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irinia Nov 2023
an embrace without a lost paradise
your cabaret words like a trance
I walk through the corrosive noise
I find my way to your footsteps on narrow streets
you hardly look back at your traces when they erase your touch from the map of time
so painful the hands left alone
you are touched by a melancholy impossible for some mornings
I am touched by reverie, entropy and memory
next desire on display a stain or a broken destiny
the weight of our shadows unknown
a foreign tissue is carrying the profoundness of thoughts
bear with me this heart tarred with pain

a moon song be the night
when trees remember how deep their dreams run
irinia Mar 2023
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
irinia Feb 3
night rests her weight on my shoulders
the cry of seagulls tears the unconscious of morning
I see what I need to see, the stranger in me
I absorb crises, storms, bridges,
life's torment  to invent its limits
the differance - the forgotten passion of language
the effete and the barbarian.
the sun also rises unhindered
on wheat plantations

last night I dreamt the Authority of dreaming
I had to send a petition so they tell me how to end the dream.
dreams do no harm when they keep their innocence
between innocence and experience a handful of pebbles
to help find our way in the blinding light
irinia Jul 2023
silence, heat, witnessing and forgetting, waiting, dried flowers in my hearing, they all grow wiser in the light that doesn't stop growing
shhh, I don't want to disturb you when your body is dreaming
irinia Oct 2016
I must confess to you that the death problem
made us sweat:
Our old school teacher,
Miss Barnovski,
whom we used to call the Duchess,
set us two enigmas — you and I.
She wrote on the blackboard — it was a splendid autumn
afternoon —
the radical of you plus the radical of I
is zero, and got out of the classroom
leaving us alone with our queerest thoughts.

Nichita Danilov, from *It might take me years
irinia Feb 2023
a moonless bird
in a storm without center
some things hardly
come undone
emptiness dissolves
surfaces contours
plastic hands scream
in distant dreams
dystopia belongs
to daylight in a world
devoid of shadows of thought
unable really to recognize
the gap between their eyes
in between me and anti-me
tyrants dream disembodied worlds
angels have not yet been invented
no more black words
in mugs by the window

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

I am singing a lullaby
to my emptied hands
I bow to this force
the starvation of life
the oblivion of the pulse
in which time grows
irinia Jun 2023
they say it's the limbic system
I say it's the earth of my brain
and you are here to stay
irinia Dec 2023
the sea of sleep was shivering the other day
today the clouds are in a rush towards the freedom
of the leaves perhaps, and I don't need to know anything about love
cause I can feel it silently labouring, growing more space for sight might light night for despite and ignite for dynamite and satisfied
the child, the lover, the warrior, the go-getter, the wise and the fool
the vulnerable, the humiliated and the daring, the dreamer
they need to talk to each other like the winds talk to the roots

is this all one can give to another, the patience of the flow,
and nothing more  more space to be
is it the echo of your bones that I can't left behind?
irinia Dec 2023
indulging quietly in their delight
the echoes of light are rumbling the universe apart
I leave behind the skin of some days
no light in some pockets full of depth
but cosmos is born in your hands
what a wonder that light rhymes with delight
so natural so wild

what an adventure carries me inside a surprise
what a surprise to feel ourselves emptied of death
the radiance of an imaginary time quietly rumbling
or is it or was it or is it
the echo of your savage lips
irinia Apr 2015
“I have loved you so much that I believe I understand you a little.”
Marcel Proust

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

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

-words are just riverbeds-

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

I’ll wear rivers
lipstick
bluebirds

in this poem of touching
every cell is spinning
its nucleus of *numinosum

while the day breaks open
into the heart of trees

-words are stones of silence,
unintelligible altars-

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

blood has its madness
irinia Mar 2015
when there is no cell
when there is no body
when I am on the edge
you rise
a wave
a sea
an ocean
embracing me
while I plunge

