Den Piece

I wonder where’s gone
The little piece of sky
Hung above my window

Has anyone seen
The little piece of sky
Neatly tied over the roofs?

Maybe someone absentminded
Has picked it up by mistake
Collecting dry laundry from the rope

Den Piece is used as a base for a track with the same name – beats by Filtercutter, lyrics and vocals by Zzuuu Filtercutter feat. Zzuuu – Den Piece

The track is released as a part of Come On Let’s Go Compilation on Svetlana Industries, you can download the whole compilation here.

Broken Magic Wand

Blue stiff morning
Rubbing my dried-out dreams
Desires with sprained necks
Poems with a speech defect

The princes are turning into frogs
A kiss is no longer enough
Tell me who has broken the spell?

But what if we go back
Just for a step?
Maybe the colours still wait
Behind a corner

My feet are painful too
Of endless searching
For the right path
But hey, the magic
must be somewhere near
Shouldn’t have flown too far by now

Somewhere I know
There must be a way
To rejoin the pieces
Of the broken magic wand

The Missing

Now when you’re here
I miss missing you

Sweet Disharmony

Photo by Raphael Almeida

Today I simply enjoy
Disharmony of colours

Dizzy high red high heels
Fluorescent cyan-blue tights
Daring tight bright yellow top

Tickly moment of losing control
Moment when strict edges of sense
Become totally loose

Crossing the street with you
Green for automobiles
Your slightly parted lips
Half smile and half fear

One more missed opportunity
One more nonfulfillment
Gives me the pleasure
Of delaying an orgasm

In Splinters of the Mirror

“I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.” (Marguerite Duras “The Lover”)

This quote made me thinking… Imagine if getting old wouldn’t mean getting wrinkles and according to Margaret Duras and a couple of people who really know how to wear their aged face with confidence, ‘more personality’. What if it would happen just the opposite?

Maybe even scarier than getting wrinkles would be to age by starting to lose your face lines, until your face becomes a completely plain, plastic looking surface, completely unrecognisable and impossible to remember.

This was the idea that made me write the poem bellow:

In Splinters of the Mirror

A drop of delight
Smoothly slides
Down the throat

One more well learnt
Innocent look
From the mirror
Slowly removing make up
Placing my face
Neatly on a shelf

I wonder till when I’ll keep
Carelessly breaking mirrors
Heedlessly dropping smiles
As coins at railway stations

The sun is slowly rising
Worn out shadows sleep
In folds of my eyelids

Hey, hurry up
Magic can’t last forever

Soon there will be only
Round plastic mass
That remains of my face
An expressionless ellipsoid

About Bicycles and Chains

I have a refined sense
of choosing the wrong moment
perfectly wrong words
in the right tone of voice

Tonight I park my bike
on the other side of the street
Once our bike chains were tied
together, making one long

Remember watching you puking
without a word, finding
a handkerchief in my bag
No, I didn’t go away

And when the music stops
and all the lights melt away
we would bike home together
shoulder to shoulder in silence

Walking over rooftops
with a bottle of wine
watching an unknown girl
slowly unbuttoning her dress
in the window with
red velvet curtains
à la David Lynch…
when I told you:
“sorry, you’re sitting on my skirt”

We’ve been perfect companions
for our late-night beers
right in such an amount
that makes everything wrong

Tonight you walk the rooftops
the opposite way, alone
slowly sneaking out
jumping over terraces
attracted by glowing of a window
on the other side
warmth of a simple couch
with no unnecessary details
light as a feather
you fly over rooftops

I try not to notice that
your bike is still there
parked under my window
with its endearing rusty chain

Everything’s gonna be allright… or not?

A Dutch Ambulance Car

The siren of emergency cars in Amsterdam sounds like a happy melody of an ice cream truck – an aggressively cheerful major scale melody consisting of 4 tones, more or less distorted (probably depending on the seriousness of condition of the patient). I find it a bit creepy. It makes me think of clowns, lollipops and colourful balloons, of promises that everything will be fine even when you know it won’t, of those moments when reality is just too unimaginably harsh that you simply choose not to accept it. Don’t worry, you are dreaming, this is not happening. It’s just impossible to imagine and therefore not true, it can’t be true…

When I was 10 or so, we had a car accident. My mom was taking my brother and me home from the beach in her tiny red Fiat Cinquecento when a truck simply slid onto our side of the road and smashed into the car. The road was slightly wet after first drops of rain, it was impossible to break. I don’t remember the very moment of the crash. I just know that although sitting in the back, I somehow fell out of the car through the front door. When I opened my eyes the colours were messed up and contours blurred, the picture in front of my eyes was uncontrollably shaking like on a wrongly set TV channel. Searching for my mom I found her all covered in blood on the front seat.

Red. Red. Red. Colours mixing. Red again. No other colours exist. Only red. I started to scream. “No, this is just not real” I thought. “I probably fell asleep in the car. I’m going to wake up now. This is just one of those nightmares that you forget shortly after waking up, that just leaves you a sightly unpleasant feeling that unnoticably melts away through the day. This is not real. I should wake up now…”

Well, it probably helps to hear a comforting happy-ice-cream-truck melody at a moment like that. Yes, you’re right, it’s all a joke, let’s laugh! Hahaha! Of course it can’t be true! Hahahaha!

