“when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.” Grace Paley

fall into me
on blackout days
for something beautiful
is here is everywhere
is nowhere
you knew it
Borges used it
beauty is a physical sensation
the axis mundi piercing
the palms of my hands

memory like a gipsy woman
who reads palms
beauty, yes, it draws the soul
ascetic
I figured it out in the smiling of your sleep
like babies smile to angels, they say
this game that keeps us alive is hers
golden beetles die for it
of for the love of dust

pastimes of gods its archives
everyday the light tastes differently
the body moves where the mind is
or the other way round
I'll read Cartarescu to you half naked
one page a day

beauty is the quest,
this spiral of wonder
filling up the rest &
my nails

we use or misuse each other
we don't ask as often as needed
the eye of the needle
the sky is closer
storms are wiser
waters sleep in the seeds of wind
everything so holy entangled
sweet deceit in lustry illusions
glamour for amour
cover up for unforseen
the unbearable unknown
everything so wise
like the eagerness of colts

So it goes, said Vonnegut

casually I am your anything
a strange causality a presence
this cocoon of desire
of course, urgent lover
next day another mirror
friend in the afternoon
a simple woman in the morning
slippery oblivion by midnight
unearthed hieroglyph
all night wide
foe and moan &
foam of laughter
SOS in a bottle
but not of wine
******* from time to time
not a dime piece, but she is
a penny for your thoughts it is
you can make and you can take
the cinema on/of my skin
let's speak with our ribs
for the sake of mimes
I could be your slave, but wait
when bus sirens fade away

incandescence is my name,
the patience of graves
of grapes

"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!)

to A.C.
"Love is a wave
Inside our bodies"

we want to give it all away
give it to our shadow
heaviness, breath, despair
our shadows so thin so tormented by light
we are the contour of our tears
often times you happen to yourself
and some bliss in the depth of
fiercely found wisdom

there is so much space in our eyes
for the world to shiver anew to pass
through us like the shadow of light
you want to be held in the space of a heart
we need more space in the eye of the other for
our shadows to play unhindered in the quiet light

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

the social pace manic in its self-absortion, possession facing possession and what if
the world risks collapsing under the weight of its own irony:
a hedonic frame of mind so devoid of the ******* of life
the tyranny of desire is teaching **** to the naked eyes
a culture stops breathing if it can't let go of its desires to find them again
nothing to be destroyed cause everything is dismantling slowly

going right or left it's the same but not in any corner of the world
the leftovers of God, tautologies in a straightjacket,
cause one has meetings all day but no sleep all night
He/She/They colonize you with the scripture of profit
everything has its price on the expence of being enlivened
some don't have water, others too much of an illusion
some don't have peace, others have haute couture
some haven't eaten, others have molecular cuisine
some have the shelter of the sky, others listen to the echo of Big Bang
this logic of contrast is dreaming of the creativity of decay and
what if politics has become a narcosis, a  drunkenness of words,
while the wisdom of trauma is hidden in billboards,
the text says Politics of Happiness or Diserotica

the depressive society fools itself with the financial ****** of disconnected bodies in search of the last noise of the day
the space of the mind  broken by narrow horizons
the flesh and bone might turn into a virtual dimension

yet
the soul of the world flickers, it covers its solar plexus until we meet again as brothers and sisters of the trees
just because you feel good doesn't mean that
the world feels good too

this simplicity
of being
not afraid
to be caught
with wind
in your pockets

a shy sunrise over the hills
the quietness of frozen earth
dead leaves blessed with crystal
delicate magic
pine trees, white fir trees,
like untouchable heights
of my garden
the cherry tree dreaming
of cherries and the birds
in the sky
and my heart cracked opened
by the crisp wonder
of a winter spirit

some waves just pass through me
I let them touch other surfaces
they got carried away by the breeze
or the lament of seaguls
my architecture or the scripture
no wonder the receptivity
but only if you feel the field
to understand the predator
merge with one
to understand a bird
feel the weightless air
to understand a flower
dream its sensitivity
to understand the ******* of dawn
let yourself be devoured
there is empty space
in the great chain of being
oh, how mimetic everything is
lust doesn't last, it isn't so obvious
nor the craving for shining surfaces
as an empty screaming in raw beats
it tastes like sand in the eyes to me

