sour seasons

I live in a museum not too far from the ocean,

its walls are meager, but there is infinite room for

a dream of unyielding meagerness.

the tenants here serenely nurse

a history always patient enough to repeat itself.
as visitors who’ve forgotten they’re visitors,

we possess the integrity of sleepers.

the weather is droughty on this side of existence.

those who arrive here, always volatile and curious,

they grow to exercise denial.

I wake up each day with a yearning for meeting
those young enough to remember snow,

the elegant disobeyers of false disobedience,

the higher spirits.

there is sometimes too much silence to endure 

in this frame within a frame.

people talk a lot because they can’t stand hearing

the cadence of their breaths, always imperfect.

I’m not much of a talker. I wish I could write thousands of pages 
about the beauty of bruised knees.

I fantasize about the ugliest of souls,

staring into each other.

irrational creatures, they never fall from grace.

uncanny music

faulty one,
I have met fear in many different corridors
or maybe she has been the one ardently searching for me
and this, like love, is one of those things
only the dead are permitted to speak of.
the dead, they always know better.

last night in my room I came across a cold skeleton,
an eerie figure made of
my arms hanging lifelessly around your neck,
severed arms, like those of a mannequin -
head, torso, legs taken away,
nothing left but the sunk obstinacy
of not letting go.

here, right here on these lips that try to crush distance,
an unwanted augury has been playing all the time
and I know it has to do with
an image we’re both disheartened by -
two ghosts sitting at the same dreary table,
silenced and stiff, pouring wine.

I lean my head on your shoulder,
wishing of not knowing.
the spectre of two mingled longings
creeps between your sleep and mine,
unnerved and deformed
by the certainty of loss.

carnivore

how can I be sure I am still flesh and bone
under your constant cutting of limbs?
I have become defenceless in my work as a hunter,
you have lived inside me in thousands of shades
and I have seen the faces of all your racking tentacles,
each one of them incomplete, whimsical,
each one of them right.
kill yourself, tired flesh, and be born again,
brilliant for another,
unbruised, untarnished, undamaged by my constant
digging of nails.
is this what you wanted, this plaguing clash of arrows?
heads rolling on our emaciated playground,
the leftovers of our outstretching vagary,
like greedy insects -
is there anything else that we are made of,
anything else to consume?
to you I could be a hundred persons more or less,
engulfed in skin, all gestures exhausted,
none of us knowing what we came searching for in the first place,
fallling through each other like knives.
our only reality, the need to be alive.

after after

the odds of being the unluckiest of gamblers...

the last thought at the end of all unwanted memory,
when undressed of the synapses that you cannot handle,
in the ridiculous rapture that you no longer share genes
with your loose, weakest ghost,
having angrily cleansed all the dust that has been gathered
in the pale zest between the happening and the ending,
forgetting that we all, dear, are nothing more
than heavier or pettier clusters of dust.

it was after I witnessed the fire I feared most that I realized
the radiance of something lives in its sequel to be destroyed.
most people I know, they light a match, throw it away and leave.
I, well, I could spend my entire life just collecting ashes.

“I will always and forever hold you in my heart and mind”

„it is clear that we must embrace struggle. every living thing conforms to it. everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. we can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us. it is good to be lonely, for being alone is not easy. the fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.

to love is also good, for love is difficult. for one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. it is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation. love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things”(R)

[+++]

six months of feast and six months of famine

I had been starving myself for a year when I fell for the tart taste of my blackest bid: the four seeds that bound me to the underworld. my teeth were red and my arms weakened with regret for thousands of men confined to live on an earth plagued by barrenness. he said he wanted me there and was capable of terrible wrath for whoever tried to spite the passing of worlds. my undertaking of love and devotion was to have the curses of men set upon the deceased. the flowers were gone in Enna but I would have women turned into mint and white poplar.

they made a compromise eventually: to bring lavishness and beauty out of sterile grounds, one must spend half of his time in the underworld. the rule of Fates is fair enough. those who've tried to break it, they've had their limbs tied to stone seats for more than a lifetime.

otherness zones

I remember your words,

you told me about the darkest of nights,

the longest of winters and how we will arise brilliantly,

winding softly sharpened lines, ten times more beautiful.

inside out presence, my knees are warmed by the reminiscence of hell,

the smell of embers, I hold it in me like a rare possession,

it curves the lines of my lips because I know more than them.

it’s past midnight now, the passing of death, lush dawning,

funny how the whole city lives in our mouths,

faintly a matter of space for one who has seen the other side,

dissolving vanquished by the unlikeliness of our worlds.

