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1  

Every kind of indulgence

Emotional greed, because I’m the only one in this room who can feel

Maybe we can build something pretty

A tree house with small blue windows

Laze inside liquid to begin again, a more perfect version of the womb

The plants will grow arms and the flowers ears

This way eternity will have companions

Sea blue see oceans of life through the peep holes of sea blue perception

Can you grow new limbs to replace the ones that have fallen off, my lovely little worm?

This is the place to hope for miracles

Each new extension: FINGER TOE ELBOW KNEE growing eyes to keep the memory

beyond this illusion of life

The third eye

Tonight we dream of gardens, the perfect birth.

x

2

On a bed of crushed wings he breathed dust

"Our holes are very dry," she said

Ashes and ashes

3

When it burst forth in prisms of passion, when it became born, it already contained the promise

The possession that would build like smoke, wet wood and smoke

What is it, which I speak of? Where does it find home?

I speak of what it is I have found. What it is, is unspeakable

It lives right now in some garden ripe with fruit and wilting flowers

Ponds that have no bottom and fish with three eyes

It lives at the edge, where the grass becomes thick and reaching

Lives on the giant rock that towers above, yet is surrounded

The dark bird cradled by the divine giant oak is the meaning of love

Sky is self, but it is something else

Seeds sex, seeds passion and spasms of life, seeds the undiscovered

Leaves mean creation from the root

Soil is seeking, soil is fear

The large cemetery, decorated with seashells and makeshift God ornaments... reminder of the things which can not be remembered or relived

It is partly there

Partly playing with the serpents

Partly asleep

Partly amongst the lilies

Night like insanity casts shadows on the things we think we know

As night falls on the garden the things which are known... the it ... becomes a great dragon without body

It has learned that time is a vulture

That time is peace

That time is unreal

One spring day it began to count the blossoms, the sprouts, weeds, moving things, breathing things ... it began counting the life

As summer spread there was no rest, as the life became overwhelming

As autumn crept in - subtraction

Winter is the realization of death

And spring a contradiction to the end

Could it have been imagined? The end, and what would become of it?

Repetition, but this time there is more

It diluted the unforgivable, hiding it between the cracks, between the unseen

The ants have found it hibernating there, and now palaces and pathways

Eternity is a bell that rings only once, but that too is pictured again

It forgets to sleep, not exactly alert, just the slow hum of being it. Being

Sense is only a projection

And so on and on

It was, when I was wandering the labyrinth

I am the stranger who created it, no obligations... only discovery

I am it, but it is not me.

I am the seed and it is the tree, linked by the umbilical cord that is God

... if God had a name today.

  

4

Rhythm began at the far reaches

Periphery and then reaction to tilt the head

Fragrant luster

Moist to the touch

Felt it stir around the corner and at the top

Unexpectedly reaching

Layered miracles

Silence to stimulate grace

That initial nerve candy

Edges, heights, expanses

Open space

Stepped one foot in front of the other

By no other name but love

Then still soft center

Clearly grown

Finding lotus flowers in the frozen fish pond

  

5

Firecrackers and sex for breakfast

Beautiful dragon hot inside your mouth

Inside just a dream

Mouths full of hunger

the more

the all

the everything

Time flows between meanings and sensation of pleasure

Electric nerve endings

fever and sand sticking to wet skin

Glowing vibrations with wet smoke

kaleidoscope heat

Transforming beyond the obvious

Into blooming gardens and dragonflies.

  

6

Desperation bends like the arms of a willow tree

The song becomes a dripping whine

Call for fire

Little black holes - cigarette burns

The taste is lulling and smoke filled rooms remind

Water filled with empty

Bottles and shiny candy wrappers

Paper boats

The sinking feeling somewhere in the middle of me

The poison is swallowed

Search me with bloodshot eyes

My pockets full of loose change

Bra straps too tight

Body milk, inside out

The door half opened to wounds

Peeled grapes

And only the idea of a peach and mushroom sandwich

Shadows of figures that have become floods

It is a little less than luminous

Charged batteries

The mess is cleaner that it had to be

Funny ha ha? or funny sob?

Goose bumps to expose

  

x7

Perforated, split, cracked, ripped, opened

Tear in the seam of remembering

The reflection bares light

She found the snowflake buried in the storm

Impossibility of preservation, a heavy weight in her chest

She began to hate the sun

All wishes contained the perfect presence of the one

The single thing: S*N*O*W*F*L*A*K*E*

Fragile nature of hope

She began to pray that the sun would die

Logic breathed like a heat lamp

Dawn shattered and crippled her

Desperation is the child of torment

She is a mother that never gave birth

Desperation is the child of knots and tangles

Hesitation of final decisions

Tongue extended

Bare knees and palms pressed tightly into snow

tongue to snowflake

She consumed the one with deep swallow

Forever filled with the longing

To untie/untangle herself

Perforation, torn seam to find the one growing in her belly.

 

8

She came in parts this morning

Came to show the smell of dismemberment

"My soul has leaked through the cracks"

Her voice that of a child lost at the bottom of the sea

"I have lost my beginning and now there can never be any end"

We sewed her up with shiny strings

tied her up with ribbons

Sent her back into the world.

 

9

Thought trance and wallpaper

MORNING. the tranquil intention of sleep remains

I want to explain

but then and now explanations are a kind of torture

I had a friend who wrote messages in her body

by repeatedly rubbing them in with an eraser

Messages of burning fire with white clouds of puss

It has always intrigued me, this kind of explanation/torture

If she had not died, I wonder (curiosity) what she would have written

in remarkably determined acts of slow mutilation?

 

10

Adoration is a unique lingering

Those who pray for love with blind anticipation

folded into an origami bird with a thousand wings and no eyes

Those who seek, search by dream

Sailing down any/many waters

Water to fly in melt or die in

Seeking again some warm flow of love

Current that flowers into an abyss

In the middle of the night I scream

I will be your pleasure vessel

A goddess empty of will

I will bend

Desire, a particular kind of madness

Holds so well and the night is otherwise too long and narrow

Wearing nothing in sleep, only the pulsation inside bones

Want to love and love, want to love

Here we are, want to love

Finding impulse to love and all the night as dream spread over our bed

I spoke, I want to love like a tree want to love and love

The act of memory filters the past

The only love, which is alive, is the one born and born again

Uttering want to love

The beginning, a gasp into infinite directions of curiosity

The bed is full of lovers and flowers

Good morning again and again.


All of the above poems are © Copyright Jelena Stefulic 2001. They may not be copied or reproduced in part or in total without prior permission of the author.


I love indulgence, adventure, the bizarre yet pretty details, daydreams, water, and a little bit of perversion. Finding these elements in poetry has made me a poet. I have spent the last 4 years living in foreign lands (indulgence). Right now Sweden is home, until another moment of impulse inspires me to sail away.

My creations are all continuations… continue to create through floating and melting. I am in search of the divine from the inside out, welcoming your eyes and words.

E-mail: jelena@altavista.com

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