Every so often I get a submission that demands real attention. When Vlad Neagoe sent me this collection of poems, I read it immediately — three times. It’s an incredibly thoughtful collection, in which each piece links to the others in a way that makes it very difficult to choose one or two or three as an excerpt.
After a long rumination, and many more readings, I decided that an excerpt would be an injustice. So I’ve decided to publish the whole suite of poems with the permission of the author. I think you will enjoy them as much as I do.
***
The food has the taste of yesterday’s hour,
when all life’s desires separate in all death’s
greatness it will be too late: the food will be
other and the taste pungent: the hour will
melt in a single mouth wherefrom a single
equally blind digit watches.
They will pass you, Love, from one
to the other one from hand to hand
within the sound of lachrymatory
brass bands; they will betroth you,
then they will oblige you to long savour
the victory of the vegetables of rubber
but no one will take the fish bone out
of your throat: about him they wrote
at random, “Whoever wills to save
his life will lose it…” without your
knowing it you ate belladonna roots.
The whole world is consumed by rush
this unquenchable thirst for evil borrowed
from gods dries up the mouth, the blood
the gods wait for her at the turning point
they cast devastating lights before her ‒,
nothing predicted an existence so slippery:
suddenly life is equal to terror.
To the one who abides in the eternally
open wound through which the winds
of death are blowing day and night
and where the tree of life can fall
no matter whither, today or tomorrow
on the road or on the summit of light
whereon you’d like to lie he can fall, too
his sealed fate undoes innocuous
metallic encasings so that he should
know you, Love and the only true
Spirit akin to us and all that gathered
together in the heart in a scintillation
walking into death and perdition
as to an unprecedented celebration,
body illuminated by a flash of lightning
in the night wherein they are aflame
the abysses engendered in the wounds
within the penumbra of the celestial
bodies, life and all the others
will be given to you at this lonely
time: the vanities of the escape like
the bead of foam, as remorse
in the thrilled waters of joy dispersed
around covering the nothingness
that pours forth impetuously
he is agape to swallow the houses
that emerged from His mouth,
that of the one who survives.
I Know
I know it’s good for you to be given
what is due to you, but also something
over and above I know it’s not enough
the Devil introduces himself as in the old
days transvestite and he instills intelligence
into you but without tricks, wigs or
something else it’s enough for him
to hold a mirror in front of us so that
we should believe ourselves to be others
others greater and always different
but always recognizable, the cliché
sniggers, carries you in him and fed
you on the earth’s milk in every
sound your silence is heard the reason
comes on a wave from another sphere
and is unconsciously united with the void
in the soul and she carries you randomly.
“You’re reasonable, man,” the philosopher
tells you. But why does the happiness exist
only for the reasonable animal? Life doesn’t
have much to do with the man and has
much less even with his ideas and has
nothing at all with his desires and
I don’t know what life wills what thirst
of hers we should quench. The oracle
recounts to us, she always divests herself
of all that she contains, of all that is due
to you ‒ despondent is the thought on death,
but more terrible is the one that says that All lasts.
Fastened like a butterfly with pins
on a name, on a gesture, on a tic
on an obsession I’m deeply moved
and I move again, I bustle about,
I fidget I hurry to be, I run behind
myself, behind my place, behind
my void, but I don’t know who
the one who’s running is, who
reserved this place for me, what
the name of my fate is who is
and what is the one who moves me
and who is the one who watches
over the events that involve me
I don’t know and I make haste
waiting although I don’t move
from my chair I don’t get up from
the bed although I make my rounds
into my heart over and over again
the Time becomes more and more
burdensome such that you feel
like smashing your head into him
the run coagulated in the brain
and the existence takes the colour
of the sin. This house, these friends,
these hands, this mouth, these words
that make up this image that comes off
without prior notice weaving
an irresponsible theology she launches
into an orgy of loneliness.