...in time you learn the state of breakage comes with velvety perfumes,

in time you learn the vastest part of life takes place in rooms of absence.

new roses

olanzapine tastes sweet
melting on absent tongues.

...sour air. beneath the skin
there is immense room for doubt.

the haziness of a half-formed

comfort zone, of a half-formed 

glance of not aware.

wholesome dispatch, a promise of 

white space, illiterate warmth. 

a lifetime to learn

not to care for what is 
on the other side of sleep.

beauty only exists within contours of defeat

we might have lived centuries of sleep ago
as forlorn hallowers of a damned descent,
defenders of beautifully bleak cities of wreckage,
an army of sullenness.
the inside of our fabric is written in melancholy,
a dictate from Saturn,
to swim relentlessly through spastic dark waters,
drifting into liquid-eyed, blood-eyed, hollow-eyed creatures,
just to find out we are not any larger than
the trembling space between our thin, tired lids.
to shield a delicate canvas for narcissistic decay,
probably the reason we were manufactured in silent undoing,
our eternity hanging by emaciated fingers,
an unfinished projection,
earthen, disturbing dream of opium skies.
the only wisdom is to love the iridescence of ruin,
for there is nothing worthier or lavisher
than the charge of impossibility.

love song

do you remember it? …the arcades
breaking down with the
flood of petrified voices,
the splitting ground breathing
vengeance in immaculate spirals,
the vestal black sky…
and us, for the first time,
we didn’t have a single question to ask.
as I clearly recall it, we were walking
lightheartedly like enamoured ghosts,
hand-in-hand through the millions of shards,
laughing at the burning buildings
with our heads thrown back.
sweet velvet dream.

streamside

shut your eyes,
let me close them with mine,
lightly as we
exchange skin we
exchange confusion.
silence is our drug
and we serve it remarcably well,
the perfect pieces
in the irony of contours -
you slipping fragments of reason and I
not finding it unusal at all
that someday these entwining sillhouettes
will pass each other in streets and subways
like perfect strangers.
...and now you've already begun
swimming towards the cutting void
in intact darkness,
unaware that we, my dear,
we could never really meet
anywhere.
and I smile at the thought
that you could so easily be my feast of vanity,
lovely undernourished body,
that you could carry me wherever you'd linger,
like a stifling and bitter anchor,
while I could engage in the task of killing time,
cutting pieces of you
from my remote distance
with the gentlest of hands.

"une ballade allemande dit que les morts vont vite, mais les vivants aussi"

an incision into the girl writing here and you will find:
+low calorie heart nourishments
+synthetic chemical compounds
+stories of hospitals sealed up in lace
+too much love for words for their own good
+waste routine
+sickening evidence of absence of absence
+many, many piles of shards

*if you feel like talking about anything, you can always find me here: lelia.1807@yahoo.com

to live unceasingly in those instants before drowning

people are often told motion can be consuming,
but most of them die from the lack of it.

such a horrible irony,
to be ripped to pieces
by the silent, the indifferent, the nonpresent.

such a strange paradox,
that nothing moves more violently inside one
than what one has lost.

into undoing

to each his own choice of mind,
to each his own state of drift.

disintegration begins
at one's warmest point.

...incongruous urge
to possess undividely,
to posess exhaustively,
dismantled limbs,
minds pumping blood.

- raw petals of dialogue
will slit heart peels,
will rearrange grounds.

I know less of me with each day.

ennui

I shamelessly avail myself of a mask of insecurity to conceal a distance that has been stretching onto me for years, fastened to my longing like a jealous siamese. I prefer them to believe I'm afraid to talk to them, not that I've never felt the urge to.

I draw on black, blue and gray to screen listless, weary, disheartened eyelids and I shield my wrists in silk and lace.

I've spent countless nights in dainty music and lights, surrounded by persons whose lines were gradually erasing, dreaming of forgetfulness.

I drift each and every day in streets, passages and skin, in search of a pair of white hands who once told me reality is too inane and pointless to be real.

the only thing I could ever love was solitude and when I encountered it in someone else I clinched to its minute comfort with the obstinacy of a long-time wanderer jolting himself into one first and last drop of water. I later reasoned that one drop is enough to drown in.

