Tag: Poems

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The Leaning Towers

By Marcus D. Niski

Magic steps unfinished

nights gulped down under

new waves

within us each one view

skys no longer burning

over spent seas

the clouds lie down in vain

my nest made in your arms
it’s loose body drooping and falling away

under failed remorse
into the void of unseen dimensions

[MN] 10 January 1999

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I Warm up my Machine

(For Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961)

By Marcus D. Niski

I warm up my machine
to begin to write
with hands
across the keys
thoughts ablaze with sound and fury
keys burn in my wake
as lines rage
across a blank white page

[MN] 5 February 2000

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To Write like Cendrars

(For Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961)

By Marcus D. Niski

To write like Cendrars

is to write
with pure clarity
and vision

to write straight and true

with the heart of an arrow

to write like Cendrars
is to be:

burnt alive
by the fire
of writing

[MN] 15 February 2003

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ODE TO TZARA

By Marcus D. Niski

The flies buzzed over
the rotting belly
from which an eye came
watching for a moment.

While little resistance was shown
towards these excesses,
the shapes suddenly vanished
and were no more than a dream
published in the press.

Now our countries united
filled with a desire to gobble
down one another without kid gloves.

Majestic mushroom, Keep on!

The victories of the Red Army
have had results and consequently
the fall of the navy into the sugary milk
will end the depravities of this majestic
Hitlerite coalition.

Yes! this will be you,
O queen of graces, after the final
centrally determined stimulus seeking apparatus
preys upon itself.

Eloquent evidence of this
is also imbedded in the historic wellsprings
caught in an enormous glass bowl
that runs skillfully across a plain of mirrors.

But what arguments can be advanced against this fact?

To which we may say with an added mixture of sadness,
the dream unwinds with an angelic indolence,
and ceaselessly, the hair undulates obedient to our
caress…

Behind so many flowers,
the azure Adonis discreetly hides itself.
The last tree impotently blazes.

Drinking, cigarettes and wild living on the horizon
harnessed by desired eclipses,
weeping over accelerated throbbing,
that solemn hiding place of nothingness
which was my body.

Probed, the patient ibis
presses its beak into a rim of fire
paying no heed to the passers by in life.

Through the great hawthorn of rain
I hear the human linen tearing
like a great dolphin heads under ice

Under the claw of sense, all looms
are withering. Sitting, the spinner drowns
morning thirst muscles and fruits
crack asunder

But the sleeping lady spins
lovely threads
the furniture giving way
to animals of the same stature
who gaze fraternally at the Lions.

Meanwhile, in this hour of love and blue eyelids
I see myself burning.

[MN] 24 August 1996

In memoriam, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) leading surrealist poet.