KiKi: my dear rough diamond

this is from belgrade, for my friend who loves garfield

Big square, dark table. Big room with one big doorway covered by a sheet of plywood. A small piano in the corner- the upright kind. The coca-cola ad says racoreste-te. And there is a little triangle of light beneath the stairs and the dark wood of the chairs and little brass rivets in the chairs holding down the leather, and the menu, is spelled meniu and features a picture of a group of drinking glasses, in orange, yellow, green, pink, and the rims of the glasses have shadows, right, and so the photo is a weird raised effect and is like a close-up of some tentacled octopus arm.




Out of the window, there is a little square of a window on the way up the staircase, and I see the pink of some little flowers through this, and in the corner of the stars is a big stone pot, and it has a plant like a green leafy one with some of the ends of the leaves yellowed and tinged with black, and I hear the flick of the lighter now.

if someone has flushed the alphabet away

in belgrade, boy approaches basket, pretending it is a horse

16 9 2010


Could be anywhere today



But still, there is the sheen of the glass ashtray. There is the liquid-black of the unused straw. The middle-aged woman swinging her arm like military while staring at the ground and plodding over the stones. There is the obligatory old man in a beige jacket and khaki pants- his posture is such that his chin is level with his shoulders.

We hear a barking laugh that sounds like an aggressive, feigned hilarity. A baby in an orange and black stroller, bumping over the cobblestones. He has deep-black hair, sits fully upright, and looks to his left, to where we sit. More than looks, he is glaring; his brow is furrowed and his faint eyebrows are fully tensed.





15 9 2010



Went back to the galeriile fortuna café. Same table today. Same angle. Later in the day today, though, but, and, the light is lighting up the wall of the old church and it has become a glowing cobalt, and over here, some group of Swiss students has sat down. One of them is a girl with the face of an angry boy, and she keeps glaring and looking scornfully at the currency here, the Lei, as the others produce wallets, dig in purses, and actually, they are all girls at that table, except for one boy who is small and Indonesian looking.

And I see the entrance to a sewer, and there are little raised ‘U’s’ on the thing. Little ones and big ones, spiraling out from the center. As if someone has flushed the alphabet away, and the letter U went careening into the sewer cover causing raised u's for the pedestrians to negotiate.

One of the students eats a white coconut or maybe white chocolate thing, looks almost like dead skin, and I hear it crunch, and it is most likely not the skin of a corpse that she has been drying for months and is now eating in public, feeling secure that the others are fooled by the chips bag that her harvest has been slyly deposited into, right.

Right, and today, I walked through the cemetery again, and I sat down and happened upon some teeth in the ground. I dug with rocks and pulled out an old set of ceramic false teeth. I used two sticks as if they were tongs, to lift the teeth, thinking at the time that maybe they were haunted, and I placed the teeth in a tree.

Here's What Happened on Your Birthday, Stephen Kaskade!

Belgrade

14 9 2010


Cluj-Napoca Galeriile Fortuna

Outdoor café, perfect weather, perfect old stone square and buildings weathered the way I like and perfect colors.



Here, my receipt tells me: “MULTUMIM!”

We see the man in the suit stride by with the flash of a golden tie. The table of three girls smoking cigarettes and they keep looking at me and it could be a variety of reasons. And here are these bright pink/ Nantucket Red pants tight on an old woman with the weathered face of a pug. And the little birds chase each other to steal the bread from the mouth of their brother. And an old gypsy woman sits on the edge of a bench, facing the back of the bench, which enables her to pound at the back rest in adamant gestures holding meaning only for her.



Yesterday I saw a wedding party on the steps of the orthodox church- they released pigeons into the air. Today A white and dazed looking bird wanders amidst this roving herd of pigeons. If you were smaller, be damn sure this roving avian mass would be intimidating and more and more I see how the dinosaurs are inside of the birds.



An old woman holds up a bottle to the waitress, pleading for water. The waitress smirks at the old gypsy woman, and obliges. I am disturbed. The bottle is covered in orange plastic, and was previously used to contain yoghurt or some other cream-fruit beverage, and it seems to me that the rule should be that you can only refill water bottles with water, or at the very least, the bottle should be transparent. One must see the water one drinks. And can anyone enlighten me as to the function of all this pigeon head bobbing? The other birds are not like this.

