poems

Five weeks on the floor


and sometimes the light changes.

The famous ultrarapid berliner clouds
pass and electrify
my beard.

It’s music you can rely on.

They injected the room with naxolon and are

continually taking pictures.
So beautiful, the still naked body under the cupola of flashes
and yet it terrifies the tiny creatures.
So tiny my fears and yet vivider than myself
in the top ten imageless long dreams of all time.

When you’re a child and your brain is the size of a pair of dark rings

you think the guys in movies are sentenced to death, guys
longing for a bit of realism.But here in the sleep lab

you’re allowed to think something else.
Last night a sort of adhesive snow fell,
the kind that won’t rub off.
In the short film of me driving an ATV
I inserted images from Mars.
After that I erased everyone from the pictures I made in the plane.

I even erased the plane and the clouds and

now it’s only me
sitting in the sky holding a steamy cup of tea.



e-card from Big Natural Hills


Decoupled socks hide like cats
in the back room. An injured sailor’s shirt
hangs over the chair splashed with chocolate.
At 5 she bragged that she would grow up
to be a man. Then she left for work, left a mug
and a damp red tea bag on the shelf,
marking another bygone era.
She watched the Baby Channel all night
like a partly bloomed flower
or a plan to electrify the entire country.
You squeeze a stamp picturing red
astronauts and then let go, and it looks
like the cortex of a white mouse.

You got old in this proletarian neighborhood.
They used to say it smelled like punctured
lives. You used to think the towers
of the little Russian church were so fragile
you fed them croutons and carrots.
The next morning when you left
big brother’s house, you felt the acute shift
from cold guitar to acoustic, an iodine rain
over a crowd of broken heads.



Come with me I know exactly where we’re going

The bathroom neon made me look ugly every morning before work. After the landlord threw me out of the studio apartment I discovered self-esteem. Friends usually make some effort but let’s be real things make more sense on TV. Not a single person gives a damn about following directions in here. While I was in the hospital I felt some kind of fear of quietness but sometimes quietness meant something else. The color screen was pinging from time to time and if you stood and listened and I stood in an hour they collected all the pings and it sounded like a little Chinese song. Anthony’s friend went out running and next to him a guy was in costume and had a bluetooth and was also running. When the tower collapsed the explosion lifted him a few feet off the ground and he kept running in the air. And even after the explosion threw him back onto the sidewalk he kept running without knowing why. I thought he was Wall Street trash who didn’t deserve to know that he had just lived the moment of his life. In the postoperative room after gastro-intestinal procedures you call your relatives after your first fart. Everything depends on the juicy crackers when I was little they tricked me into drawing them with markers. The emoticons are the nicest people you can meet. Bucharest’s advantage is that you can always run into the old lady on Grandma’s oil bottles. In Unirii Square on a huge Phillips screen the company founded by Marx’s uncle said: Karl’s best sayings aren’t his. The new clothing stores have floors made entirely of glass and you can see the factories underneath. I photographed my slippers and put them on my desktop I’m waiting for someone to come in and see them. We got out of the car me to smoke you to collect ladybugs we stopped by a tree stump. We made two children in one year the storm took away our roof. In another year the kitchen burned down. You put your ladybugs in your pocket and we got into the car. The name of this folder is hospital and when I close it I am asked do you want to save changes to hospital? As a child the hours of winter made me feel the voluptuousness yet another lost sense. The crowds waiting at the traffic light are a force. The TV series used to keep our family together for weeks together they connected us to other families. And even after the explosion threw him back on the sidewalk he kept running without knowing why. A gigantic magnetic resistance has shrunk everything it’s hard now to kill your secretary with a filofax. I’m afraid to leave the supermarket. Staying home to watch TV or going to a party with TV stars and pretending not to know who they are. You only smoke homegrown pot maybe this will make you forget that nothing grew at home. Saying Paris is Bucharest’s older sister is like saying I myself have an older sister in Paris. There are no emoticons to express what I’m feeling right now it’s as if we are taking our drunk kid to school. The bacteria in the soil activate the serotonin. Autumnal noon the children have been fed and are now functioning outside in natural daylight. Anne Frank’s diary is on sale at Buchenwald. And when he called his relatives yeah yeah I know it’s awful what’s going on but listen. When he was young his mother cheated on his father and now he’s sending us all jokey emails. In an old photo of the two of us on the TV near your shoulder it says I’ve sped and. It would be difficult for me to write my story I’d have to cast myself as a loser. God hates the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign writing is talking without being interrupted. Because time destroys the precise resources of narcissism that make us survive. On September 11th Anthony’s friend found out he had cancer and when he called his relatives: yeah yeah I know it’s awful what’s going on but listen. So Anthony fucking 9/11 ruined my cancer moment. It’s impossible not to burst into laughter the night they operated on me Gloria Gaynor was giving a concert in Romania. You would be dead if you were taken to an emergency room in any other city in Romania. I’m dead in every city except Bucharest my ghosts are haunting Romania. At the new company they were asked to give up verbs conjunctions and prepositions. Children who don’t know any English should die at birth I don’t want synchronized spoken translated cartoons. There’s a one-eyed tomcat on the moon I can hear it whining lost on Clint Eastwood’s property. We are much prettier in pictures we smile under the multitouchscreen layers of mud. I was in the hospital my daughter telephoned me she told me not to clap my hands otherwise the butterfly would fly away from my t-shirt. And someday there will only be Tuesday and Wednesday and Tuesday and Wednesday Tuesday Wednesday Tuesday year after year. So much withdrawal until the discovery of tobacco when I was one my grandfather slew a pig. In its stomach they found some small flattened components of a satellite they were embossed in Cyrillic. Then it was the winter of 1732 a few guys stood around at the end of the car cemetery. They are screaming terrified and pointing my absent spot will is pancreas the next sex? When they were operating on me you heard me saying with somebody else’s voice thank you dear for warming it up for me. The necessity of death is the best imaginary friend one can have. Like a samurai’s wife who’s saving money to buy him a terrifying mask.





(2007) Translated by Paul Killebrew