“If the perception of reality involves unpleasure, that perception – i.e., the truth – must be sacrificed". S. Freud

silence, this empty space
sight is stumbling on every object emptied of itself
I tend to forget all the nights  turning to dust
all the words turning to rust
we can hardly bear the intensity of paradoxes
I can see the world better through walls of tears

silence, this fullness of time when
the unreal seems so real, like the song of stones
I take back, I own the vision of my skin
grief is an explosive substance
the destruction of words follows
the destruction of mind really

who wants to see "the future of an illusion"?
we are so vulnerable so flawed when it comes
to creating reality, we want to forget all pain
we want to not know
the innocence of apples and oblivion we carry
in our dreams

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

My grandmother was married by the communist party. Yes, don’t be surprised. Comrade Soare insisted: comrade Alexandru is a promising man, he knows the right direction for the world to go. Grandma wasn’t convinced, but the party insisted, it was her duty.  They lived in a city where every street had a dark end. Women were not allowed to have silence between their legs. Only arms filled with zest. My father married my mother for the garden. For the apple trees, peach trees, cherry trees, for daffodils, roses, for the raspberry. Their minds colonized,  the right to think abolished. The right to feel obscured. Politics of desire mystified. The wind had ears. But they were proud, they were tall, they looked the other way. They carried history in their teeth without laughter. I came along as an unfinished story. The debris of time filled my mother’s womb. It was never mine. They gave me the demand of truth: touch feels good. A living soul is necessary. Thinking is vital. Community is air.  We need each other.
One day I knew, how it happens. My blood started flowing with cataclysmic power.  This is not the time for Hollywood love stories,  but honest touching. You spin my mind, and I keep dancing.  I carry your body in my silences just for the sake of the world.  I had to cry. Passion is terrifying. You suddenly don’t recognize the meaning of crossroads. The world gets swept away.  I feel like shouting at the speed of the world decomposing. You make me laugh.  What if love is a tyrant?  There is emptiness hidden in the seed of desire. I had to learn from tears, from disembodied words.  I have to learn again the meaning of freedom. Who knows what is this everything that matters?

so hard to comprehend if you
can truly be loved as you are
or we simply use each other
like Seurat used light
the jukebox of desire plugged-in
it keeps turning reality against itself

sometimes  I am dreaming, feeling
crying, laughing too much
I know.
I keep looking at the world
with the terror of being alive
with a look that exhausts love
itself

what if contradiction is the mother
of progression?

he survives his story kept in boxes and knives
the dread of forgotten runes keeps him company
mother repression father night
emptiness surrounded by invisible walls
death a continent for the living

I am facing this vortex of muted music
with empty hands, despair and white hair
no solace for the unshed tears
everyday he tells me something
about nothing

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

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

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

something is growing like a wave
that forgot its end

don't ask how I am
I might confess with riven words
I am trying out dances for
one thousand and one nights
like a Scheherazade of unforseen
whispers

the streets are full of hours
the hours filled with a labyrinth song
our faces risk a strange engulfing
we are so benevolent with lying to ourselves
my love has a dervish spin,
my mind is on a nightwatch
down the rabbit hole
so loud the world its disparate pulses,
unbearable conundrums

we should learn more from tears
what if my love is the worm
inside the apple
what if your love is oblivious
like an empty womb

all I have is this feeling
like a spine. of course
certainty is not in fact possible
especially on untouched
lips

I have no choice but to breath this air
or do I? I can speak and I can write
something about anything,
I can witness the hows the whys
pro and cons of the daily agenda
freedom has a local flavour
idealogy a bitter taste

discrete pockets of life disjointed
I meet them on the streets
the social body this rags when
policemen rebel against the truth
doctors against health
teachers against compassion
politicians against duty
a slaughter house the mind in action

we look the other way with a laugh
not to see the epidemic of helplessness
political physiology gone awry
oppression cemented in our deeper minds
we carry it in our shoulders like
a gun machine waiting to happen
the collective focus a borderline land
the air itself suffocated by the
politics creating despair so that
minds have no more sceneries
to dream the world into existence
or do they?

