letters (coral vipers)

cold blade to bare skin
knife into the pancreas.
scarlet whisper over my body.
coral vipers burrow into the ground
beneath my feet.

your eyes…
your voice…
your smile…

fragments (i told him)

I told him,
“cut the crap,
it is just sex.
I have six hours,
don’t waste.”

a glass of wine…
eyes into eyes,
blue melts with brown.

he asked me to stay,
this time for good.

he picked my dress
from the stairs,
my bra from the kitchen table
and hung them neatly
in his closet.

he made me tea
and fixed my dinner.

I mentioned that
I use my stove
for extra storage.

he asked me,
if I will stop by again.

I said
“perhaps…
sometimes…
next year…
if I will have six hours
to waste”

fragments (I like my days)

I like my days,
repetitive
and uneventful…

my morning rituals…
the coffee shop.
if I would go blind
tomorrow,
I wouldn’t miss
one corner there.

mid-morning sun
fights shade
of my UV reflective glasses.

skipping red light
like a heartbeat,
in the green valley,
I race blue Truck.
he gloriously honks
while crossing finish line
ahead of me.

car radio announces
tornado warning
for later afternoon

and off my path.

fragments (a portrait)

a stroke of the brush...
the melatonin layers and suns
imbedded into the skin.

another brush… another stroke
and winter tangles with the snow
in hair that melts on shoulder blades.

The mirror is a silent judge and witness.
A smile of wisdom from within.


the lonely footprints
in the dirt of the road
and shadows in the clothes

a broken brush…
a smudge across the canvas,
a breath of wind across the fields,
deserted, left behind
that disappears in far perspective.

I hold the brush; he’s leaning on the cane.

letters (dance with me)

dance with me…

your touch…

double –edged sword…

scarlet path drew the dance
into the oak floor, white walls.

drops of pain shivers
at the edge of the blade.
night hides the secrets.
the shadows slither into the corners.
wind whispers behind the doors.
rain flows through my veins.

rhythm deepens…


my wounds…


trembling hollowness wraps around my heart.

letters (I drown to you)

I drown to you
like a moth to the flame,
ignoring pain,
ignoring burning wings.

attracted by light,
by warmth, by your nature,
abstract, mystical and elusive
like dancing shadows on the wall.

I hopelessly fall in the trap,
Into the open arms of death.

tears of the moon, cold silver flickers,
woven into the canvas of the night.

last visual memory,
before the darkness
consumes my eyes.

…the sunrise will wash out
handful of ashes.

past is lightweight and overrated.

letters (the snake)

the sand dunes, the burning sun.
the wind rasps through my scales.
I curve my path; I ripple into the far horizon.
I flow with the sand.

today, I slither over your body,
Into your dreams,
attracted by the scent
of your sweat – beaded skin,
your gentle warmth, your misty breath.

I am infringed into your sleep.
I am reflection of your fears.
the mesmerizing force
drenches from my eyes.

the paralyzing thought
seals your lips from scream.

I hiss your name in my ancient tongues
.
your blood, in the valley of your neck,
throbs in my belly.

you still…. you tremble….
you surrender!

letters (it is all about you)

you are my sleepless nights,
my never –ending thoughts.

you are my fears, my hopes,
fresh breath of air.

you are my life.

I’m standing at the Edge,
I spread my wings….
the Northern wind caresses my face…

am I to fall?
am I to fly?
am I to live?
am I to die?

letters (true enemy)

Time...

Lately it has wrapped me
in a tight, sticky, milky white cocoon
and hung me somewhere between life and death,
between hell and heaven.

It patiently waits
when a butterfly will chew its way out,
just to devour her.

Time has never been a friend.
But when I got captured and stalled…

Time is my true enemy now!

Fragments (being me)

how does victory smell?
it is stinks:
the stench of a burning flesh,
the nauseating smell of spilled blood,
the damp smell of the dark prison,
where the soul is locked.

if I would have faith in my heart,
I would ask for forgiveness.
other than that,
I like the smell of victory.

letters (last steps)

nameless, breathless, imprisoned
…I flow-by.
barb-wire curls around heartbeats.
a sweet bitterness embraces darkness.
these last steps
into unknown
…minefields.

fragments (just a thought)

the tight coil of the time loop
is about to snap.
the stars are ready
to drift apart
into oblivion,
collide
and demolish themselves
into galactic dust,
ripping real and imagined
into nothingness
until the Last,
unpaired and unattached
would remain.
the Last one:
invisible, formless and nameless,
a silent witness
of the past glories and dismays,
…perhaps just a thought,
frozen
and curled in the circle
of repetition,
doomed into eternity
when time will perish
like a puff of smoke.

