a pain that eviscerates me
first comes love, then comes pain
luckily I learned from the birds to swim
love goes with such precision where it needs to arrive
to every wound left alone to die

here it is, the paradise circus
a kind of massive attack
a kind of antimusic
mindlessness, a great improviser
let's make nonsense beautiful
let's write the chronicle of cruelty
oh, the boredom of bling,
we've seen it before, the corruption of words
besieging the nakedness of light
the illusionist in chief and his linear obsessions
will decompose our composure
klingonians are here, what if
the future is tyrannically dreaming
in digits a parody
of reality

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

I pass by cafés and shops
with eyes as wide as narrow boulevards
I feel it, certain ideas consume the oxygen of mind
I pass by myself, lose track of routes or hyperbolic sensations
poetry drips down from this quiet space where
splendid contradictions resist the temptation
to capitalize on exclusion, where fullness and emptiness
talk to one another as mimes do
for a change, wide boulevards pass through my narrow eyes
imagination plays its alchemy on my mind like a sugar spike
I rest on an origami isle - your smile

You pass through light searching for me.
From the way you don't see me
not even when I take the shape of a cry,
I understand that your supreme triumph will be death.
Despair is an empty space
in which no one meets no one.
Despair is an autumn in which
the highest peaks are strangling each other.
Where can you be?
It's as though my days have slipped away
in a shrill season
of no one,
and no one can recall
what light flashed across their faces.

Carmelia Leonte from *City of Dreams and Whispers

we use or misuse each other
we don't ask as often as needed
the eye of the needle
the sky is closer
storms are wiser
waters sleep in the seeds of wind
everything so holy entangled
sweet deceit in lustry illusions
glamour for amour
cover up for unforseen
the unbearable unknown
everything so wise
like the eagerness of colts

So it goes, said Vonnegut

casually I am your anything
a strange causality a presence
this cocoon of desire
of course, urgent lover
next day another mirror
friend in the afternoon
a simple woman in the morning
slippery oblivion by midnight
unearthed hieroglyph
all night wide
foe and moan &
foam of laughter
SOS in a bottle
but not of wine
******* from time to time
not a dime piece, but she is
a penny for your thoughts it is
you can make and you can take
the cinema on/of my skin
let's speak with our ribs
for the sake of mimes
I could be your slave, but wait
when bus sirens fade away

incandescence is my name,
the patience of graves
of grapes

"The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy — an energy at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than another man’s, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity."

something must have happened
many times on my lips
further away into the liquid world
before the world
and on my knees full of devotion
I'm laughing a lot more nowadays
no longer baffled at the sun's *****
"seduction is the mother of wisdom" -
said the poetess
combing her hair with precise movements -
I drag my amniotic desires on to every door
I see
I'm recklessly alluding to my lover
with thick eyebrows
or to how to turn the light off
I am no longer covered with skin
when the lightest of waters dreams
between the yearning and the scream

I'll watch the birds wane tonight
tomorrow perhaps

I contemplate the horizon as a broken puzzle
yet aflame the sessions of thought
Eros is singing to the raging gods
the seeds of future mixed with the atoms of the past
the layers of history unreadable
we play games with the invisible
in between thoughts transparent vibrant walls
in between you and you, some fragments
in between myself and I, fault lines and vital figments
the mirror gaze an oxymoron in the beginning
a mistery the spin of fragments
that's all I can say for now since
the soul of language is hidden inside
untraceable rhythms of silence
true passion is shattering the body of time
it brokens the one into many, it fuses the many into one
in the seed we are a cosmic creature breathes
perhaps the void of the sky is dreaming its memories
or a sweet lullaby

a liquid heart is hard to bear
even if I shout no body hears
how many we are
lost in the structure of tears
this pain that I let in like a love decree
a wave like a fist dressed in impolite velvet
how to survive hating unresolved
the other side of everything is pain
in such a world of beauty and dread
absence and seduction rampant songs
and acid hands

a cycle revolving evolving
it disappears from here if you push it out there
I am talking about pain like a broken doll
a cruel fate left me without eyes so that I can see
only what I  feel
pain in all aggregation states, a true substance

