My flesh has become a candle
But I am a flame in a transparent sky,
Like dead birds,
I will weigh more than when alive.

The burning eye feeds on wax
and makes a few hot beads drip down
Once I learned to fly, once
I had proof, but I remember having flown.

My whole body is a candle
All will pass into dust in the end
The flame will melt into the blue
And you will feel the burn on your hand.

**Adrian Popescu

This sacred sadness of the clouds
painted on the window pane.
This end of a century
splashed all over the walls!
The evening flowing down streets like heavy water...

...Who opened these windows in our foreheads,
who built these
secondary doors in our chests?
I walk inside me as if in a diseased season.
I hear mother’s voice from beyond the dark wall:
Why are you here,
why have you come back?
Go, out with you while there is still time.

I hear my elder brother’s voice as if muffled by water:
Get out of this light as soon as you can
and leave me alone
to breathe in my own shadow...

Whose faces are preserved here,
in this putrid evening light?
What season are a thousand
cut-off heads waiting for?
Whose arms will be sown in the field,
whose teeth will grow in the grass?

I walk across myself as if I were some strange season.
With Yorick’s skull in my hands, I wonder:
If I have reaped
where and what was it I reaped?
And if I harvest, when, whom am I harvesting?

**Nichita Danilov

much to be learned from the edge of dreaming
from the threshold of time about
inaudible histories, leftovers of
the real or imagined
they gave me the demand for truth
the truth they kept hiding inside the lesions of light
and now I have this excess of subjectivity
to confront, to join the dance
one cannot speak about
history remains trapped inside nails
like a circus of hungry ghosts risking
Descartes' error

The ashes of time must fall
somewhere
they fall inside the red
urn of my heart

I must forget I am a poet
this day I am speeding
towards a sure mark

the words I am uttering
are the tears
of the man I was
and died

a devil with
a long tail
is kicking up dust
I can't make out the heavens

Dan Laurentiu, *101 Poems

I feel free for a while now
my shadow turned into a fountain
I am one with myself and
the darkest shade of blue
I carry no longer empty hands
his shadow her shadow
patience makes the shoes lighter
I imprison myself when I see only
halves of colour

I feel free to have fried chicken
and a salad now
I have only my own destiny
to carry around

I am deep into the dark forests of the soul
where everything is hyperreal
me is not me you is not only you
too much is together and the mind just a narrow stream
I am listening to the old cries as if souls are passing through me,
as if I need to understand what the birds are saying to each other

the route to understanding is through this dense unknown
and when I might find it I leave it guarded by the certainty of clouds passing by
so hard to see inside your mind inside your kind inside your bones
aliveness is a killer, the mind has its own temperature
the body already knows everything I have to find the vitally wise language
I feel the natural dance of the opposites, the flight and the fall, I need some other dimensions though to get out the whirlwind
feelings flow like the contour of a distant lighthouse distant fire distant aurora,
the silence of the light a true companion for conversations in the dark

Speak, you also,
speak as the last,
have your say.

Speak -
But keep yes and no unsplit,
And give your say this meaning:
give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,
give it as much
as you know has been dealt out between
midday and midday and midnight,

Look around:
look how it all leaps alive -
where death is! Alive!
He speaks truly who speaks the shade.

But now shrinks the place where you stand:
Where now, stripped by shade, will you go?
Upward. ***** your way up.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer.
Finer: a thread by which
it wants to be lowered, the star:
to float further down, down below
where it sees itself glitter:
on sand dunes of wandering words.

by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger

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

Things distance themselves from one another
in a desperate halo
your loneliness is an echo,
rolled between my ribs.

The table is going round
The walls are bleeding
blood is pouring from the chair
where I sit back;
piles of clothes
like some famished birds
are collapsing from
a perpetually cold sky.

Nichita Danilov, from  *It Might Take me Years

there was a time before time or
so it goes that time was full of air and
memory not yet a galaxy of space atoms
the enchanted body had already started dreaming
a time without shape or direction
I was a body without horizon cause my mind
was only a dream in someone else's mind
(-the only route to some truth is through the unknown-
the mind is only an abyss of time in the beginning)

there was a time when only the touch was real,
a space of rapture and dread, of quietness and falling
into the rythms of the air
secretly in the depth of skin, of heart and joints
new sprouts were growing to keep the inside inside
and outside outside
certainty was just the feeling of (in)security inside an endless body
and your time was my time and my time was your time
each second a simetry cause time loved us

now that time creates a new dimension for each direction
I can thank my heart for being in love with the pain of being born  of time

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

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

Language thus becomes an instrument of "spirituality", that is to say, of the direct transmutation of desires and emotions into presences and powers that become "realities" in themselves, without the intervention of physically adequate means of action.

