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Mar 11 · 141
magic
irinia Mar 11
light lingers on stones
I love to be a spectator
women's hair hallucinates sunflowers
time is hitting the walls
today our ribs/smiles don't hurt
these pavements are the custodians
of wind's secrets
our eyes see without effort
a strange divination possesses this journey
from egg to coffin

light travel through us as if through
an ocean of bones
a poem dreams its exile into words
the trees let us see the seeds of time
we confuse happiness
with the boutique of dreams
and that's alright
some magic was saved on Noah's ark

springtime smells of women's hands
a young man conjures an intact eden
silence is grinding the air
at the end of things, the root of water
Mar 8 · 197
women
irinia Mar 8
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
Happy Women's Day!
Mar 5 · 230
poetry
irinia Mar 5
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
Mar 5 · 257
Wind, Water, Stone
irinia Mar 5
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
Mar 5 · 268
pain
irinia Mar 5
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
Feb 27 · 364
what is
irinia Feb 27
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?
Feb 27 · 202
no map
irinia Feb 27
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
Feb 23 · 1.3k
flow
irinia Feb 23
this blood
an unseen weeping
pour me into the palm
of your hands
I wanna
flow
Feb 20 · 705
no words
irinia Feb 20
I weep, I smile
there are seagulls
Feb 14 · 415
cosmogonies
irinia Feb 14
the dream is dreaming itself, we are its subjects
the mysterious writing of life, its ellusive quest
an inflationary expansion was deleting its traces
zero degree of consciousness in a moving aliveness
strange rhythms around and strange qualia
there were attributes without letters at first
before a predicate turned into subject
life othering itself into much more in its own image

life was chatting with itself before the knower and the known
spinning the seeds of time, change: its true substance
I am you and you are me but  we need
a symmetry break for the dawn of mind, the other of the body

so much was already done since life was rehearsing for eons its scripture, forms of habit, viable conventions
processing its otherness relentlessly
mind is this forest-creature exulting, hiding, defending,
breaking down, screaming, expulsing, recomposing, sprouting light and lightning

the very first thoughts traversed the barrier of vibrant void
their binding a translation of a body in time, a future storyteller
pure movement the nature of space, the wonder of above and bellow
the first qualia, tension and intensity, an unstructured  flow of frequencies, a cascade of warmth, fullness, emptiness,  
a body discovering herself, her unbearable, her rapture, the feeling of being

the centre is everywhere expanding, accelerating a creative chaos
thinking was just waking in the  field of a dreaming body
thoughts needed to outgrow slowly their skin of imaginary beings

then again and again
dreaming keeps decomposing the already thoughts trapped in their echo chambers, their networked cocoons circle our certainties
a thought needs to die to create another, a sacrifice to the god of the unknown
oh how many deaths we have already died recomposed only by dreaming, the solvent from which reality is born

intensively your body is translating feeling into dreaming,
extensively the mind is dislocating dreaming into thinking  
whille a distant star is crushing itself,  
love rehearses its gravity,
death is saturated by its own dismay