a radiant promise in a vacant smile
I am trapped inside the circle
of the moon perhaps
at the hour when a great nothingness greets you
a neon sky a synthetic civilization
full of fascination as any other
we begin to live again
with some honesty, some regret for the divinity
of a blue death that possesses our hearts

in the mood for rhyme
hands smell of thyme
and thought is a mime
I'm searching for a chime
this love is playtime

time is circling its core like a villain
streets are running under my feet
is that the inflamed sky

call me your fortune teller, disaster, whatever
I condemn you to the bestiary of my clarity
you'd better make up  another camouflage or transparency,
a savage new name for devilry each day

you smile an unfiltered smile,
like a Sisyphus of tease and play

the light is so tenderly intense  after the storm,
it fills the dark shapes in between my thoughts &
I feel like playing the squiggle game with your name:
one day you might be Isidor who feels the skin of the air
some days you are Yuriy the great with skyscrapper dreams
what about Luis with soft hands tomorrow?
or Tiago, the tamer of the beast of thought?
I have to mention Maksim too, for maximum of delight in your sight
oh, Alfeu for the images of the unseen passing through you quietly in your sleep, like cosmic rays
Liberio I'll call you for the day of the freedom of speech,
once you've discovered the layers of nothingness
or Noah, the new born into a fresh laughter

“while resembling you
looking at it with my heart
I’m discomforted
by the weight of tear-like dew
on wild carnation flowers”

“beyond measuring
the thousand fathoms depth
may the sea weeds
keep growing to be so deep
I’ll be merely a caretaker”

“you only dip
into shallow waters
in my morass
my body is totally submerged
in the ways of burning love”

“clouded
by affairs of the heart
I am lost
hello! Why doesn’t someone
ask how I am?”

Murasaki Shikibu

lost in a sky
of strange and far places
a hint of a house
and treetops in the mist
guide my way to you

she gazes
into the same skies
as you do
may your thoughts also
come to be one of accord

if you answered
the tapping of every
water bird
even a wandering
moon could enter

if the haze had not
come out to go in between
the moon and flowers
otherwise even the birds nests
might have burst into blossom

boat upon high seas
if you are drifting without
a harbor or course
give me a call and I'll row
out to teach you about ports

not even knowing
the meaning which the color
of lavender has
but watching it carefully
this one's heart is deeply touched

Murasaki Shikibu, *A String of Flowers, Untied...

the impossible depth of solitude
with its amber tone
vitality  and some ambiguous  words
like the scent of a blooming field
in forgotten summers
and my wish to be his toy
in the machinery of dreams
he had canons of magic in his fingers
and a slippery mind
that went from one orbit to another
till the light was decoloured
devoured
into the music of
an agonizing time
or prayer

Language thus becomes an instrument of "spirituality", that is to say, of the direct transmutation of desires and emotions into presences and powers that become "realities" in themselves, without the intervention of physically adequate means of action.

Paul Valery, from "I would sometimes say to Mallarme..."

in the laboratory of life unseen words are sprouting
they decenter time or they hit themselves against
the windows like birds do
they circle the emotional memory of our aorta
they smell of dust mixed with blood
they search for that place in your gaze where
is never too hot

"Poetry is not a luxury... Through poetry we give name to those ideas which are until the poem nameless and formless."

by Audre Lorde

your eyes incite such an echo on my lips
it reverberates every time I hear the trees, it engulfs my hands
I  feel how your gaze caresses my hair
sometimes only poems keep me whole
the hidden parts play hide and seek with daylight
all the me that cannot be create holes between words
I wait for time to confess its indifference
the solitude of skin is inborn but
poetry is this incessant birth of an imaginary me

