REVIEW AMERICANA

 

Fall 2011

Volume 6, Issue 2

https://americanpopularculture.com/review_americana/fall_2011/kanev.htm




PEYCHO KANEV

 

Requiem for one night

 

I am drinking this popular soft drink,
while I’m reading a novel from one
famous writer. On nights like these
even the soul takes a rest. What else
could I do? If I go outside in the dark
I will face again the bloody moon,
the immortality of cars and the transience
of people. What is the purpose of the
hospitals and the junkyards then? I
don’t care anymore, even for Sputnik.
New things excite me now. I wonder
what is the soul of the writer-millionaire
and whether it’s green? Van Gogh would
have laughed and would probably offer
him a razor. But I still continue reading–
and I don’t at the same time. The poets
say that there is nothing sadder in the world
than a train standing in the rain. I have
something else to offer. Time that slowly
slips away is equal for everybody, even
for them. Perhaps the fall of the words
will come soon. Everyone should drink
his cup. Here, I fill mine with the carbonated,
popular drink and look up at the clock:
it doesn’t tell me anything that I don’t
already know. I wonder if the silence has a
father or darkness has a mistress? I delve
into these things, but the seconds quickly
tell me that all my life I’ve been asking
the wrong questions. I know that earth cries
when the flowers appear, but isn’t that
how things work? Socrates drank his destiny
and perhaps he never loved his wife. But
now I am just a man covered with dust
and carrying a bluish heart full of stories,
but the question that remains is…

 

 

 

The shape of everything else

 

I will wake up when the sun is high in the sky,
and I will drink nothing but water.

And I will walk under the trees
until they become indignant of my eyes.

I will enter some old and big house with 22 doors
that will lead to nowhere.

And after that, I will go back to the point
where it began.

The old books give me some minor relief
that evaporates slowly in time.

I promise to all the small gods that I will be different,
and I will not carry too much cash in my pockets.

When I start to write all the words of the future,
I will not pray to Buddha or Christ, but to the potted plant.

In some holiday, I will go to the cemetery
to light a candle for all the dead of the future.

The sea will befriend me only as the deep water that it is
and not like the place where I engaged old age.

And this lonely view through the windows of the world
will not make me shiver any more.

Let me mention all of my former loves and tell them
that I don’t remember anything else but the quietness.

Because the poetry of silence, my dearest,
is all that you have received, but never deserved.

 



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