I COUNT TO 11

I Count to 11

The impossibility of this life
is in its beauty:
beauty is ideal
like a wild flower.

New life
and old death:
a dung beetle pushing its
little treasure
and sun, always sun.
Why?

I slap the fly on the window
and my phone starts ringing,
I count to 11
and it stops.
Does someone want to hear my voice?
Does someone need me?
Why?

I just want to set fire to all
the pigeons in the square,
I want to run my finger
along the blade of a knife,
I want to send my love
in a package to Somewhere.

The phone is silent;

I water the flowers

Inferno

The room is in flames.

Everything burns
in the flames of sorrow,
and my hand holding the glass burns,
the other conducts this
beautiful symphony
and my computer burns
with all the words on the screen,
vanishing forever, lost,
the calendar on the wall
with all the burning days and nights,
turning to ash,
the carpet,
the sheets,
the table,
the cigarettes,
everything.

I open one eye and look
outside the window
and it is so beautiful
and everything is fire—

flames,

flames,

flames

everywhere—
the trees and squirrels burn
in the flames:
the girls on the street
under the STOP sign—
burning and laughing:
my sorrow, my sorrow
spare no one,
I want this whole world to burn
in the flames,
to die screaming and hissing,
until everything turns to dust
and we will wait for the next

chapter.

I Will Never Have

She is like
a masterpiece painted by an artist
dead for many
centuries.

She is in no catalog.

Still, she’s in the attic,
buried beneath old newspapers
and spiders.

Peycho Kanev is the author of 12 poetry collections and three chapbooks, published in the USA and Europe. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Rattle, Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hawaii Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others.