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

Octavio Paz, from Signs in Rotation

words are embryos of some thoughts,
it must be said they were arbitrary were they were born
their calling as deep as the alphabet of time
in a preformed space it was already there
the force that keeps a me apart from we
my mother fed me with words day and night
in a time when the word Babel was so tall

is poetry a shortcut or a detour into the unthinkable?
a compromise with the death of language
we anesthetize the dawn getting rid of memory
we ventilate emotions through our muscles
but the Carnot cycle keeps spinning
an emotional engine escaping precision,  not questions
unsaturated images in our stories, an unruly body
suffused with misery and dreaming
I will write an endless poem till darkness exhausts itself  
as a diver who runs out of oxigen

when sand storms are triggered in my hands
black cloths cover the mirrors
I have died an unfelt death

when the body speaks
words don't listen they simply go crazy
like the oceans of a foreign planet
why is that you may ask
why is a smile full of ranced linen
why is a mouth used to nibble the cuffs of bitter hours
why is a heart so full of lightning energy

what can a body do with the pain she was given
what can a mind do with the multiplicity of truth

poetry is a visitor from another space
where a blue scarf is waving in the wind
where everything exists all at once

again and again
I believe in it
I know it exists
feeding on infinity

if you were a poem
darkness would get deeper and deeper in you
till it turned into white or alkaline nostalgia
it is something only yours, so much laughter
as if life itself was an obsession with a strange pulse

I believe in it
I feel it exists
feeding on flesh and bones
on the cycle of wonder

What is Poetry? Who knows?
Not the rose, but the scent of a rose;
Not  a sky, but the light in the sky;
Not the fly, but the gleam of the fly;
Not the sea, but the sound of the sea;
Not myself, but what makes me
See, hear, and feel something that prose
Cannot: and what it is, who knows?

by Eleanor Farjeon

Poetry is the weeping eye
it is the weeping shoulder
the weeping eye of the shoulder
it is the weeping hand
the weeping eye of the hand
it is the weeping soul
the weeping eye of the heel.
Oh, you friends,
poetry is not a tear
it is the weeping itself
the weeping of an uninvented eye
the tear of the eye
of the one who must be beautiful
of the one who must be happy.

by Nichita Stanescu, translated by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru

There is no space wider than that of grief
there is no universe like that which bleeds.

from Extravagaria

I have no choice but to breath this air
or do I? I can speak and I can write
something about anything,
I can witness the hows the whys
pro and cons of the daily agenda
freedom has a local flavour
idealogy a bitter taste

discrete pockets of life disjointed
I meet them on the streets
the social body this rags when
policemen rebel against the truth
doctors against health
teachers against compassion
politicians against duty
a slaughter house the mind in action

we look the other way with a laugh
not to see the epidemic of helplessness
political physiology gone awry
oppression cemented in our deeper minds
we carry it in our shoulders like
a gun machine waiting to happen
the collective focus a borderline land
the air itself suffocated by the
politics creating despair so that
minds have no more sceneries
to dream the world into existence
or do they?

when I am silent I become the absence of silence
I'm thinkig your body, I'm sensing your mind
my hands rehearse the circle theory,
the openings of the horizon hiding in plain sight
time plus time is a world without hyperbole,
but the courage of enchantment
even the fields dream about the all in one
cause it's poppies time and panta rhei

The poet cannot talk about what he already knows.
Northrop Frye

light splits the world in seen and unseen
night accelerates some fascination
I contemplate the poverty of words
who is doing the autopsy of freedom or something,
a requiem for a country that torments its name
streets don't smell of winter but of loneliness and oblivion, exhaustion and rage
some have already forgotten the meaning of blood
we like sweating not weeping, cursing not dreaming, finding the stain not the brain of fog
we practice forgetting like the snake charmers

dreams look like second hand stores, like the promise of the apocalypse,  a local version of Munch's scream, like an uninvented wheel or the beginning of the world.
an old lady sells fir wreaths in disbelief
too many drugstores ignore the untethered soul,  
a place of redemption they are, unwittingly

here there are poets, there are beasts, gentle souls and blind alleys,
indifferent smiles and lazy hands
and who can hear/bear the echo of that song... better dead than communists, comrades
province hates the center, the center forgets its north,
the all good sequestred against the all bad, no dialectics in doublespeak
truth to be told, there is  no consent for telling the truth
ersatz emotions exchanged casually, Hell is other people. always.  some play Russian roulette with reality, we are the heirs of a history disorder
if my dreams are full of birds, waters, lonesome deposits of the flow of time, I have to wonder
is history a desire machine searching for some mythical proportions

this country or a ****** mother with indifferent hands
here citizens have no faces, but interrupted gestures, fractured thoughts without containment
I fear those who cannot cry
without the meaning of blood history has no meaning or maybe it does, look at the speed of some digital thoughts,  the attack of ready made ideas. ideology becomes eulogy

no wonder I don't know how to end this poem
we need new words that contain their power
what is freedom? who knows, who cares.
oh, an old adagio, a gangrene of our undiscovered minds

