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.

here it is, the paradise circus
a kind of massive attack
a kind of antimusic
mindlessness, a great improviser
let's make nonsense beautiful
let's write the chronicle of cruelty
oh, the boredom of bling,
we've seen it before, the corruption of words
besieging the nakedness of light
the illusionist in chief and his linear obsessions
will decompose our composure
klingonians are here, what if
the future is tyrannically dreaming
in digits a parody
of reality

At the border between garden and orchard,
an old door
with a rusted padlock. Rusted by rain or dew?

We walk through it barefoot blissful, cherubic.
My name: Volatile

Grandmother’s apron, a white cloud
scented with lavender
under which I’d bend my head
when the lamb gave birth,
sowing the air with as many photons
as star seeds
over hills, in summertime.

Then, the timeless joy –
children by the pond
gazing at the orange mill
brimming with moon.

Under the beam,
the braid of garlic cloves
– tiny lanterns
illuminating my height
on the spine of the door,
marked there by father,
his hands fragranced with walnuts,
and on the windowsill
the little sack of seeds waiting to defrost.

At the border between clay and star,
a narrow door
through which only we
could squeeze,
on a path of light.

by Liliana Ursu, translated by Mihaela Moscaliuc

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

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

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

there in the land of the wind
the grass would like to be as tall as you
the salt of the earth would be ringing,
resonant with the laughter of tears
perhaps everything we are
has to conceive a symbolic death
to deliver ourselves

in the embryo of words there is
such a gentleness, a true prophecy:
language would begin to forget itself
we meet in this language without words
like two beings from the end of the world

The poet cannot talk about what he already knows.
Northrop Frye

light splits the world in seen and unseen
night accelerates some fascination
I contemplate the poverty of words
who is doing the autopsy of freedom or something,
a requiem for a country that torments its name
streets don't smell of winter but of loneliness and oblivion, exhaustion and rage
some have already forgotten the meaning of blood
we like sweating not weeping, cursing not dreaming, finding the stain not the brain of fog
we practice forgetting like the snake charmers

dreams look like second hand stores, like the promise of the apocalypse,  a local version of Munch's scream, like an uninvented wheel or the beginning of the world.
an old lady sells fir wreaths in disbelief
too many drugstores ignore the untethered soul,  
a place of redemption they are, unwittingly

here there are poets, there are beasts, gentle souls and blind alleys,
indifferent smiles and lazy hands
and who can hear/bear the echo of that song... better dead than communists, comrades
province hates the center, the center forgets its north,
the all good sequestred against the all bad, no dialectics in doublespeak
truth to be told, there is  no consent for telling the truth
ersatz emotions exchanged casually, Hell is other people. always.  some play Russian roulette with reality, we are the heirs of a history disorder
if my dreams are full of birds, waters, lonesome deposits of the flow of time, I have to wonder
is history a desire machine searching for some mythical proportions

this country or a ****** mother with indifferent hands
here citizens have no faces, but interrupted gestures, fractured thoughts without containment
I fear those who cannot cry
without the meaning of blood history has no meaning or maybe it does, look at the speed of some digital thoughts,  the attack of ready made ideas. ideology becomes eulogy

no wonder I don't know how to end this poem
we need new words that contain their power
what is freedom? who knows, who cares.
oh, an old adagio, a gangrene of our undiscovered minds

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

it happened in an instant
like an eternity of wonder crushed by a wink
night is a prophet, I often think, for better or worse
with its truth of immensity, its molecules of light  and
dreams' oscillation. there are nights and nights
when I feel the ripples of spacetime moving with the speed of desire

some poems are unreadable since I taste the power of words
biology dreams of giving herself to waterfalls in an embrace
chemistry can be caught dreaming to break the symmetry
of its isomorphic structures
physics refuses to disentangle the fields, the particles from their resonant selves
a tender savage disposition is collapsing time, is playing hide and seek
an Irish band sing for someone

my knees feel the earth, the dreams of tundra
I am still myself when my mind is shattered
there is love, there is death in the centre of something
indescribable

We are not yet ready—intellectually, philosophically,
or morally—for the world we are creating. In the next few decades,
old ways of thinking that have served us well for hundreds, even
thousands, of years, will be called into question. New debates, controversies, movements, and ideologies will come to the fore. Some
of our most deeply held assumptions will be revised or abandoned
altogether. Together we will need to re-imagine what it means to
be free or equal, what it means to have power or property, and even
what it means for a political system to be democratic.

