THE ALTERNATIVE
A gift came from beyond the reach of my hopes.
From the alternative:
I did not feel time.
In my moments were
The moments of my playing with eternity.
My eyes suggested evanescence.
Images in the eyes.
In memory
The primordial emptiness.
But in a dream my perverse
Desire for innocence
Dives toward its the unreachable boundary.
I yearned for the feeling of existence
And conceived of winning in the lottery of morals.
Pain in the shade of imagined continuity,
The trembling of pride in the swollen bowl of love.
Instead of life
Paraphrases
In my spread arms.
The darkness of the universe in the sea’s of glitter,
And frost in the orgies of heat.
Distance.
Even when my frantic spasm
Encircles the blooming buds of my roots,
The primordial bang separates.
And when, exalted after a victory,
I recognize the end of time and space,
A new thought brings me the awareness of infinity.
EARTH’S SLAVES
For this one, the rain has tainted his reason
And woken the sleeping chrysanthemums.
A sea of tiny drops has fallen on his hope
And this morning’s trouble frightened him.
For another one, the crystal dew
Has torn the green buds from their stems
And frozen the hot fruits in his heart.
Some king offered his kingdom
For a spavined horse;
For some the glitter of the white palace
Meant more than human lives.
We are never a true whole,
Not even before that fateful birth.
Within us sprouts the magic of evil,
The seeds of turbulent headless destruction.
We are only slaves on Earth,
Trapped in our bodies,
Laden by thought.
Our chains are gravity,
Our connections – prostitution.
POWERLESSNESS OF THE POWERFUL
Kings are not clowns.
The great embody the power of time
Hidden in patinas of age.
Also when they are cruel, monstrous and hateful,
In their names are the piecework of history.
Pride is here more important than life,
Dignity before the desire to live.
Seventy times Oryana has turned
Into the flower of birth
And to the people of the heights of the Andes
Delivered seventy chosen ones,
Then, when the Moon blushed in embarrassment,
She disappeared into the intricate paths of the universe.
In the midst of the pharaoh’s glory,
His naïve youth pushed Tutankamen into
The journey to the unknown,
And some fake poor -amen
Was wrapped in the eternal clothes
Of the king of the scorching dunes,
And only the graves of cosmic outcasts
Now defy the destructive rage of time.
The whole Mongolian mystery was created
In a test tube with a mystical potion
For the great Khan
Stolen from the vessel
That in the time of the crescent moon
Returned to the blue heights.
At the dawn of the third millennium,
One great nation followed the blind man,
And some strange weakness
Came upon the arms stretched toward the sky
To meet the mystical vessels of hope.
Mysteries wander through human time.
They hide in the ancient mummies.
Holy books are also doctrines of aggression,
As if man were not first man
And then a link in the tribal chain.
Here in the absurd, centuries pass.
MYSTERY
Odin disappeared from the Viking decks
In the spring,
When the scented icebergs arrived from the north
And tore the ropes in the Nordic harbors.
The waters have risen in rivers,
From source to mouth.
The winds have stripped the mountaintops
And lifted masses of snow into the clouds.
The roots,
Like a windswept maiden’s hair,
Have risen to the sky and suffocated the treetops.
Large herds of caribou
Fled from human settlements,
Wolf packs hid in their lairs.
A red light has passed through the sky
And disappeared in the fog of the Milky Way.
Someone’s ships have seen the west coast of the Atlantic,
And shed blood at the feet of the gorgeous pyramids,
And the dark blue water opened
To release a seductive light,
And dragged the ships into the depth,
Into the unknown …
Later on in Tunguzia, on the West Siberian plains,
On a warm noon day,
Some new sun appeared,
And disappeared into the earth,
Giving rise to hot winds
That burned down the nomads’ tents
All the way below Mongolia’s borders.
The pharaohs disappeared in mystical tombs
And left behind the gods of the hot sand.
The Greek Zeus sailed away through the Atlantic Gate
With an entire entourage of powerful gods,
While the Roman Bacchus,
Intoxicated with wine,
Fell asleep in the damp catacombs.
The Incas and the Mayans built landing strips
For the arrival of the gods,
While The God began appearing around Jerusalem,
As if the rest of Earth had disappeared in a flood.
Each of his appearances created a new religion,
As if human beliefs mattered to him!
A gray old man waited out these ages
Under a scented linden tree
And his lips repeated the mystery:
“Is God toying with humans,
or are humans toying with God?”
INSIGHT
I was pushed into a body
That the law of transience bends
Where, against my nature,
A countless multitude of lives develops.
I was given this body’s shameless eyes to watch
As he, in the phases of the moon,
Drags himself up to the abyss
So that I, in the absence of the measure of eternity,
Admire him in his phases of ascent,
So that in his loneliness,
When I feel that our destiny is tied,
I tremble in fear of his disappearance.
I keep forgetting,
With goblets of passion and imagination,
That it’s only my cave:
Through its cracks light penetrates;
It is made of silence
And the silent force of chains:
That his transience forced me into
Dreaming of different relationships.
Time contains the trembling of his roots.
If I were born in him,
My hope would smolder<
br />
Encased in eternal wondering.
IN SOMEBODY’S ARMS
I don’t know who you really are.
My contact with you has always
Ripped apart my thinking.
Are they yours,
Or mine,
My mystical wanderings,
And have you, perhaps,
Breathed in me
Since I was conceived?
You grow when I feel weak,
Smiling.
Through the abyss of my despair
You smuggle hope.
I am positive
That in the fists of my doubts
I’m not alone.
Even when we,
In the protesting game of time,
Have lost each other,
Through the genetic trail of the tears
On my face
You were borne again
And in the silvery web of wind in my hair
You were whispering your enigmatic meaning.