I can see more and more
the spinning of burned eyes
I won't let myself be
devoured by a false premise
no, no need no worries
beauty is the mother of
the night when
every wall shouts
our name
leave the door open
leave the seduction
to me

let your skin
surrender
to the labyrinth
untranslatable
let me be in love
with the sunstone
you'll find the right
melody
to leave beauty
unharmed

I’ve written on a flyleaf: I hate you, mon amour
with hard working passion I hate you.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe, your father have told you.

you’ve been so busy to cut the day off from the night
-quite an old fashion-
and just when the silence evacuates  its void to be the great pretender
perhaps Magritte had dreams about annihilation to compensate a ******
but I was dreaming of you sleeping with lions

I’ve felt your cage – the splitting of now and then into so many suspicions –
unbearable waking hour -  I wake up in the dark and I can see that I love you

when the hour gently subsides to the moon
and I can find no comfort in haunting memories
I pray to the air to touch my lips with your gaze

We are the terraced women
piled row on row on the sagging, slipping hillsides of our
                                                                                               lives.
We tug reluctant children up slanting streets
the push chair wheels wedging in the ruts
breathless and bad tempered we shift the Tesco carrier bags
                                                                          from hand to hand
and stop to watch the town

The hill tops creep away like children playing games

our other children shriek against the school yard rails
‘there’s Mandy’s mum, John’s mum, Dave’s mum,
Kate’s mum, Ceri’s mother, Tracey’s mummy’
we wave with hands scarred by groceries and too much
                                                                                   washing up
catching echoes as we pass of old wild games

after lunch, more bread and butter, tea
we dress in blue and white and pink and white checked
                                                                                          overalls
and do the house and scrub the porch and sweep the street
and clean all the little terraces
up and down and up and down and up and down the hill

later, before the end-of-school bell rings
all the babies are asleep
Mandy’s mum joins Ceri’s mum across the street
running to avoid the rain
and Dave’s mum and John’s mum – the others too – stop
                                                                                                for tea
and briefly we are wild women
girls with secrets, travellers, engineers, courtesans, and stars
                                                                                 of fiction, films
plotting our escape like jail birds
terraced, tescoed prisoners rising from the household dust
like heroines.

Pennyanne Windsor, from *Poetry 1900-2000 One hundred poets from Wales

my winter eyes are epic
emptied of the seduction
of never dying days
for now
but
still looking for an incantation:
this field this wave this sway
this maze this daze
the soul's substance
untranslatable
allusive
perfumed

some find it in the dark recesses
some insist it doesnt't exist
I contemplate blankness inside
my skin
my mind just a dream catcher
for illusions
a suspended note
an erasable tape
a network for the delicate architecture of moss
or was it mold?
some words have no heart at all
and we need canyons of tenderness, paths of joy
is it time that is dripping its imagination
in this turmoil?

the irrationality of mornings of violins of drums
strikes a chord inside
what is the basis of harmony?
so many shapes of wonder
on bridges, shores, sidewalks and hills
and valleys of the unknown
full of space atoms

a spirit of a shaman sits beside me
she calls me soul surfer
perhaps
god is
part violence
part beauty
part wonder
and I fall for it
when I find it
in the flesh
of the heart
only

pain loves the present tense
it loves gravity so that the clouds
are turned into geological strata
sometimes I use my hands like an anaesthetic
between right and wrong the pain dillema:
to feel or not to feel (the unknown)
we discover clever remedies or illusions
quiet cannery in the storehouse of flesh

it comes in circles mixtures all kind of names
it has rythm texture electric blackness
each unshed tear an orb of contraction
compulsive excavation of the void inside
sometimes I feel I have canyons of salt in my heart
on the edges of safety so much to learn about terror

this pain is a blind Robinson on Hope island
(with his bare hands he sets pyres in his heart)
was it pain that invented this language, these holy wars?
love you, hate you, nonsense, can't stand it anymore
I know my father lied to me that he doesn't feel pain

bodies in pain can't dream the water slide of life
that might take us further away into the night of day
time to say thank you, say farewell,
love everything that simply is
it is time to

silence was improvising in my eyes
in this tender fog between one moment
and this moment
and I could see the old love approaching
to invade me
to intoxicate me
with its hypnotic violence
this love like a fossilized wood in their gaze
came to visit me
again
with so many faces
so many whispers
it was as if angels had descended
on the barren land and
with their unthought hands
were tenderly carressing
the old bones unsung
what else could have I done
than
open my eyes and dream
the palimpsest of forgotten dreams
forged in the greatest intensity
of all the fleeting moments
in which
they blinked

