I sit on the white bench under the willow tree near the funeral home.
I miss the haunted house, light blue like my childhood home used
to be, and I think, can I visit? and where shall I stay?
The picket fence was broken, you mended it; someday I will return
only to bend it again. Thinking of you all the while.
Thinking of you at Hy-Vee stealing someone else’s groceries
from their cart because I told you I liked to rebel,
and you listened, and we both understood
why we wanted to take the apples we wouldn’t eat.
Ants spilling from the ripe fruit as we bit into it,
like dawn, like perpendicular lifelines.
And all this is imaginary, like the blank playing card
you found on the ground in front of a different person’s house;
but I think about it like it’s true.
I’m at a funeral home, after all. And I swear,
I must have conjured you out of the dark. The stars splintered, the
moon split open; fingertips sinking
steadily into lunar grooves, lattices, plaits of long black hair.
I pulled you from the silver dust— breath to bone. And I love you,
but I miss you all the same, for we were made from the same stardust;
we passed each other before we slipped out of collective conscious into the human race.
And the sky ends six times before I get up from the bench. And I knock
six times on the front door before passing through it.
Wrapped in a black cloak. Accustomed to the taste
of ice as it is handed to me in small plastic cups,
brought to me as I lay in a hospital bed; everything pale, sallow,
the nurses gazing absently with pity on their faces. And I chew my ice.
And I will come back to the funeral home, to the haunted house, to you.
I will come back.

the rulers of time must be blindfolded
they invent voidless words, old eager hands
in this time without dimensions
in this space devoid of meaning
they delete their mothers from themselves
the warmth of bodies is imprisoned in anguish
the body invades the mind, and the mind replies,
it invades the body, an impossible conversation
thoughts are transitional landscapes
but thinking might rebell and fragment into a standstill
time filled my mind and stuffed my throat
to tighten the unthinkable pain
on days with thick blood and stagnant winds
no words to fill the void, the unbearable hopelessness
the letters got destroyed by the gastric acid
and so I became... the reflux of pain

this intensity: I rediscover
the edge of falling into oneself,
reinventing reality,
pain, blind feathers, sharp teeth, limits
this deficit  of whispering
thoughts can see their end,  their imaginary double
the roots of words translucent
their feedom released
they dismantle non words,
half-truths or nontruth
birds are free to be birds
or dreams of the air
hunger for connection is a hunger for creation
this feeling a vital movement, an undercurrent hallucinating forests
a delicate complexity of vulnerability and necessary innocence
the forgetting is colourless, as a matter of fact
there is no true forgetting, but nature itself invented
a God of mercy

Humanity has been so much like a child
With too many rich, useful toys,
Playing with each one that's given,
And discarding it when something
Newer appears in its midst.

We have been dilettantes and amateurs
With some of our greatest notions
For human betterment.
We have been spoilt children:
We have been like tyrannical children;
Impatient and imperious, demanding
Proof when listening is required,
Tearing things down when they don't do
What we want them to do
(How much simpler to let things do only
What they can do)
Being uncreative about what seems dark
And terrifying; preferring
Only what seems easy
And effortless;
Questioning the numbers
Of a philosophy's
Followers rather than examining
The fruitfulness of its ideas;
Wandering down blind alleys of populism
That lead to concentration camps;
Refusing to admit our vast crimes and mistakes
Denying the horrors of the slave trade
Minimising the reality of the gas chambers
Tearing our hair out in futile attempts
At reconciling civilization with genocide,
When civilization (as we have come to accept it)
Never did mean the true universal goodness
Of heart,  but rather meant the self-mythology
Of a people, a race.
No, neither the good in us, nor
Our capacity for evil are exhausted.
Time will show just how young
We are in our abilities,
Of genius for good and evil.
For all these strains, unexamined,
And unredeemed,
Will find their higher fruition
In the unlit centuries to come.

