Poems by Steve I VE
America
from civilized thoughts
we came here
from the sea
and here we found a great unorganized
land
everywhere we had the chance to wander
we found nothing but muddy rivers
with inaccessible rapids
and weedy stream banks
with fallen trees
unsuitable for civilized pastimes like fishing and
bathing
furious
from mosquito and nettle bites
from the wild rose vines clinging to us
we returned with great difficulty
to the more normal coast to make plans for landscaping
we came from civilized countries with civilized ideas
with a firm determination
not to repeat
the mistakes of our fathers
with a plan
a good few generations have passed since
and we can boldly say
that with hard work we have tamed this here wild
from our planes that can fly low
we scattered flower seed collections to our taste
on the hilly meadows
our cranes moved huge rocks out of the way
where the stream flowed in the wrong direction
we reversed its course
we buried the inappropriate lakes but created new ones where needed with our powerful bulldozers
even if it meant flooding the villages
we also took care of the balance
when
we spared the snake and alligator
and it turned out that they fit well
with the bathers
we filled the mountains, the forest and the more gentle landscapes with concrete roads suitable for bicycles and pushcarts
horse-drawn carriages and even small trucks
from the convex bridge raised over the streams
you can even throw pebbles
and to see the drifting water lily
with the telescope mounted on the railing
we can examine
the passing foam and the many
tiny zig-zags and the secrets of the roar
from our huge bridges
that can span straits
we can survey the indentation of our coasts
and if we roll down the window of our refrigerated car a little
we can take a deep breath
of the winds galloping over the bay
the concrete parking lots on the mountaintops and
at the entrances to the caves
are safe and comfortable
they serve delicious food and cool drinks
and the toilets are fragrant and
hygienic
because otherwise stumbling around in wild bushes
is only for childish maniacs
and
savage people
there is no pleasure in them
man exposes himself to danger
dirt
and
tires to death
in our country there is order and cleanliness
and what
is more important
we
give each other respect in nature
and very subtly do not
disturb each other
we have realized the eternal dream of the individual
where everyone can live freely
secured for himself
by artful habits and intelligent laws
and only
should care for others
if all parties
feel like it
The sigh of the tree
Eyes, ears, lips, skin and consciousness
Tell me where I can hide from them,
from human ash spewing lava, rain and sand
from perceptions, reactions
I should hide, hide if I could
Why do I want to keep my inner original self
my bark that fits in the hand
my tons of branch arms raised with my heavy tree muscles
to the sky
my pores that breathe days
my nerve endings that suck nights
my lily veins, the balance of my foliage, the coral
the harmony of my annual torso
the accuracy of my eternity clock
the market hall of my virgin flowers and drunken fruits
the judgments of capricious seasons
the wind-swayed protocol
when will they fall, again and again to the yellow earth?
Signs of fear in Miami
lively footsteps stir the air
and living animals
flow through the foam outside
shall this light become a sound now
or
shall this eye
see the dreamer
on the sometimes flaring milk
of this
thankful charm?
the stealth of our ancestors
in the plastic moonlight
in the sigh of the perversion of experience where the silence of the wind has failed
and the direction of the wind has played out
where
a phallus-sized fat and bar-mirrored melt walks in this sediment
where hairless little apostrophes
flutter
where only the hurricane brings
a flagging Serblit
metal-heat
and
a raft leather vest
for which
the shell is raised again
the
waves again stir up the snails
the
color-changing towers in Miami
twitch for the pack bridges
and
Szamba Bimba
swings for the Dinka sons
on concrete rivers dreams roll and flow down
all to the side roads
on bamba wall glue
and fuck
the
collapsed stilt bridge
over boutique bays
grilled music juice boils
many swamp spirits sway
and
my love struggles with nausea in the stale doorway
to Shanghai
we shudder and moan softly
how superfluous is this mine air
this violet soy
that silently flows around the rushing dawn
among the tortillas
the storm
is already galloping over the alarmed
snakes of the Everglades
the alligators are coughing
and here again
not even in spots can you see
anything
that is worth
nothing
that floats in the lurching tide
where the buoy gets stuck
blows into the trees
silences some whistle
heats a whale
smashes a pond
or
into the moths it’s getting into
only the small reeds are rustling
and the wind is howling on the beaten grass
the shocked seagulls are watching
the salty splash on the pillars
and the curly clouds are slowly
towering
as below
a strange crowd
is pushing
From the fossils
Stuck in the waves of secrets
Hidden beyond the distant challenge
Becomes the mute ghost of the mouth.
