Distance is the cog wheel
on the haunted axle of my hearing,
grinding fine the deadened mind
of that unborn god
waiting to be caught
by the earth's blue speed,
and carrying in a handled urn
the plucked heart - ours,
it's beating, it's heard, it's beating, it's heard,
a sphere in wild growth -
the roads are wet with tears,
memory frail and elastic,
a sling for stones, a gondola
drowned in childlike Venices,
a tooth yanked from the cells with a string -
down the empty socket of Vesuvius. And you exist.

*Nichita Stanescu

He offered me a leaf like a hand with fingers.
I offered him a hand like a leaf with teeth.
He offered me a branch like an arm.
I offered him my arm like a branch.
He tipped his trunk towards me
like a shoulder.
I tipped my shoulder to him
like a knotted trunk.
I could hear his sap quicken, beating
like blood.
He could hear my blood slacken like rising sap.
I passed through him.
He passed through me.
I remained a solitary tree.
He
a solitary man.

*Nichita Stanescu

pillars of darkness are full of debris
suspended in silence
as inside so outside
one day everything is transparent
the angel of apocalypse seized the window of opportunity
the meaning is locked in the semiotic circle
I and non-I mutually annihilating each other
terror breathed in normally
psychic ***** killing biology
the impossible unreachable pain
the mute rage
the lost connection between heart and heart

so powerful and meaningless from above
so small down there
all those little roads
men like ants, bugs, worms
all those petty little lives

to be above, to disconnect from this void
from the taste of earth in the mouth

frozen semiosis
things are sick of meaning
interchangeable
murderers can be heroes, devotees
dreamers

let us weep, let us pray
that we never forget
how the heart knows to play
the chords of day

the heathen hours plunge neighing
into something
struggling on my lips
I am looking for my blood
how it knows to explode
the salty earth is my sister
something rounded
dissolves yesterday all over
the crest of sleep brings you to me
whole
full
enraged
with desire

don't peel me off you
that's all

when there is no cell
when there is no body
when I am on the edge
you rise
a wave
a sea
an ocean
embracing me
while I plunge

Lidia Vianu, from *My Cup of Light

share
my last cup of light
before we both
grow blank and
white

Lidia Vianu, from My Cup of Light, Anthology of Romanian Poetry

"That's something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities."*
Seamus Heaney

it is not enough
the eyes, the ears,
the ebb and flow
of calcium in bones
of iron in stars
sometimes silence pours down
like a blessing
some left their offices
and they're now deciphering
the eyes of thunder
some inner power turns me around:
the tribes of air
the shapes of a child's wonder
the involuntary rehearsal of words
this passivity of language
like jazz phrases
the wrinkles of that woman
imprinted in my heart
(by her murderous fingers)
spring gives me rose-like mornings
(because of my bedroom curtains)

and there is something else
this feeling of oneness
the cedar and the flowering river
motherly care, exhaustion, or not knowing
and the hues of morning skies
countless fleeting little gestures
and the cries of birds
tearing solitudes
my complete abandonment to him
in the sea of time

I let the window open
every day is a declaration of love
even when I hate
the dance with the unknown
the inextricable
the polyphony of laughter
and darkness

you live in me during the day
and I **** your name each night
anew

An anxious dress
Like a spring crocus:
Violently violet
Inside and outside.

Its cold silk,
Snake-like and pure,
Born, endured
Like a straightjacket

By my hot sinful
Skin.
Both
Smell of myself;

That is, of life
With death inside.
My soul, living bird,
Can you rend them?

