a few of my poems in english

MARIUS IANUS

în engleză de Adi Urmanov

Marius Ianus (penname of Marius-Christian Drajan) was born in Predeal in 1975 and studied Literature at the University of Bucharest.

He is part of the Letters 2000 and Fracturi literary circles.

His books include toilet paper (Carmen underground series, 1999), anarchic manifesto and other fractures (Vinea, 2000), Mamijuana – best known of… (Fractures underground series, 2002), the bear in the bin – a movie featuring myself (Vinea, 2002), and toilet paper, preceded by the first poems (Vinea, 2004).

Currently, he works as a desktop publisher.

e-mail: marius.ianus@gmail.com

anarchic manifesto and other fractures (2000)

Ode Toilet paper

With hands frozen
with legs even colder
I’ll eventually go to Dracula
Mihai worked there people had to
put their hands on a certain image say
a few formulae
he received four letters in which he was told
it had worked
the old black and white mad chestnut trees are swinging
what did their flowers smell like?
I’ll give Paul Miski’s book
I won’t talk to some girls who ignore me
I told them “Take me with you” and they didn’t
take me
the poem didn’t start yet
a little bit of patience
picture your best friend with his eyes yanked out
sticking his bloody palms to your face
OK
Angelo didn’t return
to set free the time the bladder
the prohibited smoking
Maria was talking about a mirror
in which somebody didn’t want to see its back
Miski will give me too the master’s car
and books
Paul complained they attacked his computer
from the very beginning
the literary circle got crammed with pre-Stanescu poets
we are just pale hungry teenagers—
how to oppose that?
the poem didn’t start yet
it snows outside the sweater, hung with green clips at the window
sweater, coffee with milk
dizzy flakes are spinning
and tersely
I felt lifted from the chair dancing with all
the winds among the branches on which let’s write fresh
paint
and my soft bones were getting stuck to the bones of others I was sliding
as if bobsledding right into the palm of a poor
unhappy child
and I found myself in the head of a madwoman preaching
after a staggering clinical death
with the hearts of others in my teeth
with the exclamation mark between my pupils
with you
the poem didn’t start yet
Cristina came back to go to the movie
I sat on the stairs with Anamaria
with Daria on my mind
not to get her rumpled
I stood with my nose pressed against the windowpane
to see who got first downstairs
in the snow
I wrote desperate messages on the notice boards in the department
with unknown recipient
I signed them anonymously
I took interest in the leaves that were still in the chestnut trees
and the poem that didn’t start
If desperation exists, broken eyes
which the snow doesn’t cover
it nevertheless snows
if toilet paper exists
written by me…

When I wrote toilet paper I was going in for my baccalaureate
then I was baking bread
Cucu was dancing dead drunk on Doors and yelling that the disciple
exceeded his master he was already in the Nirvana
The trailing was pulling phone lines from the street poles
and we were talking gibberish
George had begun to mimic me
he’d have climbed on the bench next to me while I was reciting
Popica had brought me money in the madhouse
It was told that he’d found me on the pedestal trying to shave
Davila
When I came back I was like a vegetable
I could only see straight forward
Mache had changed the notes in the computer
I had got out of a teenage crisis
I had tried to commit suicide
and I was writing a raw book
with its skin peeled
in which to wipe down all my
swelled imagined filth
I’ve written other poems as well since then but none like
toilet paper
it was a poem like a knife
in the spirit of a haiku:Those who masturbate
are flowers
and I couldn’t ever but rewrite toilet paper
if I didn’t grow tired
otherwise what’s with this saxophone sounding rustily in the poem?
why do I only listen to Hooker?
and I want to return home
but not at home – we don’t even have a home
somewhere where a home wouldn’t be needed
beyond the whitewashed mask of the moon
on this side of this cheating face of a drug addict
who wants to break the shop windows
where there’s nobody else anymore
or if there’s a girl she puts you in a swing and casts a spell of life over you
if there’s a professor you shut up and he takes notes in a frenzy
if you’re a child you give others the entire cake
if you love her she runs to the monastery
if you understand your brain opens and inside the brain
bursts
her smile like a diamond
and she’s less and less somebody
snowman spread with ink smoking
the poem hasn’t started

There are girls worth getting you out of your skin for
like a flayed rabbit
but none is her
there are living flesh monuments of loneliness
at nightin the residence hall
I wrote a blues for them
But the poem hasn’t started yet
this prologue is long because the snowing takes long
there are in it friendships that make my eyes more
hysterical longer closer to tears
perhaps you’ve read it for nothing
there isn’t even going to be a poem
but you can read toilet paper
one fragment was published in the military high school anthology
Paul has it now
in toilet paper I wore my heart of a winged dog
wrapped carefully in my pocket
with my hands frozen
with my feet still cold
live having sex
in the snow

On the corridor with Alexandru Matei

Pay attention, I told him, here comes a mouse
it opens and out of it a flame appears
that burst a few empty bottle
Filled with blood, he answered
and I circled dizzily until
I forgot where
I was in the department hall waiting for Godot
Until we unfolded our middle fingers
to signal
towards who?
where?