Morning Milk and Cereals

entering the carpathians

13 9 2010 Cluj-Napoca at Transylvania Hostel, kitchen

10:37-10:47



Look where you’ve eaten breakfast: we can see the spots of muesli that cling to the inside of the bowl. There is yellow, and brown and banana color. If we look long enough at these grain clusters, we see the face of a dog who is rabid and biting into his own paws. The outside of the bowl has a glossy purple stripe around the upper half. The bottom half is white. The bowl has a narrow base and opens up from that, like an open ceramic flower.



A key card is needed to enter the kitchen space, and mine rests on the table in front of me, to my right, and in line with this computer. The card is white, and has a red sticker on it. The edges of the sticker are black, where the adhesive property of the thing has picked up dirt and residue and other filth from the hands that hold it.

The chairs here have the Ursus Bear beer logo on them. This morning, the bear seems to be in full lotus, wearing a tagine pot as a hat, and letting his legs become the tentacles of the octopus.



Ah ha! I see you, little Heineken keg in the corner.



And in front of me a simple sign printed in bold font on a white piece of paper, and hung horizontally on a small bulletin board:



“Morning

Milk and Cereals.”

old people who do not wish to swim or do really, anything

Cluj-Napoca, Romania

12 9 2010


3:39-4:07 pm

Cluj-Napoca, Romania



We see the old woman dipping a spoon into a plastic bag. The contents of the bag are not discernible from here. Behind her is a grey plastic crate, that looks like a milk crate- until I see that there are four more, evenly spaced, and that one of them is rusted, meaning that these plastic crates are metal crates, and so, perhaps they are fixed to the ground. Perhaps they shield some electrical thing. Perhaps they are the front line guarding the underpinnings of a city. The old woman’s legs rest on the low step on which she sits. She sits, not with her legs out in front of her, but resting to what would be her left side. The left leg on her looks reddish and purplish. It looks somehow bulging and uneven in unexpected places. It could be part of a tree; it could be a painted, craggy rock; it could be a fat leg that someone decided to burn- they burnt away the skin of her leg to set free these new colors.



A tree with flaccid leaves clinging with a sort of why-do-I-bother-I’m-gonna-die-anyway attitude.



An old man on a bench with a turtleneck, a burgundy hat with a navy band- almost a feminine hat, and his little mouth is open in a slot, and I have learned that when, on old people, that lower lip curls in, it may be that they have lost those teeth, and so this man sits, and he may as well be a floating cetacean siphoning for krill, and but he has his legs crossed tightly in the way of old people who do not wish to swim or do really, anything. But he is transforming, and now he seems to be a sort of canine panting in the sun, tied to a tree- he looks straight ahead, dully, but sometimes cars catch his eye, or maybe it is passing birds, or young people. This old man stares at a college kid who drapes his leather jacket over one shoulder, wears red pants and smokes. This old man stares and turns his head to follow the progress of this younger man. Now the old man stares up into the sun, but is quickly distracted by that flying bird.

The old woman who was sitting on the low step with the odd leg has finally shifted and sits forward, turns again to pick up a blue piece of plastic, then looks forward again- but she has revealed more of her leg, and I cannot tell now whether there is some sort of protective cast or wrap on it, or if she possesses an elephantitus-leg. It is enormous. It is a massive, uncooked kebab that she must always walk on and rest her other leg on while she stares into the depths of the street. Her hair is cut as if with a bowl, and she may be the type of person who would paint her own glasses in pastel colors with cheap paint- which would have saved her the money she spent on the glasses she is wearing.

And now she is up!

And she hobbles, and her momentum is more side-to-side then forward. She walks in a slow and unsteady walk. Walking on an outsize kebab is the walking of the inebriated. Now she is at the public fountain. She rinses a plastic bottle and submerges it! She picks up some litter from the street and tosses it into the middle of this oval-shaped, sandstone pool, right here in the middle of the pedestrian walkway, this pool. Now she has her hand in the fountain, and is splashing water into the street, over and over, she removes water from the fountain.