Carolina Ilica, from **The Short Poem of My Long Life

there is so much night fallen under, in between, beside
the space is not enough to handle the burden of the living
the music refuse to surrender, grotesque
to givedeathsomethingtodo
each tiny thought fills the chamber of not-yet-thoughts
toomuchtobear
each idea splits into thousand others each minute
the mind is a rag, a broken doll watching this performance of power
l’elan vital
feelings ceaselessly running wild into each other,
crashing, colliding, stumbling blinded
calling their names
no redemption for light anywhere
crawling happens in all direction in the same time
until space it’s collapsing under its own weight
I slip through a dark visible hole attuned to the rhythm of hell
what an experience, the speed of blood refuses to freeze
terror is running to stand still
not enough connections
I practice some claws out of chaos
crammed with ******
the pain is unbearable all over
every inch is a battlefield
time has turned into the ghost of eternity
just a direction to flow, if only I could find
sing me a lullaby mama
so that I can make more space between my ears
lend me some grace
to ask death
to be gentle with me
only imagination breathes in
to steal some time alive
dreaming the touch of peacefulness
amid the stubbornness of heart

nospacenolight
this is how I became an expert
in pigeon’s flight
while insisting somehow
to keep my eyes inside
this is how I got some courage
to bear Yes & No in the dark
to keep writing when I die in myself
for love to find

there is a growing light inside, a young hour,
a raw sun falling down from everywhere
spring is near, birds are alluding
I'm sitting here, watching the air passing by
in this full emptiness, a joyful wonder
Karunesh
a god of compassion is looking after the alluring violence
in bloom
the patience of spring, uncomplicated
carries me somewhere
into laughter

not forgetting flames me up
like a foam of whispers
bursts into with laconic daring
over darkened waters
your name hangs unwritten
I rolled over on a rib
but it's useless
how long am I going to ferment you in my armpit
with your fragile ****** smile?
chase me away like the passersby do
with the meaning of travelling
I was not and you were not
you were not in my dying
we were only a laden pool of sunlight
I didn't find any solution
than to behead the days
these thin days unraveled from myself
from the bone of the world peeled of magic
the art of forgetting is for those
who sleep on pillows

such a long, long road
I've been travelling to a destination
obliterated by pain
to this gravitational center, to this place
with no hiding space
only mute seagulls
have seen my screaming
I've cursed myself on pages,
diaries of gory hours
I've cupped myself in belated answers,
dancing tears
more than eyes can meet

while I was forgetting nothing about everything
the world revolved once, twice, a dozen of times
you were learning to dissipate your name
to waste it on the lapel of not yet discovered seas
in the silence of leaves

now I know this calmness,
this tenderness of dying
I could write this unthreatening poem
today, tomorrow
till forever finds some peace
perhaps
some forgetting

Silence as of one million closed doors
bestow powerful illusions upon loneliness,
it lights up the memory of its sons
even before they are born,
it carefully razes
the trees in which hamadryades slumber,
shut me up inside
the being that I am - so I do not know what I am -
and throw a light for all time
upon the moment of my death

Ioanid Romanescu, from **Magic

"God is Alive, Magic is Afoot."*

Who are you? Who am I?
the light  in February can be self-sufficient,
sharp as deafness in the middle of the sentence
heavy as denial,
rapturous as a fusion
in the wind, in the air
forces of cohesion and destruction
play well together
in the arena of ribs, guts, lungs,
perhaps the silent liver
something is shivering inside
the light of a blade
an efortless wave of desire
a tired boundary left alone in the afternoon
the contours of my limits, your limits,
their limits so bright in this
constructivist fabric
Picasso was just foretelling us
forcing the doors
to expose the cover-up
dreaming his internal objects

then we start all over
with every breath
I want to give myself to me
as a new toy, as a gift
I want to love him with overt passion
I want you/him to break and store me
in between your thoughts
the body is full of eyes, of ears, of lips
I’ll survive in a whisper

They just want to flow into each other
clapping, holding on to the fluid of life
engulfing everything, defying all
censorship, authorship,
leadership

the light in February
is newly born with desire
to embrace itself, its darkness
in the vibrant body
I am, you are are sliding back with the air
finding rest in the vital void

the song remains the same
I am you, and you are me
the enchanted blade
is ready to cut
a new body for misunderstanding
we need to survive each other
something is tickling my feet
some wordless revolt
some rage of the living
to impersonate death
to posses their breath

I feel my boundaries
watched over by desire
but you are always invited here
to sing your sea of blood
turquoise or as you like

I am my desire
my desire is searching for myself
everywhere
in the incomprehensible light
in the lightness of his hair
in their hunger, courage and despair
for tomorrow

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
    But you’re in it all the same.