Paul Valery, from "I would sometimes say to Mallarme..."

For the kids the first ending of the world.
For the cat a new Master.
For the dog a new Mistress.
For the furniture stairs, thuds, my way or the highway.
For the walls bright squares where pictures once hung.
For the neighbors new subjects, a break in the boredom.
For the car better if there were two.
For he novels, the poems - fine, take what you want.
Worse with encyclopedias and VCR's,
not to mention the guide to proper usage,
which doubtless holds pointers on two names -
are they still linked with the conjunction "and"
or does a period divide them.

Wislawa Szymborska from Here New Poems
translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh

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

my love is an aborted child, I do not shed the same tears, only the same skin saddled with puzzles inside the intersection of presence and absence. the outcome of irrational congruence being yourself all day long is not enough you my pain don’t really matter to me silences fall between my fingers or was it too loud when I asked to be touched?  I am not able of speaking about love today with a mouth full of noises all hiding places are equal to themselves only you my pain defy definitions although they call me primitive.( theory says I am supposed to have grown up to live by the standards of a self-controlled open system)
but you my pain are well aware, I am still primitive, ultraviolent when I laugh, when I cry, when I refuse to let go of the ****** horizons, of foreign faiths, the end of all dying days, the mixture of their cravings and solitude
they are caring their bows in the honour of their truths my pain looks so pale among so many others. This is my pain in honour of your pain.  This is one way of loving the sellers of illusions yes, I have to own the arrest warrant for my heart someday

yes, this pain is a proud beggar

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

"Oh, tranquility
Penetrating the very rock,
A cicada's voice."
Matsuo Basho

I was broken, how much do I have to say?
my first taste of the air, a tornado
I wear my mind full of cracks, of strange attractors,
the chaos of the blue lives there,
some collage of potting soil and beauty
my tears are round like an explosion
my hips an extension of tenderness
I was broken beyond despair beyond repair
white birds in my smile going to far away places
in search for their shape
when nobody sees me my hands are full of laughter, of dance, of forgetting, no need to take myself too seriously

I am broken and I like to feel
my fragments caressed by
the morning air, by his sleepy hands,
or the passersby's careless looks

maybe the earth knows or
the body knows first
what he or she dares
immersed in sunsets
and adverbs
lions make themselves
prey in blue windows
outside the fle/ash  of words
the verbs of the world
inside a shepherd whistles
a love song
to the sweetness of grass

If only, if only a small red fish would come
  show his golden eyes above the apathetic ocean and ask me
to make three wishes, to have three dreams I can’t come up with one

If only, if only the tides would come, burning
  to wash us off the shore, to take us, wrap us
and bury us like amnesiac seeds in its warm *****, its vast womb

If it came as an enormous face, a shining face
  to look us in the eye, to draw us into its blinding mirror,
to make us press our mouths to its vast lips, and into its huge blue eye
  retreat and rest...

If only, if only something, someone, anything, anyone would come,
    a ray of dark apocalyptic light, an effervescent narcotic toxin,
a new shiver, a new anxiety, a leap into a different world,
    if only there could be another man, another wisdom, a new thought
to think us all          to deliver us from ourselves, to abolish us

and we cease, universe, souls, if only we could endure the birthing pain

to sleep... die... sleep... to rise again into Imagination...

Magda Carneci from *My Cup of Light

as elusive
as unstoppable
as the Heraclitean wave
around a jug
with the dark void at its core

Ioana Ieronim, from *The Lens of a Flame

a raw light today
undecided to retreat its hope
from the mystery of leaves
I'm watching the clouds dissolve
into something larger than themselves
I'm watching my hands, how
their screaming is giving myself to me

the light without name will go its way
so we become waves not deceiving
the sea

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

today is a straightforward day
when the light lends me some essence
the foliage is getting more ardent
the daymon of thought less voracious
the sky is self-contained
this path or that path insists not to leave any trace
inside, today is just another day stolen from the void of mistery
I am wearing all my loves as one in my wrinkles
pneuma stories if you look straight into the rain of photons
and yes, my chest is still the nest of a hurricane

a fearless incantation in my watery hands
that show you things you don't wanna know
about the fluidity of bones
I imagine with my fingers poems  you've never
asked for cause happiness is a bitter woman for you
take me back home from the land of noise
keep me in your armpit like the shadow of a smile

