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

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

We were losing along the way
our desire to break free.
Among the chains,
the pleasure of the flesh was
primal.

The microscope
turned against ourselves,
and we laughed like madmen.
Then we began to torture
ourselves
to tear the truth from within.

Come, tell me everything, and so,
we sank into shadows.
Living for an instant was enough -
the rest of life was just recounting it.

And those who couldn't
keep their eyes shut
tore them out
just so they wouldn't see.

by Miguel Oscar Menassa

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

nobody tells me what to do with longing
unquantifiable as only the sand is
exulted light dives in my hair
my shoulders are amazed like a cactus flower
your blood self-absorbed rehearses abysmal cascades
tigers are still asleep in your dreams
will you chase the moon on my surface, will you, tell me,
leave your silence on a chair
what if love is this cypher for the mystery of time
what if the pulse is a form of photosynthesis
we have to stay away from any fire since
we would exhaust its thirst
a step into a surreal second that augments me
second after second  the one who loves
disturbes time in its mazing grace
the sky this gestational field
the space between each word a cosmos
a white truth will repeat itself
again and again bearing witness to
life hand in hand with death

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way the trees empty themselves of leaves,
let drop their ponderous fruit,
the way the turtle abandons the sun-warmed log,
the way even the late-blooming aster
succumbs to the power of frost -

this is not a new story.
Still, on this morning, the hollowness
of the season startles, filling
the rooms of your house, filling the world
with impossible light, improbable hope.

And so, what else can you do
but let yourself be broken
and emptied? What else is there
but waiting in the autumn sun?

Carolyn Locke, from Poetry of Presence An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems

don't rob this moment of its nakedness
better distill words
to the strength of this feeling
don't touch the sleep of children
future might turn back in rage
it's majestic
the way temples are erected
inside mitochodria
it happens unintentionally
Borges said it
beauty as a physical sensation
never mind being wiped out
new roots/fingers/words will grow
in your wrath
the vibration of thousand mornings
will not suffice it
(don't confuse pleasure with beauty
or make up with follow up)
if god were a sensate being
I would kneel
in front of a sea with no paths
I cannot explain
what the consistency
of your bones
means to me
there is no way
more simple than this:
what if beauty
is?

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?

this absurdity of words blowing up the windows
so that some forget their names
life crumbles in rooms without walls
we are trapped between the skin and the moon
the world prepares us for dying in the most explicit way
through its calculated violence
trapped in the hive of fear
she is also an enlightened despot
one might get trapped without noticing
when we want to be free to be kite tamers
escape routes vanish in the dictatorship of cruelty
blood is currency in the exchange of illusions
one day can last as long as a life time
the horizon brings no relief from sunset

it has been a fire journey cause
your legs carry the regret of a volcano
a water journey since
tears have memory
an air journey cause
my sighs are filled with oxigen
it has been an earth journey since
tumbling lights fill my words
when I deny you

when
I dissolve myself
into you
I become Babylon
anew

when guns speak louder than words
all beauty must die
when we let any child die
all hope must die

when the earth will move us
far away from tears
all beauty should remember
its momentary flee
in a child's knee

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

in thousands of aborted silences
of never found again words
in the nakedness of our failures
in the savage desire to be more than
the sight can bear
in the simple recognition
that you know little
from outside
we can listen to the allusive warmness
carving new bodies
for the days to come
for the healing of memory

we opened circles
minds
lungs
to embrace the new symmetry
of laughter:
I laugh when you cry
she cries when they laugh

and they pray:
no more
I won’t be your prey
your substitute
for the undiscovered
truth
take me as air on your palms
as dust in your wrinkles
smile with my tears

when silence is lighter than us
we only want to feel each other
in the mirror echoes
of a patient heart

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.

your words like high speed winds
making noise on my skin
I put on a psychedelic lipstick
I take off the blue dress
(made in India)
- he tries new scores with
oxidized fingers
galvanizes the silence, the thirst, the dreams of the air-
I want to confess iloveyous louder
than the coffee machines. Louder
than the morning radio. Louder
than tram number 5.
life is what happens while
you stay, leave, come back and
redefine our melting point

I open the door,
you are there
with your carnival smile
and nothing prepares me
for this obscure truth:
imponderable I feel
when you say
my name my name my name

I don't know where I'm going,
the streets are intoxicated,
the air pregnant with sweetness
my tears cannot wait for the linden honey
I would go to that place where
time is made of dreams

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

my town
where wild flowers grow
between tram tracks.
there was a time when
it was hardly morning,
no bridge into daylight.

