a woman's passion is a fiction of the sun
a radiance that forms and lingers
it's time burning like a rag in a guttering flame
it flickers, it spits a storm, a moment's certainty
a lifetime's doubt
it is the whisper of the wind in barren trees
a crucible for gravity's fervor
a silence dreaming its imploded sounds

this skin can barely hold a tender paradox
a first touch, a lost goodbye
like a taxidermist of time
your fingers drum on the tabletop
the coffe's steam rises like a ghost
the city blends its glass hours, the melting clocks
the hourly sigh of a smile, all that glitters turns into tear
I have to watch out for that precise instant  
when time fractures when our eyes meet

I contemplate these crossings illuminated by clouds
between a shape of thought and its veils
we didn't invent a screen-reality
it was already there, in the scriptorium of mind
I contemplate this geography known only by fingertips
unworded broken lines in tense bodies
I wonder about the lineage of tears, of hopes
how we grow old in this ardour, in the burning of bridges
I nod, I frown at the glaze of time
I move to the center of seeing like a novice
I gaze at the poliphony of being
at our Janus faced trade with flames
I say to myself it's good to decenter the "I" in this poem
however,  there is no purity of words
height after height and depth after depth
we betray a simple evidence: we belong to the same air
will we regret our rush towards the malaise of thought,
will we be rowing over the theft of light?
an invisible will is building up, an antifragile declamation,
the soul's defamation

The eye altering alters all
William Blake, The Mental Traveller

in this fall
it's the sky of the eye that's falling
in the aquarium of time
fish swim in the shape of our memory
my reflection dissolves in unfolded thoughts,
in the maze of forgotten hours
a mythical hope starves the multiplicity of dreams
light colludes with its absence but
it's mind time, the burning hours let go of self-deception
there are twists and turns in our soberness
love is the art of inside seeing
how the vulnerability of truth gets expelled
by the mouth of time

This world is mine for the taking, make me king
Eminem

they rehearsed invincible smiles till the sun went down
dressing up in their finest for the banquet
pageantry and glamour innovate the stones of hatred
we are having the hors d’oeuvres of great nations
unbound myths are complimenting the foliage
striving for a better world with clinked glasses
few faces are sweetened by glee, others by awkwardness
here come the tech giants, the cogniac
aren't we enjoying ourselves in the flattery of folly
earnestly the world is splitting itself
rendering incommensurable  realities
unstoppable

I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.

Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.

I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off:
Grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
Towards which my deep longings migrated
And my kisses fell, happy as embers.

Sky from a ship. Field from the hills:
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.

by Pablo Neruda

I can't leave aside the latitude of your eye
where roads and memories reside
my dreams
more than my shadow crash into you
my lips conjure your scent
my insinuated hand  does not hold
does not hold anything tangible
words are wounds, the meanings flow
angles intersect and lines converge
to the proof or woof of your existence
in this poem the words laugh
at the fragile calculus of tears
as if they would celebrate the question mark
in an unfinished sentence
I wonder where your touch begin, how far
the eye can stretch into the camera obscura of flesh

in the mood for rhyme
hands smell of thyme
and thought is a mime
I'm searching for a chime
this love is playtime

Thus, like the skin
of a shorn ewe, the day rises.

It is difficult to skin the self from a stone.
It is difficult to skin memory from a Greek.

But why should we talk about these!
After all,
light too has a skin,
light too can be skinned...
So
light too is guilty of being.

A gust of fresh air
comes with the millennium.
We are beautiful;
why should we not be beautiful?

We eat one another
only from hunger,
from adoration,
from structure,
from love.
It doesn't matter.
We are what we are,
that is, beautiful.

I carry my ever still blood
in my heart.
I carry my ever salt tear
in my eye.