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

Of patience, I know only
what sea turtles have taught me:
how they are born on lightless
beaches so the moon can serve
as a beacon to lure them
into the water; how they spend
their whole lives trying to swim
towards it, enamored, obsessed;
how they flap their forelimbs,
a vague recollection of flying -
the right movement in the wrong
medium, as if they knew how
to reach the moon in a former life
but now only remember the useless
persistent motions; how if you cut
one's heart out it would keep
beating in the pit of your palm,
recognizing the cold night air.

by Ariel Francisco from Best New Poets 2016 50 Poems from Emerging Writers

hear listen to the sound
of the crisp snow spinning the air
say hello where are you
say farewell to the old moon
while rivers are carrying their quiet darkness
and all the poems untouched
by emptiness
remake or retake
get drunk with lucidity
get high as the wind passing through
untold stories

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.

They dug and they dug, so their day
went by for them, their night. And they did not praise
          God
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, knew all this.

They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
thought up for themselves no language,
They dug.

There came a stillness, and there came a storm,
and all the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too,
and that singing out there says: They dig.

O one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you,
and on our finger the ring awakes.

by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger

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

"Science and art are like arms and heart. So many accidents of meaning, art is in heart, and so is hear, ear, art as a form of heart hearing."
Michael Eigen

I didn't want to open that door
nevertheless life did it for me
residues of this old combustion
pits of rage you're carring
for their perfumed names
humiliation at every corner of the street
suspicion of the sunrise

I remember or maybe I dreamt it
two sons looking for their father
he chose other walls full of zest
holy days were a laughter
indiference for the son rise

how chalenging to be a man hiding vulnerability
there was no one to show you how to
keep the balance of seeing and feeling and forgetting
there was no one to show me my edges
for good Gods to dwell and feast on life unhindered

You pass through light searching for me.
From the way you don't see me
not even when I take the shape of a cry,
I understand that your supreme triumph will be death.
Despair is an empty space
in which no one meets no one.
Despair is an autumn in which
the highest peaks are strangling each other.
Where can you be?
It's as though my days have slipped away
in a shrill season
of no one,
and no one can recall
what light flashed across their faces.

Carmelia Leonte from *City of Dreams and Whispers

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

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

this is my city, all mine.
the houses, transparent, have no doors
and i see myself inside them all.
i walk down the streets, the streets are alive,
they change shape, keep taking me
somewhere else.
i come to a bridge: the other bank doesn’t exist,
there’s nothing beyond the bridge.
i’m looking for the church, i can’t find it —
the church is liquid and it flows.
a few dogs are running towards the still-bleeding,
still-beating, heart of an angel.
it’s neither day nor night —
there’s only the fascinating ray of death, shining.
a huge word is hurled from the skies,
smashes us to pieces
me and my city.

**Gabriel Chifu

under the voiceless sky I become
more and more allusive, myself and me
my selves dissolve in hematopoiesis
the economy of loneliness abolished
I want my heart to be a public space
an agora for your dreams or theirs
societal connections make people real
although thinking does hurt, I swear,
but we'll get used to it,
to the incommensurability of Reality

love is a constant state of meeting the other
of meeting ourselves like light meets the grass

I contemplate the horizon as a broken puzzle
yet aflame the sessions of thought
Eros is singing to the raging gods
the seeds of future mixed with the atoms of the past
the layers of history unreadable
we play games with the invisible
in between thoughts transparent vibrant walls
in between you and you, some fragments
in between myself and I, fault lines and vital figments
the mirror gaze an oxymoron in the beginning
a mistery the spin of fragments
that's all I can say for now since
the soul of language is hidden inside
untraceable rhythms of silence
true passion is shattering the body of time
it brokens the one into many, it fuses the many into one
in the seed we are a cosmic creature breathes
perhaps the void of the sky is dreaming its memories
or a sweet lullaby

It's possible to look on the world
through:
the magnifying glasses of wonder
the diminishing glasses of despair
through fingers, through tears
the black-, the blue-, and rose-coloured spectacles
through a keyhole
the piece of glass for observation of sun-eclipse
the barrel of a rifle
and through thousand hollow-glasses
of the Auschwitz-Museum.

by. Henryk Jasiczek translated from the Polish by Adam A. Zych

I am black with love
neither boy nor nightingale
intact as a flower
I yearn without desire.