walls had ears,
neighbors had eyes
whispering behind the curtains
there was an emptiness in the guts
of the city
and poetry locked in the drawers,
Borges was read under the blankets
while Dostoievski was  a comforter:
demons were embedded.

yeah, people were clapping and smiling
watching the nub of history, numb
they had a life to live,
what can you say?

one day the radio
burst on in the streets
some were shivering in the attic
"we are free", they said
"we are free",
came the echo in trance

"shhhhh"! said others,
let us wipe the blood
don't disturb the sacrificed
so we can sleep
without dreams

it's Thursday in my town
streets are weary
and our souls are
slowly expanding

snow has the height of pigeons today
translucent joy trapped in its consistency
the whole world is moving I am standing still
to listen to the intensity of ice, to its labour
to hold the tension of true opposites
the perpetual dance of white turning into black
maybe the trees are hallucinating their dreams
the same way we do
sometimes I forget the lesson of winter
to find itself again it has no choice but to
become spring

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

I am unknown to myself
when I look for a silhouette or
your stroboscopic touch
the canon of your steps full of woe
an infinitive phrase your timeless smile
silence has its alchemy
poetry finds me like a sacrificial song
being ourselves is enough
nothing more nothing less
the radiance of time a promise
who will be the woman dying one final death
is a stranger to me.
sing to me with the voice of morning
you, woes of laughter spirit

the mind needs to repeat this journey
into the clarity of fruits/glasses/doors
they used to talk with voices without tears
they used to speak without tongue
we are pedestrians into aerial dreams sometimes
we live in this density of meaning too complex for a circle
an uncoscious trajectory so precise & mysterious
I throw myself into the pool of time,
in its seeds, dangers, spirals,
into the unseen in my eyes
who I am is a destiny

Who is silent now, who speaks?
To whom?
Cinches of lead stifle the lungs
in long typographic nights.
Then beyond. On the blue, chymic flight.
In the space between words, in the fluid and phosphorescent body,
in the eternal field of alien light.

(The dawn which comes. Watery dawn in the diencephalon.
Red triangles dead center in the pupil of our time.
A continuous buzzing upon our tympanums. Excited
thoughts, irritated senses.
And no one comes here, to the utmost floor.
We're not afraid. We've got sharp blades
of steel, of silver, of copper. Delicate necks,
strong nails. Soul fully
at anyone's disposal.)

Who is silent now, who speaks?
And to whom?

Liviu Antonesei
*translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim

but who are you, Theseus, what is your name
behind the name that I call even in my sleep
when there is no memory of the worlds
you have founded
and will

what stays hidden beneath your name that I whisper
with a hunger older than ourselves
with a thirst so fresh in the fleeting moment
that words to name it have yet to be born

who are you to me, Theseus
my lord of many lives
and a hidden essence?

who? the labyrinth of days
shows me a different you
every time I open my eyes

it’s my words that ask, not I

not I who can listen to you with my skin
and can feel you with my hearing,
taste and touch and arrest with a gaze
across expanses bending over the horizon

bridge over the water
cobweb over cliffs
joy
joy over joy

a life-saving answer
maybe
to the riddle
when the time comes

by Ioana Ieronim from Ariadne's Veil

your touch a bet with intensity
unfathomable
my eyes turned into seeds like
energy turns into matter
the pain and pleasure of words
who cares who is one with whom

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

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

in the middle of seeing islands of fog
the roots disconnected fom the branches of thought
was it like this: you do not deserve to be
the vitality of forms, do not exist
we were told while breathing
do not exist in your bodies do not exist in your minds some dreams are just silly
dumb as that daylight
throats are full of words of unshed thinking
of noise so loud that the world might have imploded
dark circles of impossible pain contain our ribs
why are you here you were told, we don't want you
we  can not witness the joy of life with our teeth full of something we don't understand
our eyes are holding the light captive
like a knife full of strife
why are we here why
the fog obscures the echo
why are we here why

the unbearable or the body as fiction
cold minds in cold hands and so we have
the remake of the fake
the power of looking and not seeing each other
tears are silent so silent are some words
poisonous smiles and innocence inbetween
"the unbearable lightness of being" a remix
time holds us in its merciful circles
the rest is a mystery, why I love you

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

for Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,
wind scatters water,
stone stops the wind.
Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,
stone's a cup of water,
water escapes and is wind.
Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,
water murmurs going by,
unmoving stone keeps still.
Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:
crossing and vanishing
through their empty names:
water, stone, wind

by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger

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

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

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am,
then I can change.*
Carl Rogers


my hands can be so prosaic
uninterrupted in the mechanism of gestures
mindless, blinded, tired
of polishing the edge of the world

your hands and their delicate shiver
are used to behaving
trying to learn how to grasp the meaning,
the contours of the void in daylight
or why haters hate
(was it your fault or theirs?)

