Recent Works by Dragosh Ziditoru

The Day I Discovered Oranges

The oranges of my childhood were larger

filling the open hand like a miniature sun

simplest of toys I didn’t dare eat

before bedtime, solemnly swallowing

piece by piece. Lighter

the captive sun was lighter, yet just

as simple luminous wild

more than enough for the small fingered cup.

I remember this while fondling your breasts

now as my hands grew stronger

the right size I guess.           

Still I don’t believe when they say

‘heavy’ doesn’t apply to (balls of) light.

Spaghetti Cross

Writing about wine stained love, it shouldn’t take long. 16 minutes or so. As  long as microwave spaghetti or the world record for blood-writ poetry in an Olympic year.   The long black lines put to boil in the back of your throat, prepare the sauce out of juices and ingredients necessary for smoothing things out with the other sex: mainly cash and silence. Used considerately, they’d keep love slow boiling, just in time for a late dinner and full moon choreography. Love writing hasn’t been easier, pour in whatever you’d like. No one wants to see blood, much less taste the thing. The real stuff had proved such an expensive, overrated, sticky stock. No, the poem won’t be made veridical by a glint in her eye, once done, she’ll wolf the spaghetti with polite mumbles, like any wholesome well-done dish, but it’s all right, there are thousand reasons for silence on her every curve and thousands of lines like this, all saying the truth on nothingness, nothing goes I this line of work, so well written tho’ almost divine, you can’t help erecting a spaghetti cross mid plate, ketchup blood, chocolate nails for her feet and palms. 

 

The Necessary Window

On nights like this we could have been anywhere

glide through Siberian night like twin icicles falling

all the way from moon’s frozen eye

or, say, enduring and populating Sahara’s wasteland

two fat green flies chasing and mating

across a corpse’s luminous eye.

Just the same we’d be the sherbet-sipping,

Shisha-smoking couple in this ’70 Istanbul postcard.

Slightly abstract, yet a pair, the ‘we’

of every present tense, perfect lovers of everywhere.

So irreverent our nights, their being

Too hasty or naked or long,

giving us time to be wherever without the flights.

 

On nights like this I’m in your mum dream as well.

She helps with your first spring dress. Then straight

On Saturn; there are satyrs, you and other hot nymphs.

 

Mounting the pedestal in a foreign public square, we

face each other as two shards a hipster named ‘fucking,’

so let’s put out rosy tongues and wander around like stray dogs,

stuck on each other for days.

On a night like this to love is to dare.

Hence, love, take me up the dim lit stairs

of your place. Then in your room, on narrow bed

under a necessary window. Then everywhere.

Sounds Familiar

I know you. I know you inside out, better than all rest, better than the boys you said you loved back and your mum, who doesn’t have just you. My eyes bulged out when we met, like in old Disney cartoon and stayed that way.  I kept gazing at you past the night and horizon even when my scrotum licked your every curve. A thousand times. These are the most expert hands in the world in you.  I patrolled the Kandahar of your moods, bombs exploding when you were weary or drunk, attended the corners where ghosts and goblins lurk. Killed a few myself. Barehanded, as your saliva dribbled on my chest and fingers and your fears passed inside me.

‘ I know you’- only pride of the defeated. Nobody knows better the game than the loser. I’m bursting, you-filled like a Medieval Japanese condemned to death by water, a reed down his throat, a needle about to splash him like a nylon bag.    Men fare better now, though a few I know reached for the gun or bottle or took that plunge. The rest of us learned to pee, pee heavily like elephants, in bars, over the bridges, against street lights, in public toilets, peeping at each other’s cock. Ah, that reassuring murmur of pissoirs, telling we have made it quite far.

276

 

‘Making love on Fridays has never been easier’

we agree over breakfast. Some call it sex,

wrong name for a ritual implying mostly wine

some laughs, then breakfast at Bohemia,

 under the railway, where the Turkish landlady

 

offers me discounts for late coffees and brandy.

This one, fake blond , glorious curves, prestigious prizes

in some new obscure art, loves her omelette plain.

Nibbles at it as I take in her smell still strong

on my left fingers. An old fox trace.

 

Of night and sea speak her innermost, unerased

on skin and nails, though the game is over.

We never tried that hard anyway, our names

unnecessary at last, like the long phone numbers

of those giving bad head yet asking for more.

 

I love the love talk part. Holidays, football

unread books and foreign  places are quoted,

random names to wrap us apart, keep us

civil like opposite trains soon on their way. Pure

honey oils the tongues when nothing comes next.

 

I’d like to make them count, my days. Her face

smiles at the forked mushroom pile, glowing

beauty as silence camps between our chairs.

Dark arrives- red grey howls of sirens, a traffic 

stuck bus to whisper me her name:

276

 

Medusa

What about her, the black dressed passer-by on last Monday after-noon? Her umbrella, shading the blue eyes which recognized you instantly, protected the city from eternal greyness.  You asked for a smile- eyes demanding, lips drawing its first half -while she, aware of the century passed since Baudelaire’s death, cut short hers. It was you she’d been looking on the empty wet boulevard, yet all seemed a loafer’s dream, in a wink of the eye which refused to wink and not stair. You wanted to turn around this time, call her by the secret name she always tried to remember, tell her the poets and their whores might be dead yet nobody’s really alive in that stream of gray. Tell her you’re the loneliest man in London, yet alive, show her how much a second dilates. Well, how much? None of you will ever find out.  

The streams shifted. You did too, when rain stopped. Your life could have been rightfully hers. That part of you who knew it beyond doubt had to be left in place, a rain soaked rag, the massive lump of a badly started statue.