Perhaps time is a machine gun when it stops. These words capsules for the unbearable. I would go away from the smitten crowd and talk to the sea. I pray to her: at least she examines its hallucinations of power.  To restore the heraclitean movement of our tragic faults. Try to create life with dead words from a dead sea of splendour, but the beauty of words is always unexpected.
Inflation accelerates in this incubator of power, its obscurity a destiny.
Do we still understand the meaning of light when women get pregnant with salty wounds, with poems that decompose as soon as they are born. I'll keep wondering if the echo of the sea grows in circles while this deluge of deception is a tomb for our thoughts without echo. Trauma is ahead of the game shaping falsified days for deranged deeds. Perhaps a sea of laughter is restored somewhere  like a pool of light fleeting on somebody's lips.
How can we see and it's in front of us: cruelty writes history.
Time violates its own decay when the world gets to be somebody's prey.

death comes with a sway
in the cold of the night
in their beds turned to hell
shed a tear stay to pray
for the dormant force
not to take more away
so easy to forget
how fragile we are

we are playing with God's elements
the uncertainty principle unseizable
all we have are these disparaged letters
touched by the pigment of time
we repeatedly ignore the human DNA,
its receptivity, fragility and mistery
the horizon of safety questioned by bombs
whirpools of dread are stocked in our shoulders
the chain reaction of violence precise like the atomic time
it works faster than the splitting of atoms to
iradiate the mind

No one needs to answer to eternity
not beings – lovers or birds
nor things
nor even the elements linked in dark conspiracy
No need to have stopped just there
set down time’s suitcase
(someone once wrote: shaking the dust from his shoes)
to stretch toward what in you always escapes you
but find shelter in blood
salvation will not come from anywhere
but the counted passage of hours
beings and things would pass by like green water between
           riverbanks

lush with grass
or clouds at the edge of a storm
salvation will not come from elsewhere
at the cathedral’s base so many shadows flutter
mortals waiting or wandering
they were the ones you followed down narrow lanes
transfixed by desire
they were carrying time’s suitcase
what law impelled them forward and circling
if not the endless cycle of the seasons?
Finally they broke the spell
perhaps they’ll lead their gangs again between the Rhine and the
    Moselle
saviours of sacks and string
swallows swirled with hawks at the storm’s edge
they sketched your fate

by Emmanuel Moses, from  Preludes and Fugues, translated by Marilyn Hacker

"You dream of a better day, alone with the moon" (Blixa&Teho)

I want to turn my body into protest, they are killed twice:
by hunger and  by bullets in the middle of  hunger
hatred is an invasive species, mistletoe  in reversed veins
I can see how thoughts fracture in the middle of sentence,  unrecognizable streets pose symmetrical questions
how can this be or is this all that can be
how much patience the pain has
death is like Schrodinger's cat,
it can be simultaneously here and there
a surreal space exists where time can't be saved
an invisible hand recycles genesis, invokes innocent beasts
time doesn't pass through all the layers of pain
some are turned into a certain sky, others into frozen movement, another into the fertile soil for growing wings  with which one cannot fly because the wind has not yet been invented

I'm here. These texts these sacred carnivorous words
this verbal membrane
(read carefully I summon you read twice!) :
curtain meninx electroshock therapy
blanket straitjacket
bed-sheet ***** placenta

I praise this osmotic verbal membrane
I give you I get undressed I curse myself
Ah! my repressed whorish pathos:
I give you lucidly
Any poetic art is written in ink
(I calmly assure  in public)
in fact
in these mortal neurons

