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:
- Proclamation Without Pretension by Tristan Tzara
- The First Part: Sonnet 2 – I know that all beneath the moon decays by William Drummond
- Jerusalem Delivered – Book 04 – part 03 by Torquato Tasso
- Sleep Did Come Wi’ The Dew by William Barnes
- “Let the nymph still avoid and be deaf to the swain” by Tobias Smollett
- Cascando by Samuel Beckett
- Михаил Лермонтов – Я видел тень блаженства
- The Bell Buoy by Rudyard Kipling
- Алексей Толстой – Ты не спрашивай, не распытывай
- Владимир Корнилов – Прямота
- Владимир Корнилов – Достается, наверно, непросто
- Where My Sight Goes by Yvor Winters
- Ольга Берггольц – Подбирают фомки и отмычки
- Eavesdropping myself by Vladimir Marku
- An Insolent Jew
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
- Year O’ year by Nikunj Sharma
- The Woman From The Archive by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Where we fall by Osman cisse Hanif
- When the Walls Were White by Noele Martin
- When I live with fancy’ by Nithin Purple
- When Trust Fails… by Olaniyi Beloved Abimbola
- The Weavers by Nijole Miliauskaite
- The Weaver by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Vagina Envy by Nin Andrews
- Untitled #13 by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Untitled #12 by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Untitled #11 by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Untitled #10 by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Untitled #1 by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Two sparrows and my heart by Nizar Sartawi
- Turtledove of the Green Land – Dedicated to Tunisian poet, Huda Hajji by Nizar Sartawi
- To Spirituality by Nithin Purple
- To Melancholy- Written On An intensely agitated Day by Nithin Purple
- To Imagination by Nithin Purple
- To Her Beauty by Nithin Purple
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