Explaining to a bum what poetry is

The sun ball clashed with the road to the Poiana
and got blood all over it
come here on the edge of the artesian fountain to see how
it’s penetrated by the spears of the water
trust me the ball of the sun got blood all over it
you only have to understand
when a crowd of scribes wiped the sweat
of their foreheads the idiot exaltations
on the pages of the books trust me poetry is only
what you understand
poetry is when you want to tell me something
that should stick to my mind
to my heart, which is a sad fish dreaming
to fall asleep in a wet vagina
a sad fish dreaming to give its last breath inside a
wet vagina, still not to be found
in my brain, are ticking clocks that don’t exist
are running taps long ago thrown
to the bin I love the sun but I can’t know
if it loves me
with its forehead, blooded by the thorns of the hill now
right now
I don’t love loneliness but nobody dragged me out
of its desert
nobody loved me I need somebody
listen
even a bulldozer getting on your nerves needs
somebody
and a dog with crying eyes sniffing
a trash bin
and a mad beggar fidgeting about at an
underground station
and all the people in the hospitals where I lay
for months
and all the cranes that lifted their melancholic necks
on the waste lands
as if they should have thrust their glossy hooks
in the moon when the whole
breath of the world stopped, and dragged it down
for my lover
who doesn’t exist

***

I don’t get it I’m very happy
it depresses me,
having to buy a bus pass
Sometimes I just want to eat
other times I just want to sleep
other times I just want to write
poetry and find
a simple girl like that one
in her jeans and jumper, who was standing
at the artesian fountain in Sfatului Square
and she seemed to have lost everything
in some love story
and she couldn’t care less

After two days

After two days of thinking I’d die
after I swallowed a box of Piafen
and after I vomited it after
I dreamt a crowd of characters
who were all I and who were taking care of me
gently covering my pain after
that I called her
Come to me I told her now
I look like a potato that sprouted
come to have fun
we’ll play beauty and
the beast at Predeal I didn’t succeed to
fall asleep here I can my mother can’t
live by herself at Predeal but I
felt I was going mad I left her
come to me Oana I love loneliness
Then I hang up and I told myself hell
is a white room where you lay tied-up and all
your teeth hurt and after they’ve all crumbled
new ones grow over night
already decayed.

***

it doesn’t even interest me
what’s going to happen
to me
I stuff him daily with two loafs of bread
Ianus, the animal
But he’s like Dambovita river,
at times
you can’t even tell which way it flows

Poetry

Two sparrows pull each other’s eyes out
a cleaning lady stands with
her head in the toilet, straight like a
candle – somebody grasps her ankles
and pumps

This is not poetry If that’s what you want
go to the cinema
In a poem Ianus goes to the park and
feeds the doves

Haiku

Red tulips
lie in buckets
with their heads broken
Did their minds take off?

second hand news

Somebody

Here it is, loneliness, itself indeed
spinning above my head
like a future pie
Divide and subdue it! he may well
yell, Ianus, from his damp corner
but loneliness is my inflatable doll
sailing on the blood waters of my brain
loneliness is I in black in tail coat
reciting poems on a pile of rusted iron
with “Oeuvres Completes” of
Roland Barthes under my arm because
nothing makes sense but
all carries significance and I say this
although my pockets are cram-full
with lists of ideas and archetypes
Loneliness is a man of future
tied-up in chains on the throne of a toilet bowl
for ever.

On music by Iaru

He was jolting the window to get hold of something
to thrust
his hooked fingers
in the hard, mad creature of the night

Is that all? the critic asks
suddenly blanching, tenderly throttling
All, all – answers
the engine-driver – you stretch it a little bit, son…
put something more into it…
Is that all?!?! howls a creature of air
taken out of the fridge and hastily bleached
What is all? asks the breakdown mechanic
pulling his smoky head out of the engine
like a late bomb
What is all – all?
All, all – answers the engine-driver
turning the key, pulling the crank, developing
the sadness, rattling the dark,
anchoring with the last dusty truck
the night.

Toilet paper preceded by the first poems (2004)

(what)

what can
my drunken baboon face mean
in front of the sea?
Like when we walked at night
in the water between Saturn and Venus
and we saw the stars
and we never saw
the stars mirrored in the sea
but that still touched me
told by others invented
by their imagination
because I only understand words
and some of them
talk

to the reader

and when you want to hang yourself
because the others fail to know you anymore
think of me
I always have time for you
I stay here rooted in words
and I marvel… look
your eyes turned beautiful like binary stars
above a heavy sea

***

we are others
it would be sad to be ourselves
When you’ve knelt once you are another once
when you’ve knelt twice
you are another twice
and so on

free

I am somebody who’s not dead yet
in spite of loneliness and cars
of good corridors and bad corridors
in spite of the girls who didn’t love me and
didn’t love me
I have a few meters of basement of my own
I know a few words I understand
some ideas
I have an expired passport and
very few hopes and
I want to have even fewer hopes
I can’t be bought or sold
—so poor that
in high-school I sold the tapes of my mother
who I love