(I need to shelter my heart from
the silence of decaying leaves
from the violence of life destroying
itself)

today
a strange milky light
rolling over the hills
like a blinding blanket
I caressed naked branches
their fragility a statement
plum trees apple trees
peach trees cherry trees
and I a witness
to the dignity with which
they carry their wounds
I love trees because
their shadow is not full
of bitterness.
perhaps
they know how to cry
for the absence of wonder

you see
much is going on
beyond words:
all of me and
this tree
feel
there is a depth
in everything

my imagination
suffers from excess
yesterday in a dream
I said that I sleep
I ordered personalized matchboxes
I saw the sea
in a plate from soup
I heard how a baton
conducts the conductor
I saw a breast
****** by a child
I uncovered a naked surgeon
on my operating table
and I recognized the voice of ******
among those gassed in auschwitz

by Volker W. Degener translated from the German by Adam A. Zych with Andrzej  Diniejko
from The Auschwitz Poems an anthology edited by Adam A. Zych

silence, heat, witnessing and forgetting, waiting, dried flowers in my hearing, they all grow wiser in the light that doesn't stop growing
shhh, I don't want to disturb you when your body is dreaming

rip me from my bones
as a sensuous dress in the haste of dawn
such  is the seduction
of your fingertips

in your gaze my breast
is ripening

undress me of the silence
enclosing  freedom
yours is the night
make me collapse
into daylight

“their mental state contains something lethal:
past, nothing but past” Nikolay Y Ossipov

you measured your height
with the mountains
your fists with the howl
of lonely wolves
to avoid helplessness stupidity confusion:
the all too encompassing human nature

I no longer want to keep you
in the alternative dimension
guarding your wholeness
I'll let you fall into pieces
I'll let you die the death destined
to you
instead of crushing him
or imploding myself
for him to rearrange his fragments
for me to hope for all the levels
of coherence
I/we are capable of

bodies afraid or in love are the most intense
I want my body back
from your battlefield of delusions
your pain is not my pain
your despair is not mine
your manic refusal of touch
is still my manic capacity
to love wounds tragedies
aborted laughter
some words are mirrors
I'll keep writing to you
till there is no escape
from the clarity
of dawn:
all my love is of
no real use
to you

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 sea is sighing like a woman
and I can hear its breath
of a hunted man
nearby yellow flowers
wild stones
salt drops stinging my arms
two seagulls dart out of my eyes
and fly side by side
speaking to each other over water
like human beings
in the absence of love

Carmen Firan
translated by Andrei Bantas

a moonless bird
in a storm without center
some things hardly
come undone
emptiness dissolves
surfaces contours
plastic hands scream
in distant dreams
dystopia belongs
to daylight in a world
devoid of shadows of thought
unable really to recognize
the gap between their eyes
in between me and anti-me
tyrants dream disembodied worlds
angels have not yet been invented
no more black words
in mugs by the window

the propensity of deadness
as real as the decay of sonnets
one cannot see one's steps
in bruised forests

I am singing a lullaby
to my emptied hands
I bow to this force
the starvation of life
the oblivion of the pulse
in which time grows

imagine infinity, tenderness, a suave delta
the touch of amber whispers
archaic thrill
higher&higher; into devotion
light decompressed in desire
the discipline of time in terror

I stumble in this yielding silence
you're an ****** field
held captive in the fabric of my skin
darkness spins around my thighs
I kneel
I ignite in a prayer to a self-dissolving god
inside the temple of your ribs

dance my raving one,
dance
this is an offering
a mayday in trance
the night has reached from afar
its solar desire

