I weep, I smile
there are seagulls

this feeling that keeps me alive, cauterized by light. the silence of silence is yet possible in the sonority of clouds and the delight of roots. the discreet spaces of time finding a voice, some harmonic highlights. it's not only the moon that gives meaning to void, fullness empties itself into the screaming of colour. almost here, almost there everything scatters, conjoines, rejoices  regurgitated by dreams. seeing with your heart an homage to the interconnectedness of life. I pass through you, you pass through me for a moment as short as a breath. our hands leave behind a trace of something, a roaring heart attuned to herself

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.

you escalate my depth
a pain without pain, an effortless mirror,
this flame trapped in the depth of flesh
my body is a quiet urn for
the ash of the days without an inexplicable
you

We were losing along the way
our desire to break free.
Among the chains,
the pleasure of the flesh was
primal.

The microscope
turned against ourselves,
and we laughed like madmen.
Then we began to torture
ourselves
to tear the truth from within.

Come, tell me everything, and so,
we sank into shadows.
Living for an instant was enough -
the rest of life was just recounting it.

And those who couldn't
keep their eyes shut
tore them out
just so they wouldn't see.

by Miguel Oscar Menassa

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.

The temple bell stops -
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

Matsuo Basho

night rests her weight on my shoulders
the cry of seagulls tears the unconscious of morning
I see what I need to see, the stranger in me
I absorb crises, storms, bridges,
life's torment  to invent its limits
the differance - the forgotten passion of language
the effete and the barbarian.
the sun also rises unhindered
on wheat plantations

last night I dreamt the Authority of dreaming
I had to send a petition so they tell me how to end the dream.
dreams do no harm when they keep their innocence
between innocence and experience a handful of pebbles
to help find our way in the blinding light

You were so absent while washing
your face in the morning, you never saw
how the linden in the courtyard reached a limb
through the bathroom window and shook
sticky seeds into your hair. Your hair grayed
in this working class neighbourhood you’d heard
already as a child smelled like a ruined life.
The turrets of the little Russian church
once looked so fragile to you – you wanted
to feed them carrots from your hand
and croutons. Your heart was alive.
Your heart was like an iodine rain
over a crowd of crushed heads.

By Dan Sociu, from Sentimental and Naïve Poetry, translated
by Oana Sanziana Marian

spectacle society or a faceless society? who could tell. after historical laughter comes a historic dread. when the sky is the limit of power we are doomed to endure the mania of failing floors. nothing is trully free to harm reality, not even poetry, and whose reality is more real. words like disfigured worlds,  they hack the body time. what is beauty and what is truth, this complex breathing creature in an unknowable form, this  hidden vulnerability: we can't bear who we are, we want to sink in a history without memory.

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

This shrinking violet that created Man
A fragile pawn of innocence
So many years
Why must I shrivel and die
Why must this tree ravage my fruits
I'm laid bare, this visible me

what dares disturb the illusion of hours without strife,
without venom, without height
the air is full of anice, things ocupy their prescribed places
in this compulsory life
when I was falling they said it wouldn't hurt
but my dreams were forbidden summers,
my hands were cracked by smiling
the energy of the verb to be intense while
I fell into this dialect of silence,
me and the  ghostly caress of a lonely woman