translation from Romanian by Graham High & Elena Alina Cerchez [MTTLC student]
La folle
I buy into myself 17 years of triumph, a celebration with
a pack of cigarettes in whose smoke I hide my face, the bed, the future.
She invested into a psychiatric book, Predescu,
likes the conclusion that I’m histrionic, hysteric, combined with theatrical attitude
noisy manifestation, superficiality, infantilism, summons, off-centered remarks
oversimplified and ridiculous – the eternal „victim”.
could I be like this, when I sit with a check ochre and black table cloth
waiting to absorb the colour, the texture, with the desire of covering someone
I don’t know, that way I set my hand free to play at an imaginary instrument
a song to connect myself with the world, a butterfly dance, the version for my diary of dreams
so that I dont care about the nights when I stare at the opposite windows. My only wish is
that a colder wind should blow, its fingers on the window performing like a crazy harp
the music that makes the blood go through your veins like people running from their houses in
an earthquake.
Her eyes are still traversing my skin, like a sort of rash entering my body
here’s a zoo heaven, it was saying, and he sent a rhino to mess with me.
I sit with his horn stuck in my head and I don’t feel a thing, there is the celebration
maybe it’s an hysterical rhino, persisting, and got me between systole and diastole
it’s like i’m drowning in her blood before I can touch the lust
beside that still is the rose and love-sweat smell
after love, which drives you crazy, rips you apart into many colourful pieces
at least for a few seconds when you’d like to be a whip of love which mangles the sky
like a rainbow. Stay still, remember what it said in an e-mail you got once –
mind & spirit you had, interested only in money – yeah, maybe some little investments in me
and in the celebration – that’s why I don’t care &
the light in her eyes weeps like wax
It’s past the midnight of life and death
I sit hanging, like an actor caught in the invisible strings of pride, playing his own sorrow
acting so well that he couldn’t distinguish a fantastic yellow of her right cheek
from the real red which was melting her left cheek, my broken lip, the black eyes of the mine worker
from where I dug out the coals from her and burnt them in me to warm ourselves
yes, sometimes she was deformed by it and lost her properties but the hugs brought her
to the right shape. She was made from a material that has shape-memory, and I had turned
into a certain cloth, without elegance or colour
like those you gather into the washing and add so much bleach
they come out the same colour, the colour of storm clouds
and on you seem like set of buildings planned by a crazy architect
aggressive and possessed like a outlaw biblical apple. Maybe the only apple which bites itself.
Someone screams from further of, but I can’t drag my feet after me, my heart pumps mercury
I wish I could reach her, but she must have thrown the comb already, like in grandpa’s fairies
and I’m flinged here, somewhere, without notice
there are a lot of medicine tubes, and on them it’s written that I’m ok.
Load torpedos 1 and 2, fix the target, I’m ok, but then I’m lost
sinking like a ship in her waters, actually I was off the radar
like some kind of bermuda triangle. Bip. Bip. biiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
I will find myself in some years time and I, I will be awsome. Like when you discover
behind the dust, in the closet, a box with some tapes from highschool. I listen to them carefully
these demagnetized tapes which leave me with an emotion which passes soon,
it’s the first time that I think
that people are tall become long after a while.
Even though it’s a secret place in every piece, it’s a secret message
ready to resonate in that intimate place, in which stands a feeling-worm
delicate and deep stuck in the meat that brings old memories
it’s the only thing that no-one has sever seen. In its blood I keep
some important things, an unborn child, a gift that I have never offered
how deeply I loved the madness, the un-cried tears at my father’s death
and that simple thought of seeing those treasures
how could I give her the best gift, so natural like bathing together
happy, with the changing light of the sky
and all the dead people smiling with a glass of celebration
together with my father.