Lidia Vianu, from *My Cup of Light
irinia Jun 2014
Egotist, the master of the ego mist
or some ego antagonist
he is so much there
in the center of a web
of regurgitated fears
recycling pointless
the old cycles of
night after day
life after chaos
but no death
after ego inflation
just a rusty song
of imprisoned moments
or undeciphered gnashing
all character is just the dust
you cannot grasp
grey ruminations
curses wiggling
in times devoid of innocence
the cruelty of a ****
refusing to wither

at the end of his cigarettes
a speck of self
is threading a stratagem
to severe the ties
for the ******* of distance
so that he can continue
uninterrupted
to mutilate his heart

no one can persuade the night
into whitening
like you clean your teeth
of curses
the rest is sadness
the dew would know it.
irinia Jun 2023
"I'm not able to rid myself of my self."  Herve Guibert

days alienated from nights,
from the magnitude of their roots
in the absence of your touch
electric love poems on the tip of your tongue
an electric symetry seems to surface in me today
in the doorway

I surrender to the nascent desire and glance into
the protocol of impulse, the chemistry of freedom inhaled
energetic transference from your skin onto mine
a cave woman deeper than me insists to dress me
in your unknown selves since
I have nothing else to undress, like a wound
irinia Oct 2016
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
irinia May 8
my skin is listening: this
edge of a breath that engulfs us
the hours reclaim their elements
earth, water, air, fire
we don't banish ether from our eyes
with you an apple is a riddle
answers are not separated from questions
some mantras deepen the circle of
what I would say without words
irinia Apr 22
a quarter of a second
that's all I need to understand
the emotion of spring leaves
irinia May 2016
“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
irinia Jul 2023
finally this moment is here, I've been watching
and waiting, I've been hearing it all along
in between your words, in the center of the stories
you tell so eloquently, so clever, so wise

there is light in your right eye, some shadow in your left eye
the evening light is sweetly illuminating the magnitude of loneliness
some feelings need at least two people in order to be bearable

you sat and listened you looked deeper into your body
language receded, obscured itself like the moon
sometimes there is no need for words
something more important needs to be created
in between bodies and minds,
the flow of connection, of true partnership

the waves started, the waters of loneliness surfacing
you cried your tears and I cried mine
as I listened to the silence of tears I understood: this was the moment for a few simple words: I see you, I am here
there is no falling deeper than this for now
truth, this scarry creature, was there in your flesh and in mine
your loneliness was like a sea without horizon but the shiver of depth  like a voice without screaming, a bird without flight

perhaps this tango with tears will fill your lungs with innocence
as you imagine a new horizon, a new architecture for happiness
This is a series of poems about meeting people, about how people pass through my body, my heart and my mind.

"Thus, if a resistance is in operation, it indicates that one is experiencing his or her thoughts or feelings as a danger."
irinia Apr 25
"Today I didn't think..." she paused without breathing, "I took the shoes today... to get comfortable..." A monalisa smile on her beautiful face, as if  happy to get lost into an unseen dimension. Her body was cuddling on the sofa like in a fresh nest. Silence was spinning softly around us. I stared at her shoes emptied on the floor, I entered their dream. Minutes passed or half minutes, they felt years.
Years of hope and heaviness, ambition and laughter, ignorance and bliss. They looked helpless, tired,  used against their vocation by a stern pace. " My skin is itching... again...." Her skin doesn't want me to see through her, I thought, her skin doesn't want anyone to see what she saw, to feel what she felt. I looked at her in silence, I waited for the shoes to unfold their poetry. I hoped for a smile to slide on her skin one day
irinia Aug 2015
A slight confusion
of earth with water
of water with sky
enough for life

to be lived

**Irina Mavrodin
irinia Oct 2023
shadows entangled so it happens
the oppressor and the oppressed
such an intimacy of pain terror and shame
in the quietness of the right hand the left hand
surrender to the cruelty of an exchange
to be or not to be delusional
this is a question
reality just an approximation of a terrifying
mystery without meaning

a beat of a heart alone in the dark
we have many songs but still little understanding
about the growing shadow lurking in the bright light
irinia Jul 2014
elemental force
her hips sway in Paris
his dreaming hands in Montana
entangled
geography subsides
irinia Nov 2015
everywhere there was darkness
high above it was dark
                    always it was dark
a syrupy darkness
       seeped into your mouth / stuffed your ears
slapped you across your eyes
you couldn't tell what direction
                 you might move in
a darkness of iron
     over hearts and minds
sometimes we chance upon each other / we shake hands
      with somebody / then somebody else
but the guillotine of cold
   abruptly cuts short
this beginning
the dark / always the dark
                       forever darker
over all things
in the soul / in the mind
on the earth
(the  darkness above darkness)