    So why not get started immediately.

    I mean, belonging to it.
    There is so much to admire, to weep over.

    And to write music or poems about.

    Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
    Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
    Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
    Bless touching.

    You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
    Or not.
    I am speaking from the fortunate platform
    of many years,
    none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
    Do you need a ****?
    Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
    Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
    and remind you of Keats,
    so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
    he had a lifetime.

**Mary Oliver

They’ve brought me a shell.

It sings inside
a sea on a map.
My heart
fills up with water
with a little fish
shadow & silver.

They’ve brought me a shell.

**Federico Garcia Lorca

they were deep like roses. like leaves*
the thought is blowing them away. remember
how much death we are capable of
and how much earth there is in the sky.

bu they are deep like roses in autumn.
the leaf of the hands sighs as it falls
like a bird on the mediterranean -
exhausting the light of the waters.

still, he was saying, there is too much snow.
winter snowed through his mouth.
it too did not let them see each other any more.
it fell on their hands and put them out.

Ioan Es. Pop, from *The Livid Worlds

The longest silences are blue
All the unheard sighs settle in stones
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,
And the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”
Distant clouds hide their simplicity
in fields of hope

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
The night sky whirls in the wind
its surprise and weeps.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
She was a wild woman; I, a violent man
She knew the stubbornness of tears
I knew the weight of sleep.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
Our mouths postponed day fall
and the silence of time.

On nights like this, we undressed our shadows
I was hers and she was mine
Painting with nakedness the sky
We were each other passion for falling
Our arms kept on crushing
the same way the same day
this forgetful undying.

*That’s all. Far away someone sings. Far away.

"And the heart is hard to translate"

I rush every sunset in its pit of blood
I hold your absence with my bear hands
As the center of the silence I can give to myself
Some impressions of my thoughts of you
Uncertainties embodied by swords
Are roaming the streets in my place
The mirrors chased me away
They refuse to deepen the light
Refuse the clarity of a day
When I am a simple woman
When you are a simple man
I have to prepare my escape routes
Since your fingers smell of apples
The air is full of chemicals
And I stare at the intoxicating hope
My curses explode in hourglasses
There must be a misunderstanding
why did I promise to myself
my heart,
your hell,
our dance,
the resurrection
of naivety
in this body?

perhaps there is no doubt:
I can only love you
       or
I can love only you


and no
yet
but
(shh, oh, my foolish heart!)

"Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the
       mania
   Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way. "

Friedrich Holderlin
translated by Michael Hamburger

A sign we are, without meaning
Without pain we are and have nearly
Lost our language in foreign lands,
For when the heavens quarrel
Over humans and moons proceed
In force, the sea
Speaks out and rivers must find
Their way. But there is One,
Without doubt, who
Can change this any day. He needs
No law. The rustle of leaf and then the sway of oaks
Besides glaciers. Not everything
Is in the power of the gods. Mortals would sooner
Reach toward the abyss. With them
The echo turns. Though the time
Be long, truth
Will come to pass.

But what we love?  We see sunshine
On the floor and motes of dust
And the shadows of our native woods and smoke
Blooms from rooftops, at peace beside
Turrets' ancient crowns; for the signs
Of day are good if a god has scarred
The  soul in response.
Snow like lilies of the valley,
Signifying a site
Of nobility, half gleams
With the green of the Alpine meadow
Where, talking of a wayside cross
Commemorating the dead,
A traveler climbs in a rage,
Sharing distant premonitions with
The other, but what is this?

