Uncover our heads and reveal our souls
Fever Ray

to the east desire, to the west dying, the south is torrid, the north is quiet. no map can contain a wild abandon. hic sunt leones.
your arms compete with the wind, your eyes scorch me. my fingers are mad with the sweetness of dried flowers.  the roots of days are electric.  only to the night I confess my devotion, this transition from my skin to yours

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

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

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

it is just enough,
too many in depth lessons.
pain always asks for something,
fear has run out of options,
joy wears light dresses
loneliness refuses dinner,
despair sits at a crossroad.

these are just contours of events
obliterating "the vital impetus"
as in a probabilistic game
or in the second law of thermodynamics
blissful equilibrium is just a special retreat
some form of inner spacial homogeneity

this is just a moment
before dinner is served
on a peaceful evening
by a lake
catching the last rays
of the singing sun

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

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

no surprise we collide with the future
the great avenger invades our fiber
the old method of collapsing the future
still in the cards. how many cards are there?
the world a stage for mindlessness
ideology more powerful than reality
complexity will have a say in the tale of chaos
misread victimhood to put on a show
the tyranny of dark ideas uncontainable
number pi is missing from the formula but
penguins are resilient to shock therapy, lucky them
we'll hold our breath and see the world anew
no surprise we are inclined to run away from our contribution
to reality, a deeper wound is perhaps
the dark matter of history

Love is the opposite of triumph. The opposite of special. Love is the drop of water grinding the mountain. Love is Mariana trench. I am only the depth of my feelings. They create my  mind.  Love is the impulse towards a world that transposes  me. I know I because you. Love gives me a meaning and purpose for pain. So many meanings, hot and cold, deep and shallow, sweet and sour, immanent and transcendent, concrete and symbolic. The pain of knowing limits. The pain of keeping my eyes open. The pain of bearing myself.  The pain of not really knowing you because of the horizon. The pain of not fully knowing myself. The pain of fullness. The pain of emptiness. The pain of desire. The pain of letting go. The pain of change and decay.  In desire we are at most vulnerable, not triumphant. Giving in is giving up quietness and order. Outside of this body I  cannot know the world. A body without a mind cannot know love.  Love doesn't colonize but persuade.  Love pushes the boundaries. Love is not happiness, nor comfort, but motion and tension. Love denies its own myth. Love creates depth and wonder, dread and tears. Love destroys herself to renew the world.  Who can tell what love actually is. A mystery that searches for language and never finds it. Love is not everything that matters when the world doesn't love herself. Love is not adverstisement, no commodity,  it cannot be enhanced, only discovered. She holds the opposites imagined,  yet unimagined. To love is to learn how to live. How to let live. How to be wrong. How to fail. Love smells of clean sheets and ***** streets.

time bombarded me wiht its silence today, the sky was closer, birds more transparent. maybe because of the intersection of wonder and scream. once I was one with my wounds. I had thoughts without spin today, only the wounds of the world spinning in the distance. the impossible mixture of blood dust shattered bricks, death is so ignorant, so messy. you used to smile when you saw me eating blueberries naked. in the core of trees there is silence, isn't it? in the core-self there is an emptiness full of antiwords, isn't it?

hands filled with summer  and thoughts with horizon today, flowing by themselves. a sudden burst of joy, amusement in the face of ordinary life, trivial yet so creative beyond our control. the mind contemplating the image of  the situation decided it was funny, it was something else: sitting on a chair in the cold on a busy boulevard waiting for meatballs with mashed potatoes to be ready while reading about how different the thinking of people is in the east compared to the west (the geography of thought) while listening to massive attack and my legs dancing on the pavement while thinking about summer in between the lines while looking after women in the street. me - a surreal collage of actions and thoughts haunted by love as quantum superposition. I wonder where does a thought begin, where does it trully end

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

Nothing of what she had told me
proved to be true
not even wardrobes with thousands of dresses
not even a ballroom
neither garden with peacocks and harts
nor castle
which I've been looking for for three days
but have not found, her palace with view of the sea
of which I found nothing but the view of the sea
that, nonetheless, filled me with tenderness:
so she didn't lie to me after all
she is a good woman, she loves me

Matei Visniec
translated by Anca Romete

songs are sleeping in my naked shoulders
he said untranslatable words:
I want to confiscate your lips
aerate your dreams,
and all the rest, you know

I’ve tried my skin today
as if a nest of lazy hours
free spaces I found
patches of unhope,
poppies and
the possibility of you.

joy creates perfect moments
sweet fingers
nothing to take in or out
no shadows inside fists -
I just love how the light rides
the storm of things,
horizons are passing through
my words
and