Jamie Susskind, from Future Politics Living together in a world transformed by tech

this time was that time, perhaps
your fingers smell of orange peels, of Babel
I didn't  dream of a white Christmas
Alexa played december songs
that pierced through my heart,
a distant thunder she became,
the countdown of a little miracle.
a day to lighten up the ancient symbols
to keep you close in innocently round
tears

the soul of joy grows in circles
it glitters in children's cheeks
singing together washes away
the momentum of nonsense
I contemplate the unknown,
the right proportion of light of darkness
their breath kept in balance,
the golden harvest of hearts,
of hours
the fir tree gives away
some scent, some wonder

Merry Christmas

monsters unleashed I fear
light might freeze on our faces
and what a rush to be generous
an eden of objects, a living emptiness
all in the name of christmas
merciless the geopolitics of hatred
this is not a poem but sheer rage
when streets explode under our feet
exhausted by words turned into death sentences

I could end where you begin
Kerala Dust

some mornings there is a dawn in me
and there I begin, I look at things
and they don't look back
I rehearse your name with different whispers as if
I rehearse the pulse or a pirouette of silence
You give birth to I, I give birth to you, a strange happening
some mornings  I disappear into a satin breeze that carries my almost thoughts
that's how I call your name, my almost thought, only the body knows
there is a fresh dawn and there I begin

a world in motion and who would,
who could guess the next rhyme
bliss, hope, and horror
tyrants falling, resisting, raising
fresh terror in sheep's clothing
these are mental wars, fake news tsunamis
feasting in our blood in our sweat in our tension
the invaders possess our minds, our souls
these are reality games, the most dangerous
who cares about facts or consensual reality
humiliation, helplessness, loneliness
manipulated in the transition between nothingness to utopia
an acid destroying the human form and social body
they can feel again after a long apathy the call to heroic action
let's not be afraid, the tyrant is inside and we kind of know it
I look at the face of nothingness, of dread
no power no reason no words
dread is alive too

yes, it is real, as real as daylight
how history recycles itself
darkness is falling with the speed of thoughts
of certainties, of pathos, of a wounded hope
I feel like screaming, I feel like weeping and
this can change nothing, and I can't find a better metaphor
we hurt each other unwittingly if we stop thinking together
if we stop talking, stop listening to each other
how vulnerable we can be, how deceptive
how potent the unhealed wounds
they write history books

an abstract darkness is near, a concrete darkness
division and such pain in the depth of the living
a darkness without perfume but blind screaming
disguised in a blinding light,
so old that it keeps reinventing
the destruction of saturated worlds
the social body can not survive without a heart
without a multiple mind

eyes have ears, ears have eyes
on self-absorbed nights
the tree of knowledge murmurs in my veins
and poems rush through me with their wild letters
I chase them away with a smile
I am smitten beyond illusions, delusions and other demons
by a 4 am wave, you know
by a 5  am undeciphered dream
by a 6 am reverie, by a letting go
oh, what a sweet incomprehension,
life´s creativity,
your hands anticipating mine

from East to West a pain without name, something inescapable, like the girdle of caskets, like a corpse. we struggle with what seems to be mostly an idea - the dimensions of the body, with the memory of the skin, with the history of contracting our bellies and puking our dreams. this world covered by layers, textiles, invisible armours, self-imposed absences. tears crushed by violence, by laughter, after all it was not that bad, they say. we carry so many tears that we are heavier than air, lighter than our tormentors, sillier than our dreams
crushed words, crushed voices, empty meanings for the unraveled selves. i write only a chronicle of this time devouring its fragments

I dreamed we were sailing through rice fields
(they make paper out of rice),
Along a wet brilliance, along mirrors,
Along a marshy archipelago.
In a paper boat, a pale boat,
No splashing could be heard, the oars were so light,
In the mist the boat gets wet, is sinking.
And tiny lights will appear soon.
The shoots of rice, standing out of the water,
Look askance with their Korean eyes - so that
I should understand - an object of love be thou -
They are. A candelabrum of love branches out.
With an ***** song, like a pipe inside a pipe,
(It's natural to love  everyone and immediately too),
Look: memory of oneself is going away
To the bottom like a clumsy dead diver.
Look: the lights are spinning round like rain,
Not falling to the earth - these are souls
Whose inconsolable love
For the Creation and the Creator, the soul will not extinguish.
Oh, how long ago I knew all this -
When I was still a two-legged woman
And now I'm drowning, now I'm lying on the bottom
Of love, like a million-armed octopus.