perhaps poetry is this witness of silent cosmogonies
Feb 14 · 213
this
irinia Feb 14
this feeling that keeps me alive, cauterized by light. the silence of silence is yet possible in the sonority of clouds and the delight of roots. the discreet spaces of time finding a voice, some harmonic highlights. it's not only the moon that gives meaning to void, fullness empties itself into the screaming of colour. almost here, almost there everything scatters, conjoines, rejoices  regurgitated by dreams. seeing with your heart an homage to the interconnectedness of life. I pass through you, you pass through me for a moment as short as a breath. our hands leave behind a trace of something, a roaring heart attuned to herself
Feb 14 · 211
not a poem but love
irinia Feb 14
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.
Feb 13 · 199
inexplicable
irinia Feb 13
you escalate my depth
a pain without pain, an effortless mirror,
this flame trapped in the depth of flesh
my body is a quiet urn for
the ash of the days without an inexplicable
you
Feb 12 · 128
We Were Losing
irinia Feb 12
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
Feb 11 · 144
power
irinia Feb 11
Perhaps time is a machine gun when it stops. These words capsules for the unbearable. I would go away from the smitten crowd and talk to the sea. I pray to her: at least she examines its hallucinations of power.  To restore the heraclitean movement of our tragic faults. Try to create life with dead words from a dead sea of splendour, but the beauty of words is always unexpected.
Inflation accelerates in this incubator of power, its obscurity a destiny.
Do we still understand the meaning of light when women get pregnant with salty wounds, with poems that decompose as soon as they are born. I'll keep wondering if the echo of the sea grows in circles while this deluge of deception is a tomb for our thoughts without echo. Trauma is ahead of the game shaping falsified days for deranged deeds. Perhaps a sea of laughter is restored somewhere  like a pool of light fleeting on somebody's lips.
How can we see and it's in front of us: cruelty writes history.
Time violates its own decay when the world gets to be somebody's prey.
Feb 7 · 818
the bell
irinia Feb 7
The temple bell stops -
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

Matsuo Basho
Feb 3 · 226
dream
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
Feb 3 · 173
anarchy
irinia Feb 3
words transcend themselves in that land without atmosphere:
the atoms of seconds colliding in my tissues
they arrive  in a living body with her inaudible pulses
the cry of an owl defies the noise without depth: the city descends into the nocturnal abrogation of its chimera
a sudden ripple in the density of flesh, this moment reveals its round edges,  the full potential of a feeling to mould itself into an acustic tenderness
fugitive thoughts denounce their orbit in a vertical intensity
an asymmetric perspective captures my hands : time is poetry. poetry, the descent into a living anarchy, an elusive certainty.
love, a mirror reflecting myriad forms & the insistence of stones. stones, the endurance of time caught up in its excitement,
a pulse untranslatable into other than oneself.
Jan 29 · 193
Between Him and Me
irinia Jan 29
Lord, how much life can reside in a tree?
I don’t even know his name, but then
I write down my poems every day
On pieces of paper made from his skin.

He has witnessed my winter tears
And I have enjoyed his blossoms when it’s warm
Even though my window, looking to the sky,
Doesn’t reach as far as his outstretched arms.

When I’m in pain, he
Sings my tribulations.
Even then, between us
There’s a silence so enormous
That it takes in everything
From madness to desperation:
Blasphemy, the miracle above,
Prayer and a cry of love.

Sometimes, after ages of this silence between
Us, a single leaf falls down. And then,
Without knowing why, or what the cost,
A grateful universe learns by heart
What it’s lost.

by Ana Blandiana, translated by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea
Jan 29 · 142
Sonnet
irinia Jan 29
You were so absent while washing
your face in the morning, you never saw
how the linden in the courtyard reached a limb
through the bathroom window and shook
sticky seeds into your hair. Your hair grayed
in this working class neighbourhood you’d heard
already as a child smelled like a ruined life.
The turrets of the little Russian church
once looked so fragile to you – you wanted
to feed them carrots from your hand
and croutons. Your heart was alive.
Your heart was like an iodine rain
over a crowd of crushed heads.

By Dan Sociu, from Sentimental and Naïve Poetry, translated
by Oana Sanziana Marian
Jan 25 · 574
play
irinia Jan 25
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
Jan 23 · 201
this wonder
irinia Jan 23
the rawness of things suspended in the air
an invisible hand pushes the hours through us into the compost and delight of memory
I don't have words for tomorrow, only your name today and warm tears.  I was born into a dead language so
I have this detector for the silence of windows, it sneaks in my lungs
pain is offline, the dark swallows itself
no wonder last night I dreamt a girl in a blue kimono
-you are my hiroshima, I breath like a prehistoric fish-
she was smiling to something only she could see.
love, this prehistoric wonder,
a fragile skin of this weary world
Jan 20 · 226
history
irinia Jan 20
spectacle society or a faceless society? who could tell. after historical laughter comes a historic dread. when the sky is the limit of power we are doomed to endure the mania of failing floors. nothing is trully free to harm reality, not even poetry, and whose reality is more real. words like disfigured worlds,  they hack the body time. what is beauty and what is truth, this complex breathing creature in an unknowable form, this  hidden vulnerability: we can't bear who we are, we want to sink in a history without memory.
Jan 20 · 165
parody
irinia Jan 20
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
Jan 19 · 116
Harmonia Mundi
irinia Jan 19
At the border between garden and orchard,
an old door
with a rusted padlock. Rusted by rain or dew?