*nothing louder than the heart

it must have been the sun the wind
the elation of the singing birds
that I fell into a sweet slumber
in no time I was dreaming
the storms in our eyes had met &
the stones got deeper

it was not too late for some metaphors
I was trying to sleep
when the air said:
“I will take him from you,
and give him back
randomly
and white butterflies will grow
in your hair”

“he will have himself
that’s what matters”,
I said to myself
while time was left dreamless
and some butterflies
were carrying the sea
to the roots of sleep

"thank you, my heart:
time after time
you pluck me, separate even in sleep,
out of the whole.”*

were I to perform
an autopsy of that morning
no verdict would be self-sufficient:
Love
bursting like a sudden dancefall
in my veins
your voice imparts shivering
to my plugged shadow
and the day goes offline
I offer my skin as a battlefield
for whispers
I wouldn’t compromise with
birds on wire
or diagnose my boundaries
when time is turned into gold dust
among your empty shirts
lodging the imploded silence
and your shaved smile
like a hurricane lamp

the word I hate most is
Love
it says nothing
nothing at all
about you
the hidden dimension
in my flesh
the shape of us
without mercy

I weep, I smile
there are seagulls

You cannot be sad, you cannot be bad, you cannot go far, you cannot subdue the pain

Can I like pink? The color of the flowers, of the irrational happiness of a child, can I like pink?

You can like blue, the color of the bruises from when your unremitting mind hits your body, you can like blue.

Let the little boy run, said the stranger. Let him go and don't fear the danger, the unseen, the unpredictable.
The mother fears, she fears herself without the child. She keeps lying to herself that when the moment will come she will feel free to do it, God will let her now when the moment is right.

The days are from yesterday not long enough to keep this unsettled mind straight. The minutes cannot embrace the impatience and still touch hands. The minutes are now so far apart that they cannot find themselves in hours. The day breaks.

I am playing with the minutes, with the hours, the little boy laughs.
- We have no time, carry on, we have no time, the mother said

The time, teared apart like the petals of a flower ripped by an insecure girl in her boyfriend's love, the time comes together again. The boy has stolen some minutes, so he can play with them later. Hold on to them and laugh whenever you remember your secret, said the stranger.

The day is shorter. Now. But some of us have the time to laugh.

I will hold on to my minutes and when nobody can see me I will wear pink.

*the author wants to remain anonymous

it had to start somewhere
Odysseus never came home
only chaos promised to return
the dome of illusion will be (ful)filled
with stones
the mutual game of deception is over
the pride of the mountains collides
with itself
the rise of irony in history
the decay of fists
awaits dignity to play
one more card today
chaos chooses its roots
beneath the surface
inside millennia
of looking over the sea

godless promises await
mundane
a fresh horizon
of pain

for a moment, so stubborn as a breath
so fragile as the tremble of a leaf
so sudden as the harmony of tears
I feel this space in which je suis toi
feelings and words are one with
the gratitude principle for
not to harm the riverbeds of time
I wrap myself in poems, between the earth and the sky
I need to pay my respects to the wisdom of the air
where there is nothing more to say,
in that space of miracle
time is passing through me like the sadness
of a beautiful woman

the first snow so warm wonder
is whirling in our living hands
seconds can be windows
they can feel a kind of truth
an impossible simultaneity
of tears and laughter,
a peacefulness as deep as the roots.

let me circle around your mystery
give me one more second
to smile back at you

From the deep anxiety of dawn
the grove of trees unveils.
Sad awakenings.
Leaves, sister leaves,
I hear your lament.
Autumns,
moribund sweetness.
O youth,
the hour of growth is barely past.
High skies of youth
impetuous freedom.
And I am already desert.
Caught on this melancholy arc.
But night scatters distances.
Oceanic silences,
astral nests of illusion,
O night.

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

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

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

Old courtyards with tubs of laundry:
‘Go to the washerwoman and do your own washing’
I whisper to you, and the wild apricot trees
all turn suddenly white, the sky pales,
the world is ****** in a drenching buzz.
There΄s a smell of bluebags and a sulphurous bubbling.
You΄d hardly believe it — so much steam rises
that only dirt is left in the copper.
The wild apricots petrify into coral.
It΄s so easy — easy in a woman΄s way —
to wash your soul, to rejoice in the spring wind
shaking the scales on its dragon-tail
so that you΄re looking at soap-bubbles
it blows for you between your fingers.
Two children pass by, holding on a string
a balloon transparent as a bubble.
For a moment we are crouched inside it.