On the shallow bottom, in the rice fields,
Belonging to earth, water and sky,
With a living longing - and sweet fear -
Those will fall in love with me who think 'I was not there'.

by Elena Shvarts from Contemporary Russian Poetry
translated by Gerald S. Smith

Because nobody cares
About anybody.
It's got dull, cold, and bare
Like in a movie house where the movie's over.

Where are the girlfriends, kind as fairies,
The friends who come in a hurry when you call?
None of them gives a hoot or a cuss,
You can't even weep.

Life's been orphaned and grown thin,
Frozen to death like the village movie house,
Because nobody cares
About anybody.

1990

by Vladimir Kornilov from Contemporary Russian Poetry,
translated by Gerald S. Smith

Modern capitalist society, in order to culturally and structurally reproduce itself, to mantain its formative status quo, must forever be expanding, growing and innovating, increasing production and consumption as well as options and opportunities for connection -in short it must always be dynamically accelerating.  This systematic tendency toward escalation changes how people are situated in the world, the ways in which human beings relate to the world. Dynamization in this sense means a fundamental transformation of our relationship to time and space, to other people, to the objects around us, and ultimately to ourselves, to our body and our mental dispositions.
This is the point at which acceleration becomes a problem. An aimless, endless compulsion toward escalation ultimately leads to problematic, even dysfunctional or pathological relationships to the world on the part of both subjects and society as a whole. This dysfunction can be observed in the three great crises of the present day: the enviromental crisis, the crisis of democracy, and the psychological crisis (as manifested, for example in ever-growing rates of burnout).

Hartmut Rosa, from Resonance A sociology of our relationship to the world

nights revolve in imaginary loops
I am captive inside my lips, inside fingertips
so that I see everything half and half
waves, tears, apples, words
half for me, half for not me, but the other you
I have to keep my hands for myself cause
you have sunshine tattooed on your skin
words are this space where I can breathe
when your hands get concentric

By the sea, by the dreary, darkening sea,
Stands a youthful man,
His heart all sorrowing, his head all doubting,
And with gloomy lips he questions the billows:
[...]
The billows are murmuring their murmur unceasing,
Wild blows the wind, the dark clouds are fleeting.
The stars are still gleaming, so calmly and cold,
And a fool waits for an answer.

Heinrich Heine, Questioning from the North Sea cycle

the world so fragile so resilient embracing tight
its spinning delusions, inequalities, contradictions
while he is smiling at his fists, the most powerful
a mascarade game we play with reality
impossible to tolerate the contact with daylight
democracy no longer soothes us when it lies to us
political agency crushed in empty pockets
eyes full of a radical hope
the truth obscured in our mythical mind

we need to be brutally honest with our mental health
with the health of the oceans, of the air, of our dreams
he is a fragment tormenting our fragments while
the world is not yet prepared to grieve its disneyland

an escapable paradox will hold us
oh, how are we falling when we think we are rising

the future is unstoppable
its echo chambers are searching
for some truth

who knows if we trully own our words
or they own us
too many sunsets and dawns are happening in the same time
and the departed are tormenting us with the song of their flesh
I found a rhyme in you
absence rhymes with presence
somewhere in the hands of time

my cells have their own theories and fruits of dying
even porcelain dreams
when I am with you I enter the tunnel of vision
I can see better what happens with fused from confused
me and him trapped in the asylum of gestures
somnabulists through our own skins
while they are busy scrolling
God forbid to hear the sadness of a time
that is getting darker and darker

a soul history is like the caligraphy of dunes
the psyche toiling its dark materials
sketching shadows from imagination
the cabaret of desire contemplating all the wonderful trivial terrible beings you can be. a wave in my mind you are
between the visible and invisible man the wisdom of the shamans

I walk on streets, I see things, I touch hands suffering from imagination deficit disorder. sometimes I have thoughts in reverse
but I cage my heart in this shrine of memory while
I am looking for you dawn by dawn, bird by bird

when the night finds its resonant frequency
my heart feels like a compass I let her find the scent of your body
let's get lost my hands would say
and let no wind find us and let no why and no road find us
my face illuminated by the song of birds
your face illuminated by the laziness of a sea that only we can see
let's get lost so  we can find each other
in the archive of veins

you, an event on my retina
an accident of time colliding with itself
my hands have pulse on your t-shirt
everything in its place like a silence
waiting to happen
the speed of smile measured in light-seconds
this body is a house of metaphors
a space for living words forgetting my name