By the figtree
My Achilles died
And Ajax lies
By the grottoes of the sea,
By streams, with Scamandros as neighbor.
In the persisting tradition of Salamis,
Great Ajax died
Of the roar in his temples
And on foreign soil, unlike
Patroclos, dead in king's armor. And many
Others also died. On Kithairon
Lay Eleutherai, city of Mnemosyne. And when
God cast off his cloak, the darkness came to cut
Her lock of hair. For the gods grow
Indignant if a man
Not gather himself to save
His soul, yet he has no choice; like-
Wise, mourning is in error.

Friedrich Holderlin
translated by Richard Sieburth

I sought to be loved,
But no one was there.
Day after day my heart ached;
I longed to share my passion.

One starless winter night,
My heart gave up.
It went empty and cold;
Life had no meaning.

Hatred washed over me,
Like a wave
Over a sunlit rock pool.
My thirst for love had gone.

My desire had evaporated.
I know my yearning will never be satisfied;
I will continue with my life,
A slave to hatred.

Francis (aged 12 years)
from *New Families, Old Scripts

"De mi-ai face tu inima punte, sa te intampin mereu."*

here, distracted by seagulls
I have dreams interrupted by gravity
you are painting the moon in my hair
I would like to open my eyes
to say something
but I am already taken to you in all languages
between the lines only empty spaces
I still haven't figured it out
why you split the page in two
don't want to hear the dying time
you are painting my red red heart
naked
I want to kiss your fingers,
your tired shoulders
in solid mornings
the way you stepped/screamed/exploded inside
my skin your umbrella against the void
they cannot convince me of anything
the night cannot erase
the freedom of light
in Turner's eye

somewhere beyond the hip of night
I'm waiting for something by the sea
but what it is
it's a mystery carried by seagulls
so far away
that far away
from me

A time will come
when everything will be in its place

happy the man who on his inside
is bringing this about

Ioanid Romanescu, from **Magic

Right here - one small step away -
right now - the moment that this has added
itself to and became the past -
I heard myself calling me from all that follows

stretch my hand out as I may
the horizon comes no nearer to making sense -
but if I answer it is likely someone else
will answer back beside an echo

my eyes are tired of dreaming -
it's like a bird thirst when it flies over the sea -
they crash into reality
if I could only put myself out
in the man I ought to be

Ioanid Romanescu, from Orpheus
translated by Stavros Deligiorgis

"Welcome to this place"

"In our secret world, we were colliding
All the places we were hiding love"*

a beautiful warrior spirit rests in her
the clarity of numbers
the will of mountains
the ignorance of dew

sometimes she feels herself
with uncertain fingers
saying let it slide
to all the tears
not turned into poetry

there is such force in her smile
despite decades of loneliness
despite the heavy burden of an empty sky
she has an electrical heart
dreaming of the acceleration of life
in the first and only home
she knew

her heart is dreaming to be born again in every smile
in every fiery pulsation,
to rest in the dream of the womb
she owned

that time in the sea of womb
doesn't need to be remembered
cause it's in the most intense of breathing in,
the most vulnerable cry,
the most beautiful self-abandonment
when life just trusts life
with the heart power

children’s laughter brings the magic back in time,
trees are dreaming their waltz dancing hearts,
send your storks through my heart
I’m wearing it everywhere
white*

02.01.2015

my shoulders were so tired
of carrying this meaning without meaning
I’ve done my negotiations with reality –
to handle the truth that I cannot exist in your eyes
but in your absence I invented the world

you’re the creator of this empty space, so central
of restless nights, of desperate sighs
making a secret pact with the Danaids, my days
my love for you only sealed the invisible dimension
against all odds
I’ve worked like a smith at this smitten dream of love
but you’ve erected walls inside, walls of silence outside
Yours was the impossible touch
I would know your belts better than your hand
no room for dreams at your table
only your fist in the arena of power
between the kitchen and the living room

you’ve stayed so loyal to her rejecting womb
that all women should have been born as men, soldiers
but there she was, this little girl, chasing you in my dreams
how clever should I have been to get your attention?
how sensitive could I have been to translate your silence?
you’ve turned me into a sleepless tigress weighing the danger
of every move in the corner of your eye

