MORE POETRY I HAVE WRITTEN

As I watch you resting in bed,
I make a wish and draw a little closer,
intending not to wake you up.
This is for encouraging me to see the bright side of everything.
This is for absent friends.
This is for the warmth, the softness, that you irradiate
as soft as your puffy nightgown...
as soft as your closed eyelids...
as soft as the cascade of golden hair falling upon the pillow...
I have all the reasons to describe this picture in a poem.
For I want to take it and put it in a frame
before the years tear us apart.
To keep that picture, warm and full of twilight glow.
A likeness of the love that you give me
in spite of all the clashes we have had.
For I wish that you would never fade away.
Yet we cannot stay like this forever,
it's a painful truth,
and we know it well.
So let us stay close to each other
for as long as we are allowed.


Light, white and warm, incides in countless crystal glass prisms,
becoming little rainbows, little colourful rainbows, little rainbows of love.
So many little rainbows and so many bright colours
reaching my soft hands, both my shoulders, this short and tangled strawberry blond hair,
reflecting themselves in honey eyes full of merry tears,
filling me with acceptance of what there is,
ecstatic, clinging to the experience, forgetting everything else.

Prisms, rainbows, colourplay,
rare flowers of a light garden, flowers with petals in all bright colours,
bleeding hearts, geraniums, fuchsias, hyacinths, linden blossoms...
Fruits: persimmon, starfruit, autumn plums, winter lemons, passion fruit...
And the forbidden fruit, of course!
Flutterbies, ladybugs, dragons the size of my fingers,
officers' uniforms, ladies' parasols,
can be seen through the carousel of prisms.

"There was an old lady tied up in a basket,
17 times as high as the moon..."
In her left hand, she carried a broom
to sweep all the storm clouds away.
So that the loveliest pieces of art, those rarities,
would remain sublime as on the first day.

There is a waltz played on a little accordion somewhere beyond the limits of reason.
And it goes like this:
Eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei...
If you follow the melody without looking back, without stopping,
you'll reach a lone carousel
full of bright colours and of the waltz.
The steeds are dragons with dragonfly wings, rainbow cows, marshmallow serpents.
Eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei...
It's twilight, close to night, but it's warm,
countless colourful lights shine in the carousel.
Flowers of gunpowder fire in all the bright colours
fill up the vast dark garden of the night sky.
There is no storm or battle in this land,
and the bursts of rainbow flames are the closest thing to both lightning and gunfire there is.
Eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei...
Celtic crosses, linden blossoms, the dark side of the moon.
The scent of gunpowder, that of melissa and linden blossoms.
Fruits: persimmon, starfruit, autumn plums, winter lemons, passion fruit...
And the forbidden fruit, of course!
Somewhere a Celtic cross, the circle crossed, the cross encircled,
the circle crossed or the cross encircled?
The waltz of a carousel, that of a music box,
with two lovely young people embracing each other,
an officer in uniform and a lady in red waltzing on the top:
Eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei...
a carousel full of various littlepeople
like trolls and nixies and the like...
while, watching the carousel, thirteens of maidens dressed in twilight pink,
maidens spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning,
spinning cotton into moon-white silver,
spinning silver entwined with this poem,
clinging each to her sharp spindle,
humming the waltz as they spin the fluffy white cotton:
Eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei, eins-zwei-drei...
In the obsessive rhythm of the circle, the spiral, that which returns and returns.

I once had a dream in which I fell down off a cliff,
into the dark and cold which seemed to have no end.
For a second, I believed that I would die.
Then, suddenly, I awakened
to find myself almost fallen off the bed.
I was alive...
but my dream had died in exchange.

For a while, I felt that I had no escape,
but then...

As a child, I usually had a resting place
underneath some covers.
It was warm and soft and cozy
very cozy
and I usually took to exploring this underworld
where I was queen, star, whatever I could be on my own.
Whenever they were unkind,
I intrenched myself... NO! I sought solace
in those warm and cozy underworlds
looking for dragons (not to slay)
looking for beasts, for trolls, for strange friends
I was not afraid of the dark
for the night was soft and full of colours
and it all was so chrysalis-like
wrapping myself in that resting place...

(In my early teens, I started catching frogs alive, and then...)
Frogs go "frog, frog, frog"
They only know the name of their species.
How funny!
Green, with bright amber eyes.
In spring, the ponds are full of them
and it is not rare to hear a little male serenading his Juliet:
"Frog, frog, frog, frog, frog, frog, frog".
In those days, I took a plastic cup and went down to the ponds.
And then I knelt by the waters, cool and mirror-like,
and tried to catch one with the cup as a trap.
So, after at least twenty minutes, it paid off.
Now frogs swallow their prey whole
(what should the poor bugs think about it?)
This is why, in summer, a frog that has had fireflies glows in the dark.
But back to the story.
So I have a frog in a cup, which I carefully drain, sparing the frog alone.
I put the young male, green and cool, in my pocket, 
drain the cup in the pond, and pour myself an Aquarius
(this is for being born under the sign of the cupbearer)
and pop the frog in for liquid courage.
(PAUSE)
And then, quite calmly, I drink the frog,
sending this suitor into a death trap
which is, nevertheless, warm, dark, cozy.
This fate has been met by four or five marsh frogs
and a goldfish.

Not long ago, I wrote a poem
which was a parody of Snoilsky's Lützen.
In that poem, I rewrote the lyrics
not to deal with an epic battle,
but to deal with some young people drinking in a pub after class.
The parody poem was written in Swedish
and it stayed true to its source.

A hypertext is a text which derives from an earlier text, or hypotext.
Many of my works are based upon such hypertextuality:
The Countess of Toggenburg is a hypertext of Othello,
and so are Die Upon a Kiss
and the play in Winter Roses.
A less serious hypertext of Othello
is a parody I wrote in my teens,
"The Travesty of Othello".
In which I make allusions to shot glasses, Monty Python, and the Lewinsky scandal.
Already the title itself is hypertextual,
as well as a sharp pun
on "tragedy" and "travesty".
I wrote it as a style exercise
apart from the whole canon of István & Réna
(which included a short story, a play, poems, a graphic short story,
and, as a coda, the original short story told from different POVs, à la Rashomon).