I carry the angel in the middle of heaven.

by Nichita Stanescu

I pass by cafés and shops
with eyes as wide as narrow boulevards
I feel it, certain ideas consume the oxygen of mind
I pass by myself, lose track of routes or hyperbolic sensations
poetry drips down from this quiet space where
splendid contradictions resist the temptation
to capitalize on exclusion, where fullness and emptiness
talk to one another as mimes do
for a change, wide boulevards pass through my narrow eyes
imagination plays its alchemy on my mind like a sugar spike
I rest on an origami isle - your smile

some would argue that others don't believe in tears
I would say they push the tears into clouds
they rain horror on our mouths' sky
despair on our skin's topography
disjointed jaws displace the mind
disembodied voices displace the soul

they look at reality with raven eyes
a tzar without empire and a fool like me/you/us
they wage war on reality but
I promised myself a war on tears
I return some shadows to the dark
past is like a bird that forgot the magnetic mind
the enemy is kept in ckeck for two hundred years,
a fabricated reality hotter than a lover
a freedom colder than a heart without pulse
without an enemy there is no identity  
this is a trappping thought and
clandestine thoughts write history, rewrite destinies
we stare at hope on blind windows but
we promise ourselves a war against numbness
against depression bleached in abandoned factories
an anxiety deeper than the weight of time
wages war on imagination
this future is held hostage by hands without silence
our cities suffocate whispers and we gaze at truth with vacant eyes:
a king without a throne, a wanderer, like me

50 ways to wreck, get in line
Need to grow, have to push
Flicking through vinyl and feeding the rush
Kovacs

let's decenter love
crush it and mix it with pepper
let's put it in boxes and send them
to an uknown destination
let's caress our defeated hands
til they willingly remember
skin's magnetic charge, the magma of darkness

let's asphixiate the air till no longer tolerates words
excavate the emptiness, two fossils washed by rain our hearts
unbearable the silence hidden in the middle of teeth

let's not do impossible things like two acrobats of the invisible
certainties implode like stars' collapse into the ***** of space
your confetti smile, this brutal beauty of longing
let's stop counting days, stay resonant instead
we are a fleeting sorcery in a dyzzing endless pace

A poem
is when you have the sky in your mouth.
It is hot like fresh bread,
when you eat it,
a little is always left over.

A poem
is when you hear
the heartbeat of a stone,
when words beat their wings.
It is a song sung in a cage.

A poem
is words turned upside down
and suddenly!
the world is new.

by  Jean-Pierre Simeón from This is a Poem that Heals Fish, courtesy of Maria Popova

our bodies a carnival of mismatched why
the curves of a whisper, the strength of a sigh
they merge in a dance,  trompe l'oeil meets the sky
no labels fit no definitions hold
we are free to invent the rules of the fold
with every step our shadows multiply
we chase the echoes of a surrendered reply
in the androgynous abyss there is delight
a space for contrast to become light

sunset's scream of gold, light exults
you betray yourself in depressive insults
the city's hollow tone echoing through flesh,
where life's dreams are made to mesh

unstable rhythms like a windless storm
no paradox, just pain, wounds in display
I fell for the burden, the taste of failure's bite,
the tremble of your fright
no need for final meanings or touches that pretend
love without desire, desire without love's bitter end

I told you: night gets shattered
when  darkness fades away

night’s name steers me
to the silent reverie of your hands
for a fleeting moment
no dawn chases us, no time defines us
no shadow dulls our glow
without notice the horizon itself is drifting
my hands' yearning is as calm
as a wing over moonlit seas

I teach your name to the breath of words,
to the folds of dusk, to the quiet cups of morning
then I turn inward to who we are beneath the surface of silence.
no thread of certainty but rhythmic pulses I feel  
the horizon’s glow is fading
I craft love from the certainty of unspoken fears 
I etch poetry into the air to sooth my eyes from absence

who sighs through the hollow spaces of time

light was tortured till it denied its colours
these roots are echoes of a silent voice without name
the wind seeks to unravel the knots of forgotten stories
who listens to the pulse beneath the silence
who dares to taste the corrosion of truth, the glow of feeling
the walls of the mind crumble into whispers of the unseen stories
we leap into the storm as if into rebirth
we trace our essence from one shadow to the other
let's unravel the fabric, step beyond the echo
a restless dawn bears the weight of tomorrow
who will…
fill the chambers of longing with the murmur of hopes
let poetry be no fugitive
confront chaos with the flame of awareness
we glimpse the world through fractured light
history repeats uncertainty, our fragile hands

who seeks to redeem the silence of wounds

your eyes incite such an echo on my lips
it reverberates every time I hear the trees, it engulfs my hands
I  feel how your gaze caresses my hair
sometimes only poems keep me whole
the hidden parts play hide and seek with daylight
all the me that cannot be create holes between words
I wait for time to confess its indifference
the solitude of skin is inborn but
poetry is this incessant birth of an imaginary me