The Deep Well of the Sharp Corner of Kőbánya
It is inevitable to go around, to be at this damned “stone quarry” crossroads again. In this old suburb.
From where two roads open
One to the future
The other to the past
And I remember very well that million moods when a person vowed not to cheat, never to deceive himself, and not to turn to one or the other road, just
because “the grapes are sour”.
And 1956, right, since our little Tienanmen, where here, on the secluded football field called the sandhill “Rejchshorn”, those Russian soldiers kindly asked about our female relatives, our mother, our sister, sharing with us the girlish corn porridge, what was happening. And the two roads, one up to the Rose Hill, the other to some strange myth, and both have been there ever since, indistinguishable in the miserable beginning. There, each is still the edge of the city. And only the heat, the desire, the dream of a great life, of youth, could stir it up.
And how many times have I passed here since then, as a coalman, as an exhibition organizer, as a book agent,
as an American tourist just arriving
Or departing
, on foot, by tram, or by jeep. And the sun shines from here and there on the strange mirror of the Sharp Bend, in the smell of brewery malt. A strange, distorted mirror, with a double path in its dusty fringe. With two paths that have now become my undeniable, irrevocable past. Sometimes to the noble hill, sometimes to the suburbs, and through them, bypassing America, it led here again, home.
And of course, in the last decade, under the spell of some female eye.
Now, as I look at this mirror from here,
it is full of strange signs, traces of events.
And why this intention, this compulsion, to decipher
And even now, there is that hill with the kitschy name, in the distance, swelling and swelling like dough, and reaching into the surrounding valleys, turning everything pink.
I could have gone that way too. But for me, the other path is the one that led home. then there, in that beautiful
Pannonian Landscape –
there it is for me my interest.
There is that magical place.
Where at the end of this long winding road
the true essence unfolds.
So here is this road, a kind of slog, but mine.
Characteristic, individual, varied. You can look at it as anything, and that’s good.
And the hidden bays of continents floating in the seas of the end of the world, the incomprehensible mysteries of far-reaching landscapes
After the American world and its worldless cities.
Airports come, border guards and customs officers, staring helplessly and incomprehensibly at the swag brought home.
With the swirling symbolism of wires, nails, wardrobe accessories, machines and parts
cheap ornaments so indispensable to life.
This road winds, down through the warm sands of Jász-Kiskunság
king melon sand dunes
salty play ponds
peat ponds dotted with water lilies
and by detouring through the solipsism of the Roman
we reach the big world
our spiritual Mediterranean homeland and the
wild peaks of the Dinaric Alps, Meteora, Sounion, Ithaca,
the endless world of imagination
Capri, Naples, Rome, Pompeii
the gardens of civilization
then suddenly we are in an international refugee camp in the
hallway of the world,
then the New York elevated railway leads us through the museum of the world’s capital,
down to the famous American south,
the great Faulknerian south, in the sultry charming swamp smell
in a small town in Florida
my great journey
ended
from here on the wings of my unbroken spirit, my aching body
for the last ocean crossing
home
My little Into my Ithakam.
And all along this bloodless road music played,
And the song rang
What the world here also calls
a better life.
And the stoic accusation was already made, there is no such thing, everything is in vain.
But then – we have learned this too, it is not so. We provoked
We did not regret the time
a whole
life
went here
and
We became rich.