I feel you adjusting my thought
That negated me into the absurd,
The sobbing of the wounded roots.
In the genetics of my past,
You are wondering over
The barren flaccidity of a eunuch
In the swelling strength of creation.
In sodden dreams,
In the guts of the Trojan horse,
You push me through the aching membrane of a virgin.
Across fallen bridges you begin.
You can’t have my feeling of joy
At the images in the depths behind my eyes
You are of a different past.
Your thoughts carry the fragrance of distant places
And the wondering over Darwin’s truth
Of spontaneous growth.
Amidst the triumph of my instincts
You shamelessly whisper in my ear
Your version of my beginning.
Sarcastic
In my harmony,
Stubbornly didactic
In my agony.
CHAOS
In that one of long ago,
In the chaos before the beginning,
The seeds of all time sprouted.
In our chaos,
In the one brought to our genes through memory,
In that one are the beginnings of our thinking,
And constitution,
Individualities unskillfully colored.
Then came destructive canons,
And deities,
And faceless forces
Without senses to feel pain.
So chaos crept into the soul’s depth,
And its fires holed up in the crevices of our mind,
In shadows.
And then,
Human mind rose above roofs,
And frozen lakes melted,
And the spirit scattered in the universe
As the hope for renewal spread
Through the innards of dead palm-trees,
Like light
Coming through clouds
Creating a silver lining,
And opening paths from that darkness in the depth
To those challenges in the heights.
And the chaos got excited
And became stronger,
Like corn in the field
Coating the kernel with the silk from its bosom,
New oases of chaos in the eternal philosophy of motion.
Chaos instead of a refrain
In the melodies of our reincarnations,
In the continuity of our ascent
And the silent force of time
Drove clumps of that chaos,
The one ripened before the beginning,
Into my hope,
Into the feeling of serenity and warmth.
DREAM
At the corner,
Where two streets touch,
Blossoms the triumph of modern architecture.
On its street level
A beauty with slanted eyes sells straw hats
And silken Cantonese kerchiefs
For inviting women’s bosoms.
Up,
Dauntingly high up,
On the fifty-fifth floor,
The sun euphorically crashes itself
Into the mute windows.
A passionate beauty slips out
Of her salacious clothes
And recoils from the smell of somebody’s hands
On her breasts.
A constellation of foggy balls
In firm geometrical formation
Levitated off the high seas
Into the mysterious heights of the universe.
Unchecked, the echo
Of the magic word countdown steals in
And makes everything on both streets still,
Like a Bill Hoopes canvas,
And menacingly cold
As the time when the roof over an ice rink
Falls upon frozen statues of hockey players,
And in a dreamlike explosion
Turns everything into cubes of ice
For somebody’s royal feast.
At another corner people stream at shop windows,
The flash and blare of never-ending sales.
Others vacantly stare at TV screens,
The terrible commercials surging out,
Crass and immoral,
With miracle messages for personality destruction:
This capsule
Guarantees your future happiness!
And at 19.99 it’s almost free!!
Our number is nine times zero!
Call now!
Up there,
On the trodden English grass around the Museum of Art,
Hollywood beauties
With artificial breasts and bums
Are shooting a movie about the immense importance of profit
And, with pictures of Nostradamus’s pierced eyes,
Stir up fear in the gaze of a Bosnian boy.
HYACINTH
A disembodied face
In the fog of emptiness
Unexpected
With its head under a rock
In the endless gray
Of dawn
Its enraptured mane
Flame of the soil
Engraved
Without a murmur protrudes
The dark blue spring
Of hope
SPOKEN AS A STRANGER
People, I don’t want to have features,
Nor to carry a void in the keg of happiness.
I step away from your euphoria
And hide from its Dardanian gifts.
It is your nature
To color entire kingdoms of misery with smiles,
Where fists push bundles of cut flowers,
Dream-tellers erase morale,
Whims change sports T-shirts.
Your eyes symbolise storm clouds,
In your ears rings the music of anger.
I don’t want your blood in my veins,
That destructive warmth,
Nor your heart my heart to pull out,
Nor the hope in your dreams!
Nor the atmosphere of stiff smells …
Hope is here the offspring of trouble.
Your caresses are not for love!
Your lips are make-up in front of burning jaws!
Your happiness is Trojan naïve
In the colorful palette of illusion.
You make intrigues on the trail of Zion’s commandments.
And whose return do you pray for?!
Who are your creators,
From what time?
Fortunately,
From different matter you are coined.
Our genes are different.
BEYOND THE BOUNDARY OF INSIGHT
My world is void of time zones,
And of silence expanding into infinity.
There live faint memories
Of my own membrane of gladness, of sadness
That plunge my heart into the cages
Of imaginative pigeon keepers.
In my world birds have flown beyond the boundary of insight
And discovered the hasty river of the dreamed future.
Mountain tops under the blades of a new day.
I believed that the wisdom of the world
Lay within the thresholds of ancestral homes
And in those timid woods
From which foxes dash after naïve chickens
And ravens angrily grudge at weary dogs
In front of a carriage on the skates of evanescence.
The Wosks show me their roots
Hidden deep in somebody’s land.
In my dreams the crimson feeling of insight.
I pursued the traces of moonlight to the book of creation
And searched for the one who moves planetary tides
In eyes that merrily go downwind.
I saw time in album pictures
And on newly frescoed walls.
Blanca and Una
Throw pebbles into the Capilano River.
The Iris and Dino are calling us from across the water.
Unease creeps from afar. Time and wonder.
Drinks make dew on the flush
Under our closed eyelashes.
Footprints Page 13