by Ben Okri from Mental Fight An Anthem for the Twenty-First Century

nobody tells me what to do with longing
unquantifiable as only the sand is
exulted light dives in my hair
my shoulders are amazed like a cactus flower
your blood self-absorbed rehearses abysmal cascades
tigers are still asleep in your dreams
will you chase the moon on my surface, will you, tell me,
leave your silence on a chair
what if love is this cypher for the mystery of time
what if the pulse is a form of photosynthesis
we have to stay away from any fire since
we would exhaust its thirst
a step into a surreal second that augments me
second after second  the one who loves
disturbes time in its mazing grace
the sky this gestational field
the space between each word a cosmos
a white truth will repeat itself
again and again bearing witness to
life hand in hand with death

I'm in no hurry,
I'll let time pass by.
Each second as it drops
Bit by bit erodes
Suffering.
I'll be patient.
Each wave that breaks
Is rasp to the rock.
On which I'm bound,
Each speck of rust
Thins the chain.
In just a millennium, or two,
The rock will become sand,
The iron links fine powder,
My bones calcium molecules
Dissolved in water,
Suffering nothing.

By Ana Blandiana, translated by Adam J. Sorkin

Pull this thread
and I unravel
My eloquence
becomes a frantic search
Scars and sinue
This cold hand of reality
That digs my grave
I wane in the wind
My breathe I reclaim
Fragile games we play
Fragility melds in this solemn gray

the song of birds measures the air
the buds of the future are fragile
what a fate - not a rhyme:
the eyelids are filled with light

searching for beauty in
the pain
or at least the envelopes in which it arrives
I'm deep in debt from feeling too much
at this point, solvency will never come

I see my shadow standing still
on the white wall of an art museum
it weighs on me that this is something I cannot undo

at what point of taking something apart does it
become something different?
because I’m pretty sure I’m someone else
at least, I’m not myself

“how to drown yourself”
a white quilt
suspended
unknown, undrown
bottom two corners sagging
top two pulled taught

tangled air knotting itself throughout my lungs
interwoven with my vital organs like threads of unconsciousness
my breath is never left
undone
unknown, undrown

“to allow yourself to be forgiven,
to find a way forward,
to follow yourself back”
three phrases—
stitched in red
on three white flags
“the future is a hopeful past”
I lowered each to half staff

unknown, undrown
two people seems to be the right amount
people puddle, standing
unknown, undrown

a paradox, perhaps you'd say
imagination frees reality
what if it's the other way round:
reality frees imagination

my lips forget your ironies
waters feel your surrender
the rush hour of something ineffable knows
you are caressing the back of the light
your words are crispy and salty

I emigrate into a silence that keeps its promise
I'll learn your steps like the worm learns the apple
or the sea learns the depth

light learns colour from its carbon dreams

the hours bloom in the ebb of flowers
these bones are branches of a thought without signature
who thinks for my blood, my soles or hands
the hands feel to fill up the void of thoughts
who listens to the rhythms of life
who cares to know the decay of truth the reality of feelings
the ghetto of the mind breaks the world into unvindicated stories
we jump into the sky as if into a revolution
we traverse our nature from one end to the other

let's mix the unknown of our thoughts
let's  dequantify, step out of our center
a disputed sky is carrying its weight
who is going to...
fill the torture chambers with the echo of dreams
let poetry vindicate all tears
look brutality in the eye, thought's fermentation
we see the world through our wounds
the magnitude of being alive cancels sunsets
history recycles uncertainty, our necessary hands

we strive to redeem the hiatus of colours

light lingers on stones
I love to be a spectator
women's hair hallucinates sunflowers
time is hitting the walls
today our ribs/smiles don't hurt
these pavements are the custodians
of wind's secrets
our eyes see without effort
a strange divination possesses this journey
from egg to coffin

light travel through us as if through
an ocean of bones
a poem dreams its exile into words
the trees let us see the seeds of time
we confuse happiness
with the boutique of dreams
and that's alright
some magic was saved on Noah's ark

springtime smells of women's hands
a young man conjures an intact eden
silence is grinding the air
at the end of things, the root of water

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