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

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

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

there in the land of the wind
the grass would like to be as tall as you
the salt of the earth would be ringing,
resonant with the laughter of tears
perhaps everything we are
has to conceive a symbolic death
to deliver ourselves

in the embryo of words there is
such a gentleness, a true prophecy:
language would begin to forget itself
we meet in this language without words
like two beings from the end of the world

no signs no omens no nothing
just a sudden harmony in the noise of time
I was not even watching the speed of darkness
but making pancakes while not thinking that
when he smiles I'm in big trouble
in fine, this nameless connection this loving
togetherness of everything this God
who keeps imagining the world as if it does not know it
appeared in my fragile form,  fascinans et tremendum
a vision of a fluctuating infinity with so alive the dying
and life just continued breathing, the pancakes were ready
my inbox full of invitations to cure, illumination, mindfulness,
more connection, more healing for trauma, let's become wiser, deeper, more relaxed, more aligned with the soul of the world
so, I agree but in the meantime only the mystery got deeper

I listened only to voices of pervasive enduring loneliness today.  that's right, no point in altering it through symbolic transformation, the metaphor has its decency. no wonder i found this place where silence has infinite nuances like a love slipping through your fingers, like a time obliterating the intensity of the systolic wind. I thought about writing a letter of intent to the world just to say No! (after much yes, a no is vital). No, i don't want to understand, i don't wanna know,  don't wanna shed tears, read books about the meaning of violence, dream war, fear devastation. if you zoom in more and more you can catch history repeating its fractals. the more you look the more you might feel the ******* of pain. somebody asked : do you tantra today? No! today let only this particular silence be

I carry your hands like waves breaking on the skin
your eyes get flammable like capsicum on innocent tongue
I have long conversations with this boiling sea
the sea bears the roundness of the moon
the moon reveals its wounds
the wounds shed their skins to feed
an undiscovered earth

A slight confusion
of earth with water
of water with sky
enough for life

to be lived

**Irina Mavrodin

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

Too many days come seek their past within me
I reach out my hand towards your face and it draws back.
I reach out my hand towards your heart and it stops.
I mustn't speak.
Who knows what secret code
what signals meant for death
I might disclose.

And your face.
And the vision of this hand.
And the way you're removing yourself.
And the image -
vertical as a scream.

Carmelia Leonte from *City of Dreams and Whispers

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.

the fullness of words in your mouth
my trembling hands
a truth cuts deep
into the ribs of morning
it's the big bang of language
when silence has no shadow

smaller than the table, smaller than the chair,
smaller than my father’s big boots.
like a potato, that is how small I dreamt myself.
because in spring, they put the potatoes
in the ground and that was it,
till autumn they were not disturbed any more.

I dreamt myself in the planting pocket, among them,
sleeping sweetly in the darkness,
turning on either side in summer
and then falling asleep again.

and to wake up in autumn still sleepless
and unclean like my brothers
and when it is time to dig us up, to jump above
and yell: stop digging, stop digging,
for I shall willingly come home,
if you put me back in spring,
and in spring I am the first one
to be thrown back in the planting pocket
and so on, to always stay and sleep,
from the planting pocket to the basement and from the basement to the planting pocket,
for many years, deeply asleep and forgotten.

Ioan Es. Pop
translated by Beatrice Ahmad

the dream is dreaming itself, we are its subjects
the mysterious writing of life, its ellusive quest
an inflationary expansion was deleting its traces
zero degree of consciousness in a moving aliveness
strange rhythms around and strange qualia
there were attributes without letters at first
before a predicate turned into subject
life othering itself into much more in its own image

life was chatting with itself before the knower and the known
spinning the seeds of time, change: its true substance
I am you and you are me but  we need
a symmetry break for the dawn of mind, the other of the body

so much was already done since life was rehearsing for eons its scripture, forms of habit, viable conventions
processing its otherness relentlessly
mind is this forest-creature exulting, hiding, defending,
breaking down, screaming, expulsing, recomposing, sprouting light and lightning

the very first thoughts traversed the barrier of vibrant void
their binding a translation of a body in time, a future storyteller
pure movement the nature of space, the wonder of above and bellow
the first qualia, tension and intensity, an unstructured  flow of frequencies, a cascade of warmth, fullness, emptiness,  
a body discovering herself, her unbearable, her rapture, the feeling of being

the centre is everywhere expanding, accelerating a creative chaos
thinking was just waking in the  field of a dreaming body
thoughts needed to outgrow slowly their skin of imaginary beings

then again and again
dreaming keeps decomposing the already thoughts trapped in their echo chambers, their networked cocoons circle our certainties
a thought needs to die to create another, a sacrifice to the god of the unknown
oh how many deaths we have already died recomposed only by dreaming, the solvent from which reality is born