Grete Tartler

[Translated into English by Fleur Adcock]

New Europe Writers Bucharest Tales, Contemporary Literature Press, Bucharest, 2014

If the soul were a cherry, you'd squish it gently between your lips with a smile just for flavor. That's just sometimes. You run through my sleep, create a new dimension. There I see you,  taste you, smell you, I lie in wait actually. Or watch over you,  my pure emotion.

let's pretend
we are not yet born
inside zebras
moons
layers
I just love the fragmented world
in your eyes
give me your pride
I'll clean the streets with it
I wonder who would notice
we are going to be born
from the womb of morning
with jasmine in our fingerprints
the world stares back
through glass eyes
ego psychology everywhere
like a plague
like a roller coaster
my butterfly heart
is moving the air
towards silence
I need to tell the difference
between you and you
but my eyes are full
of blue feathers
look, things have drowned
their names
dividing the depths
of living
I slowly phagocytate you
like a wave without direction
just before my eyes -
this rush, excitement, fear, quietness
this you-quality
suddenly turns into I-quality
as the belly of that
second empties itself
into no-more-than-life

there was a time before time or
so it goes that time was full of air and
memory not yet a galaxy of space atoms
the enchanted body had already started dreaming
a time without shape or direction
I was a body without horizon cause my mind
was only a dream in someone else's mind
(-the only route to some truth is through the unknown-
the mind is only an abyss of time in the beginning)

there was a time when only the touch was real,
a space of rapture and dread, of quietness and falling
into the rythms of the air
secretly in the depth of skin, of heart and joints
new sprouts were growing to keep the inside inside
and outside outside
certainty was just the feeling of (in)security inside an endless body
and your time was my time and my time was your time
each second a simetry cause time loved us

now that time creates a new dimension for each direction
I can thank my heart for being in love with the pain of being born  of time

a pain that eviscerates me
first comes love, then comes pain
luckily I learned from the birds to swim
love goes with such precision where it needs to arrive
to every wound left alone to die

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

here it is, the paradise circus
a kind of massive attack
a kind of antimusic
mindlessness, a great improviser
let's make nonsense beautiful
let's write the chronicle of cruelty
oh, the boredom of bling,
we've seen it before, the corruption of words
besieging the nakedness of light
the illusionist in chief and his linear obsessions
will decompose our composure
klingonians are here, what if
the future is tyrannically dreaming
in digits a parody
of reality

out of the blue
my hands turn into themselves
and so does the dust of leaves feeding
the soil of a mysterious skin
we are passengers through blissful omens
cruel visions of a ravished anti-time
so treat me like fire

You pass through light searching for me.
From the way you don't see me
not even when I take the shape of a cry,
I understand that your supreme triumph will be death.
Despair is an empty space
in which no one meets no one.
Despair is an autumn in which
the highest peaks are strangling each other.
Where can you be?
It's as though my days have slipped away
in a shrill season
of no one,
and no one can recall
what light flashed across their faces.

Carmelia Leonte from *City of Dreams and Whispers

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

So it goes, said Vonnegut

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

incandescence is my name,
the patience of graves
of grapes

"The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the individual keep himself from this process, because only by its full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and peculiar energy — an energy at once physical and mental, so that all his senses are more alert and more profound than another man’s, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity."

something must have happened
many times on my lips
further away into the liquid world
before the world
and on my knees full of devotion
I'm laughing a lot more nowadays
no longer baffled at the sun's *****
"seduction is the mother of wisdom" -
said the poetess
combing her hair with precise movements -
I drag my amniotic desires on to every door
I see
I'm recklessly alluding to my lover
with thick eyebrows
or to how to turn the light off
I am no longer covered with skin
when the lightest of waters dreams
between the yearning and the scream

I'll watch the birds wane tonight
tomorrow perhaps

I contemplate the horizon as a broken puzzle
yet aflame the sessions of thought
Eros is singing to the raging gods
the seeds of future mixed with the atoms of the past
the layers of history unreadable
we play games with the invisible
in between thoughts transparent vibrant walls
in between you and you, some fragments
in between myself and I, fault lines and vital figments
the mirror gaze an oxymoron in the beginning
a mistery the spin of fragments
that's all I can say for now since
the soul of language is hidden inside
untraceable rhythms of silence
true passion is shattering the body of time
it brokens the one into many, it fuses the many into one
in the seed we are a cosmic creature breathes
perhaps the void of the sky is dreaming its memories
or a sweet lullaby

a liquid heart is hard to bear
even if I shout no body hears
how many we are
lost in the structure of tears
this pain that I let in like a love decree
a wave like a fist dressed in impolite velvet
how to survive hating unresolved
the other side of everything is pain
in such a world of beauty and dread
absence and seduction rampant songs
and acid hands