Cassian Maria Spiridon from City of Dreams and Whispers
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Mihai Ursachi
irinia Mar 2018
Dear E. S.
poetry
is the world the human race
my own life
all flowered from the word
the transparent wonder
of a delirious ferment

When I find
one single word
in this my silence
it is hewn into my life
like an abyss

Giuseppe Ungaretti
irinia Apr 23
How many rythms we are and who listens.
We are inaudible.
No body can escape history, only in dreaming.
The dreams dream the missing body.
The mind escapes in its architecture, an unstable jungle.
it evades in dreams too
The dreamer dreams what one cannot think.
Concepts are birds on wire or double edge swords,
one edge cuts the density of the world, the other one cuts the body away. The body is the musical canvas of the mind.
Ideas don't exist without a hand, without a tongue.
Everything transforms into other than itself,
the body becomes mind, the mind becomes body.
Thoughts turn into motion, sensation  into image, images turn into words, colours, noise, an eternal hum,
we are the toys of a god of life. 
 Everything vibrates in a potential field of meaning.
Every tribe of cells has its own sense of time and grammar, 
In between the empty space improvises.
The mind is a martial artist, it rehearses its moves with conviction and pathos.
The body absorbs reality and feeds the mind,  it is an amplifier of life.  
These words are passing through my mind, my chest, my eyes, my hand,
I don't know exactly what they mean.
How much sense there is in a touch,
how light or rushed or heavy or shy or joyous or furious or screaming or ardous or defeated or uncertain or afraid.
I carry the other in me when I dream their bodies.
Then you move away, stay or dissapear, who knows.
 Communication moves through the body.
Everything that is alive finds a way to be. 
 Everything that is alive finds a way to destroy its aliveness.
The body resonates inside the body of the world.
The nuances of light gives the eye its intensity,
the movement of darkness moves the mind to fill the blanks.
A shared chemistry binds us and how much effort we put to disentangle.
Full succes is impossible.
There is no escape from being alive until we greet the great unknown, I suspect death is alive too after all.
we already know many ways of dying, we pretend not to know how life can render us lifeless.
Frozen, constricted, unflowing, circling, dying bit by bit.
Nowdays we die with speed in our eyes, with surprise.
What do words dream and who dreams the words?
Who dreams the world and who shares the dream?
I don't want to be captive in anyone's dream.
Let's share the dreaming,
from some dreams
there is no scape.
irinia May 2
on this hill a poet can see how
the tip of the forest is the dance-floor for light, how
silent sediments don't notice our steps
yes, there are mythologies of darkness in the bracket (some are ready to take the plunge) but
I am here to watch the evening simmering, the light letting go of itself
the tide of sight attuned with the air discarded by trees
my bones run in a depth even when time calls a truce with itself
irinia Feb 2016
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
irinia Jan 2024
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
irinia Apr 22
If I stop dreaming
It fully wakes the beast
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld

a collapsed time, its recurring pulse
spews me in and out of my mold
everything exists all at once
everyday,
probable and frozen states,
this configuration of atoms.
terror owned my muscles
cruelty assaulted my mind
I was breathing only in dreams
fused and confused,
receptacle for an anarchic pain.
I was living the secret life of moths
encapsulated in strangled words