intensively your body is translating feeling into dreaming,
extensively the mind is dislocating dreaming into thinking  
whille a distant star is crushing itself,  
love rehearses its gravity,
death is saturated by its own dismay

perhaps poetry is this witness of silent cosmogonies

“sometimes I get nervous
when I see an open door”*

not really in the mood for this
“who are you?”, I was asked
and the prolonged tears suddenly receded from language
shoulders, heels, nails looking for something closer to the happiness of sunken ships or whatever
my antishoulder, antiheel hurts
when you take my face into your hands
to drag my eyes into your cries
it’s just you and me now mother
let’s face it
your dying is my breath
my joy your death bed
temptation your authority
into the cemetery of numb disillusions
you wouldn’t let go of the death of words
you keep your sleeping pills for good
on empty shelves

I’ll stay in the doorway
to watch my birth
catching up with myself

i am not stable
i am not wild
i am not simple
i am not mild
i'm only dreaming
about the mystery
i received
when i was born
a child

i am not yours
i am not mine
i'm only a letter
in the alphabet
of time

tonight I’m calling fearful souls
the peers of my tribe
there is chaos in the heart of stones we are casting
there is a lot of pain in unborn desires
we are trembling, we are holding our breath –
what does it mean to feel safe
we are dreaming and waiting
old mothers are screaming unheard
the tyrant is playing backgammon with God

I am searching for each of you in the safety of dawn
the beast with bottomless eyes is here
Inside
so difficult to grasp our soul
to endure this: a world of faceless people
we cover our eyes, mouth, hearts
bottomless eyes are smearing

the body as a battlefield
oh, we remember what we want to have forgotten
we collapse under the burden of our own fragility
the history repeats itself shutting down stories
so many stories of cancelled love

the slaughterhouse soul is too heavy
and I can’t remember the ancient joy and innocence
the simplicity of being
words have just exploded
and my heart is cracked open

and now I am afraid even of my words
of that which should not be named
the murderer of soul, dignity and poetry

I am afraid of staring into bottomless eyes
without my peers
without my tribe

let me tell you stories about stories
let me touch you with the pure joy of touching,
the eclipse of emptiness or
spicy details on the trajectory of sight

some sorrows make for an obsession without identity

we can invent a sign language
for nobody else to understand
this unfinished text, the singularity of clarity,
the sweetness of fingers

no shame in shade
let me touch you with a heresy
haunted by silence

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

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

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

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

"I don't care if I don't look pretty
Big girls cry when their hearts are breaking"*

They wouldn’t let me cry, they could have felt the tender lies decomposing.  But this pain knows nothing of the theft of day, of how lemon tastes for you, of predicaments of truth.( The arrow of meaning goes backwards and forwards when it doesn’t get stuck.) Silence is nailed against every word. This old story: they are speaking in the corners: look at her. But this is not a poetic novela if you care to know, only misery exposed. This vital flaw of violins, of not being composed.  Not everybody knows to transmute pain into a bridge of light. Like Jarrett did. This pain doesn’t need words, images, metaphors, brutal as it is, like a mating season. The echo rests in stone.  This pain is a wall breaker. The taboo of words. I won’t say more. I would let myself live inside this large momentum, this much I can save for today. The magnitude of tears takes me there, so close to the one I love.

we knock on the doors for them to open, to
let us out, but those on the other side don't hear us and
they too knock on the doors for us to open and let them out
and when they open it's ourselves we bump into
but we don't pay attention to ourselves and we say we want out
and they say we want in, don't take the door away with you,
we wouldn't have anything to open on the way out,
there would remain a blank spot in the wall,
we won't find any way to get out.

Ioan Es. Pop** from *The Livid Worlds

"no distance
for your words

a breath a voice a presence a force
coming straight
reassured

touching my nakedness
under my clothes"

**Ioana Ieronim

the walls have ears, they used to say
these walls are full of screams of declamation
of a burning stream of bodies with parfumed names
love confused diffused in this internal flight
being chased while chasing unrecognizable the face of truth for now
the warmness the softness of bodies so promising so alluring
the illusion, a fleeting connection so powerful that there is no one
to guard the depth of this edge, me and the anti-me
this disconnection sings lullabies to my zest for life
the right vision comes to those who wait
it is unbearable at first, cause you are not used to your
eyes seeing through the water, let alone the abyssal depth of blood

this could be a poem I could have written if I were you but
the most strange of it all is that I am this you and the other you
luckily the light is untraslatable and you can see it too

the flesh of words heavy since
we no longer speak the same language
yes is no no is maybe maybe is later
later is tomorrow tomorrow is never
one can only run away from pain only
towards more pain
only the words are sad my heart no longer
a wounded totem
my fingertips have always had their dreamy way
in truth love touches you daily with the most prosaic sway

I didn’t know you were here to stay... you’ve found a place to rest inside this chest. there is no one there, on the other side. why can I measure my life in pain-years?  I am going to listen to the weight of your step... we are so many... poor bodies with slaughtered desires. life lifts up gently like hypnotic steam from raw bodies while you growl inside my bones. you have thorns of truth and short sentences: “papa doesn’t love me”, “mama keeps cursing”, “I am useless”. you are the only thing alive since I insist to lay down in my mother womb over and over again. have me expelled, have me covered in a blanket of blood so that I do not see the future.  you keep giving birth to my selves.
stop looking at me with charcoal eyes, father
look, mother, you can have me silenced for the beauty of dawn

A gale
stripped all the leaves from the trees last night
except from one leaf
left
to sway solo on a naked branch.