I can hardly bear this
tension of my lips
as I fall for the silence
in your hands
I remain silent till
the coffe gets cold
the streets get slippery
because of a radical darkness
somewhere there is a first
breath, a first kiss,
a last breath

I want to forget all languages
except the language of whispers
a rumbling cascade this feeling
of my quiet fingers
such a wonderful paradox
within a broken world
innocent dreams can envision
you

familiar this bubble of emptiness
comfortable as a womb
pain plays hide and seek
my hands are free to write
this hybrid creature that is me
fantasy and reality share a reciprocity
I am metabolized by my dreams and so I become
the aperture of the heart open as ever
to catch the murmuration of silence
of longing and forgetting
circles inside echoes inside circles

we didn't invent love
love invented us

you wear my skin as a coat
in the morning light
storehouses of tears
bridge my thoughts
of you
what is this je ne sais pas
biology, art artefact,
genocide of reason?
politics of satisfaction?
yes and no and maybe:
life playing a vitality game
with itself

there is a cosmic spin for
unborn thoughts, gestures,
meanings.
a house full of empty things,
the past. for non-believers.
****** traces on my skin
left by the wind, the sea, the fields
a tapestry of dread cause silence
was a cathartic violence

sit next to me and we'll watch
the elusive rhythm of gravity
pulling our cells in the same direction
to a new species of desire
unabridged

unseen the trees capture the clouds
moss captures the fog of oceans
roots store the sky deep into the earth
even dreams have their cycle
words capture unseen chemicals
is it in my eyes or in your eyes
the rain that grows discourses
of fire?

time has a savage chemistry
it flows in silence in the depth of life
stolen or borrowed, hidden & fluent
and I am this space for time
to learn how to love itself &
the transparency of mystery

his words have the beauty of sirens
his eyes the depth of a flame
the dawn is unsustainable sometimes
his fingers are looking for the edge of darkness
fragile as a new born thought
his dreams are characters in a play with the invisible
hidden in the stones of the sky, in unwritten books
and unfollowed dialogues is the voice of his time
he struggles with the unseen rule of the world
like a priest without a church
the darkness inside kept in mutable particles

he will unlock one day, all of a sudden, the mistery
of light inside the deepest darkness cause
his feet carry the craft of wisdom

my hands are full of waves, walls, kisses, common faces
a shamanic design sometimes
but they still can't bear the weight of words
in a language without wrists

I am a Jane Doe on a metaphoric journey
cause time isn't waiting for me in particular
so I won't waste any more minute on the description
of the darkness of language
better start writing the memoirs of the time to come

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

some sorrows make for an obsession without identity

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

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

the breath of history in unknown bodies
intoxicate my sight I might say
it chokes me with a mystified light
I have to learn how to breath my own life
it's easy to confuse the absent with the real
the incorporation of dread, hidden feelings
and unspoken truths a subtle tyranny
no body carried my body in a mind

I want to spend my life writing love stories I will
forget by midnight and rewrite with laughter

between generations a subtle struggle cause there isn't still
enough space inside for the life of one's boundaries
it's either you or me to suffer but everybody is OK
we smile at each other, we appreciate each other

unbearable life colonizes the body with unbearable silence, signs without symbols but symptoms, drives and confiscated stories
unreachable bodies woven together by force in the fabric of illusion
cast a dimming shadow like the melancholy of an echo heard
by no body

the social pace manic in its self-absortion, possession facing possession and what if
the world risks collapsing under the weight of its own irony:
a hedonic frame of mind so devoid of the ******* of life
the tyranny of desire is teaching **** to the naked eyes
a culture stops breathing if it can't let go of its desires to find them again
nothing to be destroyed cause everything is dismantling slowly

going right or left it's the same but not in any corner of the world
the leftovers of God, tautologies in a straightjacket,
cause one has meetings all day but no sleep all night
He/She/They colonize you with the scripture of profit
everything has its price on the expence of being enlivened
some don't have water, others too much of an illusion
some don't have peace, others have haute couture
some haven't eaten, others have molecular cuisine
some have the shelter of the sky, others listen to the echo of Big Bang
this logic of contrast is dreaming of the creativity of decay and
what if politics has become a narcosis, a  drunkenness of words,
while the wisdom of trauma is hidden in billboards,
the text says Politics of Happiness or Diserotica

the depressive society fools itself with the financial ****** of disconnected bodies in search of the last noise of the day
the space of the mind  broken by narrow horizons
the flesh and bone might turn into a virtual dimension

yet
the soul of the world flickers, it covers its solar plexus until we meet again as brothers and sisters of the trees
just because you feel good doesn't mean that
the world feels good too