I arose amid violets
at the day’s first light,
sang a song forgotten
in the unchanging night.
I said to myself: “Narcissus!”
and a spirit with my face
darkened the grass
with the glow of his curls.

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

where the air has no memory
for the mountains to keep growing
I welcome the arrival of the birds,
the promise of fresh myths
the seduction is the constancy of the heartbeat, for me
the intensity of dreams stronger than ever
dreams that willingly transmute themselves  into reality

I welcome those walking the path of love
now that I finally start to see the unseen of the horizon
no more endings confused with beginnings
this is the secret garden where my heart
is growing wiser bolder deeper even more eager
to surrender herself to the sweet craziness of the world
to the thoughtfulness of mornings
anew

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

When you dream you are an author but you do not know how it will end.
Cesare Pavese

a broken view the horizon
careless the blood chronicles
you can see me through the prism
of your yearnings
a lost god has forgotten your name
I'm waiting now and then wordless
for the Renaissance of desire

let's believe winter
and the sledgehammer that
protects the flame of night
there are layers upon layers upon layers
mixing mingling confusing combining
colluding to obscure the dawn of mind
all is together and yet only fragments
roam around searching
for their other half in the poliphony of darkness

he is a spinning man
he spins himself into laughter into tears
powerful visions and sweet oblivion
while rushing outside of days
to find his spin
searching for a new vibration
an incantation of the living
while light is improvising in his shoulders

there are spaces in between the patterns
thare are hidden passages in between the thoughts
he is busy to explode
or maybe these are the leather hands of his father,
full of transactions
I see smiles killed before meaning
the magma of danger in the secret chambers
some white lies, blue lies
purple lies never
he is a hunter reading the signs of miracle
cunning as an uninvented night

I see him in a dark room
full of waves of moaning
and sometimes silence attacks him
with thousands blades
and he can't bear himself
by himself
with these heavy startles

I see him in the dark room
camera obscura
developing the image
of his unknown heart
of silence
lightness
true laughter

the quest for meaning, the passsage of time, my hunger for you while I keep myself composed, dream days and reparation, tears of intense wonder, never mind the order cause life is a verb. So many different mirrors of the same passion we were handed over in the hallucination of hours, in the mist of nights, in the depths of cups & palms, or of unborn words.

something twinkles
tingles quivers
in warm hands
in stuck feet
something moves
an eyebrow or a lip
the wavelength of hope
or void
we need the world
we need each other
badly

we invent sinking
swimming & drowning
in this density
we face adversity and fear
how we can
dancers dream
with their feet
mourners dream
with rivers
haters dream
in the silence of tombs

we go outside of ourselves
to find the world
inside
there is creativity
in healing

what if everyday
is a poem
in this fluid
called life

There is no space wider than that of grief
there is no universe like that which bleeds.

from Extravagaria

warehouse of time never complete
never emptied
this wave reached me again
this drilling pain around the navel
i don't recognized anything
my nails  my cries my falling into despair
nevertheless it is my flesh - this warehouse
everything comes together  fused
in the flow of the unknown or unthought known
wavelengths chasing each other
the revenge of forgetting or the impossibility of space
something emanates slips away
when there is not enough body of the mind
which is always the case cause gods get tired
is it the heart that is touched first, I don't know
this energy of mystery
it creates new figments of twilight
new shades of falling
if i let it be it tells me this story
tear down the invisible sites of hurt
for the impossibility of touch of sight of speak
the solution is always poetic,
take shelter it says
inside someone's heart eye
inside fluid worlds of wonder

what if
the warehouse of time
is full of weeping eyes
of buried hearts

the nakedness of words as natural
as the simplicity of grass
I am yours only in front of that roundness
when you see through the blues of fire
I am yours in the silence of moss
when darkness is home
when I claim the body of the rain
and your touch becomes lunatic

some mirrors sewn by my hips
some sewn by my hands
some inside my mind
cause I am strange
some songs remain the same
I hear this again
I am too sensitive
too serious
too vocal
too tired
too absent or too silent?
too crazy (but what do you mean?)
I am scarry, she said, but fascinating
well, loneliness is not fascinating
I wanna shout but I refrain myself
from this refrain
it can be a blessing, I agree
but wait, there's more
cause I speak some bizarre words
bizarre as in the byzantium
although I try to keep it as simple
as the milk foam on your lips

yes, this is my language
and these are my days
to be too much of myself
exactly as I am in each breath
each step and each cry
as strange as any creature
that has ever walked under
the light tide

if you find me too strange
you can look the other way