suddenly everything has forgotten its rythm
the sky was shouting at the mountains
the wind was shouting at the trees
the sea at a naughty kite
some words were looking for their delta
and their hearts of stone
my sleep was taken away by migrant birds.
it must have been then
when I started to love you
like madness loves its forgetting

the weight of tears leaves no traces. apparently. pain has no axis of symmetry, but petrifying meanings. everybody must be afraid. there is no point. there is no point in the scream of windows, in the continuity of doors.
in a turbulent ray of light. this destructive force, the orphan desire of a child. its autistic strife. pain, the silent witness of unlived lives. streets keep their rhythm and pretend all is forgiven. rarely is. there are more pains than people. hear the steps in the geometry of desire.  reinvented desire to love. to let live.

every full stop is an abyss of breath.

oh, how the world really functions
the most unbearable aliveness, pain
so good to have tears to offer to
the god of patience and enduring
I pray for a gentle pain,
a gentle sway of caring
the courage of dawn

Surfer Grandson Smoker
Manager Traveler Father
Daughter Cook Teacher
Mother Reader Lover
Trainer Son Painter
Volunteer Exhibitionist
Santa Claus
member of a fishermen club
tomorrow
or you name it
if you still have air

we left ourselves outside
alone with these explosive days
blind witnesses
have buried their faces
into the desert of time
the concentration of pain
remains a universal constant
the world is a helpless arena
of master plan illusions
what shall I become
or what shall be consumed of me?

and these rupture faults
body-dynamite against ego-dynamite
culture crushing nature versus
nature crushing culture
the soul famine
in the book
of unknown faces

we were all just enlivened cells once

while we feast in our blood
the discreet continuities
remain hidden
identity encapsulated
in the wave length
of supernovas egos

poetry is left with this
apparent nonsense
camomile turns into laughter
and the pride of butterflies
deserves better

this rhythm consumes us
faster than the speed of dreams
the speed of thought
the speed of forgetting
how our mothers
were never healed

to be or not to be simple
that’s a question

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

don't ask how I am
I might confess with riven words
I am trying out dances for
one thousand and one nights
like a Scheherazade of unforseen
whispers

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

love spoke with an incomprehensible voice in manic days. we were looking for the soul of words, from one rhythm to another, no nuance no desire to escape this passion for dreams on repeat. my name is Carmen, I told him, you came to light me up like the morning that has never seen torches nor sobs. I'll write as long as the words hold me. Contaminated minds in humid bodies, I felt my fluid fingers maddened by je ne sais qua. I couldn't find my emptiness, you couldn't find thoughts any more in the tunnel of yearning, it kept descending into the desire of the earth, it ravished us. I don't want to get out of mind but I would go to the sea of green, was it in the palm of your hand? I'll turn into a cradle for the illusion of eyelids. I didn't have eyelids anymore, just two burnt eyes, the darkness that dug into them, that darkness that blinded you, called you, squeezed you till you turned into ink. I'd like to spell the word desire like a mantra, may it forgive me until it forgets me, until I howl and then fall silent. I shut up as a field. I'm writing about too much aliveness, purple in the pleasure of pain. I keep reaping the grain of wheat, I have no helpers like the hero in the story. pain contaminated the tablecloth. I didn't hide my desires in the orchids, but let them smile. we talked about ourselves as if we didn't know.  we were our new selves, our old selves. it was us all over in the abyss of mind as if it didn't hurt in the morning. I wanted to give myself to you. I am pierced  by words, I can't stop them, they flow from the eardrum of the mind to the marrow of my bones or the other way round. The stories of the lymph, I listened patiently. Maybe today is yesterday and tomorrow is the day after. I've forgotten the alphabet of time. What do words actually know? Love is the mercy of time passing by, leaving us untouched, now I know.

he used to call me only when it rained
or the light was full of moaning
a smile was drying on his face
like a scammer's top hat
you could cut the mist with a knife in his eyes
he used to touch me like i was a chocolate wrapper
he spoke with chalk between his teeth

sometimes there is no progress between hello and hello

my hands protest today
so they become
don’t know how it started
they were filled with air without memory
nowhere to land, no stories attached
to the sleeves
this body is a history of fights,
wandering weeds,
of fists full of laughter

I was once an empty space with time borders
a true self or a void full of ambition
certain patterns disguised in black and white
milk tears


