“Oana Popescu este psiholoagă incurabilă, utopistă cu veleități eremite, fotografă-poetă-musiciană amatoare

<‘O așchie scăpată dintr-o lungă tradiție de forțe marginale, dezabuzată de statui cărora le decupează miturile, întinzându-le peste praguri din care rar iese praful. Își petrece majoritatea timpului descifrând crăpături, borborosind în deversoare hipnopompice și aciuându-se printre liane.’>”

 

 

 

ROŞU

 

borrowed dreams

 

I hurdled the two-headed ghost shell back in the throne room where it could brood more patiently over its tragic machinations,

hedging reality’s demands…

no more could I bare its grudge than it could swallow up my shards.

no more can it disown my trails without trampling our grave.

 

it was meant to churn through our ribs as soon as his first yell echoed over the ballast –

right after our ignes fatui stroke the common chord

with disregard to any hope that was left for a healthy breach of faith.

 

help no longer mirrored desire,

need started dwelving into an undefinable dimension of loss felt warming.

I didn’t know how to glue our film to our reality.

 

all I know is,

that film is all that’ll ever guide me.

 

*

 

*

Adunarea oaselor

 

Ne-am trântit jaloanele de cariere rupestre

drept poduri

între denivelări pe miraje de suflări curate,

filigranate peste puncte de coliziune cu roți blocate,

subtil

precum un val de molii sfărmându-se de tavanul unei peșteri celeste.

 

Ne-am sădit semințele distrugerii când,

inoculabili funestelor cârlige,

ne-am convertit alexici prin lege –

slugi la lumina soarelui, orbi la reflexia lunii,

sperând.

*

 

*

 

children lose nothing.

Despite a myriad of chances that this will blow up in our faces

I vouch for the immutability of my heartstrings;

 

For only once before has fever transverberated across my unbeknown horizons –

echoing the clash of slits of hope and languish,

before groping for a resignation form,

in the relay of immanence and strife.

 

But this time I learned to suck the marrow from the damp decks of history

and follow the creaks of season’s fury

signalling safe harbor upon desert’s return.

 

My ears drum homesick

and my wishbone crackles of your nearness,

 

Suffusing the bleakness of our undertows

with promises of feral laughter.

 

Thus,

with perfume’s remains,

I disembellish my carcass for the sake of our lungs.

*

*

lines ov escape

 

(a scanty hostel library cut-up poem)

 

Reaching the darkness of the closed doorway

with a great heaved breath of relief

we add to the list of the funerary goods a vast inverted bowl of sky,

dark blue almost to blackness,

 

A land by which the mind is fired

quite extinct

 

If he was overcome by sleep or pain, he would

tread very soft

and I was angry for all the wrong reasons

as was the ideology they are now replacing

with sinking hearts;

great and wondorous series of terrestrial transformations,

a mysterious dagger,

the sharp stab of guilt,

 

looking for all the world like a cannibal chieftain.

 

The troops had moved in, and poured down upon them a still coldness they did not feel.

Forest far behind us,

we kept running in spite of ourselves.

 

I’ve seen several dead people in my lifetime, but

that must have been some while later, it might be as much as a

whole generation of gigantic animals,

buried in the entrails of the earth..

I shall be glad to consult them.

 

Within those waves each martyred soul

would mend life’s thread and make it whole.

—

 

That was how I won the reputation

of a charlatan.

 

Now no longer shall I feel vexation,

My heart’s murk is clearer, less appalling.

 

*

rituals of resistance

Perpetually losing home ground,

Never to regain ourselves fully,

Even when the cellblock inevitably unfurls.

 

Where have we gone?

 

The collective no-place of communal feeling;

Always yearned for, watered down, side-tracked, ironically reminisced and recurrently buried,

to no avail revered,

As a child dreams of friendly echoes only to be hit by silence.

 

Benediction as hoax,

Tricksters as karmic gurus,

Wisdom as a thorn in our side,

 

I scheme of leaving this sandcastle…

 

and go seek in chance an hour of mercy.

 

*