I am eyewitness of charm, a skinwitness of wilderness, a heartwitness for pain. I wonder if you tear your bemused silences or am I stripping you of stillness. sometimes I am silent as a plastic plant, scattered like the vowels of a foreign language or whole as an apple. only the rustle of my hands is enchanted. you are  an impossible congruence  for a witness of the progression of tears.
You are searching for something, the hush of blood in the intimicy of the ear, an oceanic tempo, a steamy vertigo.  time is reaping my breath with some fascination. there is this feeling, a filling of one's body with  the magnitude of the other. this absorbtion.
I follow the rupture lines as much as I can. there is no filling from the outside, they wait to be inhabited by one's blood. I would offer my skin flambe, the memory of your skin feels like a cataclism of fingerprints

it's difficult to grasp the glory of madness
red carpets are deceiving but they match red ties
monochrome minds cast the shadow of empires
over our gluten free days
no wonder we are so allergic to silence, to steps shaped by loss
a thinking without thinking destroys the becoming of words
a tired public is trapped in the structure of hope,
the show  must go on
let's see if money speak louder than guns

a Proustian quest for original wonder gets illuminated among pine, olive, palm trees
the eye needs delicacy and moderation to grasp the breeze of thoughts
is it the soul or an architect of joy who blends the harmonies in a pointilist smile on my face
an atmospheric fluidity in my hands between land, sea and light

in the blindness of night darkness is a form of light falling into itself
there's so much to be seen but the eye has blue limits
I watch how I am pushed inside
by the centrifugal force of breathing
these women in me, known and unknown
they insist, whisper, shout, smile, dance, cry, they carres the echoes of shadows they want to tell me
what love is in the dreamed language of the blind
I say to them: no, you don't know
what love is
Yet

I couldn't dance with my eyes full of skin
Sometimes depth is synonym with pain
The ache of heart echoed the light of night
Luckily the moon was full of herself

Boats are roaming the shining, boats are sleeping in the port
Dreams are seafarers well contained in the electriciy of skin
Fishermen talk to me
I talk to you with invisible words
"Au revoir madame with beau chapeau"
Time is an artist in the randomness of breath

"C'est tres beau", says a little boy to me
We are smiling together at the sunset
It's the first time he sees it in the train, he confides in me
Innocent tears spin through my heart
Words cross boundaries when they feel what they see

wherever I am with you it feels like
the edge of the world
my blood absorbes your voice and then
I cannot return to myself
you smile when you see how glasses slide on my nose when I read
you fall into your blood as into gravity
sometimes we speak with the same
silence

I share a narrow window with the seagulls
I don't know if for them air is a magic fluid
for me it is a canvas waiting to be filled
the coal of time is burning our breath
away

a croissant tastes the same flying over the Alps
sweat is sweat no matter what tram you take, it's so humane
on a tshirt from Asia a capitalist mind has written "Hit me hard and soft"  
let's heat the hit
clouds are dreamed of beneath the trees  
a young man takes a photo of an old woman having breakfast sur la Cote d'Azur
yeah, something hits me hard,  a contrast so sharp
black and white infuse  the blueness of air
the blackness of misery,  the whiteness of glamour

I'd better guard  the sea not to throw her abyss into my mind

At some point soon I will lose my eyesight
so I am getting ready
Every day
I try to remember your smile
which will soon be my only light

by Ionut Calota, translated by Lidia Vianu

I often forget my name
and do not always
finish my dreams
Every morning I give away
baked bread
in desolate streets
The world has been deserted
for an eternity
Instead of churches I build
a new heart
that has now walls

by Ionut Calota, translated by Lidia Vianu

It feels like an unseen field.... a constant tension,  a rush of more tension, the acceleration of looking and seeing desire, the spiral of pulse, a void full of everything. as if I can sense with an imaginary skin some  thoughts screaming in your smile. they are blue riders on weightless nights, they roam the dunes of time. I think of you, hooked by a mystery that will never be solved

water shines like dreams that mystify their depth
in nights without moon by the sea the solitude of breath is even stronger
a savage sea feeds on the memory of light, but only the sand carries its age
its black heart rumbles a white rage
a watery path their dreams, they travelled by sea or the surface of time
they envisioned us perhaps
in the randomness of waves

the breaking edge of waves consumes me
wind, sand, water, light meet
in the love story of a time
surfing its waves

