Aftermath

When I close my eyes I see you
On top of me, beautiful and flying
A wild flower, married with children
Things said to whip up my desire

You did not guard the line
The words come back to me abused
Betrayed, spat on, nullified
We are humans, after all, not angels

Now the headache is here & silence
A bottle of wine spilt over my eyes
What God gives, God withdraws
What I want or need He knows best

Emptiness sets in, rage & despair
The way out of prison carefully blocked
For we fear the other’s deprecating look
Trading our lives for flickering death

Burnham Beeches

They sleep, eyes closed, leaves fallen
Their starlight and midnight in Zone 11
Inconspicuous smouldering in early hours
A love game on an island beaded with owls

My games do not make a system
Here is Egypt, here my fingers touch the lake
A sad city, gloomy lovers, blunt spikes
Running and standing and grinding the soil

Knives and destinies, wheels of grass
I look for a prophet drowsing on the bus
My journeys, their trains with tickets aged
My light in the room by its occupants is gauged

People a hundred times larger than mist
Hold on to their gardens around waterfalls
I have come here to be silent in hedges
Munching on in the procession of mud

It looks better digested than derailed
Down-to-earth accounting held in peanuts
Insider information, importance among branches
Ridiculous, vulnerable, conceited and proud

Failure

There is a gaping, shrieking pain in me
A mad woman tearing off her hair
On the bottom of an empty abyss
My heart cries for her, it cannot do anything

Looking back to ruins, smouldering decoration
I wish this were but a bad dream
If parts can be glued together and work
If life is not a grinning sarcastic midget

What now? Prayers, penitence and hope
Mercy will have its last word, but the horror
Of the moment will live long after
In a memory crippled by satanic voices

The shock of my collapse anguished by lies
Fragile trust succumbing to monstrosity
The tree is down by one casual blow
Which comprised weeks of derailing love

Accusations and guilt follow like sheep
I am sure I will never do the right thing
Want the right thing, another grim touch
I just want to cry slowly, eternally

Midnight Breeze

Goodbye, my dear, in the blaze of the setting sun
It was me who killed you
May you live happily in other people's lives
And shine as you did in mine

Too greedy, perhaps, too desperate as well
For a place called home, me forlorn
On the ocean's shore in the wind
Eternally lost, wondering what is life

Days will come and go, the same struggle
Mistakes and victories, the mill-wheel
Did not mean to hurt you, nor me bleeding
Sitting on a crater with dynamite

Desire splitting the Earth in two
Everything could be overcome but that
The life itself, the life that turned to kill
So that is me, waiting for nothing

Too close in our whispering dance
See the fragility go up in the air
Thread-like shapes, pouring hearts
Broken, twisted, cracked and shattered

But why, why this torture of a garden
Where things were ready to grow?
Is it a lie or is THIS life?
Did we seek our blood from the beginning?

Maybe, maybe we lied before we spoke
Who knows the truth when your part is missing?
Your choice not to suffer more
Mine to stare into the midnight's breeze

More likely, we crashed into our mirrors
Recognized ourselves in disappointment
As the true faces of our incomplete lives
As two languages pressed into one sentence

That is how our trajectories beguiled us
Promising to be THE path, while behind
the soil, magnets misshaped maps
And we missed in a devastating boom

Waiting for the comet's second round
Energies that pull themselves into each other
The half-time of anguish, that is left
The full-time of the moon over the road

To An Unknown Lover

When your hand bleeds
I lap glass from your veins
Crunched desires & loneliness
Squealing into the night's void
Tremours from a broken eye
Your darkness a silent reproach
Your beastie rings
As they break in flames
From within, beg but don't stoop
Rags everywhere, threads
A midnight crossroads without lights
Tweak my heart, chop it
As I knock, knock & knock
on a ramshackled shed
With featherless hens inside
Half furious, half compassionate
See the waste, the damage
One, second, third, another
Their wounds gaping out round
As they gather here
Souls not burnt out yet
On a string hanging from a secret purpose
As they stare and pretend
They don't, the horror, the horror!
Of dumped lives
Masked in candy wrappings
In a park promenade
Behind their invisible tears
Lurking, praying, sighing
Endless hours, patiently wilting away

