I want a touch of Eminescu
To make you fall for me outright,
And hints of Grigorescu’s hues
To turn your art to pure delight.

A bit of Creangă, I would keep,
To share our tale for all to hear,
And, blessed by Slavici’s stroke of luck,
I found you near, a heart sincere.

With Blaga’s strength, I’ll crush my fears,
And Bacovia’s heart shall feed on pain,
To make friends with my solitude,
And find some beauty in the rain.

And maybe just a bit of Petrescu
To spend with you one final night,
So Stănescu will recall from me,
You were my rarest, purest light.

Here I am,
a tangle of roots
buried deep
and reaching down
deeper,
looking for a sign of life.

But no,
I sprawl and
twist around,
widdershins,
round and round
the battering thump
breaking the walls
under my flesh.

My waking hours
remember,
thick with the weight
of words left unsaid,
an iron on my tongue.
Unmoved.
Unperturbed.
Stagnant and decaying,
until I’m a stranger
to my own voice.
A crow lost in a cornfield
lulled by a scarecrow’s
siren song.

Like a crow,
plumes as dark
as a saint ‘s hope
wandering in the arms of limbo.
Wings bruised
for hammering obstinate bars,
voice hoarse for singing the blues
over dissonant chords.

Over and over again.
“Like a broken record,” they say.
Singing the same old song.
I have been.
Songs like plastic bags
of cans that digs into a tender
palm until the blood supply is cut.

What does the sky
Feel like on my wings
The stretch of endless blue
Soft wind threading through my feathers?
Tell me, the feeling has long escaped me.
Emptiness ringing in my ear
in the space between
where song once lived

Time has a way
Of erasing memories,
Of erasing wounds
and hardening them into scars,
of stepping into clear water
and muddying it.

Now the air is stale,
silence dense,
solitude burning red,
my bones rubbing against
my soul,
Leaving blisters and scuffs.

These heavy eyes,
the sky’s allure has faded from their gaze.
they have learned to shrink
into this smallness.
no horizon here
only walls,
and the dust taste of dullness
is vapid.

How I miss
how the sun makes
the salt on my skin rise,
or how the rain can seep
into my thoughts until
it colors it sad.

Now, there’s just fields of
milky grayness, playing labyrinth
until I reach the end,
only to be devoured again.

And sadness is too mundane a word,
at most it’s an espresso
that keeps you awake,
A defibrillator,
that jolt that makes eternity
an agony.

I am but a riddle I cannot solve

Don’t you feel bad for Grendel,
His mind is poisoned by the devil.
He is just a lost boy in a harsh world against him.
Voices in his head push him towards the brim.

He hates the world that he roams alone,
The Dragon’s charm; his flesh hard as stone.
The Shaper's voice; his head is aching,
Wealtheow’s beauty; his heart is breaking.

Grendel's mother’s embrace—a silent plea,
In her shadowed depths, he struggles to be free.
From Beowulf’s strength, he cannot hide,
The warrior's might marks Grendel’s tide.

Grendel's anger seals his fate,
Fatal madness will not abate.
His demise is in the mead hall,
“Poor Grendel’s had an accident. . . . So may you all.”

i’m afraid i am nothing,
without literature, and art.
without words and ink.
without flowers and music.
and most importantly, without you.

I didn't see it coming;
I expected nothing else.
Thirteen years old, hiding behind the rules
so I didn’t have to face
that shortcoming, that missing piece.

Once I had accepted limitation as
the sublime:
something that would come in time.
The constraints, then, gave it meaning,
deciding who says what.
Syntax is rules, and rules are limitations.
Without them, we are-- what?

But in time I came to want it,
that freedom to--
I traded "pressure to not" for "pressure to do".
Peering through the rhetoric,
I ventured into the upper reaches, and
I came apart.
There was nothing to hold me together
in this elevator, its yellowed walls crumbling away.

“Not all freedom is good. You can have terrible freedom.”
Was it the mother or the Aunt that said this?
Or Friedrich “entsetzliche Freiheit”--

Ah, Schiller.
What of the Mrs? Did she have freedom
in her husband, in Richard F.?
More freedom in the
(****-and-) (ball-and-) chains
than in the haze of youth?
The most, then, (it can be presumed)
from her departures: first to Alaska,
then even farther north, from where none return.

As freedom dissolved into expectation,
itself now another limitation, I wondered.
Which had it worse:
the woman (machine) outside the yellowing elevator walls,
or the girl (ghost) pacing within?

How, or when, or what is not the Akond of SWAT?

Does he pick his nose with his fingers and toes?
When he smells a rose does he slime the rose                 with SNOT,
                                                           ­                       The Akond of Swat?

When he texts a text does he always press SEND?
When he chats online does he chat with a friend            or a BOT,
                                                            ­                      The Akond of Swat?

Does he breakdance, jitterbug, krump, or twerk?
Will he dance a jigg, or jive, or ****,                               or GAVOTTE,
                                                        ­                          The Akond of Swat?

When he eats a banana, does he eat the peel?
Has he eaten an eclectic electric eel                                or a BRAT,
                                                           ­                       The Akond of Swat?
Some one, or nobody, knows I wot
When or how or what is not
                                                           ­                       The Akond of Swat!

Is a poem not just a song
with rhyming verse
that’s not yet sung?

With repeated chorus
not yet stuck
inside one’s head,
amongst the muck?

Is a poem not just a song?
A daisy chain of verse
not yet strum

around a fire
among some friends
deep in the woods
on away weekends.

Is a poem not just a song
not yet proclaimed
by a choir’s tongue?

But uttered silently
in a bed-lamp’s light
at early hours
of the night.

Is a poem not just a song
that peacefully rests
in black ink upon

a white page
inside a book,
upon a library shelf
until it’s took?

Is a poem not just a song
quietly set to lips
that read along

on a train,
on the way back home
from visiting gran
for tea and a scone?

Is a poem not just a song
unset to keys
and not yet begun?

Not yet major,
and not yet minor.
Just metered in beats
and little other.

Is a poem not just a song?
I suppose it could be
but not this one.

Laissez-faire and free,
Nothing bothers me in
Bohemian living.

Fruit fresh plucked,
On the grass with the bees
Relaxing and eating.

Read a play, finish a novel
See what's up with sister
See what's up with father

Laissez-faire and free,
Why are you so worried
That I'm not worrying?