you are an unfinished landscape
of breaking points and hopeless moans,
oases of quietness,  turning points and
electrical paths, buds of mystery
I know nothing about

still, there’s something  teasing
written in between
such is coherence:  a paradox
-two interlocking  unwittingly-
irrational at one level
imaginatively reasonable at another
-reality is framed by negotiation with a god of silence-
two singularities conversing,
filling the air with space  
: it is me⁢ is you
Like when you erase me perfectly
with a blink of an eye
tired or cynical
with yourself,
or when I crush you
like a manic avalanche in
midsummer day

-there is some madness in between-

after all
shame and shamelessness
cannot be understood
in binary codes
while humility and pride
are two faces of the same coin

it’s been written  since day one
this matching choreography of turmoil inside
or just the pursued birth pains of self
-switch, twist, push, turn,
run, hide, split,
break, slip, cut
repeat, repeat, repeat –
the vertigo of life
rhyming imaginary possibilities
new gestures,
new proportions of light
and darkness
in the power of my hands
in the clarity of your voice

we approximate the truth of our last breath
grow old in stories within stories within the story
we tell ourselves to survive the crack of dawn

and so it goes:
the hero decrypting sunset
deepens the story
looking for
some freedom
to be

and I cannot look at you
without
the sonorous light
bearing tenderness
within

I set you free
in my blood
without knowing
if you stay
for today

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.

a mistery as whole as any other
this fresh earth of spring
sometimes we say woman

I smile at tired women and
they smile back at me
I smile at beautiful women and
few of them don't  really need
my wondrous eyes

they know the weight of a hand,
the flame of dance, the duty to care
they know what a dress is
especially in an embrace
they know oblivion, mischief,
the rage of hours, the hours of blood,
the tearful line between
reason and passion

they don't ask who they are
when the sun is round like
the womb of words
and the heart a volcano
of quietness

slowly the mountains come out of the blue of morning, they regain their face
light bathes them in its milk
I hide in the tall grass like a child
this self expands into the clouds behind the trees
an engulfing joy dissolves words into vowels
everything that exists  is wonder, a forgotten state of matter
time confesses a circle
the circle conjures  an earth so wild
the forest stores its prayers inside moss
the sacred hidden in the most profane  flower
an work of art with unknown author, every atom is colourful
I offer my skin as playground for butterflies
they can feel she's not so different from the skin of the earth
some hours are born by the self of rain
I wonder if the wind feels me
like I feel you in blooming nails

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

words come to me from the roots of a resonant hazard
I wonder if we fool ourselves that the future is open
Heisenberg paradox in our eyes, starseeds in yours
billions of years of solitude haunt me
we carry supernova physics in our bodies only they
know what we are attempting, we are crazy
enough to dislocate the inception of language

we should carrefully ponder the meaning of the words
with which we slowly killed our bonds
we should consider the poiesis of living
words have no meaning, only texture

this body a structure of rupture filled with words
their censorship - an act of love but
I can still feel their rawness, tenderness,
the milk of light, the roundness of sunset
I'll give them away to the rites of spring
to the procession of the shadows that carry us with them
to the unexpected burst of you like the morning light
poetry works best in silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m writing in this language
to forget about myself
to spit out the caffe latte
my mother’s milk
and my father’s  coffee

the mind has diamond edges
virtual slopes
the body is a jungle
writing to me is like
writing to you

I’ll let go
of the spitting image of you
of me
no slogans
no slop

you are some unfinished poetry
in the unwritten me

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

You are there.
You have always been
there.
Even when you thought
you were climbing
you had already arrived.
Even when you were
breathing hard,
you were at rest.
Even then it was clear
you were there.

Not in our nature
to know what
is journey and what
arrival.
Even if we knew
we would not admit.
Even if we lived
we would think
we were just
germinating.

To live is to be
uncertain.
Certainty comes
at the end.

by Erica Jong

when I carry you in my lips
I forget about my heels
eating cherries like a mademoiselle
(also called mademoiselle Chanel)
I don’t have to look in the mirror
there is summer in their look


you came to inhabit my lips
and the colours of words starve blinded
traffic lights repeat what they have seen
you will find your way over there
to the old carnival
inspiration of the living
no one dares to touch me
I am too much of an electrified cage

this woman wants to give herself to you
with the most natural lack
of grace
you can pray with my lips
for the rest of the day

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

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

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

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

And bequeaths an autumn flame to the trees.

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