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

-Diamond Sutra, ca. fourth century CE

Giacometti knew it and found a way to tell us
what the dot the line the circle share
a vulnerability
it is only a matter of intensity
of losing the very self you've only just found
Giacometti dared to tell us the truth so gently
a man sense of the world is born everyday
and every heel has its vulnerability

I listened only to voices of pervasive enduring loneliness today.  that's right, no point in altering it through symbolic transformation, the metaphor has its decency. no wonder i found this place where silence has infinite nuances like a love slipping through your fingers, like a time obliterating the intensity of the systolic wind. I thought about writing a letter of intent to the world just to say No! (after much yes, a no is vital). No, i don't want to understand, i don't wanna know,  don't wanna shed tears, read books about the meaning of violence, dream war, fear devastation. if you zoom in more and more you can catch history repeating its fractals. the more you look the more you might feel the ******* of pain. somebody asked : do you tantra today? No! today let only this particular silence be

from the fifth floor you can see better how people
grow older, you can see or choose not to see
the world like an eruption
in the night I sing and bleed a little
I explore the memory of light on the skin
there is pain and an envelope of laughter
there is the concrete shape of things and the shape of babel
the other-me rehearsing faces, bodies. alphabets, the taste of love
who decided we are human some believe love is like a full stomach
i would love to remember when i was a single cell
a coded fullness hallucinating me, hallucinating you
she has a beautiful smile when it's winter
and you love her. the story encircles you
we can choose to see the world with sincerity
my ashtray is full of dreams and I won't stop dreaming
you'll use the same soap as her and you'll even write a memo to yourself: love can be so hot in the middle of the day
I'll write in my diary: let's see what I can forgive myself for
somewhere inside there is a feeling waiting for another feeling
there are words waiting for more words, for only the words
can point to something much more free

and it was dark inside the wolf or so she said, Margaret. it haunted me gently. the blazing light was feeding on darkness, as always. we were only creatures made of words that come and go leaving behind their trace of mistery. we need something to believe in cause we need something to trust. where to find it? let's believe in pain and in the art of letting go, I wanted to shout. pain  mixed with fear, a hiding pain, a pain from which I wanted to hide, a punishing pain, a muted scream, a helplessness, a circus, a charade, a make believe. what if we were fools, we were empty because of being too full. where is the group, the vitality of our communities. children don't have a sense of future, only the infinite present for not feeling like a human. let's not pretend, let's not fool the world with our orderly words

snow has the height of pigeons today
translucent joy trapped in its consistency
the whole world is moving I am standing still
to listen to the intensity of ice, to its labour
to hold the tension of true opposites
the perpetual dance of white turning into black
maybe the trees are hallucinating their dreams
the same way we do
sometimes I forget the lesson of winter
to find itself again it has no choice but to
become spring

hands filled with summer  and thoughts with horizon today, flowing by themselves. a sudden burst of joy, amusement in the face of ordinary life, trivial yet so creative beyond our control. the mind contemplating the image of  the situation decided it was funny, it was something else: sitting on a chair in the cold on a busy boulevard waiting for meatballs with mashed potatoes to be ready while reading about how different the thinking of people is in the east compared to the west (the geography of thought) while listening to massive attack and my legs dancing on the pavement while thinking about summer in between the lines while looking after women in the street. me - a surreal collage of actions and thoughts haunted by love as quantum superposition. I wonder where does a thought begin, where does it trully end

time bombarded me wiht its silence today, the sky was closer, birds more transparent. maybe because of the intersection of wonder and scream. once I was one with my wounds. I had thoughts without spin today, only the wounds of the world spinning in the distance. the impossible mixture of blood dust shattered bricks, death is so ignorant, so messy. you used to smile when you saw me eating blueberries naked. in the core of trees there is silence, isn't it? in the core-self there is an emptiness full of antiwords, isn't it?

we are targets for light, for the precision of its
unknown aim, yet we insist in blackening the world
as a self-described pyromaniac, I practice daily rituals with your presence. I tell your name to the wind, to the sheets, to the cup of tea,  to the orchids. then I tell to myself who I am, who you are.
outside the world is drowning in its own guts. your name is incomprehensible, but not to the rituals of the heart, they defy gravity, brevity and bribery. Diffracted on the psychic field your trajectory is eerie, the amplitude of some waves enormous, as I watch them wash the horizon away. dreams are the only shadowless creatures, and still I dream only your shadow. we still don't know why beauty is truth and truth is beauty. oh, happy rituals of the hands: inventing love, writing poetry.