We are no longer destitute
at that
strangely familiar intersection
on the street corner
we are totally equipped with all sorts of crap
Nothing bombastic, neither outside nor inside. But the two together are plenty
And it doesn’t matter where this road goes, it winds on
It has turned
back into
itself
–
…because “only the song
that a person sings to himself
is certain in his hut in the dilapidated house of spring, if for the last time…”
Catatonic Love
Then
We can kill each other with all the murders
We can fight We can run Like a Fitness-obsessed Patrolman
We can march on the cobblestones
On the worn sidewalk
at noon
at night
After
you finally wake up from your folded arms, terrified by the early afternoon
you support yourself outside
No one can touch you
Fearless
You circle down the stairs
with your phosphorescent
rainbow humming snail from the fossil shells of your dreams
You harass the fidgeting
Dreams that sweep the walls with their sluggish tails
The silky silk of your scarf glides between their legs
A herd of animals swirls around you on the railings on the fences on the doors on the street in front of you
around you
and on the outside snail carriages wind in the wind
For a long time to come, far away, on the street, the avenue, on the other side of the park, like an unwritten rubber eraser, I will trample beside you
behind you
a jute bag full of your big city beetroots on my shoulder
your secrets are hanging from my eye sockets
tin amulets that have been stuck
your straying bits are flying on my clothes
your centipede salamander is zigzagging between my teeth
it would run away to you
i try
to throw it at you on my vacuum
but from your gaze, its legs get stuck and back
it falls under my tongue
my hat floats like a dragon in front of me, my slipping pants roll between my legs
all of your socks in my shoes
a crumpled letter you received
your smile, your tinkling laughter is thick
rubber wax face
it snowed something Unknown
The city is shaking between us
Hangover coughs
It curses softly, peeps from its flower beds and trash
It promises unreadable menus from its roasters
My cymbal hooves clack, I seek your gaze that wanders into distant anomalies
The light of a blinking lamp scans some presence, it slips over me
It jumps on the ornaments of mysterious buildings
Lost in the silvery fish of leaves, it suggests the bark of gloomy trees
It reappears on the crests of the street
A drowning signal light flashes in the flood
The dawn of consciousness is looming
It slowly begins to leak out of you
It soaks through like ink, your eyelashes flutter
On human heads floating in a sea of lava
On rattling bone stubble
Whining avaron
you step up
to the curtain of my shadow space
you spy behind
the tiny ones fall on your eyelashes
frightened, you stagger towards me
on unstable cobblestones
I stumble towards you
I will hold your lifeless, vine-covered sarcophagus hand
still ice cold
Compared to the Russian meteor
poem to a beautiful woman from Pest
And of course, where am I compared to the Russian meteor,
The size of which NASA and MTV measured differently.
And what made the defense minister think, and what put a spur in Putin’s ass, and who will patch people’s retinas, and the eyes of blinded Siberian windows
The
Vulgar layer, please turn yourselves on,
And then where do we come to,
How weak pops are here in a downtown Pest arty hideout, giggles at local aphorisms,
A soft tremor runs through
And it’s hard to navigate, my schedule, you’re messing it all up,
You don’t know when who’s calling me and how important it is!
Sometimes we run out into the snow and look up at the Prague sky, here stretches its third-rate slide show
Then back to the shuntés, where sub-Europe seeks itself
Here I am, too, in this
sleepy-ornamental asphalt chair
Winter, winter.
Reality in a state of explosion
it’s been in the atoms
since the beginning
the photon knows what it’s doing
and
the brain is slowly learning to store and organize the
information in this way
our limited capacity is
increasing which for
millennia has forced us to distort reality for millennia.
We started with scattered
grimaces and grunting sounds
and
we slowly moved to more precise descriptions
that trained the age opportunities
to stay on the population
and
the willingness to innovation. Great brains were born here
and
Plato and Aristotle saw
the century before.