I have seen you, heard you, smelt you
Made for the nearest shop
To get some Christmas dynamite
To blow myself up
To erase the panoptical boom of hope
From my memory
Ambition of logs laid off
At a ghost town station
Pointers pointing nowhere
But at each other
Emptiness salted by good intentions
For you wanted a saviour
But harnessed a devil in a space shuttle
A slow taster of blood
Languid enchanter of glasses ringing in ears

Ocean Whispers Between Us

I
I may need a biometric passport
Fly on the wind instead of blown seeds
For this bait is too strong for a sperm whale
My little burning star, a palm of simmering rain

But when reality replaces ideality
And Zeus melts lamely in the afternoon sky
A tearful woman sits waiting for a horoscope
Days fall from a rope strung between her planets

I am a word arriving from nowhere
When your desire has pitched up a tent
My ears love, my eyes eat my fingers
Their limbs flow in the shadow of birds' wings

Are we a sentence in timeless duration
Squeezed out of transient bubbles at night?
Water looking for its boiling point in armpits
Dry land hosting elk games in the freezing morning?

I cannot get enough of your words
And wish all your poems were endless
Bolting of thunder, lashing of the wind
Touching of softened fields of sweet lava

The soul has had its way into a cellar
We are roasting a rat, drinking humidity
Dark sensors, blind tongues, tied thoughts
plot in a holiday resort after the fall-out

Here is your coal to burn, old, black and hard
Here love squirms under the whips of pride
Fear with scissors lock pants in a tub
I wash you, you wash me in the ocean between us

II
We are the blue blazing in northern steel
Architects munching apple flesh at gates
A thin glass line purchasing a ticket
The developing history of nuts in levitation

I killed a rabbit for you, tore off a piece of field
Sharpened knives for my whirlpools told me
There was a splitting leaf releasing insects
Lunch after lunch building a housing estate

A feast on top of a TV tower, unlimited views
Occluded systems rasp painted breath
Taken hostage among swallows at conference
Moving south with bushels of snowflakes

Premature derision, the north pole between us
Torn planes on the wings of torn calendars
Forty years after, bread of ashes, beds of ruins
Sharpening of teeth in the fenced off moonlight

I have cooked you, spiced and spattered with thyme
You have drilled a nest in me, stuffed with void
Round after round smudges bloodstains on a tie
A tear lurks in the grace of an electric chair

Vast arctic reserves, tatters of light
Me a melon nailed to the straits of a post box
You a herd of moose conjuring up grass
Clouds, islands of blue, orders of red, stiles

We are not desperate sadists in graves
I'm letting you bite off my minerals on a ship
You touch me with rakes plugged in essence
Let's be more cruel, my grey, it brings us closer!

III
You are an apple at a winter fair
Lucky men licking stories off birch bark
Tied in a boulder
Lined by smoke from a ship's funnel
Jaws spread from Dawn to Dusk

A furnace closed to balance off
A 24 hour off licence
Attempts to abduct a flower garden
Pass the ball to spectators
Knitting dust

Waiting for a mayor's head
Spitting, chewing, playing ice-hockey
The land of high motors
Ringing of infinity
Achieving of circling cakes

Your little whisper in the moonlight's grace
Don't leave me alone at home!
For I will lock you out
Or hang myself on your golden hair
As you sing buckets of loving passion

High Stone

Foreboding clouds, colts of sin
Dark gobblers hurl rain on Mary
Her cloak turns pale, alone she stands
Blind boulders shine, moss sings

Dear, you're turning me into Milton
Oh, how I want to, want to commit!
Hiss like a golden spittle on a stove
Your resurrection, my ascension in steam

Snowing blood, the blue is gone
Trees whisper of moonlit Antichrist
His dirty shoes, love-murky eyes
Remember the whores of Babylon

In those sad days without cell phones
Pigs got caught in the wire
Lo! Potatoes nesting in the road
Are they a symbol of my desire?