With this example
Violence demonstrates
that yes of course -
it likes its little joke from time to time.

Wislawa Szymborska from *Here New Poems

let me listen to you
your hidden landscapes
your lives lost
in velvety oblivion

listen to the streams of blood
throbbing at your wrist
in the tender flesh inside your elbow

listen to the vulnerable intensity
in the soft vale at your collarbone

the silence on your lips
the whirls below

listen
listen through you
to these things that one cannot speak

**Ioana Ieronim

we are left here
enchanted but unable
so disabled to
recognize
the wormholes
this paradox
is it the most misterious
they don't say
but
the moment
I become
words
I die in all letters
at once
I dissapear from
the impossibility
of prethought
curved into a field of longing
most inner of language
so the moment
my words enrage you
bemuse you
or make you wanna run
I am alive again
in your coffe
or in a jacaranda
far away

life is a beautiful mess
everybody is afraid
to say
wholeness an antiword,
they don't mind,
the mastery
of a waking U
so poetry
is reality
in a language
we don't understand

what becomes of me
we will see

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

"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

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

while fishing the stars
in your window
caught my skin eavesdropping
these rhythms: it must be some truth
I came along ahead the cortege of my selves
straight from
the blues of morning

tonight is simply beautiful,
I'm just saying,
heaven & hell
one metaphor away

I feel like a poet again as
I'm standing in front of this window
it is full of ivy and ripples of quietness
life has certain rhymes and some riddles
I'm thinking about lovers exchanging
spontaneous glances, words, illusions
I'm thinking about social workers
returning home with a tired smile
I'm thinking about young and old
carrying different worlds under their skin

I feel like a poet again as I wait for the hours
to ripen for more truth to tell
a round whiteness  an exultant blackness
embrace the window

All we need is darkness
for the natural selection of light
I watch the past as a travel show
the necessity or adversity ignites language,
different shapes of games, we like the power plays
of circle
let me be sealed in a wave
I want to descend to the faith of sand
to the Cro-Magno vision of words

too much outside too little inside
everything there loud and noisy
in the stream of energy
every single cell an orchestra,
a blazing furnace
recycling the unseen
what to choose slipping
from a dream to the same dream
possibility after plausibility
with the insatisfaction of a night
unable to decipher the tales of the moon
one needs true silence to hear
the meaning of music
don't let go of the wisdom of stones
every fragment knows there is something
wiser, a finite infinite semiosis

When the hand which writes takes a rest
it seems to me demonically transparent;
beneath its skin, veins like a few plants
in a fishbowl — and the blood
flows within and floods
the silence; its murmur through time
the unlived life of the ancestors
rushing into the light of my eyes.

Dumitru Chioaru, from *It Might Take Me Years

It might take me years
To dislodge myself from
Life – this magma which has swallowed me,
And be out of the reach of neighbour gossip.
To emerge from a fight not mine.
You were there, privileged angel in the dark,
Amused at my faux ferocity,
Recalling the courage of my first days,
When I was unconcerned about
What place I’d fall asleep in.
Not yet understanding
The human need to cling to a past.
Always ready to give myself away.

You watched from above
The prose of my struggles,
In the web of our common suffocation.
You knew how to be the cruel one,
To leave everything behind, in a town to which
You would never return.
Today I fear the drizzle,
I fear the fog.
I never forget my umbrella at home.
I mind the hustle of the quay,
Unusual at this early hour.
I cherish the noises which accompany my coffee on the terrace.
I watch helplessly, in exasperation,
These faces of common poems
Which harbours always hold.

Constantin Abaluta, from *It Might Take Me Years

This hospital has a room

for weeping. It has no crèche.
No canteen. No washroom queue.

Only this queue for weeping.
No lost property booth. No

complaints department. Or
reception. No office of second

opinion. Of second chances. Its sons
and daughters die with surprise

in their faces. But mothers
must not cry before them. There is

a room for weeping. How hard
the staff are trying. Sometimes

they use the room themselves. They
must hose it out each evening.

