Hajku de l'arbre coupé

Ne pas savoir écrire
des mots coupés
triste compagnie

ode to the polish verse commander

designed by history
the walls I saw reflected
upon me the words of comfort
of a disconcerting dreamer


The side-street of a glance
is in your pocket, in your grave
and wears no verb



in the night-time of a text
called love in colour
pavements said paint


deep into the crossroad
of green and dark lights
walks multiply

Terrain Vague

Two drops, just two drops

Twice the number of passing gent doubled
Blinking for all that dust, seeds of birth
Relaxed feeling of a sinking sun
Reflected in the Duna through the queens of Buda

Repeated the words of a picture, I thought
Shining from the top of that hill I thought
I saw you standing among those misrepresentations

Buda has one empty heart I imagined
Stone walk up to the rear of the great hungarian hills
I threw a stone back to the sun

Imagined the forest which leads
Through the labyrinth of Pest
Into the sunlight your reflection
Threw upon me, my memory.

házi kocsmája

Smell of tobacco in the plastic chairs
Soda in your cheap wine
Good wine is for food
Old coffee resting amidst the fumes
of menthol cigarettes
of mosquitoes from the Tisza

The dog is wailing for company
We recite our week's walks and encounters
How was work, where is the wine?
Home-mades and home-stomachs
Glory be for a bit of kocsmája
in my memory box

Oh for a good wine discussion




I wrote the following lines for the picture above last year. I was told by my girlfriend, who is Hungarian, that this description of her father’s “kocsmája” (* which stands for “his pub”) made her very sad. I wanted to know what exactly she felt, but she simply swept the matter away, as those were my own words, my own images – my own relative reality.
Of course this didn’t satisfy me. The remarks I receive when deciding to picture the debris of a broken-down building don't just stem from a sense of harmony between a population and a government's politics of representation, nor simply from a sense of national pride. To me, it's a gap in between pride and history.
The no-man lands of construction and the marginalised bits of history lie behind the big puma or macdonalds banners, and those kilometres of temporary walls are symbolic holes in a country having to imagine its future at extra euro-speed.
(The irony of an outsider's position, to catch the cracks whilst through his own country the wind of financial cracks blows down an economy so fragile)
The banners and temporary walls on the way to university, to the supermarket, to the bank, to the bar, to bed, to the night-job, to the tube... those banners stay up, reflected everywhere in the plastic colours left by soviet history. They stay up, and mirrors are everywhere that tell history in their own moments.
This, at least, is how I see my relative reality.

sok boldogság után

Families for no season - Család

Hungarian has this unique capacity of 'gathering meaning'. One breath is enough.
Patience, in its gatherings, to give flavour to its spices. Hours of conversation for the well-being of some grounded meal.
Certainly I follow an already paved notion of discovery. But how good it is to be welcomed into it. A garden for a meal, a street for an encounter, a concert for the ears and silence for the planes.

find your road - droms

Besh O Drom, Zöld Pardon, May 2008.

Blasting brass, sörs and lickors
Jumping Jig of Jolly Jammers
Like a time of past joy
Figures of pleasure
Feelings of distance

Paths of Crossroads
Only in the square can spring
Pusta born youth
Pustas, leopards,
Born square and wild

Musicians change at each gig, but tunes stay the same.
I figure this is how it's always been. At risk, now, of seeing a 'survival operation' by a network of musicians. One would learn other's words, lines, tunes - the other melody, the melody of the other?

Parc for a roll-around

nice old shiver

A shiver like a warm hand on cold legs
Like a book saying death out loud
Holes of no colours, gaps of no length
Pictures shivering digital and crisp
Ice-frozen in the I

les fenêtres font le voyage

I had to finish the year off with some words for my three countries of adoption... adopted in travel, one rooted in words and images, countries as travels rooted in themselves.

les fenêtres font le voyage

des fenêtres pour bus, pour des images en déroute
des têtes pour stimulus, pour des voyages, du doute
une contine de soirée bien perdue dans mon sac
déjà lui bien caché au grenier de vieilles pâques

Windows of the freeborn men

at the bottom of my glass, no drop
alone, breath fills the gap, dreams
never giving a tip to their endings
I feel her hand, and an easter bell
sings again

hol az ablak?

Kis ajtóm, kis világom, gyerekem nézd meg oda
a színes, a szinészvilág, kint az igazi mozi
Az út az ablakon, ha a szemeid jönnek ideig
mint a husvét amit elveszett a tata, régen a katona

a régi Renault - East as a beginning

How many times have we seen someone say
Abroad, as broad a road as frontiers are thick
How far, how far have we seen someone walk
Along and inside the parks of the strange
Broadway capitals.

How long will it be for our legs to tremble
and fear to bring excitement to our doorstep
Excitement to be pored back into our new neighbour's cup
One thin, fragile, but recognisable cup
Where eyes lie.

The old Renault in the main park
Standing like a flagstone at the corner of eyes
Doorstep to past anecdotes, souvenir now so dually
Pronounced

into the railwork
turned flat grey pusta
turned river Danube
turned black mountains
turned high-circling roads

soon at your doorstep
a junkyard of left-overs
the scattering of memory
and the loss of tragic colours.

Nyugati Pályaudvar - cheap flights at 4a.m.