I'm not afraid of walking alone at night, but I'm terrified by the coarse dryness of mornings.

I've always found it strange that I wasn't born in october. I find comfort in heavy rain and the feeling of hunger.

I only feel I've actually known people who've lived for years close to me when they lose their grip or forget to finish their lines. those instants of uneasiness, they appear coherent and warm.

I can't find anything more dishonest than color photography.

when I think of beauty, I envision collapsing buildings.

I've  figured out long time ago that the only people for me are the unhappy ones.

"one of us cannot be wrong"

I see you've gone and changed your name again. and just when I climbed this whole mountainside, to wash my eyelids in the rain, I'm standing on a ledge and your fine spider web is fastening my ankle to a stone. and they're handing down my sentence now and I know that I must do another mile of silence.

(you thought that it could never happen to all the people that you became, your body lost in legend, the beast so very tame. shouldering your loneliness like a gun that you will not learn to aim, you stumble into this movie house, then you climb, you climb into the frame. let’s sing another song, this one has grown old and bitter.)

well I lived with a child of snow when I was a soldier, I came so far for beauty, I left so much behind, I thought I'd be rewarded for such a lonely choice. forsaken, almost human. and when we fell together all our flesh was like a veil that I had to draw aside to see the serpent eat its tail. you covered up that place I could not master, it wasn't dark enough to shut my eyes.

(we met when we were almost young deep in the green lilac park. you held on to me like I was a crucifix, as we went kneeling through the dark… but let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie, please understand, I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter. we weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.)

I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert you're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.

...well, I've been waiting, I was sure we'd meet between the trains we're waiting for but now it’s time to board another. elsewhere is your feast of love, it's light enough to let it go. I'm just a station on your way, I know I'm not your lover.

(I cannot follow you, my love, you cannot follow me. I am not life, I am not death, I am not slave or free. I am the distance you put between all of the moments that we will be.)

you who's been travelling so long, yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control, you left when I told you I was curious. I never said that I was brave. I know that kind of man it's hard to hold the hand of anyone as though it was the burden of some other.

(ah you hate to see another tired man lay down his hand like he was giving up the holy game of poker. and while he talks his dreams to sleep you notice there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder. he was starving in some deep mystery like a man who is sure what is true.)

the stories of the street are mine. the cadillacs go creeping now through the night and the poison gas, and I lean from my window sill in this old hotel I chose, yes one hand on my suicide, one hand on the rose and one eye filled with blueprints, one eye filled with night. who is it whom I address, who takes down what I confess?

(are you a teacher of the heart?

yes, but not for thee.)

…we were so small between the stars, so large against the sky, and lost among the subway crowds I tried to catch your eye…

(well you know that I’d love to live with you, but you make me forget so very much. and maybe I had miles to drive and promises to keep, I saw there were no oceans left for scavengers like me. and they struck my heart with a deadly force, and they said << this heart, it is not yours >>)

no, the words you sang were wrong. but you stand there so nice, in your blizzard of ice, oh please let me come into the storm. the windows are small and the walls almost bare, there's only one bed and there's only one prayer; I listen all night for your step on the stair. I have begun to long for you, I who have no greed; I have begun to ask for you, I who have no need.

(you were the promise at dawn, i was the morning after. leave it all and like a man, come back to nothing special, such as waiting rooms and ticket lines, silver bullet suicides, and messianic ocean tides, and racial roller-coaster rides and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.)

like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free. I lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me. but the room just filled up with mosquitos, they heard that my body was free. then I took the dust of a long sleepless night and I put it in your little shoe. I heard of a saint who had loved you, so I studied all night in his school. he taught that the duty of lovers is to tarnish the golden rule. and just when I was sure that his teachings were pure he drowned himself in the pool. his body is gone but back here on the lawn his spirit continues to drool.

(I have changed my name so often. like a baby, stillborn, like a beast with his horn I have torn everyone who reached out for me. I choose the rooms that I live in with care, I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one. when it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can.)

I journey down the hundred steps, but the street is still the very same. it's four in the morning, the end of december. and the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend.

(it's you, my love, you who are the stranger.)