I met my shoulders today
I no longer hide my thoughts in open spaces
or defeather my dreams
my gestures turn into statues
to be seen from afar
I put my spin into the cup of morning
so I could tell today apart from tomorrow
in time’s bone marrow

every man has his island,
his hiding places projected out loud
with blood power,
vernacular dreams &
ventriloquist voices.
among other things, madness -
an optical illusion
what you see is what you are
or seeing is believing
insideman and outsidemen
undifferentiated
the room has one view
on patched windows
indesire cutting deserted canyons
for the self-acclaimed King
(indesire wants nothing but to be,
to make room for islands in reality)

“be good, otherwise Haruka will come
to take you away, my child”
(what’s in a name
Haruka is “from far away”)
but children very rarely draw lines
caught in the furious chaotic circles of the world
now that every action has a reaction
reality principle is just a skin
holding the inside out & the outside in.

everyman has his island
of vexed fantasies
look into your eyes from outside in
before you see that fire
or anything else,
see this
-the beautiful war-

a protest against emptiness?
the failure of forgetting the beginning of touch?
an unanswered question?
the sky inside the roots of trees?
the desert inside the heart of rain?
the dreams of the heat of the earth inside cold stones?
an uninterrupted dance of absence and semantics?
the memory of photons from the moment of conception?
the steam of bodies in the quiet air?

what if love is this cosmic urgency,
emergence with myriad faces,
a protest against the liveliness of
nothingness?

time has a savage chemistry
it flows in silence in the depth of life
stolen or borrowed, hidden & fluent
and I am this space for time
to learn how to love itself &
the transparency of mystery

life needs to destroy
itself
a little
to become
Real
like the center
of our atoms
mixing
crushing
falling
into each other
to the depth
of mystery

A blossoming intensity
Invisibilium
One day I’ve felt: to be who you are

the urgency of feeling alive
the quietness of the waving at the end of the road
That’s how it is: I am who I am
An intense inexplicable tautology
or  a certain taste in my mouth,
a lazy hand on the morning pillow.
the salt of the earth in my tears, so many, uncountable
young staring in the mirror- to have someone to watch my scorching sorrow
the conundrum of why to keep dreaming

iridescence of silence in my gaze,  unpredictable tones

To be, to keep it simple.
the elements and their transmutation cannot explain it:
each and every antientropic pulsation
the eyes of fire see through me
I am unrecognizable inside out
Cause I am you and you and him.

A sound is lying between my sight and my hearing,
mornings strung astray,
noisy, lonely streets, indescribable,
only posters ― whole or torn
of some extraordinary concerts, long forgotten ―
in which lustre of the world? ―
autumn has come over the botanical garden,
her trellises have forgotten to support any leaves,
she is singing herself to me in my eyes
in one poem.
Diligent, my heart surrenders to an elegy
like that thought descending from Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gellu Dorian, from *It might take me years

Its baroque eyelashes still obscured
By the vapid, nocturnal turmoil,
My city rises from sleep in the morning,
To the acrid smell of taverns
Opened too early,
Where garrulous, ***** drunks
Resume their heated quarrels.

My city awakens at dawn,
In the suave perfume of flowers clouded by dust;
Those tender, resigned cupolas, waiting
For the midday summer sun, to ooze over them.

Bent backs and furrowed foreheads,
Large crowds trotting on the sidewalks,
Greet each other absent-minded, on the fly,
Hurrying on, forgetting their pitiable heritage, their history,
When, thirsty for blood, their ancestors,
Greedily slaughtered each other,
―In the name of mother country and of different Gods―,
Under the shadows of rival cathedrals.

It took me a long time to be able to discern
The time corroded voice of my city,
But today I understand its madness and its error;
I cross it lovingly, with a lithe step,
And I am saddened by the sight of lifeless, white kittens,
Lying on the pavement, snuffed out by the spirits of the night,
Red poppies blossoming from their muzzles,
In the morning light.

