Uroborus

Lena Roszevic | 18 | She/Her | Romanian | Pseudo-writer and poet in love with the stars. I write to the light of the fireflies buzzing my mind the scraps of thoughts and feelings I can never hope to reproduce in sentences longer than the patience of most. Sometimes I even make sense.

[alwaysalreadyangry]

i thought i’d written this up on here before, but i can’t find it. so let me tell you my favourite story about my time in oxford.

my college library is a converted church (with graveyard still attached). and it closed at about 1am every night, but they let people keep working in the vestry – where there were… i think six desks? – overnight. i was not very good at doing my work at anything other than the absolute last minute, and would fairly often end up in the vestry the night before an essay was due.

it was grim. honestly i do not miss it.

the highlight of those nights was when i allowed myself a break to go out to buy a burger from the kebab van that was on the other side of the high street. the nearest kebab van was ahmed’s. kebab vans in oxford are serious business (there are few kebab shops, and they’re mostly not near the colleges, where the first and third-year students often live in). i just looked ahmed’s up to check i was spelling his name right and found this amazing painting of the van!!

anyway. so one night in – i guess it was probably april? i think it was in my final year, and not too long to go before exams – i walked out to the kebab van. it was 2am, or maybe 3am. a weeknight – maybe a tuesday – and there was nobody around. too late for other people taking study breaks, and maybe the people who were out clubbing weren’t coming back yet. i felt like i and ahmed and the other guy who worked in his van were the only people alive.

and then an entire band of men turned up in full 16th century regalia. 

i think maybe one or two of them had musical instruments with them, but not all of them. they stood there. they didn’t seem to think that they were doing anything unusual. i guess for them, it wasn’t. nobody else came by. nobody said anything except to order some food.

i thought: am i hallucinating??? what is happening???

i always ordered a cheeseburger at ahmed’s, and as it wasn’t a busy night they didn’t already have any cooking, so i stood by the van for a good five minutes while it cooked, just watching these men, who seemed like time-travellers, solemnly order their kebabs. none of them had phones out or anything. nothing broke the illusion except the situation we were in. it honestly felt like time was collapsing. like we had all been pulled out of the timestream and were just chilling here together. it wasn’t april whatever, 3am, 2011. it was no time, no place. The Kebab Van At The End of Time.

they just seemed like people from the past who wanted to get something to eat. an eternal constant. and the guys in the van were as nonchalant about it as the men themselves were. yeah, we get sixteenth century people through here all the time.

and you know what, they probably do. it’s oxford.

[la-catharsis]

Felix Vallotton - Sunset (1913)

[asnake-coileduponherself]

You have cold lips, he said

You gaze at the stars

With tenderness and awe -

Your soul split in running lights of cars

Sees no flaw.

  And you live on and on in poetic night,

With nebulas in your hair,

Getting higher than the moon`s height

On your hedonistic prayer.

  And you fall in love with people on the street

Like they`d be stars -

In a single lonely heartbeat,

Smoking your cigars.

  Like we`d be cold and distant,

You love us absenting;

You, with a gaze so silent,

Forget we won`t be gone at morning.

[asnake-coileduponherself]

What on earth are you wearing?

iv.

she peeks from between the erroding tree bark with her mouth agape, eyes glimmering like titanic illusions of childhood drenched in silver, immovable, like the age of the tree. the other one, in the low wheat meadow steals trembling, quickest of glances from amongst the gates of marble grass, sweating palms spinning the flowers clumsily.

it`s rare, oh, so rare for something like this to happen, for two of them to ever met, so sweetly achingly close. it`s no wonder the tree wails, forgotten for this moment and the handiwork of flowers crumbles apart. it`s no wonder the tree doubles over in its sickly, oldful laughter and that they sprout furious blushes upon their cheekbones and sharp earlobes. given away, she`s the first to speak.

`what on earth are you wearing?`

dryads are rarely good with words. it`s mostly her luck that this particular lampad finds it funny. she giggles a smile like dying embers and blushes shades of deep red as she waves her over.

`it`s called darkness`

`i`ve seen darkness.` she stumbles upon her words clumsily.

`not like the underworld`s darkness` she smiles `it`s quite prettier`

`is everything prettier down there?`

the lampad smiles to herself. sometimes dryads are good with words too.

[asnake-coileduponherself]

Pot, keetle, black

iii.

it`s easy to see, really, does not come as a surprise, really, that the scales with all these years in which we haven`t bothered to fight anymore, out-weighted by all the same years of learning and teaching and exploring and surving alone. alone, strange parting in our shared life. strange these … fights. strange how they turned around, into you not knowing how to breath your words and me not knowing how to stop them.

strange that learning how to stop gathering the drops of these toxic gas into the slopes of my eyelids and the cracks in my skin has turned to creating their own storms of wildfire that spew and froth like hurricanes in me. i … recoil from myself.

when did i starts forgetting to control my voice? when did i learn all this screaming and talking like this? when did i learn to be like this part of you? i recoil.

when did you learn to enclose in silence eating like worms and rats at your insides? i recoil!

when did we learn these words?!

from who, dear god, from who? me from you and you from her?

is that the fear that rots me breaking through my thinning skin? is that the horror of becoming everything i sweared i will not ever resemble? is that me, pot, calling the keettle black? is that you growing into the same old posture that she still wears? me and you? … and you and her? … and every single them to ever come from one another?