I know you had to lie to me, I know you had to cheat, you learned it on your father's knee and at your mother's feet. but did you have to fight your way across the burning street when all our vital interests lay a thousand kisses deep?

(how come the night is long? the crumbs of love that you offer me, they're the crumbs I've left behind. now it’s come to distances and both of us must try, your eyes are soft with sorrow. that's a funeral in the mirror and it's stopping at your face.)

you defied your solitude, I came through alone. you got away, i never once heard you say, I need you, I don't need you, I need you, I don't need you and all of that jiving around. your vision is right, my vision is wrong, I'm sorry for smudging the air with my song.

(confined to sex, we pressed against the limits of the sea. now I am too thin and your love is too vast. no, it wasn't any good, there's no reason why you should remember me. I told you, when I came I was a stranger.)

I know you need your sleep now, I know your life's been hard. but many men are falling, where you promised to stand guard. and you say you've been humbled in love, cut down in your love, forced to kneel in the mud next to me? then read me the list of the crimes that are mine, I will ask for the mercy that you love to decline.

(…and summoned now to deal with your invincible defeat, you ditch it all to stay alive, a thousand kisses deep.)

I’m good at hate, I’m good at love, it’s in between I freeze. been working out, but it’s too late, it’s been to late for years. my mirrored twin, my next of kin, I’d know you in my sleep and who but you would take me in, a thousand kisses deep.

(are you a teacher of the heart?

we teach old hearts to break.)

.....


*not my words, obviously.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2XkfBWSmcs

accurately haunted

most unyielding one,

long before your sharp departure, I had been having these icy flashes of something one could call daylight inquietude. still, the more I was sinking in everything that has been, the more unnatural it seemed to reckon that I won’t be expelled from perhaps the most unwarranted thing in life, that for each minute of warmth, one must walk miles of anguish. yet I don’t give in. to come to terms with a wreckage, one must make a deal with his ghosts. as for me, the sole possible choice was backwards, to live inside the open wound instead of bearing the upsetting scar.

you see, things have become so much different these last years. it happened imperceivably, in slow, yet irreversible cuts – the more we got closer, everyone around started to get smaller, turning into shattery, irrelevant lines. do you sense it? the world is meager,  it’s us who’ve grown much larger than it, overwhelming ghosts.

I’m haunted by an image. It’s not the one that kept following me last year, the inert body, face down in the water, the dream of forgetfulness - one who’s been to hell will not come back. this time, my dream is one of stillness, hazily drawn yet somehow very similar to the softening, disentangled chills of a never ending night time taxi ride. of course, some days are harder. the hollow faces in the streets, the irksome hands in subways, they still scare me, but soon they will cease to. control will avenge from what still and fully lives within, be it entire possession.

I’ve been feeling it for a long time, now I’m sure of it, you and I live in the very same body. your wintry torments, they impel a harsh weight on me, sometimes in the form of a strange noose. days like these, I forget to eat. as the steps inside become louder, my eyelids turn red and sore, heavy hands press on my chest, my collar bones ache, my body feels unbearably tight. with all disarrangement of things, I, for one, stand still. one who has but one moment to live no longer has anything to dissimulate.

screened

hesitant reminders of present,
threads of light permeate the sleep-ensnared room,
embracing diffident street noise
in slow melting of all leftovers of night.

I'm lying in bed at the brink of black & white,
life-disjoined and space-severed,
contemplating the minute quivers of our lurking bodies,
freezing the flashes.

the blurry one

chasing a safe passage in a downpour of anxiety,

I couldn't evade meeting the uneasiness in you.

to all appearances the outside world had overpassed us -

the walls were whiter than ever,

the room unhandleably motionless 

and yet a disturbing buzz was creeping under our skin,

fumbling the bitterness of the not entirely said.

the instant of lost control was achingly bound to happen.

following the distress of your glance,

I knew that shift in self-composure 

had washed away all possible exit doors

and right there, in the midst of the subsequent pause,

the echo of the wavering speech

was feeding the inbetween space on wholesale emotion.

it was withal a strange release,

as if in a lifetime of stasis

on the tangible ground a heart was thrown.

we will meet again, every dusk and dawn

nothing is more present in us
than the past.
knotted to its blurriness,
we suffocate piece by piece
in thicker and sorer textures, 
weaving and tearing up
constant deaths of
self and -
every once in a while,
as if acceded to
an ever-granted possession,
it cleaves another scratch
on our insecure inner walls,
pulling us away from our canvas
to remind us jealously
that we are merely its faint
discontinuous dream.

cryptocardiac

she steps into the chamber senses seeping, eyes half-open,

miles of unforbearing flashes mounting up her veins.

like verging needles, tight languish pulses demand

an inward unlocking for a feast of words.

alone in her atrium of embers,

she starves for the ripple of black on white.

she speaks ventricular language.

dialogue dust

I told you, let's take a seat here and forget,
tonight we'll have an entire cinema of sweet disregard.

