We laugh at them for their glitter-search flurry. They are known for that.

They laugh at us behind wooden fences. We are known for that.

They ask: Why are you counting us?

Four dreams are wisdom, five are greed, one is virtue. 

Don’t you know those who want yet another language, 

so and so many children, 

countries, loves, summer and regular houses, 

second chances 

sang to their irises, and yes, corneas, retinas? 

Now, in so many years… One east. One west.



Do not catch them. 

Do not count them.

Stand beneath the widening sky while five shadows cross your face at once.

It can be quickly divined I am no friend of the counting glass.

So I guess I don’t care in a purely French way,
And if I am not caring, what should tell me — my brain,
Then it’s not my brain that wants to talk but — theirs.

Those who want me to bleed so that the grass under me
Will have something to drink. No way!
Yes, it is my very own idea of slipping off the pier
But not a bridge, in a spectacular jump of cooling down
The racing heart excited, eager, thrilled by its own liking
Not a bomb. Or a bridge. Or an unfortunate flight.
I am not a fan of dying this summer, Man.
I might be fanatical about living my own page right now.

You hear crimson in blue; 

you understand warmth through coldness

and all of it comes in half-grey tones, 

in cold blue whispers that no one understands but you.



So I speak,

and you listen in just that way.


And how does she listen?
She… listens with her tympanal apparatus most beautifully. 

She listens precisely on the most difficult frequencies.

She knows how to listen…

And she wants to listen, although I don’t know why… 

Well, why would she?


“Because that’s just how it is,” she’ll probably answer, 
and then once again she’ll sail her sailing canoe up the Amazon 
to hunt Siberian koala bears with a suction-cup pistol made by Philips, 
bought from an Argentine greengrocer’s shop
standing in the middle of the Gobi Desert, 
while out shopping with him...

And I will return to my tiny little house with its 523 rooms, 
no windows,
and a single storey with a basement. 
As usual, I’ll sit down in the dining room 
to catch a hammerhead shark in a three-litre bathtub 
standing on a lawnmower and made of blue Panasonic toilet paper, 
bought from an Argentine greengrocer’s shop 
standing in the middle of the Gobi Desert 
during the nicest shopping trip of my life.

And afterwards we’ll tell each other all about it. 
You’ve driven me crazy epistolographically.
You have.

The machine did it coldly,

as if no human hand had hidden behind the order

just merely placed,

and these streets, these geraniums on a hand-tended windowsill

are already the past 

in the machine’s cold eyes.

Can there be a pause in a war

long enough to vaccinate children,

to supposedly preserve life,

but not long enough

to end it—

and stop ending lives?

The reader is disappointed.

Bored, to hear the truth:

Whose hands order a daughter’s wedding cake

with Crane’s-bill decorating it

could also order a young man into the mouth of winter’s bloody frost?

Tell him

of the dripping of strategic red lines,

of the grave’s remarkable uncovered simplicity.

Write,

as your job in a damn journalist tone

the presenter lines,

who’ll, in a professionally cold voice, deliver

to the quivering like wind-blown petals

sea-fish

covered with the net

banded ones.

When I was what I thought was little

— although now you sit SATs at this age,

six or seven — I ran a field with my brother.

(Yes, now show me those left free to run a field.)

It was a morning, and I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Today, he said, he might not talk again,

as he’d already exhausted the allocation of words for a day.

i took him at his word

or at least played along like those streams

endless images, sensations unceasing, set loose to roam

to thrive, to live.

(Yes, now show me those left free to walk by a stream.)

But what comes out of that little (and I thought, equally matured)

mouth must fit within the count allowed.

Now, after many years of pulling a thread to where it was sewn,

I still do not know.

If even the edges of what we can write are the edges of what we can think,

if we might run out of words the way the lungs run out of breath, 
the pen out of ink…

Turns out some-one counted. The number is thinning. Sixteen thousand.

Perhaps he was right, this brother of mine,

Not that one boy could spend himself dry by lunchtime,

But that all of us are saying less, until a field that seemed immense

Becomes a well-measured garden of God-knows-by-whom-seeded poppies,

red going on red, like a piece of writing we would create unstructured, unaided.

That we all are writing more of just short, encrypted or not, texts

and one feels like a thief now with open hands running through long pieces

taking them out, lifting a thin red petal from a page and holding it up to the light.

That we all are the children who write clean, field-mown level, 
that’s what it is to see

And that’s what we believe at face value, or at least play along with God-knows-by-whom-seeded weed,

What is a child that would rather run than speak, but an adult who writes by word count

who never again ran through a field

but rather through a ground portion

that day by day

runs thin.

They say gusto can evaporate… if kissed every day
Chain, pointer-equipped case
Who creates such covers of the sacred in our days? 

Own investitures. Sweet modulations people you!
They say no one shakes free from the sun but by dying
Yet haven’t you seen souly shadows in retrouvailles, flânerie-free
If they call it panache, must they call?
Not many wear hats, waggers done with flair.

A kettle will know when to scream, whistle untaken off
Why daylight comes with slow fire, with love, the whiff of far-off fog
And short streets, cul-de-sacs, trembling perhaps 
That we might stop for an iron smoke.