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"

again and again
I believe in it
I know it exists
feeding on infinity

if you were a poem
darkness would get deeper and deeper in you
till it turned into white or alkaline nostalgia
it is something only yours, so much laughter
as if life itself was an obsession with a strange pulse

I believe in it
I feel it exists
feeding on flesh and bones
on the cycle of wonder

your trainers full of dirt
next to a Christmas decoration,
the woodpacker self-absorbed on a branch,
a pigeon floating on a current of mystery
I emptied of an I in the tenderness
of this fleeting moment

the sea of sleep was shivering the other day
today the clouds are in a rush towards the freedom
of the leaves perhaps, and I don't need to know anything about love
cause I can feel it silently labouring, growing more space for sight might light night for despite and ignite for dynamite and satisfied
the child, the lover, the warrior, the go-getter, the wise and the fool
the vulnerable, the humiliated and the daring, the dreamer
they need to talk to each other like the winds talk to the roots

is this all one can give to another, the patience of the flow,
and nothing more  more space to be
is it the echo of your bones that I can't left behind?

" My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief."
— Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

when the body speaks
words don't listen they simply go crazy
like the oceans of a foreign planet
why is that you may ask
why is a smile full of ranced linen
why is a mouth used to nibble the cuffs of bitter hours
why is a heart so full of lightning energy

what can a body do with the pain she was given
what can a mind do with the multiplicity of truth

poetry is a visitor from another space
where a blue scarf is waving in the wind
where everything exists all at once

words like teeth without roots
hands emptied of dreams
oh, the hideous pride of a bit
to be all

I've decided
so limp and stuttering
as I am
to face despair as stones face
the wind's breath
my hands put new letters into words
in these words that are old barrels
in which they keep distilling
the pain of the world

to be
or maybe just
trying to be

to be or not
or yes
or like you were without truly being

well
let it be...

to get in
or sometimes out
of your own mind
as if you would not even care about exuberance or sorrow

naught or infinity
nothingness
endless

to lay/to stand
faling into a slumber is like an upside-down waking
one sleep with many dreams inside

a single step more or one less
in open space or hidden path
not knowing everything
nor nothing knowing about
yourself

down here all seems to be
strength/weakness/happiness
falls or rebounds

to be almost at all
or only to-cease-a-little-bit-to-be

light/abyss

finally
all seems not to be anything than always the same shamelesss
swollen from so much foolish tension/internal/but eternal/rather
flat/mat/fat/and mostly incorrigible
                                                    ­       "This is the question"

by Gigi Caciuleanu, from "Miroirs"

finding our way back again. to what? this is a steep question. I am drawing this map of words, today we should speak of what is, the roots of words, this silence their soil, these words vehicle for the inexpressible.  Gaza strip, day 52, Jordan foreign ministery says Israel is busy with genocide. what else is trully new, for sure not pain, a fundamental law unrecognized by physics. the paradox of time that goes deeper into words when we feel them. the center cannot support itself exposed in cruel eyes. fall and rise of a time we lived in sometime like in a house with no windows. reality is and is not in the same spacetime simply unreachable, untraceable, incomprehensible. someone speaks in a low voice, another speaks more with the eyebrows. the door opens to the dance of life, and who is riding the dance. brave minds and collapsed bodies, I didn't want to be here today, she says. one feels disgusted by the expulsion from eden. I am looking for the secret garden where the mind of the body grows, but I don't know it. I am looking for a theory of absence. this is a story about the impossibility of story.  we have to listen and forget so that life goes on

the first snow so warm wonder
is whirling in our living hands
seconds can be windows
they can feel a kind of truth
an impossible simultaneity
of tears and laughter,
a peacefulness as deep as the roots.

let me circle around your mystery
give me one more second
to smile back at you

the unbearable or the body as fiction
cold minds in cold hands and so we have
the remake of the fake
the power of looking and not seeing each other
tears are silent so silent are some words
poisonous smiles and innocence inbetween
"the unbearable lightness of being" a remix
time holds us in its merciful circles
the rest is a mystery, why I love you

the light is raging, colours are hiding
when we hide our hearts full of dusk
we are mercenaries of ensoulment
listening to this manic-depressive couple,
power and helplessness, makes one wanna scream:
darkness is vulnerable too
clockwise the mind in action flows looking for its anti-time,
our actions can stand as tall us
anticlockwise is a flow into the trance of the unknown
into foreign bodies full of the tension of keeping the light
apart from day

Magritte is dreaming his hat, Freud his pipe
The Empire of Light perhaps
Ceci est une pipe, a vital voyeurism, the pleasure of stirring up
so many levels to listen for their hidden symbols
we are antiparticles for each other, when we collide reality starts screaming for each soul to witness
but a homeless pain possesses our dreams
unable to recognize the ******* of caring

too tired for rage, I am only wondering
where to find the necessary love for this fiery world
I ask the trees, the birds, the mind of the wind,
I'll pray for them to teach me their grace

I carry this huge body inside me
of beings unknown
to themselves
they look at the walls
and don't tear them down
they murmur a refrain
indecipherable,
the self-hypnosis of life.

we live the best we can
in these lands
we seek each other out
and not find each other
only sometimes,
to our surprise.
we live in this body
of tears and fear.

I was little, very small,
it must be said.
I envied the flight of birds,
I crushed the flowers
with such a tenderness,
unbearable.
I had a feeling that poetry alone
had not pulled the bridge
from the shore of trust

we know the thrill, the trembling, the rush
the falling into falling into falling
only words survive of me as I surface
no escape for the velocity of resonance
a singularity  undescribable
beyond the bones an unfinished poem

you remember the confessions you made to my skin
how I used to touch you as if you were a land of the impossible
still possessed by a dreamy beast, my blood
as if the days hadn't invented the time of dying
love starts with a sigh, with a passing by
waiting for something to happen to the wind

when guns speak louder than words
all beauty must die
when we let any child die
all hope must die

when the earth will move us
far away from tears
all beauty should remember
its momentary flee
in a child's knee

a liquid heart is hard to bear
even if I shout no body hears
how many we are
lost in the structure of tears
this pain that I let in like a love decree
a wave like a fist dressed in impolite velvet
how to survive hating unresolved
the other side of everything is pain
in such a world of beauty and dread
absence and seduction rampant songs
and acid hands

a cycle revolving evolving
it disappears from here if you push it out there
I am talking about pain like a broken doll
a cruel fate left me without eyes so that I can see
only what I  feel
pain in all aggregation states, a true substance

a radiant promise in a vacant smile
I am trapped inside the circle
of the moon perhaps
at the hour when a great nothingness greets you
a neon sky a synthetic civilization
full of fascination as any other
we begin to live again
with some honesty, some regret for the divinity
of a blue death that possesses our hearts