© 2013 Diana Manole
No Title. Just a Scream
I’d burn Rome again (like Nero desperately seeking to quench his thirst for absolute beauty) and the University of Bucharest Library (as the Romanian communists did in 1989 trying to vanquish the past, book by book, along with the Securitate archives hidden in the basement), if that would finally erase your poems from my memory – words baying the pain of another race and your love for other women pouring over me – cement about to harden and turn me to stone from the inside out.
Adrenaline. Rush
After you kiss me I can’t eat, drink, sleep, move, breathe.
I’m frozen in a moment in time which envelops me like a cocoon, drops of blood roiling saliva, drops of sweat spoiling tears. “A poor-caliber Caliban, four-eyed and two-tongued.” (Sometimes images migrate from poem to poem against my will.) I spell out in amazement the difference between lust and love on a roundtrip between here and hell.
“I learned it the hard way,” you mutter your lips still stuck to mine, your thoughts wound tight around my thoughts like grapevines spiraling around the canes, your eyes burning with a primitive joy that withers me like X-rays and condemns me to bread-crusts-and-bilge-water from dawn to dusk!
Colonizing. Stories
Friends from all over the world question my right to tell stories of another race but I stubbornly keep writing about you, writing in silence in tacky two-star hotels rooms in the two hemispheres. You carve words directly in your skin like a monk performing acts of penance for the sins of others. The blood, in suspicious stains that you got used to not seeing, dripping like a Chinese water torture drop by drop into the pile of the carpet, changing you from victim to self-executioner. The pain spreads through the air with the lusty smell of African flowers still waiting to be catalogued by the Royal Horticultural Society. Your syllables slip into my syllables, inseminating them, an intercourse that lacks the least tenderness like an in-vitro fertilization where the end justifies the means – one wriggling sperm chosen randomly from the plastic cup penetrates the egg against its own will. You write hunchbacked over the table full of wonder like a first-grader still struggling to understand the meaning of each letter. When the angel comes, his color doesn’t matter.