I’ve rarely put on lipstick
my eyes were all too busy protecting
your crushing absence,
too much life compensating inside
all those tears still dissolve my face
with every imaginary man
again and again
I’ve studied  pigeons’ flight
instead of the art of flirting in/with the night
I’ve searched for wounds to heal instead
of blissful laughter, not to disturb
the stillness of the forbidden one

I’ve carried your pride for so long
incongruent with my own sense of value
a nothing left outside, a sign without meaning
I was
counting the pathologies of day

but I’ve signed the declaration of independence
don’t want to take the art of losing to perfection
You were so right to hide, to yell and to pretend
dreams are the hardest thing to handle
I’ve stretched my soul on height and depth
that it’s become a fluid full,
emptied of myself

I will always love you
with a wiped smile
Father,
the future remains unwritten
inconnu

"The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy — an energy at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than another man’s, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity."

"Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as an escape."*

I feel like loving you today
like the wind through the willow trees
like broken pieces love their design
I would wear my glance
light as a feather
I would lean against the past
as a girl asking petals on her nails
"now he loves me,  now he loves me not"

I wonder how your love looks
when I'm boring
crazy with seriousness
or amnesic
of the burden of words

Today I feel like loving you
in the scent of freshly made
cherry jelly.
Do you know how to whisper
bedtime stories on my skin?

I think it was yesterday
I saw a beautiful man
on his way to freeing time
letting it roam
on forgotten paths of wonder
as if promising to make the most of himself
that very moment when it's time
to lose yourself

I feel like loving you today
like a mother forgetting her sorrow
like a spare lover
offering a shoulder as a butterfly nest
for your laughter
while you are dreaming yourself
in these words

in this absence of tomorrow
when only birds turn into flying
I frame the image of you
owning yourself
being here, being everywhere
inside, you
words of thunder you were carrying
breathing in your fingers

my voice passed through you
resting in unknown spaces
I didn't look back
since each day is a child
I make with your shadow

my true self is a blank paper
spring will bring me flowers
your image is so real
between pillars of silence
you keep painting yourself with naked air
under untouched skin

I'm walking blinded in your language
wanting to coin my phrases
like "I can die without you"
or "I need you to love my shoulders"

this is all too strange
under the eyelids
this beauty
when birds descend into singing
when tigers turn into grass
when your eyes turn into silence
and I disappear into words

finally some light can settle
in the hidden places
between one moment
to another
the wholes of time are filled
with dirt
with blue horror
like on the bottom of the sea

as inside, so outside
as above, so below
they used to say
but light there is a medium
of refraction for darkness
in this desolate place
of destruction
for one to exist
to be real
to feel safe
to have it all
another should be
trashed, diminished,
disfigured, humiliated
not in innocent metaphors
not in unkind dreams
not in works of art
but out there inside or
on the streets busy
with people

such is the gentleness of light
and the merciful god of unity
in the design of heart
when we can still recognize
the human kind

I am still standing here
and quietness can come
cause I've already cried
an ocean of light

the face of man is still burning
in the name of God missing an "o"
while some  "map of  the problematique"
is lying naked in the sun

still,
don't stop the rock & roll
the blissful oblivion
this vital movement
into forgiveness

"Ah! descendons
Ensemble!"*

suddenly the night moved
and I woke up to see him
sitting there in the steamy windows
with his powerless hands

his soul was flickering
screaming inside in every
possible way
his hands had done too much
if only he hadn't desired such
till she told him:
"you are filth
you make me sick
you are a disgrace!!!"