Flavia Cosma from * Bucharest Tales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

she is wearing some chemistry
an old dress for a bluestocking
she turns her face towards a green sea
new rhymes for blazing verbs lurk
in the definition of imprecision but
everything is falling into place
cell to cell conversations afloat
shards of mystery smooth
rounding out the caves of night
mirror wars meanders
mitochondrial Eve confused
into this new creature
saturated with radiance

questions not asked
but answeared
how you love her
do your hands chase
her tango shoulders
is there music inside
the shade of water
waste inside nails
naivete in knees imprisoned
vibration self-asserting

a devious sweeping world
of unthinkable gestures
your hands a seismograph  
for the cataclism of shiver
no need to search for
her selfless sense
as you ravening negotiate
the fossilized song of you
the depth of this tympanum
this membrane
time itself this creature
zoon erotikon
levellling up resurecting
ravaging enchanting

all the rites of passage
for the overwhelm of flavor
she breathes in prehistoric gills
nirvana dance inside DNA
you redefine your sharpness,
delicacy tears & tearing
she dissapears in a snare drum
sanity evaporates as mist
over arched forests
in the pulse of no air
in between skin and akin
in the bewilderment of bodies
searching for their lyric
manna for beautiful beasts
over the sargasso sea

she wails genuine
metanoia, love's dianoia
no disambiguation

tears are
weight
taste
colour
music
they are in love with
the gravitational attraction
I tried their speed today

tears are full of
heartbeat
screams
interrupted gestures
helplessness
the god of sweating
the dance of life
the unknown of the sublime

my tears are full of
the broken world
in their eyes
the sea of time spinning
its fountain of hope and despair

these tears are
full of me, of you
of us & them
again and again
full of  "creative ambiguity"
true wholeheartedness

Before me, nothing is what
it used to be; all seams getting ready to be;
a child with a hoop runs by, as in De Chirico's paintings
- in the distance the sky's still red, but in the poem it's gray.
I feel the words growing inside my fingers
and for the first time not for my benefit.
In the quiet of evening
the town seems a game with toy bricks
in which matches are struck and flare brightly - music cavorts at
                                                                                                       the windows -
in the distance the sky's gray, but in the poem is red.

Gellu Dorian, from City of Dreams and Whispers
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Doina Iordachescu

When
night fades
a little before the springtime
and of a rarity
someone passes

a dark colour
of weeping
thickens over Paris

on a poem
of a bridge
I contemplate
the boundless silence
of a slender
girl

our
ills
flow together

and how, borne away,
she remains

I am sitting everywhere like a stone
struck by lightning
my nerves spinning their electricity
in new revolves
this vibration is transformation

of of of of
something into anything else
syntax into the golden ratio
fingerprints into enlightened wax
lungs into vertical love
craving into silence
desire into root
immanence into
transcendence and
the other way round
projection into
introspection
nihilism into redeeemed
despair
music into a theorem
of sunrise
hatred into pain
pain into
violet mourning
bread into singing
oxes' thirst into the art
of the earth
secrets into tangible
translucent pictures
rivers into the dreams
of the sky

I into the other I
in you and him
and them
in the mycellium
of syntaxes, synapses
enchanted
ephiteliums
into a choir of selves
in love's eyes

what a miracle each morning
to rediscover the symmetry of words
words in flight words in might
worlds of words submitting
to the geometry of dreams

what a miracle each evening
to feel the ripples of certain poems
in the maze of  synapses
a certainty each day I do not count
my naked body is carrying death
like an embryo of silence

what a curse what a delight
to meet myself in flesh and bones
as a road without beginning

sleepless forests
in my dreams
embracing the shape of you
sung by the pine trees

poetry
a blue snake
stretches from one to the other
it breaks the shop window
it coils insiduously
around those driven
from the street into the house

it binds hands and learns to cry
the utterance at the service of power
don't throw the mantle of clouds
off my shoulders
remember
in the beginning was the word
in the last night
distorted

eventually
there remains poetry insinuated
like a blue snake
into the cup full of tears

Carmen Firan
*translated by Andrei Bantas

I love you
when the day exhausts its grace
when you wear my pious silence
in you nails

I refuse the touch of morning
just to breath your sleep in

you’re my axis mundi on a Wednesday
yeah,  it’s so natural and crazy
I shudder with this feeling
I search for my roots, I find you dreaming

I love you  
when you stir the ***** blues-smitten
the jazz, the blood
I’m your prophecy, you’re my bane
my lips won’t refuse the spell:
love you whenever.
I have died
again.