letters (prose of my life)

prose of my life.
I
the other day, on my way out of the book store,
a man in his serious age held the door open for me
while I was walking through the double door and a hallway.
the moment was somehow awkward to be casual.
we made an eye contact and I thanked him.
he told me back that I had made his day
just being there… and he would have stayed
a whole day by that door just to keep it open for me.
it was a nice one
and I had granted him one of my most enchanting smiles.
II
and I had remembered them all:
some of them wanted to buy,
others pleaded, cried, begged and tried
to warm my heart with the promise of suicide,
the smart ones run away instantly,
the choice that marches before my name.
a few attempted to bully their way trough,
but as soon as I hissed, all disappeared,
there was no brave one to stay.
and when I had thrown a bolt of lightning or a few,
no one attempted to cross the bare lands for years…
III
… I am standing alone.
my eyes drown into the sunset.
…live entangled hopelessly in time
like a dying fly in a spider web.
I have missed You,
one who knows
where is the line
that separates right and wrong,
fear and bravery, love and hate,
one who can stand in the middle of opposites
with a smile
and hold the door open,
for me to be born into this world,
one who can open his arms
and embrace
all that I am…

fragments (one day in the woods) part II

He made a note to self that they were strangers from the fearful look on her face and somehow guarding posture as she sprung to her feet when she noticed the man. They were too far away for George to hear the conversation but small bits of it reached his ears. She repeated several times “no” with her head moving accordingly. He overheard the name “Laura” and George decided that it was her name. The man talked convincingly when she disagreed, George understood it from her head moving side to side, saying no, and her hands, now on her chest, crisscrossed and palms to her shoulders. After a few long minutes of debates she gave up, she drank the water, he offered, put her shoes on, holding on to his arm and they started walking in the direction where the man came from.
George felt a relief and was ready to walk into his way, but a sudden thought struck him still, what if that would be his daughter walking in the woods with a stranger, what would he do? He would give everything away just to be there for her. And he started following them in the distance. It was not too difficult, even so they did not talk, but they walked loudly. They were following a trail and shortly they reached the road with a few cars parked at the site. It was Saturday and there were a people who run into the sanctuary of the woods from their daily life in the city.
Laura and a man got into a white Volvo that was parked with its back to the trail and a license plate perfectly visible for George, equipped with his binoculars. He pulled out a pen and little notebook from the left pocked of his jacket and scribbled the number of the plate, double checked it and buried the notebook back into his pocket.
As the car took off, the first drops of rain were rustling in the bushes, as they touched George’s face, he got startled.
The rumbling sound behind his back, somewhere close, reminded him of thunder, and he thought it was strange, it was off season…
He opened his eyes wide, realizing that he was sitting in the same place where he dozed off. And at the same time, just a few minutes ago, he knew, he followed a woman, by the name of Laura that took off with a stranger. He had a horrible headache, he felt as if his head was split in two, right in the middle, splitting his reality, which were both real in his mind but his logic whispered somewhere from afar that it was impossible and he has to choose one over another. Two blurry pictures tried to impose onto each other, but it did not offer any clarity, on the contrary, it made George’s thoughts blurrier then before.
It started to rain and he dismissed the strangeness as a vivid dream. He pulled his raincoat out, put it on, collected his belongings and started to walk down the hill toward his car.
His dream echoed in his head, bouncing in every direction like madness in its prime. Scared of his next action he reached into his pocked for the notebook, and… it was not there. He found only the pencil. His rifle and back pack slid down to the ground, he stood there without a thought, like a neighboring tree. The plate number was fresh in his memory. He rolled his sleeve high up, and wrote the number again …twice, then he mentally cancelled all his previous plans and arrangements for tomorrow and perhaps for tonight. He imagined how angry Martha would be, but it did not matter anymore…
He put the pen back into his pocket, rolled the sleeve carefully over his scribbling, protecting the information inked over his skin that was also tattooed over his brain, stored in all kinds of memories: short, long, strange, just name it, and did not need any protection. And he briskly walked to his car. The rain was not rustling anymore, but was roaring like an angry beast, overwhelming all the gentle sounds of the forest. The forest stayed quiet and helpless. George got soaked to his bones in no time and he did not notice that or did not give any significance to it. He was walking steady, immersed in his thoughts while drops of rain were collecting over his soaked clothes, which were not absorbing anymore water, and were forming small streams that were rolling down his body. If anyone would see George at that time, they would think that the Rain Man stepped out of the dark cloud and was hunting the woods.

fragments (one day in the woods) part I

Part I
I can rename it into “LOST”… it would give away too much. Ops, I just did, although there is much more to find….