We walk through it barefoot blissful, cherubic.
My name: Volatile

Grandmother’s apron, a white cloud
scented with lavender
under which I’d bend my head
when the lamb gave birth,
sowing the air with as many photons
as star seeds
over hills, in summertime.

Then, the timeless joy –
children by the pond
gazing at the orange mill
brimming with moon.

Under the beam,
the braid of garlic cloves
– tiny lanterns
illuminating my height
on the spine of the door,
marked there by father,
his hands fragranced with walnuts,
and on the windowsill
the little sack of seeds waiting to defrost.

At the border between clay and star,
a narrow door
through which only we
could squeeze,
on a path of light.

by Liliana Ursu, translated by Mihaela Moscaliuc
Jan 19 · 76
Prelude 3
irinia Jan 19
No one needs to answer to eternity
not beings – lovers or birds
nor things
nor even the elements linked in dark conspiracy
No need to have stopped just there
set down time’s suitcase
(someone once wrote: shaking the dust from his shoes)
to stretch toward what in you always escapes you
but find shelter in blood
salvation will not come from anywhere
but the counted passage of hours
beings and things would pass by like green water between
           riverbanks

lush with grass
or clouds at the edge of a storm
salvation will not come from elsewhere
at the cathedral’s base so many shadows flutter
mortals waiting or wandering
they were the ones you followed down narrow lanes
transfixed by desire
they were carrying time’s suitcase
what law impelled them forward and circling
if not the endless cycle of the seasons?
Finally they broke the spell
perhaps they’ll lead their gangs again between the Rhine and the
    Moselle
saviours of sacks and string
swallows swirled with hawks at the storm’s edge
they sketched your fate

by Emmanuel Moses, from  Preludes and Fugues, translated by Marilyn Hacker
Jan 15 · 163
despite
irinia Jan 15
these are still beautiful days to feel alive
despite the fragility of our thoughts, our tissues, our tears
the totalizing concepts swallowing the real
despite meetings without mirror, a strategy of the invisible
despite the decay of atoms inside walls, steps and apples
despite the accident of the imagination that we are
the excess of life, undigestible
despite the depth colliding with the surface of things
despite a pain without meaning, a dream without a dreamer,
a torment without memory
I look at things with crystallizing eyes
despite the limit of the impossible
Jan 15 · 103
untitled
irinia Jan 15
what dares disturb the illusion of hours without strife,
without venom, without height
the air is full of anice, things ocupy their prescribed places
in this compulsory life
when I was falling they said it wouldn't hurt
but my dreams were forbidden summers,
my hands were cracked by smiling
the energy of the verb to be intense while
I fell into this dialect of silence,
me and the  ghostly caress of a lonely woman
Jan 10 · 430
this language
irinia Jan 10
there in the land of the wind
the grass would like to be as tall as you
the salt of the earth would be ringing,
resonant with the laughter of tears
perhaps everything we are
has to conceive a symbolic death
to deliver ourselves

in the embryo of words there is
such a gentleness, a true prophecy:
language would begin to forget itself
we meet in this language without words
like two beings from the end of the world
Jan 8 · 231
poverty of words
irinia Jan 8
The poet cannot talk about what he already knows.
Northrop Frye

light splits the world in seen and unseen
night accelerates some fascination
I contemplate the poverty of words
who is doing the autopsy of freedom or something,
a requiem for a country that torments its name
streets don't smell of winter but of loneliness and oblivion, exhaustion and rage
some have already forgotten the meaning of blood
we like sweating not weeping, cursing not dreaming, finding the stain not the brain of fog
we practice forgetting like the snake charmers