The path became sweeter, she's a muse
Scented with drying fresh wood
Oak bread and cakes poured over with custard
Insensible dreams caw at buzzards

A Wayward Church

The world has changed dramatically
There's more comfort, less people
A steady drone of culmination has passed

The whole horizon is occupied by you
Ladders and bridges in no man's land
Remind me of my body and the wall

My emptiness is a gift to blind children
too much alive, too much aware
Neuschwanstein on a rock between your prayers

A supersonic jet has missed the moon
followed by the sun, it's heading for eternity
exactly the distance between me and you

Lilacs purple and white read letters
The spring of cards lands on your face
Its vortex encompassing blue peasants

Pop up in the sand of a deserted dream
After midnight where overthrown benches
Two wet birds leave forks in the lamp of light


- the title is inspired by an Anglo-Saxon/Gothic village church in Little Missenden, Buckighamshire. It is one of the superbly preseved ancient structures in the valleys of the Chiltern Hills.

The Chiltern Way

The moon, a racing car and jeans
Three days operating in the WW1 trenches
Smoke on the horizon, ducks on TV

The fog has stripped off woods
Crying cocks on altars bequethed to mutiny
Mt. Fuji is a pallisade for badgers

Earning blood, vinegar without bells
Blindness sealed three times
Skaters on wooden seas in meditation

The tongue has sprung so high
A fish in a carefree wave of wand
A tram dipped in ketchup instead of love

Nothing is falling through
Letters scattered in a meadow float
Where is he in this timid quake?

Diffused sand, a tennis ball
Hitters on hills refuse to lunch
Ready in a desert, bigger than the lightning

Infection

In the realm of collapsed distances
We crawled through a thousand caves
In an eglatine atlas of trees

Reality is your dust drying on a line
Your face open to an amazing horror
Stranded in the vast pitch of your body

The night falls on daffodils
Steps, futile shrieks in the world of elevators
Redundant as their heads are

Natural to think how great
Spread on a slice of consciousness
Roof tiles balleting in the meadow grass

X-mas In February

When snow falls on London town it brings about an extra bank holiday. When it happens on a Monday, the day on which regular bank holidays usually fall, there is one more reason to stay at home (be it a hostel, a rented room in flat share or a semi-detached house). A few million people cannot do better for there is no public transport. The day has become another Christmas Day, the only day officially without any buses or tube service. To give the justice its due, today there remain a few lines not wholly but partly suspended, operating with severe delays. However, they will not spoil the magic effect snow is having on life in a temporarily disabled city.

It happens once or twice a year a genuine winter day as we know it from the Continent arrives in the suburbs. We have known the freeze and the icy wind, now we are recompensed by a freely distributed white coat. "Let the streets, roofs and sills wear it," cry Londoners who learn to slide in its fur quickly. "We are celebrating in summer shoes, cars in summer tyres, cats with summer hair and trees in summer bark." It is eternal summer in this eternal city.

It only gets disrupted every time and again by "adverse weather conditions". In other words, we have every kind of weather, every season of the year in all their variations at least once a year. And we know how to celebrate it. When a foot of snow lands in our world, we can close the airports, withdraw buses, suspend the tube and, watching the joyous niblets flitter in their games of May through ice-licked glass, we keep up our calm composure of proud Londoners. Because we know the weather will not (keep up). Tomorrow everything will become early spring and many of us will have to trudge through the slush of their average working lives. After all, there is no X-mas in February, as Lou Reed has put it in one of his New York songs.

The Castle (Part Two)

Leaves I am turning over
After I have fallen into a tube
Open their jaws
And, like smoked consecrators, yawn
I am definitely tired of endings
I prefer large frail blossom-painted bowls
Of hilarious salad

I survived something inexplicable
I was thrown into water
My craving was to burn down all churches
And bone every parish priest
I could not get enough white substance
Where was she when the sentence
Was dawning on me?

Purring in a cat's nest
Glimmering out of a teapot
Now I imagine deserted tin mines
Whose hidden galleries outflow into meadows
Walled by a forest
Such were my cards
Such the development of my psychotronics

While she was dipping her tongue
Into an obvious schlemiel
One hundred years of gathering grass
Two hundred of dissolution
Three hundred days of making a rapture
Would have been enough
For a carnivorous churchman

To confess his wings
While her spine would be bowing to wet plants
The castle was made from chewing gum
Strawberry, Raspberry, Billberry, Huckleberry
Bloomsberry and Gooseberry
We would survive in a vegetarian plot
So far so hungry

