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

these are still beautiful days to feel alive
despite the fragility of our thoughts, our tissues, our tears
the totalizing concepts swallowing the real
despite meetings without mirror, a strategy of the invisible
despite the decay of atoms inside walls, steps and apples
despite the accident of the imagination that we are
the excess of life, undigestible
despite the depth colliding with the surface of things
despite a pain without meaning, a dream without a dreamer,
a torment without memory
I look at things with crystallizing eyes
despite the limit of the impossible

I wear my nails like a mischief
but I ask them deep questions
spring comes in the middle of winter without innuendo,
no twist of words just plain daylight
I smile at everything that smiles back at me
I listen to this ancient heart
I contemplate the transgressor in me
then I move on to stand up comedy
(life could be unbearable without laughter)
I conjure words to write themselves
especially when I feel there is too much of an I,
or like a snowdrop in January

I am unknown to myself
when I look for a silhouette or
your stroboscopic touch
the canon of your steps full of woe
an infinitive phrase your timeless smile
silence has its alchemy
poetry finds me like a sacrificial song
being ourselves is enough
nothing more nothing less
the radiance of time a promise
who will be the woman dying one final death
is a stranger to me.
sing to me with the voice of morning
you, woes of laughter spirit

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