Poems like bread, you say
rough and sweet
like the bread for those
who plough and harvest

bread like home
bread like far from home
the bread of communion
of survival

bread to feed silence and darkness
feed the beast’s hunger for beauty
and blood

wisps from Ariadne’s ball of red fleece
poems
across the void

their promise
their echoes that keep us walking
in the dark

Ioana Ieronim from *Ariadne's veil

this manic song
of my feet with your feet
the quest for our names
our bodies without fence
my fingerprints like unburnt stories
on your skin
I have no alibi
you invented my desire

the whale-song of
my shoulder with your shoulder
I'm falling apart in your palms:
I invented your desire
and you have no excuse -
you hold down the night
for the next you, the new me
the unforeseen smile
at the end of the day

you and you and you live
inside me like unknown songs
you sometimes throw me words that
make me forget I am language too
I dream the dregs of mystery like an inocent deer/apple/bird:
we are beyond categories we are elementary natural
we vibrate the nets of wonder with our finite fingers

the world is self-referential in my poems, so
when the sky is full of milk it becomes silence
when the sky is full of continents it loves its silence
you must reinvent the cycle of reciprocity if you want to feel the earth in between your dreams
your thoughts have paths of fire, mine are water slides
you sleep I dream you run I pause you sometimes sigh and I dance
oh, I allow only the mystery to preach for you in me not to forget
all words

somehow
you accelerate me
to the heat
of ripe apples,
to a brand new smile,
to the pressure of an ocean
in my veins,
to this raw primordial dance
-when you run I follow
when I stay you pray-
to the purity of a winter’s day
naked of illusion

somehow I let you in
ravished by white pigeons
drawing ineffable circles
in the depth of a sky

there is light in this silence:
you accelerate me
beyond myself
and I could die
like a woman

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

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

In my native land where some have bread
but others hold the knife, and a rustless
chain of interest links the one to the other,
in my resplendent and sad country,
I'm an aged raven, wingless,
an inconsequential pariah with a white star of distinction on his
                                                                                                                       forehead,
a bottomless vessel into which all would ***** -
all - their bile and powerlessness, their hatred.
And since in my land
I fear nothing,
and since in my land nothing
can happen to me except my hopeless
love of Mary,
I suddenly feel overwhelmed with unfamiliar joy,
by unbounded happiness in my heart's
thought, by limitless ecstasy
like death in gold and blood. Like radiance of flesh.
So, in my native country of murdered thoughts,
of guilty silence, humble elation within,
I admit responsibility and affix my signature hereunto -
Liviu Antonesei.

Liviu Antonesei, from City of Dreams and Whispers
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim

Something black somewhere      in the vistas of his heart.

Tulips from Tates teazed Henry in the mood
to be a tulip and desire no more
but water, but light, but air.
Yet his nerves rattled blackly, unsubdued,
&suffocation; called, dream-whiskey'd pour
sirening. Rosy there

too fly my Phil&Ellen; roses, pal.
Flesh-coloured men&women; come&punt;
under my windows. I rave
or grunt against it, from a flowerless land.
For timeless hours wind most, or not at all. I wind
my clock before I shave.

Soon it will fall dark. Soon you'll see stars
you fevered after, child, man, & did nothing -
compass love to the pencil-torch!
As still as his cadaver, Henry mars
this surface of an earth or other, feet south
eyes bleared west, waking to march.

from  *The Dream Songs

obscure the radiography of the sky
night clouds and vertigoes in my feet
the waters of pain just mirrors for enlivened souls
this spark is roaming adrift without the north star
what is love what is pain
these charming games this chasing of a mirage something deeper
beauty is the warmest colour
you are beautiful you don't know it
day after night night after day
we repeat each other's name devoid of time
of mind of touching hands and of and of
this skin that contains us when we awake in a dream
betwen regression and progression **** meanings
I hold on to breathing you deeply wildly
as deep as an uninvited sea at midnight

we are here because of the trees
what about the climate of our mind?
too many versions of alternative realities
and we've killed the spirit of oceans
in our souls
our bones don't grow roots anymore

we exist because of the flowers
and we are dying in the most stylish way
wearing Dior mascara, high heels, oh,
the latest Zara shirt

we are here because of the bees
it's not to late to ask ourselves
what is the climate of our hearts?

death can be so
just so asymptotic with our obsessions
so asymbolic on golden shoulders
and climate just another
hollow word
sent to Mars

awoken by words
so many words to write
shout, cry, turn into
something beautiful
the storehouse of whispers full
I lend my hands to the wind
I rehearse conversations that only
the moon can have
some words are wild
as the grass or
the horses that quietly
smell the traces of birds
through the air
other words weary
for the lament of time
there is no remedy

words,
crazy worlds
in which
we were

no air in some dreams no naivities in my nails
there is space in my shade for all of you

my eyes bear spirals of tremors
I regain my trajectory, I feel like saying
the ink of childhood held in small bottles
my heart a bird on wire sometimes
I wear eau de merveilles for the wind
the essence of weeping beheld by
deep eyes raging to the open sea

