I unfold in adoration of clouds leaves wild flowers  bees
thoughts pass like the shadows of birds
everything gets illuminated revealing a core
the world gets deeper than one thought

words have orbit for pain to find a skin,
to slide into wonder
silence is in balance with the danger in your eyes
I'm not looking for an antidote for dreaming
I feel your barbaric alchemy, your mouth full of birds
I play hide and seek with you in my hair
your hands don't sit quiet at the edge of hours
I wear my steps like I throw the dice
poetry is an antidote for the scream of an unseen colour
I keep you in my tears and you flow

the mind needs to repeat this journey
into the clarity of fruits/glasses/doors
they used to talk with voices without tears
they used to speak without tongue
we are pedestrians into aerial dreams sometimes
we live in this density of meaning too complex for a circle
an uncoscious trajectory so precise & mysterious
I throw myself into the pool of time,
in its seeds, dangers, spirals,
into the unseen in my eyes
who I am is a destiny

a ***** war between language and forgetting

Gulag,  Holocaust, Holodomor, Maafa
Operation Condor,  Shock and Awe
red famine, potato famine
the kurdish, uyghur, rohingya, Isaaq genocide
Bengal, Rwanda, Armenia, Ukraine, Palestine,
Burundi, Nigeria, Zimbabwe
encompassing the geography of cruelty
someone humane did
actually write a book of inhumanity
560000 people killed on every page
1500 people killed at every word

still can't decipher the blood as if it's a hieroglyph
insatiable the history of pain

some are in the mood for war, for triumph
our eyes are swallowed by a verticalless convulsion
the cyclopic mind is doomed to fail
it's impossible to bury this time
in a hacked sky over a fragile earth

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