Yet if there are refreshments on the train
And a corpse beneath it
If rails are overflowing with skin
May elections be cancelled
And the civil society not have a long winding
Critics sneak around, searching
For mushrooms left after a snow-storm

The Last Judgement

Yes, we are ridiculous whatever we do. Me, for example, I am hitting the streets of London soon. I will finish my life there. Not because I would like to but because I have to. I know very well that I do not decide about my life. I have lived as a writer for some years and my writing has not earned me a penny. I have tried a job or too but I came to a conclusion it was not a way to follow. Now there is no job for me and in my honesty I would like to confirm there has never been a long-term job for me. I was designed to write and I have tried to sustain myself by honest means as long as I could. I may go begging yet but it is a question of time for how long it can support me.

I do not know what the coming and inevitable hunger will drive me to. I am excluded from the social welfare system. I can consider now if staying alive is worth starving. Whether there is a point in starving to death or whether I should cut it short. The answer should be that as long as I can hold my pen and write down words I can never be sure I should not be around. Well, it means starving and suffering. I will most likely catch some nasty diseases, of which I can also die.

The saddest thing is that I really mean it. It is sad because it is so irrational. It must have been clear to me and it has always been that writing will not earn me a penny. And yet I refuse any other way of income. I refuse it for two reasons. The first is that my vocation should enable me to stay alive in tolerable conditions. If it does not then I do not owe it to anyone and my life is pointless. The second reason is that I am not destined for any other work. The latter is more disputable, how can I be so sure of it? And why cannot I do anything simple to live on?

Even if I overlooked the first reason, I would not overcome the second. I have always known that I must live on something else but writing. I have never found such a means of income. If I did for a short time, the life it brought about was unbearable and I could not follow that path for long. Now I am tired, disappointed, hurt and resigned. I am waiting for the stake to go up in flames, though I do not know what I am punished for. Most likely for being what I am because the world cannot bear me such. I do not know what surprising or incomprehensible there is in my reasoning. It is obvious that if it has to be so, my way of life cannot be sanctioned in any society.

What am I wating for? What message do I want to convey? If I sum it up, I am a case of a person who, for some reason or without it, had to do what he did and the result was he did not have a place to live and money to buy food. If the basic principle of this society lies in the following equation: work = money, then in my case holds: work = nothing. My work is, with respect to this basic socio-economic rule, non-existent. I must admit, with reference to this socio-economic rule, I have never done anything and it is only correct I am losing my right for life.

I cannot blame it on anyone, the society or me. I can never be sure enough I should not have done anything else. But what for? Are there not enough other people for other jobs? Would there be a point in my forcing myself into something I cannot do or do not want to do? I do not think so. If that was true then I might just as well wait to be assigned something by some authorities. I do not want to be another person in a wrong place. And I believe I am not a person letting his right place wait. There is not a right place for me.

It does not amount to more than babbling of a cancerous mind. Yes, I want you to feel sorry for myself. I am not shy to appear so shamelessly nasty. There is not a reason to hide what one really is. (What is more, there is no reason to look for the support of any reasons anyway.) If I disgust someone, they probably do not know what I am talking about. Those who know will either condemn or understand me without an approval. There is no place for an approval. My case cannot be accepted. (I mean my hidden appeal for allowing me to survive under given conditions.) The most anyone can do is to agree with my conclusions for they are so sparklingly obvious.

The Theory of a Black Bang

It is raining. Trees are wet and roofs slippery. Animals are crouching in their holes. The world is behind a window. It is warm inside. There are people who speak different languages. I would like to know what they think or feel behind their languages. It is a cooking time. I would like to know how many people are in a real fact here. Why are they here? Because I see and hear them. They are breathing.

I have always been alone and I will always be. Before death or after it. Vast endless space where everything is so distant it cannot be seen. There are such morbid people who think and write about death constantly because they find it more attractive than life, than the sun. Or it may be they find the sun in death. They think of afterlife as the object of their desire.

I have surrounded myself with objects of distraction. I am crawling with my eyes over the surface of the floor to hit some sugar. Question marks relax and stretch in my hair. She has an excellent body but I have learnt to hide my true emotions. I have learnt to hide everything connected with me. I hate to appear ridiculous. I am waiting for people to dig me up. She likes to be in a male society. I have surrounded myself with comedies, good news, simple words, tea and the smell of prepared food and believe that the dark world will never reach me. I have obliterated every memory of the outside.