Darkness and dust

These texts these words I've picked from books and streets
Only this ultimate membrane
(precious like the *****
fragile like soap bubbles)
still separates me
from the psychic space where you've pushed me
                                             as towards the springs of the Nile
from the psychic place whence  I try - cautiously
painfully - to pull out:
my hands my paws my brain my heart
What is beyond? darkness and dust
What is left? a poetic art this darkness this dust
these cracking neurons

Marta Petreu
*translated by Liviu Bleoca

the wind reads me well
I'm a nomad of time
a pulse like a prophecy
whispers myself to me

By the sea, by the dreary, darkening sea,
Stands a youthful man,
His heart all sorrowing, his head all doubting,
And with gloomy lips he questions the billows:
[...]
The billows are murmuring their murmur unceasing,
Wild blows the wind, the dark clouds are fleeting.
The stars are still gleaming, so calmly and cold,
And a fool waits for an answer.

Heinrich Heine, Questioning from the North Sea cycle

witness to this quiet life
certain thoughts understand the soul of birds
there are different orders of truth
order is just the unseen dream of messiness, a flower of chaos
systole and diastole of breathing in strange beings
contradiction intrinsic in all things
I need the anti-me for rhythmic change
perhaps the destiny of the eye is the tear & life
a history of losses, of blocked cycles of pain
a chronicle of laughter, an impression of the light,
a formless night
a mysterious entelechy of
randomness

yes, the tyrant is ready
to destroy with thousands of arms
with thousands of eyes
with thousands of hearts
a denied collective crime after all
and the old circle of darkness about to complete
again
the worm of history is tattooing our dreams

unbearable the recipe of pain

no real tipping point
especially
no turning point
for any tyrant

wooden tongues speak non truths
to be fed by a tyrant freezes the rivers of the mind

being a tyrant is so simple, so natural in a world we've ceased to imagine

this tyrant like any other free
to toy with history as with plasticine
cause we/you/they are as ready as ever
to support him dynamite
the horizon
of time

it's difficult to grasp the glory of madness
red carpets are deceiving but they match red ties
monochrome minds cast the shadow of empires
over our gluten free days
no wonder we are so allergic to silence, to steps shaped by loss
a thinking without thinking destroys the becoming of words
a tired public is trapped in the structure of hope,
the show  must go on
let's see if money speak louder than guns

this flux ripple passage
it creates
structures edges shapes
intermediate areas
transfixed faces:
love or
hums chirps rustle  wooes
sighs sights surrenders
breaking points musings
tsunamis  earthquakes
devastation creation
downfall cries resurections
prayers  longing evolving
endurance & the eye of storms
a touch a strike
the infinite in qualia
soil of oblivion
womb songs invocation
hues of silence
ego destruction murmur
wonder nestled
heart's warehouse
crystal kindness
unknown emergence
fountains
dead languages
renewed light moons sphere
overwhelming beauty
first cry first breath of air
much much more forms
to be turned into
we don't have enough poems
enough air enough shouting
cause horses are in love with the grass
tigers are in love with their prey
mountains are in love with water
pain is in love with stones
love just a reference
and we need to destroy its name
for its true face
this quiet spirit
cosmic vibration
in exaltation

we know the thrill, the trembling, the rush
the falling into falling into falling
only words survive of me as I surface
no escape for the velocity of resonance
a singularity  undescribable
beyond the bones an unfinished poem

you remember the confessions you made to my skin
how I used to touch you as if you were a land of the impossible
still possessed by a dreamy beast, my blood
as if the days hadn't invented the time of dying
love starts with a sigh, with a passing by
waiting for something to happen to the wind

"In paradise the work week is thirty hours
salaries are higher prices always dropping
physical labor is not tiring (because of lower gravity)
chopping wood is like typing
the social system is stable the government moderate
it's certainly better in paradise than in any country

At first it was supposed to be different
luminous circles choirs and rungs of abstraction
but one couldn't separate body from soul
precisely enough and the soul would arrive
with a drop of blubber a thread of muscle
one had to compromise
mix the grain of the absolute with the grain of clay
still another falling away from the doctrine the ultimate one
only John foresaw it: the resurrection of the body

