogeneity

this is just a moment
before dinner is served
on a peaceful evening
by a lake
catching the last rays
of the singing sun

the fullness of words in your mouth
my trembling hands
a truth cuts deep
into the ribs of morning
it's the big bang of language
when silence has no shadow

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

no surprise we collide with the future
the great avenger invades our fiber
the old method of collapsing the future
still in the cards. how many cards are there?
the world a stage for mindlessness
ideology more powerful than reality
complexity will have a say in the tale of chaos
misread victimhood to put on a show
the tyranny of dark ideas uncontainable
number pi is missing from the formula but
penguins are resilient to shock therapy, lucky them
we'll hold our breath and see the world anew
no surprise we are inclined to run away from our contribution
to reality, a deeper wound is perhaps
the dark matter of history

Love is the opposite of triumph. The opposite of special. Love is the drop of water grinding the mountain. Love is Mariana trench. I am only the depth of my feelings. They create my  mind.  Love is the impulse towards a world that transposes  me. I know I because you. Love gives me a meaning and purpose for pain. So many meanings, hot and cold, deep and shallow, sweet and sour, immanent and transcendent, concrete and symbolic. The pain of knowing limits. The pain of keeping my eyes open. The pain of bearing myself.  The pain of not really knowing you because of the horizon. The pain of not fully knowing myself. The pain of fullness. The pain of emptiness. The pain of desire. The pain of letting go. The pain of change and decay.  In desire we are at most vulnerable, not triumphant. Giving in is giving up quietness and order. Outside of this body I  cannot know the world. A body without a mind cannot know love.  Love doesn't colonize but persuade.  Love pushes the boundaries. Love is not happiness, nor comfort, but motion and tension. Love denies its own myth. Love creates depth and wonder, dread and tears. Love destroys herself to renew the world.  Who can tell what love actually is. A mystery that searches for language and never finds it. Love is not everything that matters when the world doesn't love herself. Love is not adverstisement, no commodity,  it cannot be enhanced, only discovered. She holds the opposites imagined,  yet unimagined. To love is to learn how to live. How to let live. How to be wrong. How to fail. Love smells of clean sheets and ***** streets.

time bombarded me wiht its silence today, the sky was closer, birds more transparent. maybe because of the intersection of wonder and scream. once I was one with my wounds. I had thoughts without spin today, only the wounds of the world spinning in the distance. the impossible mixture of blood dust shattered bricks, death is so ignorant, so messy. you used to smile when you saw me eating blueberries naked. in the core of trees there is silence, isn't it? in the core-self there is an emptiness full of antiwords, isn't it?

hands filled with summer  and thoughts with horizon today, flowing by themselves. a sudden burst of joy, amusement in the face of ordinary life, trivial yet so creative beyond our control. the mind contemplating the image of  the situation decided it was funny, it was something else: sitting on a chair in the cold on a busy boulevard waiting for meatballs with mashed potatoes to be ready while reading about how different the thinking of people is in the east compared to the west (the geography of thought) while listening to massive attack and my legs dancing on the pavement while thinking about summer in between the lines while looking after women in the street. me - a surreal collage of actions and thoughts haunted by love as quantum superposition. I wonder where does a thought begin, where does it trully end

I listened only to voices of pervasive enduring loneliness today.  that's right, no point in altering it through symbolic transformation, the metaphor has its decency. no wonder i found this place where silence has infinite nuances like a love slipping through your fingers, like a time obliterating the intensity of the systolic wind. I thought about writing a letter of intent to the world just to say No! (after much yes, a no is vital). No, i don't want to understand, i don't wanna know,  don't wanna shed tears, read books about the meaning of violence, dream war, fear devastation. if you zoom in more and more you can catch history repeating its fractals. the more you look the more you might feel the ******* of pain. somebody asked : do you tantra today? No! today let only this particular silence be

Nothing of what she had told me
proved to be true
not even wardrobes with thousands of dresses
not even a ballroom
neither garden with peacocks and harts
nor castle
which I've been looking for for three days
but have not found, her palace with view of the sea
of which I found nothing but the view of the sea
that, nonetheless, filled me with tenderness:
so she didn't lie to me after all
she is a good woman, she loves me