a cycle revolving evolving
it disappears from here if you push it out there
I am talking about pain like a broken doll
a cruel fate left me without eyes so that I can see
only what I  feel
pain in all aggregation states, a true substance

a radiant promise in a vacant smile
I am trapped inside the circle
of the moon perhaps
at the hour when a great nothingness greets you
a neon sky a synthetic civilization
full of fascination as any other
we begin to live again
with some honesty, some regret for the divinity
of a blue death that possesses our hearts

time is circling its core like a villain
streets are running under my feet
is that the inflamed sky

call me your fortune teller, disaster, whatever
I condemn you to the bestiary of my clarity
you'd better make up  another camouflage or transparency,
a savage new name for devilry each day

you smile an unfiltered smile,
like a Sisyphus of tease and play

the light is so tenderly intense  after the storm,
it fills the dark shapes in between my thoughts &
I feel like playing the squiggle game with your name:
one day you might be Isidor who feels the skin of the air
some days you are Yuriy the great with skyscrapper dreams
what about Luis with soft hands tomorrow?
or Tiago, the tamer of the beast of thought?
I have to mention Maksim too, for maximum of delight in your sight
oh, Alfeu for the images of the unseen passing through you quietly in your sleep, like cosmic rays
Liberio I'll call you for the day of the freedom of speech,
once you've discovered the layers of nothingness
or Noah, the new born into a fresh laughter

“while resembling you
looking at it with my heart
I’m discomforted
by the weight of tear-like dew
on wild carnation flowers”

“beyond measuring
the thousand fathoms depth
may the sea weeds
keep growing to be so deep
I’ll be merely a caretaker”

“you only dip
into shallow waters
in my morass
my body is totally submerged
in the ways of burning love”

“clouded
by affairs of the heart
I am lost
hello! Why doesn’t someone
ask how I am?”

Murasaki Shikibu

lost in a sky
of strange and far places
a hint of a house
and treetops in the mist
guide my way to you

she gazes
into the same skies
as you do
may your thoughts also
come to be one of accord

if you answered
the tapping of every
water bird
even a wandering
moon could enter

if the haze had not
come out to go in between
the moon and flowers
otherwise even the birds nests
might have burst into blossom

boat upon high seas
if you are drifting without
a harbor or course
give me a call and I'll row
out to teach you about ports

not even knowing
the meaning which the color
of lavender has
but watching it carefully
this one's heart is deeply touched

Murasaki Shikibu, *A String of Flowers, Untied...

the impossible depth of solitude
with its amber tone
vitality  and some ambiguous  words
like the scent of a blooming field
in forgotten summers
and my wish to be his toy
in the machinery of dreams
he had canons of magic in his fingers
and a slippery mind
that went from one orbit to another
till the light was decoloured
devoured
into the music of
an agonizing time
or prayer

Language thus becomes an instrument of "spirituality", that is to say, of the direct transmutation of desires and emotions into presences and powers that become "realities" in themselves, without the intervention of physically adequate means of action.

Paul Valery, from "I would sometimes say to Mallarme..."

in the laboratory of life unseen words are sprouting
they decenter time or they hit themselves against
the windows like birds do
they circle the emotional memory of our aorta
they smell of dust mixed with blood
they search for that place in your gaze where
is never too hot

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

Octavio Paz, from Signs in Rotation

again and again
I believe in it
I know it exists
feeding on infinity

if you were a poem
darkness would get deeper and deeper in you
till it turned into white or alkaline nostalgia
it is something only yours, so much laughter
as if life itself was an obsession with a strange pulse

I believe in it
I feel it exists
feeding on flesh and bones
on the cycle of wonder

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

"Poetry is not a luxury... Through poetry we give name to those ideas which are until the poem nameless and formless."

by Audre Lorde

words are embryos of some thoughts,
it must be said they were arbitrary were they were born
their calling as deep as the alphabet of time
in a preformed space it was already there
the force that keeps a me apart from we
my mother fed me with words day and night
in a time when the word Babel was so tall

is poetry a shortcut or a detour into the unthinkable?
a compromise with the death of language
we anesthetize the dawn getting rid of memory
we ventilate emotions through our muscles
but the Carnot cycle keeps spinning
an emotional engine escaping precision,  not questions
unsaturated images in our stories, an unruly body
suffused with misery and dreaming
I will write an endless poem till darkness exhausts itself  
as a diver who runs out of oxigen

when sand storms are triggered in my hands
black cloths cover the mirrors
I have died an unfelt death