dreams look like second hand stores, like the promise of the apocalypse,  a local version of Munch's scream, like an uninvented wheel or the beginning of the world.
an old lady sells fir wreaths in disbelief
too many drugstores ignore the untethered soul,  
a place of redemption they are, unwittingly

here there are poets, there are beasts, gentle souls and blind alleys,
indifferent smiles and lazy hands
and who can hear/bear the echo of that song... better dead than communists, comrades
province hates the center, the center forgets its north,
the all good sequestred against the all bad, no dialectics in doublespeak
truth to be told, there is  no consent for telling the truth
ersatz emotions exchanged casually, Hell is other people. always.  some play Russian roulette with reality, we are the heirs of a history disorder
if my dreams are full of birds, waters, lonesome deposits of the flow of time, I have to wonder
is history a desire machine searching for some mythical proportions

this country or a ****** mother with indifferent hands
here citizens have no faces, but interrupted gestures, fractured thoughts without containment
I fear those who cannot cry
without the meaning of blood history has no meaning or maybe it does, look at the speed of some digital thoughts,  the attack of ready made ideas. ideology becomes eulogy

no wonder I don't know how to end this poem
we need new words that contain their power
what is freedom? who knows, who cares.
oh, an old adagio, a gangrene of our undiscovered minds
Jan 8 · 126
mischief
irinia Jan 8
I wear my nails like a mischief
but I ask them deep questions
spring comes in the middle of winter without innuendo,
no twist of words just plain daylight
I smile at everything that smiles back at me
I listen to this ancient heart
I contemplate the transgressor in me
then I move on to stand up comedy
(life could be unbearable without laughter)
I conjure words to write themselves
especially when I feel there is too much of an I,
or like a snowdrop in January
Jan 4 · 210
who
irinia Jan 4
who
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
Dec 2024 · 952
Mystical
irinia Dec 2024
Shrouded in this mystical darkness
The tenderness of fog a good company
The winter silence reinventing its language
The inception of tears suspended
How wonderful to love everything as it is
Like trees love the patience of earth
Happy New Year!
Dec 2024 · 703
indescribable
irinia Dec 2024
it happened in an instant
like an eternity of wonder crushed by a wink
night is a prophet, I often think, for better or worse
with its truth of immensity, its molecules of light  and
dreams' oscillation. there are nights and nights
when I feel the ripples of spacetime moving with the speed of desire

some poems are unreadable since I taste the power of words
biology dreams of giving herself to waterfalls in an embrace
chemistry can be caught dreaming to break the symmetry
of its isomorphic structures
physics refuses to disentangle the fields, the particles from their resonant selves
a tender savage disposition is collapsing time, is playing hide and seek
an Irish band sing for someone

my knees feel the earth, the dreams of tundra
I am still myself when my mind is shattered
there is love, there is death in the centre of something
indescribable
Dec 2024 · 181
Future Politics
irinia Dec 2024
We are not yet ready—intellectually, philosophically,
or morally—for the world we are creating. In the next few decades,
old ways of thinking that have served us well for hundreds, even
thousands, of years, will be called into question. New debates, controversies, movements, and ideologies will come to the fore. Some
of our most deeply held assumptions will be revised or abandoned
altogether. Together we will need to re-imagine what it means to
be free or equal, what it means to have power or property, and even
what it means for a political system to be democratic.

