excerpts
FOREWORD TO A LOVE NOVEL
You have been written to me
Not to my depression, my sadness
But to the true I, powerful – and ruthless.
I look at your fresh girlish body
And a tempest of infernal thoughts rages through me
My blood and my bones dictate everything I have to do
I will not refrain from any dastardly deed
Your frail being was written to this strong I
And you are the prey I have long waited to lay my hands on.
I play along at night – and I sing
Like an accomplice to crime I look at my sex, wildly erect;
It will push past your suave thighs and will leave indelible traces.
I already am happy
So many nights of torments, fever and delirium
So many boils that have swollen in my soul
Will then pop – and flow into you with my first ejaculation.
THE POEM OF OIL-ANOINTED EPHEBES
The pupil is a bow
Woman knows the arrow in her glance
Naked ephebes their bodies anointed with oil
Turn yellow on the beach where
The pupil is a bow
And woman knowing her glance to be arrow
Sounds her flint bones foremost the bone
The obscure bone that, with grinning teeth,
The horde of oil-anointed ephebes crave.
Ghostly, the big man of sexual disasters
Passes by with the round of keys in his hand.
The ephebes do not know him but they bow to him
And he blesses them with a smile, a sacrament
With the grand and extremely tragic sacrament;
From now on they can lick the virginal gates
And voyage inside the arcades
Or deplore the disappointment of eternal disappointments.
On the sun-baked beach
The naked women of the apocalypse
Are vainly struggling to dry up
The moist wound inherited from the scriptures;
And as the men were long lost in wars
The women naked and still ravenous
The mad women of the apocalypse
Have lured the horde of oil-anointed ephebes;
And still hoping to heal the wound in their thighs
Their mouths with beautiful angel teeth
Sucked at the fresh and round fruit
Grown on the bodies of the oil-anointed
Ephebes of today and of mythology.
THE POEM OF PREDESTINED EPHEBES
to Saşa Pană
Predestined for monstrous sexual attempts
The ephebes with slender bones, with flute bones
The ephebes who will preserve solely the memory of the weapon’s bang
Because it is only in the memory that this exasperating search can still endure
This sick desire to return to the fabric of maternal darkness.
In bedrooms, young mothers are like plants
Like crude unveiling miracles
A thigh unconsciously sliding out of trapezes of blue silk
The thigh naked to the hip of young mothers
And the ephebes with flute bones, with aluminum bones
Predestined for monstrous sexual attempts
Furiously pass their fingers through their blood and through their memory
And they climb breathlessly to the sweet and poisonous plant of the young mothers.
There should be an anthem for warmth, another for gliding.
Only in the suave heat of maternal sleeping rooms that
These monstrous flowers of sexuality can get born
These superb attempts at love and death
When the hand slides to the hip on the naked thigh of young mothers
And through the windows resounds the bang of the father’s weapon turned at the tragic moment of ejaculation.
BANKRUPTCY OF BIOLOGICAL TRADE
The withered woman with maybugs grafted on her ovaries
Heard roosters crow at dawn: cock-a-doodle-doo
And she woke up all sweaty and cried out affrighted
She had dreamt of a red bull with its sex in its horns
A wave of putrid blood then raged inside
And her body suddenly filled with miasma
Awakening the pale teenager she had bought the night before
And he, disgusted, ran out of town across the field
To wash his defiled face in the grass dew
His defied hands to wash also
The hands that he had dipped into the woman
Like in the bogs at the outskirts of the city
The red bull with its sex in its horns
Dreamt about by the withered woman with maybugs grafted on her ovaries.
THAT YEAR THE OLD SETTLEMENTS QUIVERED
A whirl of star-dusted bones – and then
The girls in the yellow sunset saluted the boys going to their death
And on the city walls they repined like in the bible and in legends
If only one of them had had a seed planted in her womb
They would have all reared the offspring, made him grow into a man
For the long winter nights to follow
When their heart even if unwilling to give itself
Still needed someone to ask for it
To woo it
And feel tormented for not having it.
The girls rummaged the marshes around the bloated houses
Looking for human seed from the time when unheeded
It had flown down with the swill, with excrement and offal
By strange processes of onanism
(Human seed, once like a pearl necklace, like a jewel,
Was now green and putrid)
The girls ravenously put their mouths to the bog,
Which they fully drained, drop by drop
Afterwards lying with their bellies up in the sun
They waited
As they wait only in the bible and in legends,
But when it was time to give birth to infants for long winter nights
And for an exhausting craving of theirs,
Between their thighs there poured forth but a legion of green frogs.
On the banks toads waited for them croaking festively
So, frog lovemaking started right there under the eyes of the girls
Who hectically kissed like mad all cylinder-shaped objects
And burst into tears clutching between their thighs gigantic trees
That in that historic moment knew eventually how to do their duty.
Livid, the death-goers gazed at the sinister and final farce
And they answered the salute of the girls in the yellow sunset
By lifting in the air
The same arms
That once
Plaintively implored the girls
In the quiet nights of the city;
Now these arms were filled with the dynamite tit of the grenade
And the boys ejaculated for fear experiencing a terrible pleasure
That mingled love with death.
The girls dropped to their knees
And deliriously offered their wild bodies to madness
The boys going to their death might still have stopped for a second
But it was too late
The sky above had begun to tumble down
And the dynamite tit of the grenade made them ejaculate for the last time
Black sperm out of which the first flames of the apocalypse rose in the air.
MAD ANICA
Anica, daughter of Crooked Peter, a beautiful woman
Yet always craving for more of the worldly stuff
Would wait for her husband to leave home
And then go sit at the gate and lure in passers-by;
At first, these were many and very glad
But she quickly drained them of sap
And started looking for others ever more ravenous
And no matter how many she just couldn’t get enough.
