2. Ode

Ode to the Abandoned Places

When the darkness asphyxiates you with its dusty coat
I suppose one could make mistake of unseeing;
sensing the footsteps on the time impaired floor
The light could be ours within that wall
Your naked body is frozen yet; it still feels warmer than cold,
And less familiar than the apocalypse –

Was it ever a place?
or is it for now and always just an emptiness defined;
Defined by lack, in contrast to familiarity
its tears concealed in the ponds of misery,
staircases that taste of rust and midnight
While the wind steals my hair

Once even you were young - said God to the world –
immortality dwells in memories, but youth;
It is a matter of paranoid perspective and distortion,
like your impossible angles in the spiral dimensions of chance
Breathe the night when longing is undeniably music;
be a lonely note in the construction of solitude

Emotionally uncharged and yet blown out of proportion –
It makes you lean erratically against its suffocating spaces,
Plays suicidal hide and seek in the moist fogs of the dawn
Demands to adore its sick genius in ferocious longing for breath
And when you are ripped apart into unity;
there are no more words to convey –

1. Sestina

Sublimation

Act I
She sleeps, wakes, puts TV on; she is home,
Her coffee is hot, she cannot find her pills.
The sun stares at her from its red lair of fire;
Smile races through her face and her dress is blue.
He is nice – she thinks – sensitive, and a little stupid –
As she leaves the room four walls fall black.

Act II (flash-forward)
On the inside of her eyes she dreams black,
Of the place that is a flat but no longer home.
You can only be very smart to be, oh so stupid.
Now she would kill to come back for her pills
In the morning when her dress was still blue.
Fixating disgust sets her on fire.

Act III
She puts the kettle on and turns on the fire,
She makes the coffee that is hot, sweet and black.
As she drops the box of which the colour is blue
She remembers – forgets, to make her way home
There is a word behind her will to remember; pills,
If there was only a way to determine the right from stupid.

Act IV
Circulating adrenaline turns her stupid
And stiletto heels burn her legs like fire.
She still does not remember about her pills,
Until the world spins upside down and her vision goes black.
Remember me not; there is no place like home
When your arms, legs and eyes suddenly turn blue.

Act V
On the other side of the mirror the grass is blue.
When the world suddenly contracts her thoughts are stupid.
The fortress of her body becomes a deserted home;
Under her eyelids live tears of fire. [prayer]
‘Let me be made of glass deep and black.
Let me come back home and take my pills.

Act VI
Let me come back home and take my pills!
Before I worn the dress that was blue,
And the four walls of the room went black,
Before I realized that I am the one who is stupid;
And the hell opened to set me on fire,
And before the world decided to steal away my home.’

Epilogue
The sky is on fire and she is contorted in a pure vibrant blue,
She is lost on her way home and there is no pills.
Today stupid is a new black.

sestina - modus operandi

Everyone says that sestinas are hard to write.* For some reason it did not take me much time to compose mine, maybe because I was always looking forward doing so.
I read as little sestinas as possible before I attempted mine, only just enough not to get confused and be aware of the possibilities. I find it far more interesting to be able to transcend the limitations of the convention without knowing what have been attempted in the past so I do not feel compelled to try it myself. In the very beginning I wanted to use six colours as my last six words (black, red, blue, white, yellow and green) and ascribe emotion to every colour, this however proved to be very difficult to do. After I failed on my noble quest to create colourful sestina I came up with my second idea – to capture my story in six acts an epilogue therefore referring to the fact that sestina is a form of storytelling.
I wrote my last three lines in the beginning to establish closure that will bear all six key words. I say key because in this case they are meant to point towards the true meaning of the poem. Together with the title they are clues that can be used to decipher the story as it were. These six words are: home, pills, fire, blue, stupid and black. Nevertheless I will not speak much about that as I personally prefer if poem is a convoluted combination of masks upon disguises for each reader to explore in their own unique way. I will however explain further the meaning of the title. I do believe that without supplementary clarification it will always come as ambiguous and somehow disconnected from the storyline of the poem. The word sublimation is therefore a reference to the psychological process that channels morally ambiguous impulses into the socially accepted behaviour. For me it also comes from the word sublime that happens also to be a name of a particular band who once upon a time recorded a song called ‘Date Rape’; and we leave it at that.

* I say that odes are far more difficult.

this is the day when poetry met design