Jamie Susskind, from Future Politics Living together in a world transformed by tech
Dec 2024 · 207
this time
irinia Dec 2024
this time was that time, perhaps
your fingers smell of orange peels, of Babel
I didn't  dream of a white Christmas
Alexa played december songs
that pierced through my heart,
a distant thunder she became,
the countdown of a little miracle.
a day to lighten up the ancient symbols
to keep you close in innocently round
tears
Dec 2024 · 488
soul of joy
irinia Dec 2024
the soul of joy grows in circles
it glitters in children's cheeks
singing together washes away
the momentum of nonsense
I contemplate the unknown,
the right proportion of light of darkness
their breath kept in balance,
the golden harvest of hearts,
of hours
the fir tree gives away
some scent, some wonder

Merry Christmas
Dec 2024 · 1.2k
fear
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
Dec 2024 · 153
there
irinia Dec 2024
I could end where you begin
Kerala Dust

some mornings there is a dawn in me
and there I begin, I look at things
and they don't look back
I rehearse your name with different whispers as if
I rehearse the pulse or a pirouette of silence
You give birth to I, I give birth to you, a strange happening
some mornings  I disappear into a satin breeze that carries my almost thoughts
that's how I call your name, my almost thought, only the body knows
there is a fresh dawn and there I begin
Dec 2024 · 294
alive
irinia Dec 2024
a world in motion and who would,
who could guess the next rhyme
bliss, hope, and horror
tyrants falling, resisting, raising
fresh terror in sheep's clothing
these are mental wars, fake news tsunamis
feasting in our blood in our sweat in our tension
the invaders possess our minds, our souls
these are reality games, the most dangerous
who cares about facts or consensual reality
humiliation, helplessness, loneliness
manipulated in the transition between nothingness to utopia
an acid destroying the human form and social body
they can feel again after a long apathy the call to heroic action
let's not be afraid, the tyrant is inside and we kind of know it
I look at the face of nothingness, of dread
no power no reason no words
dread is alive too
"gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition"
Hannah Arendt
Dec 2024 · 341
darkness, that darkness
irinia Dec 2024
yes, it is real, as real as daylight
how history recycles itself
darkness is falling with the speed of thoughts
of certainties, of pathos, of a wounded hope
I feel like screaming, I feel like weeping and
this can change nothing, and I can't find a better metaphor
we hurt each other unwittingly if we stop thinking together
if we stop talking, stop listening to each other
how vulnerable we can be, how deceptive
how potent the unhealed wounds
they write history books

an abstract darkness is near, a concrete darkness
division and such pain in the depth of the living
a darkness without perfume but blind screaming
disguised in a blinding light,
so old that it keeps reinventing
the destruction of saturated worlds
the social body can not survive without a heart
without a multiple mind
Dec 2024 · 381
indeed
irinia Dec 2024
eyes have ears, ears have eyes
on self-absorbed nights
the tree of knowledge murmurs in my veins
and poems rush through me with their wild letters
I chase them away with a smile
I am smitten beyond illusions, delusions and other demons
by a 4 am wave, you know
by a 5  am undeciphered dream
by a 6 am reverie, by a letting go
oh, what a sweet incomprehension,
life´s creativity,
your hands anticipating mine
Dec 2024 · 179
crushed
irinia Dec 2024
from East to West a pain without name, something inescapable, like the girdle of caskets, like a corpse. we struggle with what seems to be mostly an idea - the dimensions of the body, with the memory of the skin, with the history of contracting our bellies and puking our dreams. this world covered by layers, textiles, invisible armours, self-imposed absences. tears crushed by violence, by laughter, after all it was not that bad, they say. we carry so many tears that we are heavier than air, lighter than our tormentors, sillier than our dreams
crushed words, crushed voices, empty meanings for the unraveled selves. i write only a chronicle of this time devouring its fragments
Nov 2024 · 256
***
irinia Nov 2024
***
I dreamed we were sailing through rice fields
(they make paper out of rice),
Along a wet brilliance, along mirrors,
Along a marshy archipelago.
In a paper boat, a pale boat,
No splashing could be heard, the oars were so light,
In the mist the boat gets wet, is sinking.
And tiny lights will appear soon.
The shoots of rice, standing out of the water,
Look askance with their Korean eyes - so that
I should understand - an object of love be thou -
They are. A candelabrum of love branches out.
With an ***** song, like a pipe inside a pipe,
(It's natural to love  everyone and immediately too),
Look: memory of oneself is going away
To the bottom like a clumsy dead diver.
Look: the lights are spinning round like rain,
Not falling to the earth - these are souls
Whose inconsolable love
For the Creation and the Creator, the soul will not extinguish.
Oh, how long ago I knew all this -
When I was still a two-legged woman
And now I'm drowning, now I'm lying on the bottom
Of love, like a million-armed octopus.