"you are the very fiend",
said the liquor
"I'll **** them all,
I'll **** this turbid full,
I am the devil himself",
said the grin

I saw him in the doorway
leaving behind his empty chairs
he would have strangled her perhaps
next he was lying there
like a pile of rags

"What do I have to lose?"
his death was as respectable
as the one of a king
in a Shakespeare play
it was a double ******
and a suicide
then there was this bond
mother and daughter
had lost their hands
trying  or perhaps failing
to hold

there is such lightness in this
-impossible words-
going back to the unknown
into the ancient sparkle of desire
into the restlessness of oblivion
I woke up and there were some whispers
while I was listening to dawn
or maybe I was finally falling asleep in myself:
when laughter and tears come
just let them be
there is no right or wrong
in eternity

“I don’t like future, mama
“I don’t wanna go there
I like when past comes
cause I can fix things”
sometimes  words desire such
and time just follows desire anywhere
Where love is, there will time go
into a past without future
to set absence on a naive fire
to light the windows
to dive into the thick air of yesterday
without breathing out
or rushing into a dream
of a future without past
without shadow
without doubt

while past and future
simply exist  in the same time
undisturbed by paradoxes
in this fluid larger than us
of single moment within the moment
in the present tense
of love

shh, let me tell you how this story goes in this silence as powerful as the one after the first atomic bomb, in this space of crushed illusions. you are alone, I know you are. that was counter therapeutic, that lack of hope when grandma struggled with the shovel against the frozen earth so early in the morning. it was besides the point that grandpa from the other chapter was playing violin outside, on the porch of this house of tears while a childlike woman swallowed the sunset in her frightened eyes. like the opposite of a hermit.
shh, there can be so little love, you know, only broken petty gestures, meaningless in any direction the wind would blow. yes, it’s no good to make love in the quietness of lavender fields. too many mothers have turned on the other side in their slumber sheets.
you know it’s been years since words are tempting to surface the horizon of events, it’s pure physics. something will remain  forever hidden behind the horizon, they say, who count the miracles of day. shh let’s not disturb now the other chambers of thought, I'll write to you each day like a child forgotten outside to play.
they are coming inside, I’ll put you somewhere in the preformed space, I’ll cram you somewhere into the smallest place. see you in the morning with the first breath.  you have to do this alone, redefining these tears, no one will do it for you.
our bodies link us together, do they know? I’ll just keep writing to you. mothers and daughters are bonded by scarfs when fathers just look aside. you are a wall breaker, this is what you are. the world cannot bear metaphors when dawn gets stifled by false pretence. I’ll feed you with words as long as necessary, till the air becomes more clear in the morning. some things can be born only by whispers.

We came here to fly
in the height of our breath
don’t let the plight block the sun
I listened to my hands till silence came
staccato in my words
your flight is my sea of stories

I settle not into sight
tomorrow is a palimpsest
with its wise owls, the birds of fear
while sensuality is pouring down the windows
like rain in December
and there is something breathing,
a self-absorbed flower of flesh
and the tenderness of someone
to carry the “winelight”
for the flamingo me

your lips taste like morning.
I am redrawing  the horizon inside
for you to bring your pulse
in flight in case you might

What if love was invented by mothers?
I have to ask

Desire of your hands bright
in the penumbra of fire:
they knew of oak-trees, roses,
death. Ancient winter.

The birds searched for seed,
and were suddenly snow;
so, the word.
A little sun, an angelic halo,
and then the mist; and trees,
and we making dawn from the air.