Oh, Woman
He’s dreaming of your depth
like a synergy of effortless truths
your imaginary ***, a mystical shore
waxing and waning in violent tides
of affectionate sap
He would fly his kite running out of breath
like a child blessed with forgetting
puer aeternus
He would spin the hours in laughter,
in untamed visions
and here it is...
time revisited with gossamer touch
the bestiary revised with tender beings
making love  in the naked air
in the breeze of forgotten forests
in purple shy sheets
in the miracle of tomorrow
in unshed skins
imagine the bliss of the first breath
the dreams in geological strata

She’s just waiting for your rhyme
for you in primordial waters
unborn
now and again

It is you whom I love today. I love you with all my loves.*
Frida Kahlo

screaming gold and exulting light
I betrayed the sunset today
still life without promises the city
there comes that tone again
in the storehouses of flesh
where life dreams itself
you’ve colonized me
with hate and desire
unstable tempo
my eyes blind
like a storm without wind
I disfigured some light today
its unpretended beauty
no paradox
not even a surprise
I fall for these wounds, your burden
the taste of failure
the panic of not knowing
the trembling of your feet
no need for signifying something
for an ending or a touch
there is love without desire
desire without love
you can call me crazy
if this is all
you can say
at the end of the day

in the depth of human tragedy
there is also this dillema
of tyranny
that either the truth or the lie
is going to crash the tyrant

they play reality games
and
the delusion will end in catastrophe
but
how much of the world is going to take with it?

spring is in a rush this year,
to affirm the rationality
of life

she has always been much closer
than my palms, my fingerprints.
my prints leave a dam, a stony wail of my being outside in the matter,
but she leaves this dam inside me,
this stony wail, like a secret killing,
she has left her fingerprints everywhere in me.
she is inside of me and I am outside of her, all around her,
the walls, the garden,
the unmistakable halo of the town, the photon crowns
of houses. I am all around her,
outside, one of her fingerprints,
the fingerprint of this dam, this stony wail in the matter.

Ion Mircea, from My Cup of Light
translated by Lidia Vianu and Anne Stewart

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

I can howl  in words but
I say it gently instead, no, fiercely,
first to myself and to him and to her
to you if necessary and to them
for as long as it takes
why and how and what
 how come and when and what for
how is my mind, I ask even the wind
this is what I usually play on repeat
why these thoughts images feelings
sensations movements words and deeds
everything is together but not always apparent
cause we are trapped inside the curvature of  mind
evolving in tunnels unexcavated trenches
breaking loose on wider routes only when there is time
our thought trapped on certain orbits of habit
on the available energetic level at one time
the same way as our well behaved atoms spin their wonder
the same way as everything is evolving into its waterfall

imagination is the way I play with myself,
with you and them and the world
for destroying the habit of seeing hearing interpreting
we play language games everytime
we don't use the right thoughts for emerging bulshit
straightforward bullets deepening confusions
deceptions limitations judging&comparing
seduction of half truths and easy routes
or inventing enemies
so ask questions get answers
ask the same questions get other answers
I allow my mind to flow in unknown spaces
only because I learn from those
who attempt true learning
I am really forced to listen rather carefully
to the music of thinking
but about this in another poem
for now I'm listening to these feelings
and it might get unbearable
to recognize the disintegration of the night
information everywhere you look
you can wear your thoughts as your shoelace
or you can envision perhaps this poliphony of meaning
cause thought is no other than a form of relating everything to everything else
there are crystals of meaning cause we need more facets
they need to be smashed and reinvented
don't be afraid the riverbed will stay pretty much the same
it's fine to know what you know and there
is so much that we don't
we are not innocent creatures in not knowing
only sometimes perhaps
we need to listen to our deeper thoughts
who is the dancer who is the dance

what about this pain, always this pain
I don't know if you know
that turns the marriage of body&mind into
the marriage of heaven&hell,
as Blake put it

some don't believe in the Gulag of the mind
so the fate of the unconscious is to repeat itself
when it is just the psychoanalytic bulshit
they don't need they don't care they protest against
you see there is also this sweet sweet desire for not knowing

perhaps I am waiting for my mind
your mind/the collective mind
to embrace me
to embrace you
to embrace itself

the sea fills me up till there is no more space for dying
thoughts turn themselves into a boundless edge
the wind tells me there is only wonder
seashells have forgotten the stories of the depth
my hands want  to rediscover their dreaming
wild birds try the geometry of the sky
and whispers they become