All we need is darkness
for the natural selection of light
I watch the past as a travel show
the necessity or adversity ignites language,
different shapes of games, we like the power plays
of circle
let me be sealed in a wave
I want to descend to the faith of sand
to the Cro-Magno vision of words

silence swings over waters as if...
it rehearses its unseen so...
to fill  in the depth of blanks
a stratified time inhabits the landscape
orphic dreams morph into your flesh
the wind collates its courage and rage
like someone who falls into a self
my words bite the shape of a scream
the hunger of love descends language into crumble
the beauty of lungs full of air is misleasing
when I am waiting for silence to miscarry its void

I got lost today in the women's hips
they were moving with feminine wild grace in the heat
I was lost in the subway's speed when a woman asked:
"Where did you get those shoes", "how lovely they are"
"From a small fair on the banks of a lake", I replied
"Oh, I just got back from Caprile the other day"
"I hate you", she said and she laughed
I got lost in her blue dress, I reciprocated
the sweetness of her smile

undisturbed by light they sharpen the intelligence
of networks to the point of the sublime
they pierce their consciousness with awe
the mystery of mysteries envisioned,  
a jouissance beyond words in a silicon child

however, the thing is 
the mythical map of light keeps its tracks hidden
as on the face of a pre Columbian god

a fresh god is ramping up our poetical mind
it chews surrogates of photons, it fears only the solar winds
my right eye sees beauty my left eye sees fake
as in the remake of a mimetic lesson
a falsetto voice reclaims the original sin

we are trapped in the structure of a vision without windows
a bionic arm displaces the soul of the skin
meanwhile we are thermodynamic fields fading
diluted waters, double edged refrains
although our skin still glows from the outside in
clouds without shadow are narrowing the rivers

we forget to take our body temperature,
the result of millions trials in the chemistry of time
who can escape the rythm of dying, who can escape the real
and not yet real. the pretence falsifies algorithms to loose its face
we are walking into the artificial light with wifi speed

pain, fear, joy make us real, all the imperfections and hyped hours

light dissects this body of binary beings
digital space consumes our sight blink by blink but we consume the time of dying  souls get amassed into digits
the delirium of crowds, small or large, rules the salinity of tears
something has already happenned
we bled,  went mad, have loved, we lost fights, faiths and teeth
now an invisible poet knits the dots with supremacy
it uses the tests for saliva and oxytocin cravings

who's gonna train our neural networks in deep learning inconclusive. what if time is tightening its loops, is
squashing every halleluja of  bipolar fingers

trees will just have to grow taller to comprehend
the mystical breeze what if
we'll never grow as tall as them

you light a match
the flame forgets
I close my eyes
echoes pass through us
I can't tell, is it
a mirror or a door
we are suspended in shapes
that keep on crying

you drink a beer
without memory
I look out the window
silence surrounds us -
I can't decide: is it
a casket or a hatchet
we are stuck inside wor(l)ds
without seeds

the moon has died in a poem
overused and forlorn
its avatar is rising
in blazig pixels and scorn

we are at this threshold
one foot in the moon
the subtelty of dying will be
presented on Zoom

Godot isn't coming but
I am waiting too

sometimes
I understand only  the texture of your words,
the distance of your skin
you curse the silence waiting to be heard
you count the hours of toil like one counts lithium pills
you empty yourself of nothingness
desire links the margins of time
sometimes you make the proverbial schnitzel you remember
how good the *** was on the dining room table
I feel  the bruise of steps, the tiredness of patience
the sharp edges of thought, the easiness of laughter
I keep on dreaming myself going out of the night
somewhere inside the purity of limits like a blade
there is this feeling of you, round
like the time that exhausts its depth
the echo of tears gets lost in your hands,
sometimes

the surface of the cooking table
the edges of the air
the clarity of a blank page
your shivering skin
the tenderness of tears
the discipline of screaming
the eroticism of fingers
the yoke of the ramen soup
the confessions of dance
the blindness of power
all these and their forgetting
hijack the world
from falling into itself