I am writing:
this is the shape of a heart
no denial.
a tyranny of silence
is an impossible exile.
oh, I have to remember
the fortitude of silence
when I'm shouting,
when the tyrant is I
irinia Jan 2023
each morning bird watching
is a silent meditation
I have pigeons sparrows seagulls
megpies in my gaze
their delight of falling
makes me smile
I watch them teaching their wings
for each day
picking up the debris of sleep
spinning around each other
they start cheerful conversations
about the taste of the air
steal crumbs of wonder
from each other
a woodpacker comes
from time to time
its red stain is fun
none of them travel to you
they get round and round
wayching out
their own flight
irinia Jan 2016
ends so ― spiralling after
egg (that other half of our
chains) & setting gills

in gristled knot that buds
legs as tadpoles do & blow-
hole ears halfway down

the back & low-set eye
alien as featherless chick ―
ah we have peered into

that shared **** whose
blasto-flesh runs its gauntlet
of fowl & fish so fused at

the tail nothing can be told
apart ― is this why when i am
late i find in upstairs dark

you ― on placenta duvet &
hunched round self as wom-
bed ones are? ― as though

i had just returned from
all eternity to catch you
naked out sleepwalking

space without even
navel-twisted purpled
rope to hold you

Mario Petrucci, from *i tulips
irinia May 25
The memory of leaves heals me, but first I had to detonate the emptiness in my mother's gaze. Today this me summons all dreams for a clinical examination. Life must move forward to the confrontation of  horizontal and vertical truths: the tenderness of growing wheat, the serenade of aging. The innocence of my hands denounces its longevity. I split my days in two: countable and uncountable or dreaming and nondreaming. I suffer this continuous birth:  words invent me like an age without history. It must be said though: a historical smoke comes out of them. On a day like this beauty is tough, I speak with a seemingly exiled tongue. No return for dreams disguised in blind storcks.
When I look around I see all the way to New York or Cape Town how this world is oppressed by an aboundand impatience to find the point of no return for the sea level. I see the future where I never existed. Our own shadows crush us but we blame it on the sun's karma. I blame everything on love's echo.
irinia May 2015
Who else could I be than the collector of wounds
yes, gentlemen, I came here to buy
some of your hidden wounds

no, gentlemen, the hideous scars are no more of interest to me
I now collect more sensitive wounds
secret traumas
wounds passed down to three generations
pains inherited at birth
thin cuts got at the time when your feelings took shape
anything that disappointed you at birth
now this is what interests me
the first interior drop of blood
the first words you pronounced
but which never ever healed again

Matei Visniec
translation by Anca Romete
irinia Jul 2017
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
irinia May 2022
Faith is in you whenever you look
At a dewdrop or a floating leaf
And know that they are because they have to be.
Even if you close your eyes and dream up things
The world will remain as it has always been
And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.

You have faith also when you hurt your foot
Against a sharp rock and you know
That rocks are here to hurt our feet.
See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?
We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live.

By Czeslaw Milosz
irinia Dec 2023
words like teeth without roots
hands emptied of dreams
oh, the hideous pride of a bit
to be all

I've decided
so limp and stuttering
as I am
to face despair as stones face
the wind's breath
my hands put new letters into words
in these words that are old barrels
in which they keep distilling
the pain of the world
irinia Feb 2017
portraits in sepia crowding the table
no mirror path, no sugar
we drink our coffee black
deserted roads are blossoming in our eyes
under the table - disgust
some well disguised hatred
dinner is never served
cause the cubists reinvented the atom
I stay by the window counting widow-days
wondering
how many motherless women
can teach their children what to say
to the never day
irinia Apr 2017
sit down beside me for a while
even if it hurts
there are packs of stray dogs in my mother's smile
nothing's gonna hurt my father's fists
darkness comes with soft paws and no affection after ******
they refused their bodies such
that I had to not lose sight of the corpse of morning
I caught my eyes simply falling
waiting for the birds of prey
to tell their truth in our cage
what does it mean, you know, to have a soul

sit down beside me for a while
in this impossibly empty room
our flesh needs words
irinia Dec 2024
monsters unleashed I fear
light might freeze on our faces
and what a rush to be generous
an eden of objects, a living emptiness
all in the name of christmas
merciless the geopolitics of hatred
this is not a poem but sheer rage
when streets explode under our feet
exhausted by words turned into death sentences
irinia Apr 2021
When we are
Overwhelmed by fear
And the God at our core
Has left