But we can observe the high-level adaptation of reality
wherever we look
warlords have crushed other
warlords
politicians have elevated the holders of power
or
even the people
we have tried
the sparkling alternatives of revolution and
we have conquered countries
we have stuffed unknown spices up our noses
and fucked all the foreign
women our cocks still
waggle excitedly
at the sight of the flat-bellied and pondering scoundrels
when we got home
we have smashed
our mother’s kitchen
and
our father’s workshop
-the sewing box with which
our clothes were folded
and the toolbox with which
our little bicycle was repaired-we have carefully trampled and thrown into the
garbage can by penetrating the narrower in our environment
we kicked the smaller animals we shot the bigger ones into a sieve.
We set fire to the neighbors’ houses in a revolutionary spirit
we finally made the daughters and sons of the
priest and teacher who played the violin and the piano our own
finally there was order and peace
we fought the class struggle
now we can take up our fight with the internal enemy
the soft opportunists
Amulet in Chinese bowl
It was getting dark outside.
I checked to see how much water there was in my newly made Chinese plastic pool.
It was three-quarters full, so I turned off the tap.
And then I noticed in it the small, round, amuletic mirror of the sky
With the clouds on the
pink sky deepening into the ink blue and in the middle the evening star!
I have never had such a
dusk mirror in my garden before.
My Saints and My Garcia Lorca
It was a great spring, perhaps
Or autumn or summer, I don’t know
Or maybe winter
Went in so cruel
How he took away my baby-sized
My honey-clear great-grandmother
Then my grandmother
My proud, stalwart ancestor grew thin
Into the grave
Then my loving one-and-only
Mother
Crumbled into the mist
These are great losses
For a young warrior
Even
When he cleans his bloody sword
He can no longer
Remember
All the glorious victories
On heads cut off and on
On matters won.
Since then my steps have been hard and
I wander alone in my windswept
agora
sometimes waking up to the
trembling of the
towers
on my back
like
when Lennon was killed,
Let Love roam
Like a naked meteor or
a wild satellite screaming around us
Or how
Socrates, who also dragged the truth to the shore, was so casually laid down, or
The most holy thin man
Gandhi
The most civilized of all
Among us
And of course, everyone
after Jesus
But there is my great teacher
He was also cut down by one of
the
Gestapo
And without whom I would certainly not be able to fight
With life like an oriental grandmaster
With a sword.
Like a reincarnated
Szerb Antal
But all this fades
From the pain
With which in my adult life
I have been struggling for decades
With the never-ending woe
With the darkest gloomy horror
With the incomprehensible evil
With the Black Hole
And the living
Hell
Just as
and for nothing
they killed the most beautiful
And the Soul that ever lived
The eternal world champion of beauty
Among the truest poets, the Poet
With the sight of a Damascus sword
And with the heart of a white dove
They killed the lice!
They killed
Federico Garcia Lorca.
And yet
“Neither you nor I
should step
on or look at each other
Do you know, do you know why?
Love is so great.”
Birds of my time
The
Locomos raced past me
Full of white and red guards
To kill each other’s white doves
Or rip out their mothers’ hearts
At the Aztec Butcher’s Chair
Bison raced
By me
With shaking testicles
Blooding armpits
Which no one intended
really
Women and men
Yes bison women and men
No mistake
Letting the cubs go ahead.
With the salty foam of death
In their mouths
With eyes veiled by dry prairie dog droppings
Navigating into the nothingness of dust clouds
And tanks raced past me
German and Russian and Swedish tanks
And oil poured out of them,
Their track pins creaked,
And the big machine panted in their stomachs
And their crosshairs could continuously hold
The target while galloping
Even then there was no Tiananmen Square
No one stood in their thrashing path
And warships pulled past me
To shoot down
Some legacy of civilization
Ten-story
Buddha statues
To find
The nets of the harbors,
Granaries,
Chimneys
So that the smoke wouldn’t find
The From the hearth to the sky
On the coast of Argentina
And in Bosnia.