**Salvatore Quasimodo

to get my hands ***** with miracle,
to be fed with unknown, quietness, outburst of laughter
to carry me like a bridge into nonexistence
to make me a violin amidst misunderstanding
an imperfect piano in Chopin’s musings

to confuse me with another
spewing me on a distant shore
to bear my craziness of walking naked
among suspicious warriors
to teach me a prayer for each & every
breathing day
to take me to the other side
inside

I want elongation & annihilation
the practice of martial arts
in the truth of uncertainty
to invent distant words for the violent joy
of being alive

I want the little things
filling the imperfection of the day
like the warmth of your socks
my hand finding your stubborn lips
the forgetting of your tired shoulders
the softness of my whispers sometimes
my shoes next to yours wandering there
where something always happens
hic sunt leones
the shape of your thoughts in the bedclothes

I want to fall from grace
to love the weight  burying
me in this round-about,
the hymn of my blood

the light the heat
in your eyes*
Peter Gabriel

there is a thunder in your eyes
when wild horses graze in blue quiet sunsets
there is air in your fingertips

I hear
this dance with silence
and how I need to learn
to stay still
in that thunder
in your eyes

you really believe we are not more than we are
at the table or in our waking-up gestures or while we throng
in the morning in front of the newspaper stands or in the long autumn evenings
when we come back home with the same and the same movements
down the same and the same streets?

those from tomorrow will stop asking this question.
but us, now and here, isolated by the language which will put an end to it,
it's in vain that we dug with our fingernails into the mortar, in vain that we've stood
glued to the walls: from over there not a thing could be heard -
in the blind alley of our speech the answer can't be worked out yet.

and only seldom have we opened our eyes and then merely to see
how there are poured over us as if over coffins
tons of unknown. and right then we closed them back up
quickly and we said it's not true, we are still alive, i still am alive, he lives
he lives - i touched the one who was lying next to me
he is alive - he turned over in his sleep he laughed he sighed.

you really believe we haven't been heard in any other room
which we didn't have time to enter?
either the room was not yet walled up or nobody lived in there yet
or those who will come to live in it will show up too late or
were there but didn't hear us when we knocked on the walls or others
knocked on the walls too then and they alone were heard
or we didn't notice when we stepped from one room into another
from one basement into another or we didn't want to break down the walls
of the last room out of fear not to, or we couldn't imagine that beyond
that basement there could be other rooms, lit other than by
this lye pouring through the cracks of the back door
or the front doors were not yet walled in and no other
room was yet walled in over there -

then we rushed voraciously back upon own body,
we went downstairs and pulled furiously the trap doors above us -
in a fury as if in a province of self-forgetfulness
as in the womb of a woman from which we shouldn't have ever
come out.

Ioan Es. Pop, excerpt from " you really believe we are not more than we are here", **The Livid Worlds

as long as it's night here
over there it will be morning

great things will be said tomorrow,
but not as great as for the world
not to remain the same.

you brought keys bigger than the doors
that must be opened.
there is so much noise behind, on the corridors,
and how little one can hear here!

maybe we advanced more than we should have.
maybe the last in the line have found the exit
exactly where we came in.
maybe, pulled away from the hinges,
the room took off away from us.

and we put keys in left and right
search for doors that don't exist,
we insist in not ever raising our eyes.

where shouldn't we have entered? from where
shouldn't we have gotten out?
the friend says this summer will be long
and that the wars will be put off again,
because birth have been again
too few this year.
therefore once more will remain only the war against oneself.

now, good night. day breaks here too.
the room drew back from us long ago,
and we keep groping even now with the keys for the doors.

what are you doing? you put your key between my ribs.
you wanna get in? are you struggling to get out?
or only to open and nothing more?

i told you: outside it is summer and it's sunny.
outside there is no longer what you thought.
get out of my bedclothes, i come from hell
and my flesh is burning with horror.