night is falling with high speed on my shoulders
it has a strange elasticity
I ask your skin to give me some memories,
a superconductivity for sonic pulses & tactile waves,
quantic waves are collapsing into a strange synchronicity
the air might survive untrapped but not in my cells
a torid torrent makes your moves catch gravity
I can't be prosaic cause desire might ****
all the singing birds of the blue nights
that were rarely seen losing their tension
between silence and pain this emotional upheaval
that pushes the skin to the frontiers of asphyxiation
we are in Plato's cave right now burning down
the shadows with the magnitude of
you and I inside we are or just this
reciprocal dislocation
there is no I, no you, nothing less than
an infinite field of mutual recognition
a blazing simplicity unspoken

I have ships in my bones they carry me
somewhere else like a misunderstanding cause
the I of the world carries the evening
over the mountains on misterious ways
a nasty habit the imagination
sometimes I wonder if the ancestors are stalking these walls
to see if we can be happy
against the sacrifice of song
cause we die without thinking about it
a little bit every day from this stride
to put everything in its place
inside

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

much to be learned from the edge of dreaming
from the threshold of time about
inaudible histories, leftovers of
the real or imagined
they gave me the demand for truth
the truth they kept hiding inside the lesions of light
and now I have this excess of subjectivity
to confront, to join the dance
one cannot speak about
history remains trapped inside nails
like a circus of hungry ghosts risking
Descartes' error

time creeps between waves and broken seashells
the trance of a hunter, the soul of a shipwreck, the indifference of naked bodies in the sun possess my heart
the force of the sea rises inside the eyelids
everywhere you look a cinematic aloneness
the wisdom of sand in a fish' dream
now and then two embraced shadows,
the ardour of water consuming the beach

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 sky leaves traces of light on my skin
the lunar plexus is singing
I'm receiving these images from the future
the missing steps of memory come between  us
do not touch this fiery boundary cause you might
melt me down into a sweet oblivion
it's impossible not to love you from this edge
of a palimpsest full of wonder

the sea fills me up till there is no more space for dying
thoughts turn themselves into a boundless edge
the wind tells me there is only wonder
seashells have forgotten the stories of the depth
my hands want  to rediscover their dreaming
wild birds try the geometry of the sky
and whispers they become

the night is darker on your lips
my hips are dreaming while
your touch is searching for its meaning

Dear HP community, my friends, I've been thinking about this for a while and now is the time to act and propose you a challenge :)
I would love to hear from you about this: what does it meen to you to be human? It might not be an easy question but let's give it a try.
In the face of virtual worlds, AI, in the dazzling speed of our world, in the face of our severing ourselves from nature, I find the topic relevant. I hope you do too.
Please feel free to address the challenge any way you like, with depth or shallowness, with fun, humour or depth of thought, with your felt sense or otherwise. As you wish, in comments bellow or maybe in a piece of writing. I hope to hear from you and I won't be offended if I don't. Maybe we can write a collective poem, who knows?
Warmly,
Irina

a protest against emptiness?
the failure of forgetting the beginning of touch?
an unanswered question?
the sky inside the roots of trees?
the desert inside the heart of rain?
the dreams of the heat of the earth inside cold stones?
an uninterrupted dance of absence and semantics?
the memory of photons from the moment of conception?
the steam of bodies in the quiet air?

what if love is this cosmic urgency,
emergence with myriad faces,
a protest against the liveliness of
nothingness?

on this edge I hear different
things with different ears
the rain in close deserts
the emptiness of hours rolling into
something larger than themselves
your self, my self, their selves trapped nebulae
inside the knife of time carving wise bodies
when the flood of blood gets disconnected from the heart
bodies full of tears recycle the vaults of thought
I am no other than myself frozen in a primordial space,
a shelter for the pain of those I love

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

as I am trying to learn as much as I can
from the self of trees, wind, of bees and birds
of the unlanguaged child I still am, from
wise men and women through the arch of time
I am well aware that we can keep each other captive
inside the machinery of make-believe that makes lonely
bodies & sunsets bearable
I can't help feeling I am just this,
a vagabond in such a deep mystery

my body is a tropical forest in transition
thought is a beast with binocular hearing
as I am waiting for him naked
in front of a narrow window to infinity