It was the fifth day of the hunting season, and it was the fifth day for George to go in the woods, away from the house and his morning coffee that was the preferable routine, cup of a black, hot and strong coffee, the way to start the day, anytime his life would permit it. It was his blissful fifth day away from the kitchen soaked by the scent of a cinnamon mixed with bleach, although, the bleach was more of his imagination. The sterile cleanliness of the place, one could hardly call a kitchen, it could only be compared to the operating room just before the surgery. That spotless cleanliness nauseated him by evoking in his mind the smell of antiseptics and bleach. And every morning in his kitchen would bring the memories of nightmarish scents of the hospital room equipped with shiny, unfamiliar and familiar objects; one may think of tools that you can use to cut small branches. With this in mind, George felt a slight pulling sensation, not a painful but not a pleasant one either, in his chest, over his breast bone that was cut open about a year ago on real short notice, before the anesthetics had a chance to circulate up to that part of his body, by the surgeon, skillful, young woman, who repaired his heart, that was not wounded by a fat diet, smoking or any other pleasurable lazy activities that the lucky bastards indulge for decades, but shrapnel: hot, heavy and deadly. He keeps it as a souvenir. No, he likes to think of it as a trophy, a small fingernail from the bony hand that was squeezing the last drops of life out of him, but the lady-doctor won the battle.
Those days, excursions in the woods, were filled with a sense of purpose and routine, qualities, he learned for years and years in the military, even so the purpose and routine of his post army life felt artificial and fake. This winter he hit his Golden Age and was retired. The time, he had dreamed of so often, turned to be far from his expectations, filled with his friends and relatives and mostly with his wife Marta, the woman of his dreams, whom he was deeply in love with. They had the three children together. Today she remained the same, as years ago: sweet, innocent and naïve, the qualities he used to like. But those years changed him many times over and over, and she was the same, a stranger now, more, she was an annoying stranger. The thought he hated to have in his mind, but, at the same time, he was not able to get rid of.
And if he would say that he finally was happy to be home and have a peaceful night of sleep, without being awakened by shooting or explosions or being ready to wake up every minute due to some other crisis, he would be lying, because he was miserable. The idle peacefulness of those nights did not give him a chance to fall asleep. The memories of past events would run in circles in his exhausted mind, holding each other hands, dragging him inside of that circle, blindfolding, spinning, dragging him into the endless dance of insanity, until his consciousness would give up and drop him into a vale of darkness, like a rock from the cliff, and as soon as he hit the bottom, he would be awakened again and again, countless times over the course of night. Every night, in the middle, he would stop awaking Martha, he would go to the library and finish there, what most of the people call night, and he called it wrestling with the night.
They have a name for this condition, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder; they have all kinds of therapies, medications and groups for it. But George, being a loner at heart, had a different means to deal with his emotional and social wounds and problems. He had to be alone. In those times, he saw himself as a wounded animal who needed to find sanctuary somewhere in a cave, hide there from the world and lick his wounds, until they healed.
Today he left the house quietly and early, way before daybreak, not to wake up Martha. Any time he would leave the house, she would give him a look that would ruin his day with feeling of guilt and frustration.
The darkness of the night was broken by the light of the still invisible sun that was hiding below the horizon, somewhere in the deep waters of the ocean or in the dark valleys of the mountains.
The street light, outside of the house, usually, when George would take his dog for the last stroll of the day, around midnight, would cast long dark shadows. Today, the shadow was grayish in color and insignificantly small, maybe up to his knee if he would have measured it, a baby shadow, but nevertheless, it was tightly attached to George’s boots and followed him all the way down to the car and in the moment he closed the car door behind, the shadow split free and crawled under the car, or maybe lurked for a ride in the comfort of a dark trunk.
He liked this time of the day. The road was almost deserted. He was driving to the East and the sun met him half way through. At first it was just a red stripe slightly above the horizon and growing in size the stripe was swelling into roundness until it finally rolled over: perfect circle, bloody-red and apocalyptically majestic. As soon as it broke with the land, it had turned into a yellow giant that was quickly decreasing in size and increasing in intensity, blinding George’s eyes. He put his sunglasses on, blocking the brightness of a new day.