I have but almost. It is getting to me through the net. The live commentary of a friendly match between England and the Czech Republic. Hour after hour after hour is washed away by the surge of picturized information. I make rounds of a few chosen pages, namely, MySpace, Yahoo, Skype and any kind of Job Search to fill up any threatening empty space between inraids into the unknown. I am not sure I have learnt anything, which actually is not my goal. People become too obsessed with reflecting on time. When I say people, I mean me. Reflections, analysis, verbalization and intellectualization of a perception are the best way to miss the ball. I am on the verge of an enormous fallacy. I must watch me.

When all needs are satisfied, there comes the right time for despair for emptiness creeps in immediately after satisfaction. I sound wise. I sound like I have something to pass on. I become enchanted by my own words. I am standing like a beautiful woman under the shower of my words. I admire the logical structure of the stream. They give me back my lost freshness and innocence. They jump on my skin and tease certain sensitive waggons. And that is the failure exactly. I believe it is happening but it isn't. Nothing of what I write about is happening except the writing itself. But then, of course, I do not know what writing is, except that it is one of the ways from certainty to an utter loss or mistrust. I do need something female to comfort me.

I last brushed my teeth 1200 km away from here. I wonder how many light years or days that would be. Light minutes. Or rather seconds. The duration of an orgasm. Meditation is a slow orgasm spread over hours or days or weeks. It is when time stops. One day they will call me and hire me as a carer. They will put an end to my movement, they will snatch away my momentum. They will display my dry skin in a better case. The only use of words is that of a hypodermic syringe with unknown solution.

I believe money falls like snow on a wind-swept country. To be fully immersed in the present moment requires oblivion of the past, which can only reappear as a re-presented subject matter, and ignorance towards future, of which you must not have the foggiest notion. It can happen very easily under these circumstances that you will sincerely not know what to do next because every such “next” will have lost its anchor. It is the movement of a sightless person groping for his/her way on a busy street. Nothing will be more comforting than taking a risk. The future will not appear as something solid and inert in the distance ahead, as something, which has to be reached and looked on dumbly or touched without sense. The future and the past will only exist as an always newly emerging presence. It is a continuous process of being born, incessant dying.

When I start to rejoice over an explanation or a simple formulation I forget that it is already gone. Only the celebration remains. Words lose their validity at the moment of their utterance. It is an inevitable pre-condition for the evolution of any process. God only knows why this process is so essential but I know it must have something in common with the beginnning and the end of the universe and the theory of the Black Bang. This takes place when the last black hole swallows itself, when everything dissapears for an immeasurably short moment (which is eternity itself in fact) in order to explode into a new dissemination of existence.

There are things I do not seem to need now, which I have left behind and of which I have lost the sense of perception. Things carresed and cared about in old books. I know the way to them if the need to revive and regain the skill they teach ever comes. Necessary steps, necessarily passed. Do the stockpiles of previous altitudes carry me on, lift me up or push me down? Is the feeling of my disconnection from them a lie? Am I really moving or am I carrying one place with me everywhere? What place would it be? Where is my home? Where is your home? Scattered across the ocean? How does one feel at home?

The reason for talking may lie in the fact it is one of the most effective ways to cover emptiness. The illusion of fullness, which comes with words, will last for a while. The sleep is an armoured rider and sleepiness a luxurious house with hunting trophies. The longer I stay there the more of a deer I become. The more it rains, the more it smoulders. It is time for a small refreshment.

I am not looking for a job but for an income. I am not looking but writing. It is the old scenario. Everything turns out as a piece of writing. It has to, it is a law. I can view it from this or that side. I can celebrate. I am not even looking for an income. I am looking out of a window. It is silent outside. It can stay like this forever but I know it will not. I could stay forever on this sofa. The law of payment will pick me up one day and deliver me to the streets of London. It is a good thing streets are for free. It does not matter what happens as long as I am left on this sofa. Let us see if I can write a novel in ten days and nights. A book about my small world seen from the softness of upholstery.

The starting point is all words are futile. Futility is the best starting point, it is a liberation at the beginnning.