Matei Visniec
translated by Anca Romete

songs are sleeping in my naked shoulders
he said untranslatable words:
I want to confiscate your lips
aerate your dreams,
and all the rest, you know

I’ve tried my skin today
as if a nest of lazy hours
free spaces I found
patches of unhope,
poppies and
the possibility of you.

joy creates perfect moments
sweet fingers
nothing to take in or out
no shadows inside fists -
I just love how the light rides
the storm of things,
horizons are passing through
my words
and

*nothing louder than the heart

it must have been the sun the wind
the elation of the singing birds
that I fell into a sweet slumber
in no time I was dreaming
the storms in our eyes had met &
the stones got deeper

it was not too late for some metaphors
I was trying to sleep
when the air said:
“I will take him from you,
and give him back
randomly
and white butterflies will grow
in your hair”

“he will have himself
that’s what matters”,
I said to myself
while time was left dreamless
and some butterflies
were carrying the sea
to the roots of sleep

"thank you, my heart:
time after time
you pluck me, separate even in sleep,
out of the whole.”*

were I to perform
an autopsy of that morning
no verdict would be self-sufficient:
Love
bursting like a sudden dancefall
in my veins
your voice imparts shivering
to my plugged shadow
and the day goes offline
I offer my skin as a battlefield
for whispers
I wouldn’t compromise with
birds on wire
or diagnose my boundaries
when time is turned into gold dust
among your empty shirts
lodging the imploded silence
and your shaved smile
like a hurricane lamp

the word I hate most is
Love
it says nothing
nothing at all
about you
the hidden dimension
in my flesh
the shape of us
without mercy

I weep, I smile
there are seagulls

You cannot be sad, you cannot be bad, you cannot go far, you cannot subdue the pain

Can I like pink? The color of the flowers, of the irrational happiness of a child, can I like pink?

You can like blue, the color of the bruises from when your unremitting mind hits your body, you can like blue.

Let the little boy run, said the stranger. Let him go and don't fear the danger, the unseen, the unpredictable.
The mother fears, she fears herself without the child. She keeps lying to herself that when the moment will come she will feel free to do it, God will let her now when the moment is right.

The days are from yesterday not long enough to keep this unsettled mind straight. The minutes cannot embrace the impatience and still touch hands. The minutes are now so far apart that they cannot find themselves in hours. The day breaks.

I am playing with the minutes, with the hours, the little boy laughs.
- We have no time, carry on, we have no time, the mother said

The time, teared apart like the petals of a flower ripped by an insecure girl in her boyfriend's love, the time comes together again. The boy has stolen some minutes, so he can play with them later. Hold on to them and laugh whenever you remember your secret, said the stranger.

The day is shorter. Now. But some of us have the time to laugh.

I will hold on to my minutes and when nobody can see me I will wear pink.

*the author wants to remain anonymous

it had to start somewhere
Odysseus never came home
only chaos promised to return
the dome of illusion will be (ful)filled
with stones
the mutual game of deception is over
the pride of the mountains collides
with itself
the rise of irony in history
the decay of fists
awaits dignity to play
one more card today
chaos chooses its roots
beneath the surface
inside millennia
of looking over the sea

godless promises await
mundane
a fresh horizon
of pain

for a moment, so stubborn as a breath
so fragile as the tremble of a leaf
so sudden as the harmony of tears
I feel this space in which je suis toi
feelings and words are one with
the gratitude principle for
not to harm the riverbeds of time
I wrap myself in poems, between the earth and the sky
I need to pay my respects to the wisdom of the air
where there is nothing more to say,
in that space of miracle
time is passing through me like the sadness
of a beautiful woman

the first snow so warm wonder
is whirling in our living hands
seconds can be windows
they can feel a kind of truth
an impossible simultaneity
of tears and laughter,
a peacefulness as deep as the roots.

let me circle around your mystery
give me one more second
to smile back at you

From the deep anxiety of dawn
the grove of trees unveils.
Sad awakenings.
Leaves, sister leaves,
I hear your lament.
Autumns,
moribund sweetness.
O youth,
the hour of growth is barely past.
High skies of youth
impetuous freedom.
And I am already desert.
Caught on this melancholy arc.
But night scatters distances.
Oceanic silences,
astral nests of illusion,
O night.