God is seen by few
exists only for those made of pure pneuma
the rest listen to communiqués about floods and miracles
in time all will see God
when this is to take place nobody knows

In the meantime Saturday at noon
the sirens roar sweetly
and heavenly proletarians come out of the factories
carrying their wings awkwardly like violins"

Zbigniew Herbert
translated by Oriana Ivy

the sensation of
wet hair
in my teeth
pretty much your touch
your loving so heavy
words - a safe hell
in the soul's cavities
I'd recklessly counted
the fork's teeth
till my bones were spread
in the cemetery of years
no one confiscated
our competition for enduring
the snow of silence
finally bears some fruit
the impossible breath
urged me to save
some cement smile
till I can separate loneliness
from fresh dust
in my tired eyes

I must have been practicing
the patience of wood
the strife-wife
the brutal lemonade
on empty stomach

Right here - one small step away -
right now - the moment that this has added
itself to and became the past -
I heard myself calling me from all that follows

stretch my hand out as I may
the horizon comes no nearer to making sense -
but if I answer it is likely someone else
will answer back beside an echo

my eyes are tired of dreaming -
it's like a bird thirst when it flies over the sea -
they crash into reality
if I could only put myself out
in the man I ought to be

Ioanid Romanescu, from Orpheus
translated by Stavros Deligiorgis

Learning the way out.
in between feels like forever
you're darkyears away,
the antimatter
of vicarious personhood.

days crumble upside down
the pain had you butchered
only sparrows forget their stories in the sunset.

the mute carpets keep you company
still life with despair and an apple.
Jesus promised something
-undeciphered-
look at this fallen demigod
you’re a pile of fears
drying in the sun
and the night has no (w)holes to hide
a stuffed puppet
the true form -
unrecognized.

pain is almost a character
roaming inside
tramping blindly the remains of the day
making everything so sharp alive,
look
each cell  has a voice
and you can’t open your eyes:
no space, no name
just a rotten apple
left over from yesterday.
no one came on the mute carpets
and the silence holds on
like a ghost of the future

language gets killed
yet the heartbeats
march  on

we are targets for light, for the precision of its
unknown aim, yet we insist in blackening the world
as a self-described pyromaniac, I practice daily rituals with your presence. I tell your name to the wind, to the sheets, to the cup of tea,  to the orchids. then I tell to myself who I am, who you are.
outside the world is drowning in its own guts. your name is incomprehensible, but not to the rituals of the heart, they defy gravity, brevity and bribery. Diffracted on the psychic field your trajectory is eerie, the amplitude of some waves enormous, as I watch them wash the horizon away. dreams are the only shadowless creatures, and still I dream only your shadow. we still don't know why beauty is truth and truth is beauty. oh, happy rituals of the hands: inventing love, writing poetry.

the light is flowing on the naked trees
reality is more beautiful than metaphor,
I'm thinking while I'm feeling
the river of darkness flowing through me
faces gestures smiling and forgetting
destroying the plenitude of not yet known
spring explodes like vitamin bombs in old scars
the life waiting to happen begging for us to contemplate
I'll never stop dreaming someone else's electrical storms
I have to learn how to walk on how to love even more
the skeleton of darkness in the hands of time

finally some light can settle
in the hidden places
between one moment
to another
the wholes of time are filled
with dirt
with blue horror
like on the bottom of the sea

as inside, so outside
as above, so below
they used to say
but light there is a medium
of refraction for darkness
in this desolate place
of destruction
for one to exist
to be real
to feel safe
to have it all
another should be
trashed, diminished,
disfigured, humiliated
not in innocent metaphors
not in unkind dreams
not in works of art
but out there inside or
on the streets busy
with people

such is the gentleness of light
and the merciful god of unity
in the design of heart
when we can still recognize
the human kind

I am still standing here
and quietness can come
cause I've already cried
an ocean of light

the face of man is still burning
in the name of God missing an "o"
while some  "map of  the problematique"
is lying naked in the sun

still,
don't stop the rock & roll
the blissful oblivion
this vital movement
into forgiveness