* * *
To produce a poem - once a vibrating pain in the tissues was enough and a stock of words no greater than an animal's scream. Nowadays, one needs an outline and an argument, and comparative explorations into the depth of dictionaries. There are surgical interventions around words, there are word-hybrids, half-words, quarter-words, and there is an ambiguity of letters swollen with wisdom. And my thirst - a fledgling nightingale is silenced by all these scores and instruments. And when you ask me for meaning, I feel how the branch that supports the frail nest snaps under the crushing load of a grand piano.
* * *
This year again there is spring, spring incredibly familiar, so why does poetry suffocate on its own breath. The tree under my window commits plagiarism for the twentieth year in a row, green leaves upon green leaves. This year's cherry blossoms are not different from those when the cherry tree began, the same perfume permeates the air. And - although the old declare it tiresome - my sister kisses under trees as I did; she kisses passionately, forever plagiarizing her first kiss. I could as well recall grasses, all the grasses which have germinated from seed, faithfully and without compromise, like those of several months ago. Life giving birth does not fear plagiarism, just as death - stubborn in its repetition - always stupefies. Why then censure love poems, why object to their lack of shame and primitive disorderly groan of rapture repeated perpetually for centuries oblivious of readership.
I enjoy writing poems. In a poem, like at a public rally, tempers boil, screams burst open
the form, and the emotions wave a huge red banner.
A poem will not submit to censorship, it mocks the helpless angels wringing their silken
wings, it challenges the god and scorns its creator. Poems are like the elements.
0, working class - I prayed - who wave a huge red banner, o mighty class, o brave
class, o rallying lover, dark-feathered fowl, my element, come, we'll bury the god under a
gooseberry bush and dance a green dance on his fresh grave!
Just make sure that angel does not eavesdrop and reveal our plot ahead of time...
I distrust purple. In Egypt, it was the color of mourning.
Cleopatra wore it
after the emperor's death
before she died
herself.
I love the red!