Anti-Pathetic London

Suburban London, one has to come up warily
Like to an uncombed beast in a Zoo
Fried wedges shrink & chicken wings dream
Of meat after a breadcrumb monsoon

What colour are you wearing on your face?
A lot of green and yellow mascara
Fried wedges crumple on their climb from a raw valley
Which is your dream pillow left back in Africa

Half of your face here, half over there
And cold! How cold is your heart if you have any!
A seducer, an illusionist, a perisher of virgins
No heart, in place of veins - lemonade tendrils

Vertiginous nests made of waiting & surviving
If it were not for you, where would we be?
Rotting in villages, small towns, offsiding
Into an almost tangible but one step less real

A mill-wheel of diamond, burst Victorian artery
Are you a sufferer of human fear & folly?
Your country lanes, orchards, pastures & farms
Erased under the weight of non-pathetic mortals



- a little stumbling variation on English modernism.

The Forest of Dean

An ancient forest is another worthy place to ramble in after midnight. This time the sky is conscience clear. A half moon is nested in its swing, showing off its half power. It starts with rising but continues with sinking. It is changing its colour. The bold milk yellow becomes a more ashamed orange ruby. When I do not trust the moon I switch on my headlight. Its cold greenish white light gives the nearest surroundings pale and mortal hue. It is not difficult to recognize shapes of hanging birds or bulks of gaping bodies of villains and saints here and there. I prefer to switch it off and trust the moonlight. (After all, am I not whispermoonlight? But I do not think of it now, immersed in my perception.)

At one moment I notice a shadow cast in front of me. I step on it and it springs forward. - No, there is no catching your shadow. It is in a mute allegiance with spectres of the trees. They reach out for my eyes and stick them to their branches, vain & conceited. I turn my head right and left and right, then up, near and far, everywhere there is a story, a life, an exclamation and a question mark. They moan, complain, reproach, boast, keep silent, radiate, threaten, lure, plead, steal and lie. They know my way and give me false directions. They mix up paths so that what is on the map is not in reality. And if they cannot, they distract me with their bare shapes so that I miss a crucial turn and have to return. Like this one, which is displaying the pride of its dozen limbs and one phallic protrusion, turning my head on purpose on the left where I should be turning to the right.

When I have born long enough their misleading signs and paths peppered with unfinished, eaten out stones, I make a fire. A small one on a moss covered stump. The leaves and the ground underneath are wet with frost, I need not be afraid. Unlike my headlight, which only beats the kettle of tangled emotions with a simile of light, this one is real and warms me up and my tea. With a temperature drowning just below the surface, this source of heat is a gift from heaven or - from an army packet found in a hostel. The matches I have got from it burn extra long and convince sweating sticks to burn along. My exhilaration grows. I forget the forest and focus on my cup and the flaming glow. When I decide I have had enough pleasure it starts to snow. Putting out the fire with tea run through my body turns out to be a premature act. The snow would have done it. I put on my plastic poncho and dodge the white blindness. In the morning the trees pretend not to know about anything as they stand humiliated by the soft rebuke from the sky. They hold on and pose as if they were models at the latest winter fashion show.

The Black Mountain

If you want to know from which side the wind blows, climb on the ridge of a black mountain after midnight and walk and walk and walk. The fog is deep, the wind atrocious, the skin of the mountain is all that has been left after a nuclear fall-out. There is not a single light, no star, no moon. Everything is dark and thick with biting dampness. The skin of the mountain is hard and corroded. You can follow the ruts and pray for your ankles. You are a company of indefinite shadows. They might be the ghosts of souls caught in a stasis between heaven and hell. They have found their home here and wait for visitors anxiously. They do not speak, these thin mists, they mark the way, which is a difference between smaller grey and bigger black darkness.

When the silhouette of the corrugated road starts to slope down after an hour or two (time equals eternity here), when your ear feels like a looted chapel, when you are beginning to believe you have won, the mountain will clutch your foot in one unguarded moment and pull you towards itself with such ferocious force that you believe at the first moment the foot has stayed in her possession. It turns out after a few seconds of a clean shock it hasn't. Yet the mountain has showed you at whose mercy you walk. Do not tease the black mountain even in your thoughts! It is the back of an ageless leviathan who knows more about this earth than you can ever hope to realize.