this pain like an unwritten poem
only the winter knows how much I loved you
how little I am able to say
the air is tall, the night so deep
I walk in the selfishness of the cold
I walk in this landscape where love is an exile,
a forest without shadows, a party without guests
a happiness without an alibi
something that gets destroyed at the first burst of light
but springs again from the unknown depth of skin

I am in the waiting room of a dying love, a nascent love
while Monalisa is sleeping without dreams
in the depth of my days the certainty of tears
only the winter knows how much I loved you

you, yes, you
I need you to feel
more alive
and that's the end
the beginning of
any metaphor

when I have nothing else to tell you
I'll write a poem or two
strange words for a strange world
as strange as the last day of a year
we need new clothes for thoughts
to dance anew the horror, the splendour

the city looming deeper in its final rays of clarity, the yellow of an embrace enticing like an unknown skin, a flock of dark birds moving like a promise, the feeling of the ****** self, hundreds of years of desire. never stop asking the impossible questions to capture the paradox of life, how much trust we need to acclaim its splendour

something possesses this unseen something, it makes me shrill and tender, furious and ripe. how much disappointment can we bear. I want to be  engulfed by sunset like a fool, I stand with my eyes open for rain to fall into my dreams. love is something life invents to keep its honour, from the stones' point of view, love is mysterious, from the point of view of nothingness, it is everything that can fill the flesh, the empty space of atoms,  a sweet preserve. it teaches us to endure the hidden face of light

at last she no longer possesses me, at last I possess her briefly like a window posseses the clarity of morning  
I am humble, insatiable,  less blind, I am fierce and proud

We are, says everything that simply is

indulging quietly in their delight
the echoes of light are rumbling the universe apart
I leave behind the skin of some days
no light in some pockets full of depth
but cosmos is born in your hands
what a wonder that light rhymes with delight
so natural so wild

what an adventure carries me inside a surprise
what a surprise to feel ourselves emptied of death
the radiance of an imaginary time quietly rumbling
or is it or was it or is it
the echo of your savage lips

your touch a bet with intensity
unfathomable
my eyes turned into seeds like
energy turns into matter
the pain and pleasure of words
who cares who is one with whom

nights taste like earth and I pray to the god of grass
when I look at you I wonder if the stars remember their combustion
I wonder if the stones have cried out their lunacy
and who and what will remember
who will know of my
biography
I have only the feelings, their broken cycles in my body
my hands resemble a tree
they're caressing themselves too much in the wind
our fear is not an imaginary cage or an ego shaken by shivers

sometimes
you're tired of love like a marathon runner.
It's good, you say to yourself, when the walls are silent
when you're not ankle deep in doubt
I love you the best I can and that's a trivial fact
like an empty street where no one remembers the meaning of sadness

when I watch you dwell sometimes outside your skin it's hard to keep my tears in balance
then you turn around and your body knows the meaning of tenderness as the morning knows the promises of an edge, of a forgotten soul or maybe of a lunacy unheeded

witness to this quiet life
certain thoughts understand the soul of birds
there are different orders of truth
order is just the unseen dream of messiness, a flower of chaos
systole and diastole of breathing in strange beings
contradiction intrinsic in all things
I need the anti-me for rhythmic change
perhaps the destiny of the eye is the tear & life
a history of losses, of blocked cycles of pain
a chronicle of laughter, an impression of the light,
a formless night
a mysterious entelechy of
randomness

What is the flower that blooms each year
In flowerless days,
Making a little blaze
On the bleak earth, giving my heart some cheer?

Harsh the sky and hard the ground
When the Christmas rose is found.
Look! Its white star, low on earth,
Rays a vision of rebirth.

Who is the child that's born each year -
His bedding, straw:
His grace, enough to thaw
My wintering life, and melt a world's despair?

Harsh the sky and hard the earth
When the Christmas child comes forth.
Look! Around a stable throne
Beasts and wise men are at one.

What men are we that, year on year,
We Herod-wise
In our cold wits devise
A death of innocents, a rule of fear?

Hushed your earth, full-starred your sky
For a new nativity:
Be born in us, relieve our plight,
Christmas child, you rose of light!

by Cecil Day-Lewis, from " A Poet for Every Day of The Year"