this pain like an unwritten poem
only the winter knows how much I loved you
how little I am able to say
the air is tall, the night so deep
I walk in the selfishness of the cold
I walk in this landscape where love is an exile,
a forest without shadows, a party without guests
a happiness without an alibi
something that gets destroyed at the first burst of light
but springs again from the unknown depth of skin

I am in the waiting room of a dying love, a nascent love
while Monalisa is sleeping without dreams
in the depth of my days the certainty of tears
only the winter knows how much I loved you

no signs no omens no nothing
just a sudden harmony in the noise of time
I was not even watching the speed of darkness
but making pancakes while not thinking that
when he smiles I'm in big trouble
in fine, this nameless connection this loving
togetherness of everything this God
who keeps imagining the world as if it does not know it
appeared in my fragile form,  fascinans et tremendum
a vision of a fluctuating infinity with so alive the dying
and life just continued breathing, the pancakes were ready
my inbox full of invitations to cure, illumination, mindfulness,
more connection, more healing for trauma, let's become wiser, deeper, more relaxed, more aligned with the soul of the world
so, I agree but in the meantime only the mystery got deeper

the flesh of words heavy since
we no longer speak the same language
yes is no no is maybe maybe is later
later is tomorrow tomorrow is never
one can only run away from pain only
towards more pain
only the words are sad my heart no longer
a wounded totem
my fingertips have always had their dreamy way
in truth love touches you daily with the most prosaic sway

Old courtyards with tubs of laundry:
‘Go to the washerwoman and do your own washing’
I whisper to you, and the wild apricot trees
all turn suddenly white, the sky pales,
the world is ****** in a drenching buzz.
There΄s a smell of bluebags and a sulphurous bubbling.
You΄d hardly believe it — so much steam rises
that only dirt is left in the copper.
The wild apricots petrify into coral.
It΄s so easy — easy in a woman΄s way —
to wash your soul, to rejoice in the spring wind
shaking the scales on its dragon-tail
so that you΄re looking at soap-bubbles
it blows for you between your fingers.
Two children pass by, holding on a string
a balloon transparent as a bubble.
For a moment we are crouched inside it.

Grete Tartler

[Translated into English by Fleur Adcock]

New Europe Writers Bucharest Tales, Contemporary Literature Press, Bucharest, 2014

If the soul were a cherry, you'd squish it gently between your lips with a smile just for flavor. That's just sometimes. You run through my sleep, create a new dimension. There I see you,  taste you, smell you, I lie in wait actually. Or watch over you,  my pure emotion.

let's pretend
we are not yet born
inside zebras
moons
layers
I just love the fragmented world
in your eyes
give me your pride
I'll clean the streets with it
I wonder who would notice
we are going to be born
from the womb of morning
with jasmine in our fingerprints
the world stares back
through glass eyes
ego psychology everywhere
like a plague
like a roller coaster
my butterfly heart
is moving the air
towards silence
I need to tell the difference
between you and you
but my eyes are full
of blue feathers
look, things have drowned
their names
dividing the depths
of living
I slowly phagocytate you
like a wave without direction
just before my eyes -
this rush, excitement, fear, quietness
this you-quality
suddenly turns into I-quality
as the belly of that
second empties itself
into no-more-than-life

there was a time before time or
so it goes that time was full of air and
memory not yet a galaxy of space atoms
the enchanted body had already started dreaming
a time without shape or direction
I was a body without horizon cause my mind
was only a dream in someone else's mind
(-the only route to some truth is through the unknown-
the mind is only an abyss of time in the beginning)

there was a time when only the touch was real,
a space of rapture and dread, of quietness and falling
into the rythms of the air
secretly in the depth of skin, of heart and joints
new sprouts were growing to keep the inside inside
and outside outside
certainty was just the feeling of (in)security inside an endless body
and your time was my time and my time was your time
each second a simetry cause time loved us

now that time creates a new dimension for each direction
I can thank my heart for being in love with the pain of being born  of time

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