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irinia Nov 2015
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
irinia Nov 2015
Between two ruins I built a house,
between two treason I planted a belief,
between two chasms  I set a table with napkins
                                                            and salt shakers,
between mountains of corpses I saw a saffron
                                                             and I smiled at it.
That is how I lived.  Can you understand now?
                                          That is how I lived.

Maria Banus
*translated by Dan Dutescu
irinia Nov 2015
Who is silent now, who speaks?
To whom?
Cinches of lead stifle the lungs
in long typographic nights.
Then beyond. On the blue, chymic flight.
In the space between words, in the fluid and phosphorescent body,
in the eternal field of alien light.

(The dawn which comes. Watery dawn in the diencephalon.
Red triangles dead center in the pupil of our time.
A continuous buzzing upon our tympanums. Excited
thoughts, irritated senses.
And no one comes here, to the utmost floor.
We're not afraid. We've got sharp blades
of steel, of silver, of copper. Delicate necks,
strong nails. Soul fully
at anyone's disposal.)

Who is silent now, who speaks?
And to whom?

Liviu Antonesei
*translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim
irinia Nov 2015
Stasis, but
              without death
out of the flower, fruit
grows deliberately
you shroud your hearing with
              the rustle
of the poplar practiced at being
               alone

fog like thinly sifting
              sand
hills rolling round and round
               as in a plasma
your other face which, in your departure,
                you forget

the woodpecker
pecks at the house
     of the ancient children

Aura Musat
*translated by Adam J Sorkin and Alexandru Pascu
irinia Nov 2015
I didn’t know you were here to stay... you’ve found a place to rest inside this chest. there is no one there, on the other side. why can I measure my life in pain-years?  I am going to listen to the weight of your step... we are so many... poor bodies with slaughtered desires. life lifts up gently like hypnotic steam from raw bodies while you growl inside my bones. you have thorns of truth and short sentences: “papa doesn’t love me”, “mama keeps cursing”, “I am useless”. you are the only thing alive since I insist to lay down in my mother womb over and over again. have me expelled, have me covered in a blanket of blood so that I do not see the future.  you keep giving birth to my selves.
stop looking at me with charcoal eyes, father
look, mother, you can have me silenced for the beauty of dawn
irinia Nov 2015
"I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me..."
George Gordon Byron

"The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)
Is not to act or think beyond mankind:
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what his Nature and his state can bear."
Alexander Pope

"...body is but a striving to become mind... it is mind in its essence"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"... insight that he in some sort possesses,
A privilege whereby a work of his,
Proceeding from a source of untaught things
Creative and enduring, may become
A power like that of Nature's."
William Wordsworth

"What am I? ?Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought with whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mixed with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth."
George Gordon Byron

"Imagination is a Divine Vision not of the World, or of Man, nor from Man as he is a Natural Man, but only as he is a Spiritual Man."
William Wordsworth

"Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woaful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"That awful Power"..."which unites clearness with depth, the plenitude of the sense with the comprehensibility of the understanding".*  * the creative faculty [my note]
S. T. Coleridge
what is there to be learned from the poets, people who thought and felt and created their versions of what it means to be alive
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