Ioan Es. Pop, **The Livid Worlds

I can hear violins, violins
Give me all of that ultraviolence*
Lana Del Rey

only you can explode gentle supernovas
in my hands
when the space is forever expanding
between us
until the night comes out of its womb
pure

I don't know what love is
I just know how to take people inside
with their delicate shivers waiting to be seen
I let them use me like a stranger,
like a pillar, like a craw scare,
like a gentle touch , like forgotten certainty
I undress their dying souls in my silence
I remain in the hurt
I struggle  to spare the blinded of my words
only because there is a girl
I cannot let go
with her wonder eyes
carrying the river of blood
or dreaming of the brightness
of the others might

I don't know what love is
I only know the shape of my heart
with every man
with every woman
I recognize inside

"Every teardrop is a waterfall"

there is something in sight
some layers inside
the pain of worthlessness
under hatred
corroding the scared ribs

there are acts of seduction
in every corner of a smile
to undress the dead
from theirs spirits

there is the specter of ******
screaming in between the shields
tempting to posses life itself

tenderness is a foreign language
in the cravings of the night
or this is just the long way of love
waking up the leaving

there is something in sight:
the day working against itself
while somebody is learning
how sweet
it is to hate

but life is not that complicated
when you love
what you hate

spring will come
when the wind is young
and the harvest of hopes
still awaits for the unspoken

i am sitting at the funeral of my heart
while it is so busy to bloom
into the silence of stones

keep on pushing Push the sky away*
Nick Cave & The Bed Seeds

reality is patched
with evolving truths
waning and waxing
between love and hate

if only the trees would know
how hard can it be…
to live in the shadow of the other
with this infinite desire

What do my bones know
about the longing for eternity?
what becomes of truth
if you cannot recognize the simplicity of freedom
in our lungs?
What about the liberty of life
to feed its own destruction?

There is violence in an unknown god’s plans
There is mercy
if you still find a beating heart
in the contractions of pain
and then there may be hope
for some freedom -
to be or not to be
(growing, learning, loving, hating, stepping back,
stepping forward, you please fill in the blanks)

Only together we can bear the sky
we should learn from the woods
how to love the human form
Undivine

In the spaces silent with possibilities
there is contact there is emptiness
“like fire, like panic, like love,
like water, like revolt”

Meteorites are passing following their love
we know we are beautiful when we are alive

how many people do I hold in my breath?
how many lives in my veins?
I do go gently into that good night
(thank you Dylan, meet you there)
To my good aged mothers
To my good aged fathers
To unfold the creases of time

Blinks of eternity they were
Carrying the weight of days
So that my tomorrow
Can be

At dawn the earth gently curves
Giving darkness a name
And I bent over the horizon
In a heart reverence
To my good old mothers
To my good old fathers

Their curses  sculpted the clay
Which I tread on
They planted  their harsh truths
With eagerness, with tears,
With oblivion or patience
And I wonder how the wind
Touched them
How the dust molded
Their wrinkles
How the darkness hid them
From themselves

My mother had a mother
My father had a father
They were young
They were wild
Their dreams ripened
In the sun

And then…
Their living gods
Their violins accompanied
By failure
Their praying to the sea,
To the rain, to the springs
To the sweetness of grapes

Their bones sing in my dreams

It is their right
To be touched
by the waxing
and waning
of time
and love cannot be
without
Innocence

From the deep anxiety of dawn
the grove of trees unveils.
Sad awakenings.
Leaves, sister leaves,
I hear your lament.
Autumns,
moribund sweetness.
O youth,
the hour of growth is barely past.
High skies of youth
impetuous freedom.
And I am already desert.
Caught on this melancholy arc.
But night scatters distances.
Oceanic silences,
astral nests of illusion,
O night.

when i watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when i watch you
in your old man’s shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week’s grocery
i say
when i watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
i stand up
through your destruction
i stand up

There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
She will not walk away and leave these bones
to an old woman.

She is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
She is a greeen girl in a used poet.

She has waited patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the **** wonder of it.

A night is born
full of false holes
dead sounds
like the corks
of nets trailed in the water.

Your hands bring a breath
of inviolable distances
as elusive as ideas.

And the ambiguous sway
of the moon, of the gentlest,
if you rest your eyes on me,
touches the spirit.

You’re the woman who passes by
like a leaf.

And bequeaths an autumn flame to the trees.