Then Anica, daughter of Crooked Peter, discovered a garden of cucumbers
She dug, watered and tended them to grow fine
At night she would walk among them singing amorously, caressing and kissing them
And the cucumbers grew big and strong like horses
Anica, daughter of Crooked Peter, after making love to each,
Slyly sold them to the one-time impotent passers-by.
When they learnt the truth
The whole village threw up all night long
The following day they spied on her, and caught her in the dirty act;
Anica, daughter of Crooked Peter did not die under a hail of stones
She is still living not far in the Bushtenari commune
Locked somewhere behind cold stone walls
She is huge, drinks plum brandy, smells bad
And speaks only of our Lord Jesus Christ.
PRESENTATION OF THE LEGENDARY HERO
to S. Perahim
Boukshe’n Bakshe of Brebu
a.k.a Caciambaua
Liked to talk about women all the time;
He-he-he, I know some
You can jump on like you jump on a tree
And lost in thought he would repeat after a while:
Like you jump on a tree.
The sun rose early and so beautiful in the countryside
Boukshe’n Bakshe the cowman merrily took his herd grazing
Out of the village only country and god
Far, very far reapers sang
And church bells rang.
Boukshe’n Bakshe listened, his staff propped in the ground
And a mystic shiver went from his head to his toes
The dewy grass cracked freshly under his feet
The cows grazed greedily bellowing gently with joy
There were widowed and virgin cows
Some most beautiful
Darned Boukshe’n Bakshe started making love to them
They had such a nice sex yellow like a slice of pumpkin
And they seemed very pleased with their human lover.
But one day the peasants – what did they know? – caught him in the act and beat him up
And that put him down for a long time
After which he’d start now and then:
He-he-he, I know some
You can jump on like you jump on a tree
And lost in thought he would repeat after a while:
Like you jump on a tree.
GHEORGHITZA THE SHOEMAKER
For some time
Gheorghitza the shoemaker, a boy round twenty not yet drafted
With a silver earring in his left ear
Had been keeping his eyes glued to the door of the workshop
(The beautiful, pale daughter of the boyar used to pass that way)
And he, Gheorghitza would give a heart-breaking sigh.
Gheorghitza my boy (his mother pitied him)
I know what’s ailing you
But don’t lose your shirt and give it no more thought
Or you’ll waste yourself for good.
Yet Gheorghitza went on thinking
And pining.
His lips burnt with fever when one evening
A man from the court brought him a parcel with the lady’s shoe
And so Gheorghitza felt on the ninth cloud
The shoe was fresh and suave like a girl’s thigh
The shoe had silver clasps like a girl’s sex
The sex of a boyar’s daughter lined with silk
Gheorghitza turned pale
And pressed it against his flesh, deep, to the bone.
But a handful of prying apprentices gave his secret away
Silently the village lads gathered under the back window
To see him toss in bed with the shoe
Kissing it with fiery lips and calling the boyar daughter’s name
The village lads tapped in the pane and burst into laugher
Right when Gheorghitza turned paler than ever and from his body semen spewed furiously.
Gheorghitza strangled himself with his trousers belt
His mother mourned him –
But as she had no money for a permit from the metropolitan church
She arranged a burial right under the boughs of a tree
And had the boy’s cross thus inscribed:
Gheorghitza Antonescu
Born July 31, 1908
Died August 9, 1929
Under tragic circumstances.
OUTRAGING POEM
One of my nights I made love to a maid
It was all so unexpected – and almost against my will
It happened somewhere in a dirty town of the provinces
While I was staying with my childhood friend.
One evening after roaming alone in the streets I returned home and
The maid was making the bed in my room
She was a young and swarthy domestic
And she told me that all the folks were out for a walk.
She smiled
And passed by me one time too many.
I was distraught that evening and had no appetite for love
But the maid was young
I don’t think more than sixteen
And as she sat close on the bed, as if waiting,
I drew close smiling and asked what was her name.
She told me something common, perhaps Maria
I said it was nice and she feigned to be embarrassed
I think it was nearly midnight
The indistinct rumor of the city carried through the open windows
Somewhere in the distance there were theaters, cinema halls, splendid women and cars
And here I was, just I and the maid
She did not say anything, she just closed her eyes.
She was short, almost dumpy
And she smelt very bad of sweat.
Oh, maid with whom I made love in a dirty town of the provinces
At a time when I felt distraught and your employers were not home
Maid whom I have never seen again since
Maid with red garter marks on your thighs
Maid with belly smelling of onion and parsley
Maid with sex like an eggplant dish
I write this poem about you
To make bourgeois girls go rabid with envy
And to scandalize their honorable parents
Because although I have slept with them numberless times
I will not sing about them
And I urinate in their powder boxes
On their underwear
In their piano
And on all the other trappings of their beauty.
….like a provoking smile thrown at the continents, invectives will always stem from the icy fingers of future prophets.
The “brutally priapic verses” of the Invective Poem (Unu, 1933), breeding a phallocratic world impregnated with Eros, where the object of sexual desire is wide-ranging (a red bull with penis-horns, a pack of dogs, a woman’s shoe, cows, one’s mother or daughters, maidservants in a display of – in Krafft-Ebing’s terms – “apron fetishism”, cucumbers sold to travelers by the roadside, or anything cylindrical in shape), were dismissed by “serious” critics as juvenile defiance, which cost the author a brief spell in jail to boot. An avant-garde poet in his youth, Geo Bogza (1908-1993) later converted to journalism and reportage.