And planes flew over me
To hang out
The silk of the fields
To take away the profiles of the mountains and
To break the architecture of the caves
The arch of people’s mouths
The collapsed
arch of their hearts, what can I say
And Chapaev passed by me
With a photograph of Lenin’s dead baby
Clinging to his horse’s rump
This image of him
Remained
And I saw
Trotsky in his frightened glasses
With a pamphlet addressed to the Jews
For Mexico
Relying
on the swollen Mao in the waters of
The Yangtze
With a red and still beating Chinese heart
Between his teeth
Party elbow pads
With his stilettos
Belted
On which little pioneers
Fished merrily with a song
And I saw
Because I happened to be standing
The missiles heading towards the Baghdad library
And I saw the smoke of civilization
Spread over the Euphrates
The two thousand year old olive trees of Paradise
Burn
And I saw
Omar’s pale eye socket
Also moving away, alas
As the ashes of the Buddha statues
Slowly settled
On our hair.
During prayer
From Tora Bora
To Kandahar
And to the mouth of the Ganges.
And I saw tigers with quick feet
Roaring
Gandhi’s manuscripts dragged by elephants
After
In Bonares
And finally the smile of Che
Again and again
In a Carib sea swell.
And then
Who knows why
Right in Bolivia.
But then
I still
saw nothing.
There are a hundred ways
To kneel
And kiss the ground
Spiritual microorganisms
Where did the clock go
Where did the
Shadow go
Where did the
Charm go
Also
As if I were falling in pain
From the thousand-year-old clouds
That stop
at Delphi
And
at Ithaca
And linger
When
Odysseus tilts Penelope back
In the Bed
And
On
The velvety smooth air mattress
Salty, philanthropic fingers
Flutter together.
On the feeling of leaping phenomena
Maybe it was spring
And this “all-powerful lady”
Slammed open the door
And the window
Mixing the musty smell and
Scent
With the hopeless moment
That comes to everyone
Someday.
Opening out of the myriad forms
In which she takes on
In the salt-saturated seas
In the greenhouses of the sand dunes
In the mysterious violin cases of the forests
And on the triple mirrors of the fields.
Where you and I float or
trot.
I collapsed on a small mound
When a small
Hairy creature
Put
its
Head
Out
And said in a hoarse voice
“Whose soul do you think is
Bigger –
The butterfly’s
Or the buffalo’s?”
I said
I don’t know.
Memory of transcontinental flights
Oh our only refuge
Planet of our hopes
You spin, orbit in
space in your wind-blown
blue
cloud dress
with your moon-like
seas
with your breathing continents
Your canvas flashes
the hologram of the camel desert
the five-dimensional lobe crowns of giraffes
the water universe of whales
the amount of bolts and latches needed for a Volkswagen
Germanic serial columns
the tracks of tanks
the turbines of fighter jets
the periscopes of submarines
the nozzles of missiles
Eskimo and Indian folklore
chronicles of genocide and fratricidal wars
scars of murders, craters
everywhere
collapsed mountains
and ragged beaches
cannons and bombs indelible puffs
are flying around me
serial shots and carpet bombings
I hear the eternal roar
radioactive cloud tumors
flash
the Forbidden City and the Taj Mahal
the blind guardians of Ankhor
stare at the sky
the pipers of the third world
crouch in the bushes of the world
And the bloodsucking cynics cling to the skin of the earth
the Laocoon continents entwined with the lianas of manipulation
the guano of human and inhuman
ideas
covers everything
from the opal omega night
to the sunrise prism
to the rainbow
running
before the eyes of the intercontinental sun
day by day
the shadow of our hoped-for things
again and again
circumventing your sphere
sighs
and sighs
in the depths
down here
I have a father.
But why
I don’t really know
When I was a little
Red-eyed bunny
And I just blinked in the
Bush
Or a lame-kneed
lamb
I just watched
The
Working-class clatter that came in through the window
And until I was three years old,
I seriously
Considered
Whether
in this world
It was worth
speaking at all.
Contrary to all
Reports
When
I
did
with great difficulty
It was strange
And it
remained
Because all those lovely
Women
My entire maternal line
Carefully smeared
With saliva
And
Nothing changed
The street continued to clatter.
And I kept on pissing
In the terrifying sawdust tunnel
Under the twenties warm
light bulb
Because the great surging
And violent terror
Was about to break in
Unbroken.