We become
The shoes waiting
In the chest
Of a
Paralyzed woman.


by Riri Sylvia Manor,
English by Ioana Ieronim
from Poetry and Science
An Anthology of Comtemporary Authors from Romania
irinia Oct 2016
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
irinia Apr 2014
she would unriddle your wrinkles
wear your sweating
cast away your death
in her sighs

she would have you
rest your name
in the echoes of her womb
drunken you
with her rapture
of being alive
irinia Jan 2016
the women burn
their solitude in desolate pans
their underwear smells of blind hands
of running in the sun
of death a little
a moment of silence are wearing
between the legs
these women with still ****** hips
and the maniac blood slowly ascends
into nakedness

all they need is
faith
irinia Apr 2014
rip me from my bones
as a sensuous dress in the haste of dawn
such  is the seduction
of your fingertips

in your gaze my breast
is ripening

undress me of the silence
enclosing  freedom
yours is the night
make me collapse
into daylight
irinia Apr 2014
imagine infinity, tenderness, a suave delta
the touch of amber whispers
archaic thrill
higher&higher; into devotion
light decompressed in desire
the discipline of time in terror

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

dance my raving one,
dance
this is an offering
a mayday in trance
the night has reached from afar
its solar desire
irinia May 2014
Oh, Woman
He’s dreaming of your depth
like a synergy of effortless truths
your imaginary ***, a mystical shore
waxing and waning in violent tides
of affectionate sap
He would fly his kite running out of breath
like a child blessed with forgetting
puer aeternus
He would spin the hours in laughter,
in untamed visions
and here it is...
time revisited with gossamer touch
the bestiary revised with tender beings
making love  in the naked air
in the breeze of forgotten forests
in purple shy sheets
in the miracle of tomorrow
in unshed skins
imagine the bliss of the first breath
the dreams in geological strata

She’s just waiting for your rhyme
for you in primordial waters
unborn
now and again
irinia Jul 2014
There were tears of joy
There was a misunderstanding
implicitly (who was being born there?)
oh no, a simplicity...
There I was at the fount of milk
A strange woman with arms full
and red  screaming thighs
No need of words
just the heaviness of the breast

First smile, first migration of the soul
in the tearful land
of a new happiness
My baby’s laughter
unriddles the future
of my tender hands

“What is time, mama?”
“Just a circling seed, my child”
“Oh, mama, time is a wheel!”
“What is hope, mama?”
“Hope is a fly catcher, my child,
  a migrant bird.”

Such is happiness
undiluted
the mercy and gratitude of time
in my hardwood
love
irinia Sep 2014
she opens herself to the horizon
holding desire heavily in her breath
so crushing and withheld
the quiet rush of blood
bleaching his embrace
words withdraw in their matrix
only the form of his lips in her smile
and his walk in her feet
and making love so light
when the truth is androgyne
irinia Nov 2014
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
irinia Apr 2015
“A woman needs to find a way of creating boundaries that is not a violation of her instinctual feeling of wholeness.”*

daring like a ballerina
simple as a peach orchard
she loves me like a daughter
from the height of wonder
I look at her with innocence
like a mother
I teach her how to stare in the sun
to see flowers of light
the fragility of colours
and how stories happen in the dark
the hardest part is letting go of knowing
reinventing the smile
words stand there not pretending
tangible, waiting to be broken
here is everything letter by letter

cruel and demanding
like a song, like a perfume in autumn
“I lend you my fairies,
you lend me your arms”
silk embraces
uncracked choices
I follow her into laughter
She follows me into tenderness
little exchanges, attunement, failures
when to draw a line
when to plunge into circles
store fat miracles
a grasshopper is coming in
propelled by the infinite desire

“you don’t have wrinkles, mama”,
she laughs
a bird came to nest in your heart,
don’t frown, mama
let’s yell to scare baubau
"should I make it yellow?"

every day she’s mapping my honesty
giving me her burden of childhood
and we found ourselves raw and dreaming
in between hearts
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