Prose poem with bikes

The old women were coming down, in flocks, from the sky, riding old rusty bikes. It was an awesome sight. It had just started getting dark and their massive descent was impressive as the joints of the their fingers were rattling and their white long hair was waving in the deep violet sky. They sneaked in every corner of the city and began to chaw its foundations. Chomp chomp , the city was shrinking and shrinking and losing its original size. My pavement could suddenly fit in my palm and their bikes were blooming like giant copper flowers. They had become a huge wave foam inside my chest till the morning came.

image: Tim Walker

Being dead smells like brown colour

She had died looking at the ceiling. Her left eye was full of frozen tears and it looked like a bad wizard's eye. A big beetle was running crazy up and down the ceiling riding a small old bicycle, as if it couldn't decide whether to have a free fall on the dead woman's mouth or to shrug in a quiet deserted wall corner.

''Oh my the dead woman thought ''I can't move! That's what death is about? Just not being able to move?''

And she wanted was to laugh but she couldn't. Her lips were cold and frigid and her right hand was lying in an eternal dancing pose over her head. The white creased pillow was hugging her neck tenderly as a devoted friend.

"But, I like this ruby red blanket more'' she said to herself and tried to remember the deep luscious colour of the bed cover because she was in such a position that it was impossible for her to turn her head and just have a look at it. However, she could see just a little piece of it, her eye was still able to capture some of the red colour.

"I will be buried under the soil''

The idea crossed her mind suddenly and if she weren't dead she would be so upset that she would get up and open all the house windows, as she always used to do when upset.

Nice soft wet soil? Or rough, rocky soil full of tiny little stones? Would the soil enter her nostrils? Would it cover her eyelids? Or it might even stuff the cavities of her ears. But she would be buried in a coffin and this was a comforting thought because definitely she didn't like the idea of soil covering her face and body.' 'Yes..a nice wooden coffin which can protect my sensitive body areas, I can think many of them. I am full of sensitive body areas''

Ignatio used to caress her eyelashes with his long fingers before sleeping, when they were younger. This was one of her sensitive body areas which made her shiver with delight. Her breath was gurgling with deep pleasure into his ear which was one of his own sensitive body areas.

What if her family decided to make her funeral on a rainy day? It would be better, because she liked mud. Heavy mud would cover the coffin lid and if she was lucky enough she would be able to smell the heavy brown color. Being dead, smells like brown color. She had always had the ability of sensing the smell of colours. The grey walls of her room had the smell of a wild Norwegian sea, the white sheets on her bed smelt like a burning fluorescent lamp and the crimson blankets were the steep cliffs of a smouldery canyon.

She sighed deeply but then she remembered that she wasn’t allowed to sigh so she only left herself fall deeper into the canyon. And the beetle was waiting there, she rode on the back of its bike. So all someone can guess, is that she is still riding along with the beetle in the valley of death, as poets say. Beetles riding rusty bikes, had been living in the darkest spot of her eyes’ pupils, since she was a little girl.

image: Christian Schloe

The night pillow

My big secret has always been that

I have two tongues in my mouth

Two breasts on my chest

two snakes under my bed

Two is not a number

It’s rolling over my orange pillow

it cries it yells, it laughs like a hyena 

    Gods and devils  made these two worlds 

just for me

I found out that there are more.

veils upon veils, upon veils

I will spend my life here in this room

holding an apple, narrating my multiple lives

leaping in the abyss again and again

r.b

image: Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, photographed by Philippe Halsman

Few seconds

There is a sea out of my window, just a sea, can’t you look at it?
The breeze must have taken your mind

The king empties the sand every morning
Carrying his bucket across the ocean
Frowning like a child with cheap rings

And I am sitting here, alone. 
Listening to all the giant birds over my head.
Brave I said and their beaks won’t scare you

Should I crawl to your legs and hug your thighs?