The sun was sailing through the deep, blue sky when he parked his car on the side of the road by the hill, they call it mountain… he silently smiled at this thought. The last two years of his military career, he spent in northern Afghanistan. He chuckled again, muttering softly and rolling his eyes up… ”mountain”.
He pulled his back pack from the passenger seat of his car, double checked its contents, put his hands through the straps, felt its heaviness comfortably on his back. Then he bent over, tied his boots on double knot. He noticed an army of ants’ crossing over the trail, marching in harmony, one after another and disappearing under the rotten bark of an old three on the other side. He sighed, straightened his back, opened the trunk of the car, reached for his binoculars, hung them over his neck and lastly, he reached for his riffle, picked it up carefully and gently, slung it over his right shoulder and started walking.
The fresh morning air, saturated with early fall and the forest, flown into his lungs, circulated through his blood stream, sipped into every cell of his body, bounced there from wall to wall, made him light. George felt that gravity had lost its deadly grip on him; it made him childishly happy: the heaviness of his past and uncertainty of his future had disappeared.
The sound of a broken branch high up to his right, made him to turn his head and he saw a squirrel dropping down from the top of the pine tree, bouncing from branch to branch like a brown balloon, filled with water. She broke her fall by grabbing on the lower branch and was sitting there …. She looked in George’s direction, intruder that startled her and broke the balance of the forest. As much as he welcomed this morning and those woods he sensed that he was not welcome here.
In a mile or so he broke of the trail and was walking in the direction that was pleasing his sight and his feet, changing the angle frequently to avoid thick shrub or other usual obstacles of the forest. He was trailing, feeling the incline of the hill, and it was all he wanted to do, just go up, following a general direction.
He walked slowly and quietly; he looked attentively under his feet avoiding breaking the natural silence of the woods by stepping on dry branch. And every time he did, the woods become still for a second, listening to the noise as of determining what had made that noise and how dangerous that “what” was.
In a few hours of hiking George felt thirsty and tired; he decided to take a little break. He opened his back pack, drank some water, put the back pack on the ground and leaned against it, looking at a pale blue sky of the afternoon with occasional curly clouds slowly rolling toward the North. He felt relaxed and tired and decided to let it go and doze off.
A faint sound, unnatural, alien to the forest, woke him up. He was listening without opening his eyes or made the slightest movement. Someone was crying and that someone was female or a child, he determined it by the pitch of the voice. The sound was fainting away, stopped, the silence was restored for a few moments and then, the sob started again as if the person forced that cry out. George opened his eyes, carefully packed his back pack and silently walked into the direction of the sound. It took him a few steps to reach the clearing of the meadow, he stood there hiding behind the tree and looked. As he lifted the binoculars to his eyes the young woman appeared within reach of his hand.
She was sitting on a large stone, with her knees up and embraced by her arms, fingers both of her hands were enmeshed and tightly held her in that position. Her head rested on her knees, tilted to her left and her hair long and tangled, color of gray sand were reaching her toes while the wind blew it in all directions, like tall grass with roots up in the air. She was alone. George did not detect any other items, except her shoes, that were placed neatly on the ground. Those shoes told him that she did not leave her house for a hike in the woods, perhaps for a stroll in the city. He was stroked by indecision. He could not just walk away, what if she is lost, injured, thirsty or hungry. But on the other hand, her presence had disturbed the flow of his day; her presence was unwelcome in his life, unaccounted for. He just stood there waiting for a sign or miracle to happen to save his day.
And, sometimes, when you ask for a miracle it will be given, and as many would say, be careful what you wish for. But George skipped the second part of that thought, when he saw a man walking from the woods in her direction. He was ready to walk away with relief but then not knowing why, he paused, waited for a moment, still holding the binoculars to his eyes.

letters (flow)

feather in the air,
snowflake on the skin,
touch of the wind
gentle, warm and weightless.

breathe of the Indian summer,
moment of indecision.

the fragrance of winter cold
and warm passion of the summer
mixed into nostalgic mixture.

the pastel tones of sweet sadness,
painted over the sunset

life walks silently
with catwalk of constant changes.

letters (your absence)

your absence
your presence is a silent void,
the rope over the burning coal.
I walk. I run mindlessly
to the edge of the world.
I die into my memory.
your voice, trick for the lost,
floats on the surface:
enchanting and soft
like a heavy silk...
the attraction of the raindrop,
trapped in a cobweb...
the night sifts through my dreams,
whispers spell of your breath
over my bare skin.
the knife of the permanent loss
curve the stars off my flesh
and pin them randomly
at the fringes of the dark sky