There is some strange logic in this – stretching the edges of reality to cover the holes in common sense, keeping you in the safety of what you can imagine, covering your eyes for a moment to protect them from a sudden flash light. However, I don’t think that anywhere in the world they use a cheerful melody for emergency cars sirens. Maybe it’s a strange Dutch sense of humour?

Recently, I’ve been thinking about sampling this melody with some dark basslines and children vocals on top. So, the soundtrack is still to come.

Yes, btw. my mom is fine.

The Princess is Bored

Princess on Pedestal by Cathy Thorne

Collection of rare smiles in her insectarium

One more interesting physiognomy

Casually pulling their tiny legs

Crackling makes her giggle

For a little while

The princess is bored

Off with a few heads

The princess is bored

Feed the crocodiles

The princess is bored

Throw someone to the lions

Just to make her giggle

For a little while

For the Time of Burning of a Cigarette

Smoking on my balcony… Well, sometimes I pretend to be a smoker. It’s nice to have an excuse to go out and simply switch my brain off for the time of burning of a cigarette, sometimes in cold nights, holding a glowing elegant shape in my fingers, breathing-in the warmth, enjoying exhaling of the warm clouds of smoke into the chilly air. The only thing is… I don’t really like the taste of cigarettes, otherwise I’d surely become a smoker.

Listening to the mellow multi-layered silence, sounding so warm at these -2° Celsius – cosy murmuring of cars from the highway melting smoothly into the soft rumbling of a train passing down some faraway rail road tracks.

It’s been almost six months since I’ve moved to Slotervaart, a notorious part of Amsterdam, the endless source of inspiration for local black chronicle journalists. Since I like to go out and come back on my own, sometimes in the middle of the night, as a matter of safety I’ve got myself a few hooded jackets in which I look like an astronaut. So I just pull the hood down onto my face (at least I can’t see them) and ride my bicycle incredibly fast through Slotervaart, choosing paths where it is the least likely that I’m going to meet any people at all.

A few weeks ago I came up to an article about some strange devices set up in my neighbourhood, which produce high frequency sound during the night in order to disperse young criminals. This is actually the first time that the so-called “Mosquitoes” are set up in an inhabited part of Amsterdam. Until now, there were only a few of those devices at the Central Station and are still considered an experimental measure in fighting crime. Hehe, it’s nice to know that my beloved current neighbourhood is actually pioneering in something. The most interesting thing about the “Mosquitoes” is that their frequencies could be heard only by those up to the age of 25, while the hearing span gradually shrinks for older people and they can’t register the high-frequency buzzing at all. This night I’ve realized, facing it for the first time with no headphones on, that I already unnoticeably slipped into that other category – so, (un)fortunately no “Mosquito” buzzing in my silence tonight.

Out of a sudden, a hoarse broken-oboe-like quacking splashed into the cosy-murmuring silence – an annoying, repetitive sound, hopelessly persistent, like some organic car alarm. Ha, I haven’t heard it for a while. It’s the so called doggy-duck – a creature I’ve never actually seen, but have given it such a name for its barking-like voice. Yes, another danger of Slotervaart, besides the promising young criminals, is a gang of moody ducks and geese, who have squatted a little pond under my window and keep on scaring people who try to cut their way short by taking the path next to the pond. Sometimes all the birds gather and proudly march into the street flapping their wings and making a lot of noise. They’re not even scared of bicycles.

Even years later I remember places by their silence – complex rich textures composed of insignificant little noises. It is impossible to find two places on Earth (except in isolated experimental conditions) where silence sounds exactly the same. The silence of some place can sometimes tell so much. Hush… listen. You see?

Time

Tick-tock
Tick-tock
Drop-drop
It’s leaking

So many days
Got spilled
Onto the floor

Standing in the water
Reaching my ankles
I’m catching time
In a plastic can

Silence About You

Quite unremarkable silence
Behind the closed window
Carelessly beaded trams
Idly slide down the street
Some strayed bicycle passes

Sometimes the silence about you
Gains weight of too many words
Warm restlessness in my stomach
Distinctly pulsates
Shaking the window glasses

Out of a sudden
Someone walks by
Wearing your coat
Similar tone of scarf
No it’s not you…
But does it even matter?

The tempting wind remains
Harmless behind the glass
Yet the windows are still
Slightly shivering

Cheerful Mechanical Melody

Traveling by a Lego train
Railway in concentric circles
Colorful flowers made of candy foil
Glitter in green plasticine trees

In every circle I miss somehow
The right moment for jumping out

Cheerful mechanical melody
Jolly voices of winding sparrows
Red tunnels made of jelly candies
Smiling faces in the train windows

In every circle I miss somehow
The right moment for jumping out

I laugh in more and more regular intervals
The giggling melts to sounds of locomotive
And out of sudden I panicly recognize
My smile is just a line on a doll’s face