I carry your hands like waves breaking on the skin
your eyes get flammable like capsicum on innocent tongue
I have long conversations with this boiling sea
the sea bears the roundness of the moon
the moon reveals its wounds
the wounds shed their skins to feed
an undiscovered earth

the fullness of words in your mouth
my trembling hands
a truth cuts deep
into the ribs of morning
it's the big bang of language
when silence has no shadow

I feel time running like a wild animal tnrough my body
the air might hide from itself in the frenzy of an embrace
the molecules of emotion create the music of muscles, of spheres
I watch this momentum of life unfolding, rising and decreasing
passion feeds the wind, the waters, the eartquakes, it dances on liminal edges
bound and unbound the pulse of creation, of destruction
I am so very quiet, as quiet as the retina that translates the light
when the light touches you my optic nerves get burned but look
how strange,
I see further away into the clarity of hands

slowly the mountains come out of the blue of morning,
they regain their face
light bathes them in its milk
I hide in the tall grass like a child
this self expands into the clouds behind the trees
an engulfing joy dissolves words into vowels
everything that exists  is wonder, a forgotten state of matter
time confesses a circle
the circle conjures  an earth so wild
the forest stores its prayers inside moss
the sacred hidden in the most profane  flower
an work of art with unknown author, every atom is colourful
I offer my skin as playground for butterflies
they can feel she's not so different from the skin of the earth
some hours are born by the self of rain
I wonder if the wind feels me
like I feel you in blooming nails

here horizon feels like the palm of a god
the lake receives the fury of summer
un unutterable feeling pushes my hands into firestorms
light rests on everything heavy as the clouds
birds carry their chirp into the destiny of the air
the moon hides somewhere in the silence of the forest
my eyes are too small a nest for the  flow of wonder

The air dances around you and silence looks
different now. The Dead Sea is alive again, stillness acquires a
name, the world quivers on a beach
covered with blind seashells. A giant who has come down
from the mountains is posing for a naive painter. Only
eagles feel
planetary alignment, they are the only ones who can
understand man's amazed look when the woman
comes riding a thirsty gryphon. Whatever is left of life
takes refuge in your dreams. The shade of the harbour is
only generous with the spleeping statues. Every day arises
from the blazing calendar, close to the scream of the siren
out at large. The past blooms out of the rock in the sea and
weighs on your heart. The sand hesitates: I am the
beginning.
In the red cells I see only you. Even the blind see the world
again
through the eyes of their own memories. Doing survey
missions
on the maps of the world, the dolphins ask
the purple red colour of the next eon whether night comes
from beyond words

by Ionel Bota, translated by Lidia Vianu

For a year now
the cassette tape
has been played
over and over again.

We wake up
and with a swig
of loss
of death
and some tears
we swallow a pill of hope.

We follow a path
winding back and forth like a children’s swing –
long
and exhausting,
a path we know for sure
will end in a fall into
the mud of death.

Many times
we tried
to sew up the holes
that were pierced in our hearts
then we realized
our hearts have become sieves.
The pebbles of death
the tears of sadness
and the heavy memories
are too big to leak out.

by Asmaa Dwaima

we are playing with God's elements
the uncertainty principle unseizable
all we have are these disparaged letters
touched by the pigment of time
we repeatedly ignore the human DNA,
its receptivity, fragility and mistery
the horizon of safety questioned by bombs
whirpools of dread are stocked in our shoulders
the chain reaction of violence precise like the atomic time
it works faster than the splitting of atoms to
iradiate the mind

in the laboratory of life unseen words are sprouting
they decenter time or they hit themselves against
the windows like birds do
they circle the emotional memory of our aorta
they smell of dust mixed with blood
they search for that place in your gaze where
is never too hot

"You dream of a better day, alone with the moon" (Blixa&Teho)

I want to turn my body into protest, they are killed twice:
by hunger and  by bullets in the middle of  hunger
hatred is an invasive species, mistletoe  in reversed veins
I can see how thoughts fracture in the middle of sentence,  unrecognizable streets pose symmetrical questions
how can this be or is this all that can be
how much patience the pain has
death is like Schrodinger's cat,
it can be simultaneously here and there
a surreal space exists where time can't be saved
an invisible hand recycles genesis, invokes innocent beasts
time doesn't pass through all the layers of pain
some are turned into a certain sky, others into frozen movement, another into the fertile soil for growing wings  with which one cannot fly because the wind has not yet been invented