"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

so much silence in the promise of a new
green and the heart of the city is waltzing
with never the same sun and I wear
my skin tinged with the impossible words you never speak
with the thoughts that run away from you towards
an unseen horizon; when you are not careful something
moves up and down drawing an infinity column (the infinite is just the super flow of everything into everything else inventing space and time)
when you are not careful your smile is beautiful
I want you to plant your soul in the soil of
my palms, my feet, into the earth of my bones,
into the hearing of my heart
light is a journey, darkness a story to tell

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.

when I am silent I become the absence of silence
I'm thinkig your body, I'm sensing your mind
my hands rehearse the circle theory,
the openings of the horizon hiding in plain sight
time plus time is a world without hyperbole,
but the courage of enchantment
even the fields dream about the all in one
cause it's poppies time and panta rhei

to kindness, to knowledge,
we make promises only; pain we obey.
Marcel Proust

I was born into this world
of people without
guardian angels but
loveless pockets
no body to see how
pain was incessantly
turned into tombstones
a carousel of masks and
defeated laughter
blinded by deceitful colours.
triumphant sidewalks not afraid
to be crushed by the weight of
humiliated bodies.
-he was secretly dreaming
how vanilla ice-cream would taste
on her lips-
people got used to bringing their thoughts
to the drug stores
as if walking their pets
weeping was incomprehensible
forbidden by law.
-she was secretly dreaming
of him smelling like tobacco,
white musk and cedarwood -


this world survived because of
all the hidden dimensions,
perhaps.
I was handed over a disembodied world
to dream of but
the metaphors were of
no use
to moonless people
their hands paralyzed.
oh, can anybody see?
the unspoken terror
that time stood still.
-I was secretly dreaming of destroying
this world with fresh words, with
the craziness of feeling alive-

I inherited the secret passion
of some unknown promises and
never-whispered desires
the only teacher I could find -
my manic heart
unbearable the pains of
growing a mind.

they wanted to keep it simple:
to cry, to speak, to fall in love.
muted seagulls
loveless alphabets
into this world
waiting for the sun to shed
its hidden self
of blindness

It happens
more and more rarely
in my ankle
run, run, run
catch the streetcar
named desire
(I cry with you Tennessee)

decanting the hours,
a rush  into nowhere
in honeycombed memory
the dregs of days
set my teeth on edge,
deepen the archway
of naked irises
hurled into midnight

It happens
lighter and lighter
in my left shoulder
pierced with sunset
lost in a sparrow

-after **

Everything great on earth
begins as something small.
Lao Tzu

I

Older than China
I am the memory of trees;
sip the earth from me.

I remember mist,
sunlight climbing the steep hills
leaf by silent leaf.

When I was a seed
I was drawn to a raindrop:
we made a strange brew.

Take me in silence;
I am all of the autumn,
cup me in your hands.

Warm in your fingers;
I am moments of quiet in
long conversations.

More than a prayer
on the road with the pilgrims,
by windows in rain.

II

And if you see yourself here,
hand lifting the cup,
imagine these are your leaves:

no curse this winter, then spring,
three months of sadness,
you'll see its shadows haunting.

The house will feel empty, but
then there is passion,
cups left on the floor. Sunlight.


Tony Curtis, Three Songs of Home, The Dedalus Press, Dublin, 1998

*the poem was posted with author's permission

In the silent mornings or in the silent nights
there is a hunch there is a thigh there is a panther
I try to catch your shoulders using a violin
as a butterfly net
but if your hair chimes it's because it's dreaming
if your eyelid blossoms it's because of the wind
if your hand howls it's because it's night
if your ears sleep it's because they're famished
if your shoes laugh it's because they're thinking
and if your shoulders take flight it's because it's very late

If your hand falls silent it's because it's a seashell
if your veins race it's because of the mandrake
if the thigh listens it's because there are still leaves
if the blood foams it's the fault of the umbrellas

If your frock screams it's because it's dying
if your shadow flickers it's because it's burning
if your fingernail sits on the curtains it's because they're violet
if your foot whinnies it's because of the clouds
if the lungs fall asleep it's because it's dark
and if your shoulders choke
it is assuredly because of the trees.