On the shallow bottom, in the rice fields,
Belonging to earth, water and sky,
With a living longing - and sweet fear -
Those will fall in love with me who think 'I was not there'.

by Elena Shvarts from Contemporary Russian Poetry
translated by Gerald S. Smith
Nov 2024 · 175
anybody
irinia Nov 2024
Because nobody cares
About anybody.
It's got dull, cold, and bare
Like in a movie house where the movie's over.

Where are the girlfriends, kind as fairies,
The friends who come in a hurry when you call?
None of them gives a hoot or a cuss,
You can't even weep.

Life's been orphaned and grown thin,
Frozen to death like the village movie house,
Because nobody cares
About anybody.

1990

by Vladimir Kornilov from Contemporary Russian Poetry,
translated by Gerald S. Smith
Nov 2024 · 292
Acceleration
irinia Nov 2024
Modern capitalist society, in order to culturally and structurally reproduce itself, to mantain its formative status quo, must forever be expanding, growing and innovating, increasing production and consumption as well as options and opportunities for connection -in short it must always be dynamically accelerating.  This systematic tendency toward escalation changes how people are situated in the world, the ways in which human beings relate to the world. Dynamization in this sense means a fundamental transformation of our relationship to time and space, to other people, to the objects around us, and ultimately to ourselves, to our body and our mental dispositions.
This is the point at which acceleration becomes a problem. An aimless, endless compulsion toward escalation ultimately leads to problematic, even dysfunctional or pathological relationships to the world on the part of both subjects and society as a whole. This dysfunction can be observed in the three great crises of the present day: the enviromental crisis, the crisis of democracy, and the psychological crisis (as manifested, for example in ever-growing rates of burnout).

Hartmut Rosa, from Resonance A sociology of our relationship to the world
An offtopic poetry subject. Yet I am curious about the rythm of your lives, do these reflections speak to you? I would be delighted to receive your thoughts, comments or experiences. Thank you for reading!
Nov 2024 · 273
concentric
irinia Nov 2024
nights revolve in imaginary loops
I am captive inside my lips, inside fingertips
so that I see everything half and half
waves, tears, apples, words
half for me, half for not me, but the other you
I have to keep my hands for myself cause
you have sunshine tattooed on your skin
words are this space where I can breathe
when your hands get concentric
Nov 2024 · 398
Questioning
irinia Nov 2024
By the sea, by the dreary, darkening sea,
Stands a youthful man,
His heart all sorrowing, his head all doubting,
And with gloomy lips he questions the billows:
[...]
The billows are murmuring their murmur unceasing,
Wild blows the wind, the dark clouds are fleeting.
The stars are still gleaming, so calmly and cold,
And a fool waits for an answer.

Heinrich Heine, Questioning from the North Sea cycle
Nov 2024 · 255
Disneyland
irinia Nov 2024
the world so fragile so resilient embracing tight
its spinning delusions, inequalities, contradictions
while he is smiling at his fists, the most powerful
a mascarade game we play with reality
impossible to tolerate the contact with daylight
democracy no longer soothes us when it lies to us
political agency crushed in empty pockets
eyes full of a radical hope
the truth obscured in our mythical mind

we need to be brutally honest with our mental health
with the health of the oceans, of the air, of our dreams
he is a fragment tormenting our fragments while
the world is not yet prepared to grieve its disneyland

an escapable paradox will hold us
oh, how are we falling when we think we are rising

the future is unstoppable
its echo chambers are searching
for some truth
Oct 2024 · 502
song for somewhere
irinia Oct 2024
who knows if we trully own our words
or they own us
too many sunsets and dawns are happening in the same time
and the departed are tormenting us with the song of their flesh
I found a rhyme in you
absence rhymes with presence
somewhere in the hands of time
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