Peycho Kanev writes

Blues in a New York Bar

You know, man, Charlie Parker was

the best, Miles, too, so was Thelonious

and Coltrane, said to me some guy, while

I was sitting alone at the bar, sipping slowly

from my glass of sadness. How did they do that?

I looked at his white clean skin, the reddish hair,

the expansive clothes, that came from his first-class life,

filled with holidays in the Maldives, big hits

at the stock exchange, pleasantly looking trophy wife…

Then I realized it was impossible to explain it to him.

I just returned to the music.

Outside, the sun was going down and slowly cocooning

my glass of bourbon in a rusty-copper light.

At the end I went out and left him alone with the secret. 

Legends of Jazz -- Wishum Gregory [top row, from left: JOHN COLTRANE, Count Basie, Dizzy Gallespie, Louis Armstrong. 2nd row, from left: THELONIOUS MONK, MILES DAVIS, Lester Young. 3rd row, from left: Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, CHARLIE PARKER, Oscar Peterson. bottom row, from left: Charles Mingus, Art Blakey]

Peycho Kanev writes

Russian Girls

Another hard late afternoon,

when I stop at Starbucks for coffee

after work. It is a hot summer.

The sun is settled comfortably in

the cloudless American sky and shines

irresistibly. I enter in a dark mood but it looks

as if some other sun is glowing inside.

A lot of blond girls sit on the tables. They laugh,

take selfies, text on their iPhones and talk

in that strange and beautiful language. They’re

so pretty, so perfect, so pure, exactly like morning

dew over the endless taiga.

I wondered if I could talk to them about

Stenka Razin or about Berdyaev, Shestov,

but they probably will not care for Mayakovsky,

or even less for Mandelstam.

I’m sure of that. They just want to sit and

talk about malchikov; to throw back that

fair silk of hair, making all men here to

sigh involuntarily; to cross their long naked legs

under the sun’s rays and just to live as if life

happened only in order for them to appear in

it. 

I watched how the virgin American boys glanced

at them behind the screens of their MacBooks,

how the baristas gently pronounced their names

as they call them to get the coffees – Yuliya,

Nadezhda, Svetlana, Elena, Anna, Marusya…

Oh, you virgin boys, I know what you want,

but you will never get it.

These girls, bringing so much light into your

plastic lives, are from another world and

for other men. Don’t even dream about them,

otherwise you will go mad of lust and

impossibilities.

As for me, I took my coffee and went outside,

and I once again looked at them through the window,

and I smiled, for there was still such beauty

in this ugly world.

 

Peycho Kanev writes

Sunday Boring Sunday

At my window

I watch my neighbor with his lawn mower

and it’s quiet in my room

The blinds are drawn as always

and I watch the movements of

that man in the stillness of this

Sunday morning

The walls just stand there

and it seems to me that even death is

trivial like

love is trivial

and suddenly I understand the meaning

of it all:

the bloody roses

the dim sun

the dark jails

the laughing hospitals

the mega-churches

the happy suicides

the big and heavy silence

and the question in this silence now is

Bob Marley or

Bob Dylan? 

Lawnmower Man -- David Reeves-Payne

Peycho Kanev writes

The Momentum

All that is here is somewhere else.

I see a black raven rubbing its beak

in the dust and the storm is coming:

we are naked under the clouds.

You said you see nothing but

the darkness in the night; the darkness

in life.

Who are you? – our God asks.

And we are looking up

where the sky used to be,

but now there is only me.

And you answered: We are everything,

but we are not there yet. 

 

 Raven -- Þorgrímur Andri Einarsson