by Ai
We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don’t tell me, I say. I don’t want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that’s where I’m floating,
and that’s what it’s like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

A few random poems:
- Sow by Sylvia Plath
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песенка о слухах
- Velocity Of Money poem – Allen Ginsberg
- Валерий Брюсов – Инкогнито
- the secrets , we hide by tulip
- A Winter Ship by Sylvia Plath
- View From The Top Of Black Comb by William Wordsworth
- The Tour by Sylvia Plath
- White in the Moon the Long Road Lies poem – A. E. Housman
- Magnolia Shoals by Sylvia Plath
- Laila and the Khalifa by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- The Woman in the Ordinary by Marge Piercy
- Riding Together by William Morris
- Come, Rest in this Bosom by Thomas Moore
- Robert Burns: To The Weavers Gin Ye Go:
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Innocence
- In The Stone I Rooted
- In Between The Strophes
- Human Joys
- Human Charms
- He Who Creates Re Creates Himself
- Hai Kou Unpublished
- Hai Kou
- Greek Light
- Greece
- Golden Eangle
- Gesture Theory A Villanelle
- Gem Immortality
- Fruit Leaf Roots Flowers
- First Verse
- First Light
- Excerpt From The Gertrude Stein Collaborative Series
- Eudaemonism In A Senryu Novel
- Drunkenness
- Do Not Get Angry
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works