(seems like centuries ago we first arrived here,
ourselves a flashing sequence of this exhausting air,
inhaling its burden as itself was inhaling ours,
what they call existence pounding on our matter,
dragging us with its senseless turmoil
like heavy clutters of impurity)

like a compulsory eyesore,
this suffocating silly joke,
like years ago we'd fallen asleep on bad television.

I told you, it's dreadful how tiring breathing can be,
how heavily we stick life on us like excessive clothing.

...you said you found it strange
how I could close my eyes to them without a bother
or how rashly I dared to quitclaim myself,
another player of the unavoidable,
for a bleak seat in the insolent audience.

(to care less and less as in a rearward blanking of lines,
to dispatch them all in the other room -
these ridiculous makings of blood and pulses -
as things too paltry to even bother mentioning,
like cheap cigarettes or bad poetry,
to leave them for the others)

I'd say what's even stranger is
how you and I can merge in the same barren space,
mine being an evening of forgetfulness,
while yours - a wreckage of rooms filled
with that of me I keep letting go.

and perhaps equally odd, this frantic presence of yours
and how you're always drifting towards some deserted bottom
while all I'm left is this abiding departure
to draw a blank on you being there and still there,
running for trains you contend to be real,
thrusting yourself towards this voidness of mine
so fiercely it sometimes hurts.

absenseizure

indeterminately
there’s been another winter and another fall
of a sometime-subsequent self and another
pursuit of nothing-nothingness mind.

behind the clusters of dust - our dainty grant of exile,
so deferred and still so ill-defined,
not yet fractiously handled,
not yet weighty and grinning.

before there was fog I remember rushing -
hand-in-hand with us, a flood of thoughts
and strangely ours, a dissidence of unequalled warmth.
it used to be words that anticipated us,
they fed with time frames and deftly with their lines 
questions of space emerged to what was us.

hereinafter non-existence is a matter of delay
and I feel milestones of sleep might have been consuming me,
blank to the their ends, weaving several trails of walking
alongside with dusk and dawns of forgetfulness
in circuits of beauty that dwindles in the dark
and is not beauty.

...

do you ever feel
delayed,
months and years behindhand of yourself,
heedlessly dispatching sequence and sequence of mind?

contradiction

obverse and reverse
yielding defiant clearance
to accidental confluence.

so swiftly a sequence of space
can jolt us into
the mathematics of fragmentary creatures.

as futile as a quest for the withheld,
to think that I could candidly touch
the ironic abyss
between our fleeting diametric pulse rates,
where we begin our untenable exemption -

consenters to a short life
of inane deconstruction,
idle, forgetful actors,
volatile assailants.

the charge of our skin warmth,
my most privileged of foes,
what incoherent coherence.

to an entomologist

so, tell me,
what unknown vibes run through your nimble veins,
what delphic flavors sneak at the tip of your tongue
when you know that someone loves you?
is it a sheer feeling of self-reward
at the light thought of your features as an ever-present torture
deep down the inmost rooms of someone's mind,
an abiding intruder lingering on her like a sunk birthmark
or a deepening ink stain marching heedlessly
towards complete subjugation?
do you experience the satisfaction of a puppet master
at the mere idea of having your own feeble marionette,
your funny little schizoid dreamer
and owning the deadalian strings that so sharply direct her impulses,
growing her into an opposite number,
making her loathe and dismiss anyone except you,
you and your sociopathic ways,
you and your terrible words
that fall around her like long sharp scalpels,
advancing on her skin like a criminal's slow tease?
or perhaps love is a mere thing of abduction and possession,
another past page in an entomologist's dusty album,
that contracts one to the brittle size of a dispatched insect,
forgetting him inside blanked out, muted and stripped of wings.