let me listen to you
your hidden landscapes
your lives lost
in velvety oblivion

listen to the streams of blood
throbbing at your wrist
in the tender flesh inside your elbow

listen to the vulnerable intensity
in the soft vale at your collarbone

the silence on your lips
the whirls below

listen
listen through you
to these things that one cannot speak

**Ioana Ieronim

you are a stranger, I keep forgetting

forgetting that with you
I do not speak my mother tongue

what do they call it
when we reach toward one another
across the contorted mirror of our senses
and your glance teaches me
that this is the way

what we say seems to relapse into roots
down
down to the seabed that became
a land of many flocks and pastures

and now
here you are
Stranger

caged wings beat in my body
which remembers these things

remembers its winged lightness
of the beginning

when it was promise

when it was
word

Ioana Ieronim, from *Ariadne's Veil

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the ****** and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to ***** up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

"Here comes the shame."

don't bury me inside your distorted womb
don't leave me outside
to watch the ebb and flood of it
they've stolen everything for me
I was there first, your womb is mine
I dare face the sludgy mornings as you like it
I'm on this vigil: seize the women-wombs
maybe some day I'll be able to honestly
forgive my grunge fists
push, smash, kick the terrible fortress
each of them: you've expunged me
I had to **** the dawn for me
to keep you alive
keep smiling obliterating
the fresh growling
keep myself busy with fear
for you to have clean sheets
in the long winter nights
I'll take it down on you:
look at these secret men

what I cannot feel doesn't exist
they don't exist when I frown my lips
your fat womb doesn't exist
when I grind my teeth

only her can send you under
way behind you
naked

"Daddy! Look at me! Grrr!"
I'll get even
look at them:
unrecognized cocoon-women

only them can pull you under
far behind the level of the seed

"I am you only when I am myself"*
Paul  Celan

night comes like a wave
with eyes full of stones
and your pain is left outside
no earth in your heart
the air blocks the flight when

then
all you want: this old fight
to push everything against the clarity of darkness
push yourself against everything
keep up with the buds of pain
emerging and disappearing
like an unkept promise

somehow
it seems like
the wind in your gaze knows how to
empty a room full of people
but not how to learn new ways of learning
since the mind is a deaf alley
some truths transit the night
to shed their hearts
like stones in a pond
of unknown tears

and
the night comes again like a wave
with blue screams
this stereo pain
this graffiti of anxiety or lack of syntax
and you cannot fill the gap
between self and self
limb and limb
with the (t)error
of having to
die

still
there's much road ahead
and we'll keep loving you
please let the night
carry you
to this strange silence-heart
to some whirlful gravitational words
your own -