I open my window to a door
a door to an oasis of bones that
sing lullabies to unborn mornings

passion is the mother of invention

the poetry of others dissolves me with words like butterflies smashing themselves against solitary windows. flashes of liberty and my grandma's preserve jars get illuminated.
poetry must be freedom, stubborn love-spell. to be in love with your time.
poetry connects me with  the invisible light in my worn out nails - the other me, you and you and him. keep caressing the back of non-existence, the day is new and I'm whistling.
soluble time: poetry or the veneration of the unknown in every word: lover, dawn, pain, bread, together, hatred
let your words be honest, imprudent, rebellious, ET
let your words be

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.*
Leonard Cohen

the night birds
do want to be saved from light
in the land of whispers
the toll of complexity is
their unchanged lament
trapped between layers
insecure inside the semiotic square:
what is real?
true?
imaginary?
what is true and not true? – the call of destruction
this terror, the impossibility of meaning, shut inside the
drawer with plastic bags
we made my house there
somebody had to play the fool
these are reality games
recognition games
language games
with no key for the other’s syntax
who is the subject in this grave of flesh?
reality should be transactional
but the silence turned its face away instead
the clear bodies without voice rejoice
nobody asked the body how difficult it is to bear a mind
“we all know it’s not true & don’t you dare recognize it”
“you should be happy with your life & happiness doesn’t exist
(look at my poor body)”
“you are on your own & don’t you dare disobey”
“you must prove yourself & you are no good without us”

the right to reality was still not invented
since we are mostly busy deciphering our own language
words are self-fulfilling

I’m caring my annihilation safe
in the silence of nails
in the exhaustion of tools
of axes
and all the other love words

this pain in the middle
spinning, dividing, spinning
there are two points of him

he howls in my dreams
with cold hands in transcendental spaces
like a long absence in an imaginary present

his eyes - two black boxes
recording all the right data
everything more real than necessary
performing the body with toast sensations

he pauses naturally in the dark room
the man with the moon
swallowed
in his heart

the silver teeth of desire tear the night
till his eyeballs turn into rainbows
he is searching for a tender eye
to be born out of.

when she touches him
miraculously (only in dreams)
with soft trembling fingers
the wonder explodes in vertigoes under his skin
the bones are crystal sonorous
the night just forgets its name -
his body is throbbing a litany
of unknown shapes.

when she touches him
something so natural happens:
he becomes a fish,
a tiger, an eagle,
a missing fossil,
a submarine volcano.
searching his boundaries
he curses his dying hour,
the pain of letting go,
the violent pursuit of a name.

her fingers
charmed with dawn-like dreams
draw the shape of his body into the air.
when she touches him with silence
he would die a thousand deaths
only to be born one time
out of her hands
enchanted.

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

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

the skyscape is flowing so naturally over our heads
the light brings alive shadowy sonatas over the hills
each hour the tone of its intensity is changing
such immensity for gentleness
I can't help but woder if a purpose of life is
the sense of beauty

silence
shimmering with the embers
of unspoken words

silence
molding the air like clay

silence that touches
with the clarity of its language,
with its glow
under the skin

your silence
stronger than the noisy city
that I am crossing today

Ioana Ieronim, **The Lens of a Flame

each tree is
a sound soft-spoke

to unwheeled sky
perhaps

or passing
cloud ― i would set

mind as
these trees: closeset &

filigree
like something once hubbed

& radial staked
out : taken root & grown past

its paring
having absorbed what heat

comes in to build a year-by-
year body

encompassing body: mind so
still in its s-

hell as to
be

detectable
barely till my

tomb stone
deep in upward shadow

leaps upon
me like a child around my neck

Mario Petrucci from *i tulips

I want to write a poem about you
and use patches of my skin
instead of nouns
the passion of druids instead of
verbs
All I need is
Radiohead and
space to breath
in
your
breathing

(the body imagines what the mind can't)

time creeps between waves and broken seashells
the trance of a hunter, the soul of a shipwreck, the indifference of naked bodies in the sun possess my heart
the force of the sea rises inside the eyelids
everywhere you look a cinematic aloneness
the wisdom of sand in a fish' dream
now and then two embraced shadows,
the ardour of water consuming the beach