[asnake-coileduponherself]

Flower Crowns

ii. 

the wind has a song by which it shivers the trees and the ajar garden fence doors that i have never heard before. the stars, in brilliancy of hues, shine at night in crickets`s songs and lonesome barks of dogs resounding through other worlds, enclosed and hidden with the rocks by which small boys graze the curve of time. A stillness that wasn`t always there. A softer air that caresses the lungs. A mosaic of rocks and pebbles that resembles stained glass sprouting silent saints and dim halos. A song, perhaps,of a small boy`s rock ripping through a single stretching sheet of time and spiraling in darkness, missing the moon by just an infinite dust thread, like griefful loneliness, the echo of it clinking against these immense walls of ineffable hollowness reverberating throught a cognate core.

ah, i shudder. smallness closes like a bubble against me, supernal bubble of circles and orbits hurling themselves about each other, in cherubic orderness. i find them on my skin, silent and unrelentless in workings and, as of late, by their great far light, i decreed that flower crowns are the only crowns i ever want to wear.

[asnake-coileduponherself]

Garden of God

i.

and i still cannot produce greater aspirations than sleeping here, where the soil sinks in by my weight, softer than poppy petals, swallowed whole by the swaying waves of grass, where the wind drowns me in its maelstroms, smoother than submerging wholly into honey. Where the rains storm rivers washing over me in holy cleansing rapids by the roots of the ancestral, frozen, sage nut tree by the shape of whose branches fossilised, time curves and diverges in rays of light like aurora borealis playing the heavy green crowns into dances of whispers that have thought me the dreamful languages, dropping nutshells of useless wisdoms around my bed. Where time whiters slowly, so near my hand, soflty, quietly and, sprouting wet moss from my teeth and neck and lungs, i bloom.

[asnake-coileduponherself]

Bells from the seams,

Why do they sing?

Memories of softer daylight

We can perhaps outgrow?

Mountains, they whisper -

Silken whistles and faintest human breaths

Of hearts outlived already.

  ~Transient sensations

[asnake-coileduponherself]

Cloak your heart in music

Softly lulling sleep to bed

And let nights fall

And let days dawn, once more.

Let silence wash you over

Again and again and lay you out, in soft

Undressing

From your flowing clothes

And sweet perfume.

Undress, undress

From all dreams of gold

And greatness, coat of glory

And saintly piety of otherworlds.

From all dreams, at all.

Linger with me in darkness

Where`ll be only us

And darkness laid in us

And I`ll love you.

  ~How to love the tired ones

[asnake-coileduponherself]

i.

Imaginea scrumului căzând din țigară

în tăciuni liliputani

în șoaptele microuniversului

în măreția neimportanței.

Imaginea fumului în semiîntunericul balconului

simplitatea unei secunde pierdute

fără fast, în tăcere familiară

și frigul care ne însoțea

de o viață.

Vocea mamei,

în octava secolelor de suferință

în nota vieții de femeie

în melodia aceleiași vieți de alergare,

pohibind prin fumul timpului

precum un oracol antic.

Am renunțat amândouă la iluzia că ne vom tălmăci vreodată

una pe cealaltă.

 ii.

Orice ar compune sufletul în metafizic

se dezbină-n elemente stranii și nefamiliare

ce vibrează din astrale planuri liminale.

 Nu vom putea sorbi niciodată roua acelor locuri,

sacru adunată în valea-dâncă a pomeților și hăul rece din plămânii tăi,

nocturn atârnate mie, peste verterbre, între ponositele clavicule de scobitoare

și nu vom putea în veci visa la locurile-n care ne găsim, ascunse.

Nu mai caut să înteleg, știu acum că dintr-atâtea înțelesuri

niciunul n-are sens

și tot ce s-antâmplat s-a întâmplat așa,

din pură întâmplare.

 iii.

Mai sunt încă de părere că ne învârtim pe traiectorii paralele,

că am înflorit în temperamente opuse

iar climatele noastre cresc plante ce nu-și pot supraviețui una alteia

dar tu ești tu, iar la picioarele tale

râd altfel.

 Să ne iubim doar, măcar să încercăm.

-Poema ta, pentru prima dată

[gatarojastuff]

Gabriele Salci (1681-1720)

[macrolit]

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (featured in our 15-book giveaway)

[asnake-coileduponherself]

Is there any love at all,

Or is there just need;

Human, selfish need

Of acceptance and belonging

And cherishing and understanding?

Of, perhaps,

Some deep bounding of souls,

A comradery of matching sufferings

In a world where the absence of friends

Is the only unsustainability hearts know?

- candid questions of disquiet questionings