The water is teeming with weird orange fishes
Like the ones I have been dreaming of for many nights now

Regina Bou

image: 

Andrej Glusgold

The kettle

 The kettle’s lid stayed unmoved to my voice 

More silent than an early morning

immortal gods and Chinese hares

fighting under it, drowning in keylan tea 

I have to bury the kettle deep into the soil

And dream about it only at nights

image: Helen Vacalo

The song

The Augustean nights will come, bright and sad
like the blue of your eyes, like the lost tunes,
like all the past words of love that ran to hide.
After all, a thousand years, following the fight
nobody remembers the agony of closed lips.
Only the buttons of my shirt will be dripping wet 
and the copper clouds of your smooth voice

Princess Yvonne and Prince Alexander, by Princess Marianne Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn

*(written for Northography)

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Sleep

Sleep, sleep, sleep, because there is no waking up. Sleep to the end of death land and let the cats squirm on your shoulders. With the picture of your grandfathers hanging above your head. Like a sword in a tale. Like a cloud in your dream.

image: Roger Ballen

Seeking

Nora was looking at the mirror,

Her two daughters sewing in the porch.

When the wind shook the house

and the roots of the apricot trees,

Bringing wild smells of the black silence

that used to exist under that roof,

Long before any man set his foot in,

Nora saw her animal eyes in the glass.

                                        

The sound of the dry leaves rushed her breath

like the lost god  of her deep darkness

in the room of  solid memories

“Lock the windows’’ she shouted

And her daughters ran, ran like jumping little spiders.

image: From the film La Petite (Louis Malle)

The crazy Ivan

A cold morning I saw the tree of life  hanging from my ceiling

With all the holes of  its black darkness

 ‘’I am Ivan, the Dancing Monk of the Pearl rooms’’ I thought.

My wise blood  sails  the seven seas  and  carries  the seven worlds.

Maybe I am a cat with seven souls’’

I must not reveal that I left the tree where I found it

But that’s what I did. Because I am Ivan the Dancing Monk.

image: Anthony Goicolea

I am a tunnel ( The clockwork boxes 12 and last one)

I had the tormenting and freaking awareness of this incessant trip under the ground. Someone was running after me all the time trying to scare me with his warm, eternal song, inside the  depths of the tunnels. I wanted to force myself to stay awake and search for the security of a loud babbling voice, a voice that would be able by itself, like a strong spear, to keep away from me all my hunters and much more, my own desire to surrender myself to them.

That’s why I have always been afraid of the sound of subway trains and at the same time I have been so much attracted by their underground moaning that I am trembling with anticipation every time a train is approaching the boarding platform. The doors which close and open like the petals of a carnivore plant, waiting for their victims , the soft humming noises of people walking  and running, the feeling of certainty that the earth surface is a floating island above my head, the faces of the engine drivers who are changing shifts…Faces without any expression, with a gaze of superiority as if they have just returned from a palace ball on a royal ship..And those huge window panes that are like transparent mirrors of my multiple idols…But yes I am  certain. The net of the big sleep, of the eternal lethargy, is becoming larger and larger behind my feet and if it manages to grab me, it will keep me wandering in its tunnels for ever.. A possibility,  that I haven’t decided yet if it’s attractive or repulsive. What if I decided to make the tunnels net, the junctions of its webs, be my real home? I should search carefully for its most secret corners and learn how the webs are construced. Then I would be able to construct  my own webs. What a strange thing it would be to proceed without knowing anything but having  the eternal knowledge of all the worlds inside my chest. This kind of knowledge had led me safe and sound in front of the door I had found underground. That day I had come across the spot of the black dust.

I am still in the network. I have been bought by thousands of people and I have bought thousands of  them too. I cannot remember their faces  at all and I am sure that no one remembers mine. The sound of the huge machine which operated like a strap of living exhibits,  has faded into a distant past. After all it was not a special sound, just a sound that I can forget very easily even if it tormented my ears for long. As they all used to say, I was a rather indifferent exhibit, too much ordinary for most of them, slightly necessary for some others, completely indifferent to others. But I can also say, after all this time, that everyone was indifferent to me. Yes, there were some human exhibits who attracted my attention for some seconds but that was all. Now I can buy and sell anyone I want. I don’t even have to enter the auction room. I have become a specialist. However, the most exciting thing is that I can be sold to anyone who wants to buy me, without having to make any bargain.You know, the truth is that I am a secret tunnel. If you approach me you will listen to my underground voices and the creaking wood of my columns.

image: Andreas Feininger