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

this animal is my self
it demands care, quietness, aliveness
infused as it is with primordial light and dread
sometimes I am only ears and eyes and fingers
and legs and *** and spine, a stomach, a liver and
a heart, sweat, tension and craving, a felt unity
vital stories to be told in the forgotten language
of hope and despair, longing and refusal
there is earth in my hands, air in my eyes, fire
in my stomach, water in my skin
untranslatable whispers about you, the other-me
I am a thirsty boundary for the river of life to dream
sighs symbols rythms harmonies and virtues

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

you intensify a subtle creature inside me
with sudden nuances of sonorous blueness, aurora greenness,
naughty yellowness
with the impatience of roots piercing the earth of my soul
this creature keeps stumbling onto the same truth that
metabolizes light tenderly for me to have a measure of my depth
suddenly the strangest of strangers is I

any two people  coming together can be a game/life changer
but without intimacy they are only like
a fish without water a bird without air
leaves without roots dreams without a dreamer
this dazzling carousel of constant stimuli
this attack of never-ending newness
that spins the world is the ******* of  void
I dissapear from thought I dissapear from heart
I am just a message an unresponded voice
a poor sign without the depth of symbol
an avoided truth an impossible commitment
there is no time there is no space for giving and receiving
the most precious substance, our deeply lonely selves
the tears are helpless, here it is, have some void
it evacuates itself in language, oh, language games
played with much innocence,  and eagerness
I contemplate the void in mesmerizing eyes voices words
taking responsibility for  illusions the hardest bit
the body knows first about the danger left behind
by a theoretical love
only by entering the void I can feel it, oh yes
the ******* of emptiness is inside me, too

if I close my eyes and fall like forever
deeper and deeper, just deep enough
I can feel the speed of the earth
it spins me further away from the path of harm
if you want to know me just look at the clouds
they carry the rythm of my tears
far away into the roundness of a blue heart

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

The true poem is not the work of the individual artist, it is the universe itself, the one work of art which is forever perfecting itself.

Ernst Cassirer, from "An essay on Man"

has the temperament of high waves,
the character of raging winds
it can read the bones of the sky
it can be as quiet as unused ovens or
as the light over the hills after the storm

a woman's passion invents new remedies
but no desperate religion of salvation
for the curse of being bodies full of time.
it doesn't accuse you of the insolence of being yourself
no need to use blood metaphors in this poem
cause a woman's passion simply moves the air in your blood
so effortlessly that all you might want is run away and
die again and again

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

love spoke with an incomprehensible voice in manic days. we were looking for the soul of words, from one rhythm to another, no nuance no desire to escape this passion for dreams on repeat. my name is Carmen, I told him, you came to light me up like the morning that has never seen torches nor sobs. I'll write as long as the words hold me. Contaminated minds in humid bodies, I felt my fluid fingers maddened by je ne sais qua. I couldn't find my emptiness, you couldn't find thoughts any more in the tunnel of yearning, it kept descending into the desire of the earth, it ravished us. I don't want to get out of mind but I would go to the sea of green, was it in the palm of your hand? I'll turn into a cradle for the illusion of eyelids. I didn't have eyelids anymore, just two burnt eyes, the darkness that dug into them, that darkness that blinded you, called you, squeezed you till you turned into ink. I'd like to spell the word desire like a mantra, may it forgive me until it forgets me, until I howl and then fall silent. I shut up as a field. I'm writing about too much aliveness, purple in the pleasure of pain. I keep reaping the grain of wheat, I have no helpers like the hero in the story. pain contaminated the tablecloth. I didn't hide my desires in the orchids, but let them smile. we talked about ourselves as if we didn't know.  we were our new selves, our old selves. it was us all over in the abyss of mind as if it didn't hurt in the morning. I wanted to give myself to you. I am pierced  by words, I can't stop them, they flow from the eardrum of the mind to the marrow of my bones or the other way round. The stories of the lymph, I listened patiently. Maybe today is yesterday and tomorrow is the day after. I've forgotten the alphabet of time. What do words actually know? Love is the mercy of time passing by, leaving us untouched, now I know.

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

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..."

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.

under the voiceless sky I become
more and more allusive, myself and me
my selves dissolve in hematopoiesis
the economy of loneliness abolished
I want my heart to be a public space
an agora for your dreams or theirs
societal connections make people real
although thinking does hurt, I swear,
but we'll get used to it,
to the incommensurability of Reality

love is a constant state of meeting the other
of meeting ourselves like light meets the grass