And since then this
Being has been unfolding
Windows open
Mirrors spin inside
Colored prisms melted braids
Neon signs gibberish
Kitchen doors vents buffets and restaurants
The curtains of home fragrance
Sounds that are reflected
Sounds that are squeezed
Sounds that escape from alleys
From village courtyards from glue-smelling workshops
From tinkling anvils
The sounds of grunting, croaking, screeching
The rising and falling
Of the mill
And I
Just didn’t understand anything
Because to my questions
There was
No
Answer.
Poem for love
In this fall of leaves
I pray,
so,
still,
burning,
all the more,
and still alive,
and still
with my face
to the sky
Poem for my fern trail. Improvisation for Kata
I jumped out into this world – just like you,
only I bravely…,
right there at the foot of Delphi
bowing,
saying, okay
I want all of this,
and I want it.
And there stood this traveler,
the son of the world of the existing worlds –
Marco Polo before the great Omniscient
– because let’s not forget, then he was the Leonardo of all ages
Picasso, Van Gogh, Brecht
And the great Mongolian lord of the world, “B.C.”, – before Christ – stood-
telling about an even bigger world.
And the snot-spitting of the great lord choked me.
and now
here I am
doing the same
balancing on my nose this
ASOKA
EMPIRES
enter then
you guest
can be my companion
my love
microscopically intertwined
our souls thrown into the open air,
to seagulls, to albatrosses,
you Stone Lady of guilt,
you reincarnation
of
our Saints!
you my flesh and blood…
my imagination
dissolving into all space
a victorious-flag
another returning-self
take me for yourself
Losses
Oh
Monsters of the Night
Candlelit Sawdust Tunnels
Me and the Monster
Climbing Out Together
Leaving the Stifling
Close Warmth
Womb?
Birth Canal Too Early to Be Aware?
Then those first extraterrestrial
scenes full of
accidents, a drunk
with the wooden wheel of the horse-drawn carriage
smeared with blood
a furry
animal hiding in a closet, ready for a sultry embrace
the space where
I was forgotten and first
I got lost on the ice field of the big city
and the cops played with me
until they found me
and the first fragment of a secret word
birds’ trills on the window and released into the city
kitchen
the first soap bubble of my self-consciousness
I wonder where it will go now
with the blood vessel of spectrum
and another dream
with visions of housing estates
with girls with hot bun breasts
and little boys with strange whistles
the dusters communal sandboxes
staircase gas meter cabinets
and a little pro and counter-revolution
flickering shelters
and the mysterious light of tank shell casings
the hungry
inventions of proletarian armies
fatty bread patterned teddy bears
with ball-bearing skateboards
among the adults trudging home with their bags
Greek and Italian picture books
about fine people
and the columnar architectural wonders
Laouk and the winged lion shot through with an arrow
Then again a new location
As a teenager
In my first new clothes
A panoramic view of a hill
And below with the tram jingle
A steam locomotive whistled and sighed
A boat train sailed on the Danube
Above
A small stream ran into it
Trees and high-voltage
Coordinates of power lines
Between
A slush pile in the pack
Jata
Bookstore, cinema
Pranksters
Porch house, with guitar,
Nonoletán
Closing speech
Finally
I found
Who I was looking for
They call
Loneliness
Don’t bother us anymore
The human psyche
turns the wheel of history
or civilization
which we otherwise call
the human soul
and
against this chaos
we have invented the laws
which are always
lacking
From the depths of damp wells
we stare
at a tiny sky
alone.
Friendly advice
You can grind your mountain of joy
in your lap
in your head
You can grind your half-life
in your ass.
Song for my dead lover
The wings of my heart flew in my dreams
The last beat of the moon
This great eternal sky also fades
Into that other great night
My heart aches
His moon-mouth
You see it too
You see
My love
Dead
Black empty wind
Among the stars
This cooled
Galaxy is already spinning.
Song to the Moon
My Heart’s Wings in my dream
If you, Moon, lose weight
My Heart’s Sorrow
Moon’s Mouth
If
My Love
Is Dead.