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.

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.

Here: Cluj-Napoca, Romania

10 9 2010 Cluj- Café Corso:

Next to me is a planter in a window. Three spaces hold three long, rectangular plastic containers. The plastic containers are full with dirt, and the plants rise up from the dirt. And the table I sit at is nestled up against the window with these plants, and another table. Between the two tables is an angular space where the white of the floor, and part of the seat of a chair are visible.

Three old men sit beneath an umbrella. One of them strokes beneath his chin, then his lower jaw bone with an index finger that looks like a weathered walnut. The door to the massive cathedral is ajar. I can see this from here. The taxis line up in front of the cathedral. Here, they are white cars, with the yellow taxi sign fixed to the rear-roof section. The side of the cars display a thin, black and white checker decal, just below the passenger windows.

I see through a space in the trees, the waving of a blue flag.





7 9 2010 Cluj: Le General- on the balcony



Prime seat here looking out over the street, and the wavering of the skinny trees in their holes- really, their holes- they are put in the sidewalk and can see fully, how big they are allowed to grow. They will never exceed this metal grate. They will see that one day they will be growing up against a metal plate. They see that one day their roots will be pushing into the stone squares of the walkway, that one day they will face the sad blanket of the asphalt.

Hey and I have here a beer. It says: regele berii in romania. It is called Ursus, which means bear.



Over there is hotel meteor. Overhead, we see the orthodox church dome and steeple, black and tinged with slight oxidation, and even a patch of burnt red from god knows what, and on the other side of the horizon, we see the catholic church. And there is the blue sign that says euro-gsm, and of course in my simplicity, I conjoin these words to create a term for some ecstatic novice traveler recounting his daytrip to the Eiffel Tower. And the table I sit at is front and center of this balcony, and is a blue tile mosaic, with aqua and royal blues and some white interspersing this. It is only a patterned table, there is not an attempt at pictorial representations today. Not at this fucking table at least. And a red van has it’s parking lights flashing and has the passenger wheels jacked up onto the curb and there is nobody to be seen, but the driver’s window is open. This street is right next to the pedestrian walkway. And I count twenty-two of those beige colored umbrellas, the squarish ones that they hoist up over the tables, here. And I see an old man in a beige shirt and camel-colored pants, and old people fade into the sand in their own way don’t they, beginning with their attire. And over there is a woman in a bright green like mint shirt doing little gestures with her hand to a woman in a cream-colored jacket and a bright strawberry shirt, and now the police go by and in this country it is spelled polita. And there is a woman who like bounces from foot to foot as she walks, shifting her considerable weight, and wearing a garish bright green shirt with some olive stripes on it. And looking down, I see a man carrying a purse, and a blue plastic sac, and the woman carries a child in a pink sweatshirt, a white and white trainers, and the woman herself wears a black, veil-like head covering. I wonder about deja-vu. Perhaps it is a sort of sign post, an indicator that you are on the correct path, that you have tapped into a greater conciousness.



6 9 2010 Cluj

4:47

Here at Corso café. Here we see the gothic-style catholic church with it’s mottled, orange and purple tint. There is a man in a tan-leather jacket on the street sitting next to a tree. The base of the tree has been painted white. The streets are full of long, dark-haired girls, and bent, bulbous old women. The city exists beneath a web of wires. Maybe there was a man who was in charge of stringing up the electric /telephone /video /other wires. I picture him carrying the coiled wires on his back, and instead of using a ladder, he would toss up the wires, hoping to hook them on the pole, then moving to the next one, and stringing the city together like with dark garlands. Maybe he had only one arm, and wore a long-sleeved shirt with one sleeve pinned up.







4 9 2010 Cluj-Napoca, Romania

9:16 am



Hotel. The carpet is a nauseating red this morning. I am here, alone in the room. A television shows romanian news. A weather man is in a tomato colored shirt. An anchorwoman delivers sultry. Behind me the kitchen staff has taken up seats and they begin speaking and smoking.