[:style=font-size:1em; :](SELECTED POEMS)[:/style:] Translated by Anatol Zukerman * * * In the dungeon of wishes and dreams of this empty city I raise quiet words to a pedestal of correct thinking, this is so strange… Time oozes out, murderous time, even stones crumble under its trickle, but I am a man, no harder than grass, I have the right to stand on this Earth. No taller than others, but just a bit closer to the sky. * * * I will fill the void of my rooms with you, turn on my midnight lights, let the moon ring out in the sky! Time will spare us - from now on we won’t be day people. Let the tambourine of silence strike, we are saved. The north wind. A bad omen. It’s cozy and quiet here, but there, in the world of colors and sounds, on the streaming streets our pale shadows look for each other in vain… MILLENIUM The age of the active sun. Rays like arrows pierce the soft asphalt through holes in the sky. The steam of cotton-like clouds rests on Day City roofs. I wander around its endless blocks strewn with the rubbish of dates and expectations, similar faces of strangers. I and them are insects upon the squares, small like a bit of a tea leaf inside a tea glass, seek understanding in vain. Citizens of the blown wide bottomless shame noisily pray, hiding hatred inside their pockets. I am not afraid to look at the void of their hurried lives, in the darkness of their discoteques and in the silence of hospital cells. In the noisy City of Day I am only a passerby. An ignorant tourist I only can stare at the colorful mess of temptations, the volcanic swirl of bazaar passions, the primitive horrors of festive tents. I can only walk as a homeless stranger, an alien guest of Her Majesty Night, in this raving republic of endless mess, in this City of Day blinded by its own excessive light. THE UPPER SEA The upper sea splashes above the earthly and heavenly firmament eternal like waiting. The flowing waves of this nebulous sea enter their souls like secret dreams, so, the constant music of days and nights reminds the living that in the midst of their vanity, in the quest for feeling and mesuring the unknown by looking or touching - a puzzle or business as usual, the way of living and breathing - cannot be solved without considering the waves of the strange upper sea hidden from the human mind like the secret allusions of spirits. But thoughts of the upper sea fall with the dampness of rain, settle like snowy salt and the whisper of winds in the invisible shells of the upper sea… DOUBLE MORNING 1. Every day is given two names, the third is a silent word, the zero of sounds, a fragile thread, a cobweb of invisible sense that shivers from half premonition. Is that the essence of endless attempts to decipher elusive shadows, a misty reflection of movement, a sign of a vector leading towards comprehending incompatability of the bipolar existences, their purpose of making one within the third ineffable name? 2. A double morning, unclear like a dream, still quivering in the retina of my eye. The cool gray steam from gardenias creeps into the room from the balcony. Silence is cut by the knife of a second hand, and in that silence the frost of the bed is as white as the deck of a scaffold, and the damp warmth of two bodies is melting so fast in the morning cool…