The State is watching. They made
this room for weeping. No remission ―

no quick fixes. A father wonders
if his boy is sleeping. A mother

rakes her soul for healing. Neighbours
in the corridor ― one is screaming

It moved from your child to mine.
More come. Until the linoleum

blurs with tears and the walls
are heaving. Until the place can’t

catch its breath ― sour breath
of pine. And at its heart

this room.

Mario Petrucci, from *Heavy Water: a poem for Chernobyl

why aren’t you tired? of changing clothes, make-up, ribs to torment? sometimes when the night stops screaming I feel you like a blind ribbon stumbling our feet, like nervous fists trying in vain to retain some lilac perfume. I used to pray for my knees crushed by gravitational tales, for my ragged heart forcing the tympanum of time

we try to smile and hold hands we dissolve our tears into thunder until the rain stops breathing.

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

I can feel you at the end of thoughts  tonight
as I dance the forgotten rituals of touch
I  wanna be your perfect stranger till
the trance of darkness flickers
in your bottomless eyes

“To live is to be slowly born.”*

that day
time reversed its memories
the interior waters were protected
the autumn fruits were quiet
in their sweetness
some joy was scudding by
leaving shy traces on the cheeks of the city

who called you?
not my screams
they were trapped in someone else’s
purposes
fear, indifference, emptiness, hate
were in the middle

you  were a passionate thief of glances
there had been many before
each time blood rushed inwards
you had a secret collection of lost heads

suddenly it started
my right hand started
to strip you of your dreams
my right ear kept the pace
in the colorful space
I didn’t mean to pry
into the tension of your jaw
saying “I am”
(thinking real hard)
into your frowning with your lips
and the intense split growing in the middle
pushing you and yourself apart
the uncertainty of your feet
ready to take off

it is fear
dissolving my presence
my skin stopped recognizing myself
every inch has a voice
I was disarmed
I descended into yourself
and you offered to me
my own mystery

Picasso was watching over our shoulders
to Degas’ ballerinas
hinting at the lack of faith
in your smile
-there are so many spaces
filled with non-sense,
I know-

I turned into a landscape of desire
with perfumed weeds
there was an ocean of eyes
between us
wonderful images rolled over my skin
what was your chest crushing?

to be or not to be engulfed
still a lottery
our preoedipal mothers were pointing
their fingers at the horizon
pain turning into more pain
turning into hate turning
into hope
this heaviness in the middle
their laughter and innuendo
heavy as a tomb stone

that day never came
when you had me
without hello
no theory convinced me
to understand
this centering love I feel
every time your smile
happens to me

dreamers never say
“I’m sorry”
just leave me there
I'll be consumed
one day

this pain like an unwritten poem
only the winter knows how much I loved you
how little I am able to say
the air is tall, the night so deep
I walk in the selfishness of the cold
I walk in this landscape where love is an exile,
a forest without shadows, a party without guests
a happiness without an alibi
something that gets destroyed at the first burst of light
but springs again from the unknown depth of skin

I am in the waiting room of a dying love, a nascent love
while Monalisa is sleeping without dreams
in the depth of my days the certainty of tears
only the winter knows how much I loved you

you, an event on my retina
an accident of time colliding with itself
my hands have pulse on your t-shirt
everything in its place like a silence
waiting to happen
the speed of smile measured in light-seconds
this body is a house of metaphors
a space for living words forgetting my name

“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

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

By Jalaluddin Rumi

eyes have ears, ears have eyes
on self-absorbed nights
the tree of knowledge murmurs in my veins
and poems rush through me with their wild letters
I chase them away with a smile
I am smitten beyond illusions, delusions and other demons
by a 4 am wave, you know
by a 5  am undeciphered dream
by a 6 am reverie, by a letting go
oh, what a sweet incomprehension,
life´s creativity,
your hands anticipating mine

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

history invents the art of crying
writing its darkness manifesto
when the tear is hidden
the path follows a forced destiny.
what is there, to be found inside ourselves
something is looking at us
tribulations of mirage, the hazard of necessity
the word, the gun, the bone -
the threads of the revelation of time
sometimes history flows backwards
and my skull hurts like a broken umbrella
we taste the past, an obsessive memory
future, this Terra incognita, casts a muddy light
what is there to be found in the history of bones?

a wild god is sleeping in your bones
it is too early to tell the direction
of that thought, you know
it has a dark end
no need for an algorithm
for wonder

wild images colonize my brain
they throw me here and there
it's not too late under the roof of the world
not for a bleaching heart

something is growing like a wave
that forgot its end

Stasis, but
              without death
out of the flower, fruit
grows deliberately
you shroud your hearing with
              the rustle
of the poplar practiced at being
               alone

fog like thinly sifting
              sand
hills rolling round and round
               as in a plasma
your other face which, in your departure,
                you forget

the woodpecker
pecks at the house
     of the ancient children

Aura Musat
*translated by Adam J Sorkin and Alexandru Pascu