Gellu Naum, Vasco da Gama and other pohems, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2007

“I have loved you so much that I believe I understand you a little.”
Marcel Proust

we are wearing our glowing skins
full of unwoven whispers
or au contraire
we’ll have worn them
-who knows
in poetry, not in theory,
anything is possible-

one of us could say
“take this animal
out of my eyes, teeth, bones
for wild flowers
to grow in my sockets”
and I’ll say:
“for my eyelids to rest
in the shadow of your breath
and my vertigo, indigo
in the nest of your palm"

-words are just riverbeds-

see you - the sea in me
at the echo point
of blood

I’ll wear rivers
lipstick
bluebirds

in this poem of touching
every cell is spinning
its nucleus of *numinosum
while the day breaks open
into the heart of trees

-words are stones of silence,
unintelligible altars-

I was in love
with a vertigo man
last time I checked

blood has its madness

forehead to forehead
and closed eyes

so close that we fall in place
like folds of silk
like folds of wool

like our flesh that knows so much
and can so much
forget

Ioana Ieronim from *Ariadne's Veil

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

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

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

a visceral transparency possesses me
when I face you ferociously gentle
I almost see, my reflection passes efortlessly
through you, I say my hello, mostly genuine
hello, will you stop me from dream thinking
so cruel to observe the still waters knowing all that I know
almost dreamed I was caressing your lips
almost forget you untouched under the eyelids

no deja vu, busy to catch the bus to mercy street
I almost pass by you on the street with my hands
seeing forward

I have ships in my bones they carry me
somewhere else like a misunderstanding cause
the I of the world carries the evening
over the mountains on misterious ways
a nasty habit the imagination
sometimes I wonder if the ancestors are stalking these walls
to see if we can be happy
against the sacrifice of song
cause we die without thinking about it
a little bit every day from this stride
to put everything in its place
inside

for the distance, the blessing and the curse
in this forgetful bed, on this blank page
I sit as quiet as an empty hourglass
so used to contemplate the wounded pride
of desolation
the dilemma in your steps, the missing link
happiness just an eclipse
an accident on unmapped streets
-space is just the exhaustion of time-
worlds of words caught up in their embryo
crushed there,
their innocence stripped away
paper-thin dreams chased away like useless creatures
from your back burdened with the same shame and
no soft tissue for your tears

if only I could say this loud enough:
love is the courage in our cells
disambiguation
and there will be a day -
no more fear
no more far away

shadows entangled so it happens
the oppressor and the oppressed
such an intimacy of pain terror and shame
in the quietness of the right hand the left hand
surrender to the cruelty of an exchange
to be or not to be delusional
this is a question
reality just an approximation of a terrifying
mystery without meaning

a beat of a heart alone in the dark
we have many songs but still little understanding
about the growing shadow lurking in the bright light

Oh Lord, nourish me not with love but with the desire
for love. IBN ‘ARABÎ

Not only the thirsty seek the water,
the water as well seeks the thirsty. RÛMÎ

Ecstasy is a flame which springs up in the secret heart,
and appears out of longing. PAUL NWYIA

Open your hidden eyes and return to the root of the root
of your own self. RÛMÎ

The inner truth of desire is that it is a restive motion in
the heart in search of God. AL-QUSHAYRÎ

excerpts from "Travelling the Path Of Love  Sayings of Sufi Masters"

she would unriddle your wrinkles
wear your sweating
cast away your death
in her sighs

she would have you
rest your name
in the echoes of her womb
drunken you
with her rapture
of being alive

the skin of morning heavy
on windows, floors & mugs
blue-eyed wolves trace the scent
the fragility of life in indifferent forests
uncovered shoulders near the wind
slowly absorb the horizon, the new common sense
dozens killed killed killed
killed by bombs, cars,  trucks, guns, knives
hatred grows like mislettoe
the sky an endless empty whole
the same heresy errected with fresh blood

a winter born forgetting
some hands without fingers
some children cry
some wounds have no cover
the blanket of darkness sweet
hate grows like mislettoe, remember

it must be that
I woke up on the wrong side of the
moon hide tonight