Peycho Kanev - Five Poems

The Night

The moon talks to me
and tells me stories of tortures
and burned love;
sad songs are pouring out from
broken window
and here is only the smell
of stale wine and cigarettes;
outside
dogs are wailing in the dark
and nothing is real more than
it should be,
the dark stillness of time
is hanging like a broken clock
and finally the night
locks me in.



Let’s Go Back

I don’t know which is deeper –
the shadows born in darkness or the salt
of the earth sodden with blood?

The abyss is filled with blood, and the darkness
covers it as a lid,
shiny and lonely as the sun.

There, a bird flutters its wings,
voiceless over its egg.

Because of that, let’s go back,
where everything was simple and pure,
the dark blood slowly becomes clear,
and something is born, which is yet
to be named.



Kick it up a Notch

These leaves of grass,
these secrets buried in us!

We try each and every day
to trick our lives,
but we can’t.
And we wait
in this ivory tower
for our destiny to take the right
path!

Is that
our predestination?

The wind wears holes in our bodies,
the rotten structure of time, our cracks,
which we try to piece together with our backs
turned, each to the other.

In the empty holes of history
the currents whistle.

We learn, and
then, we forget.



Regret 

It has been seven years
and still

I cannot
walk upon your streets –

Belly full of butterflies
and yet I try sometimes,

past the pawnshop
and your rusty car,

parked in my brain.
These streets are veins –

and I remember your cut wrists.
Too hot outside:

to walk, to think,
to feel-

your advice on my Poetry –

Still trying, darling,
you see, even now,

my Teacher, my Friend,
be fearless!

I am getting better –
in what you practice now,

your finest Art.
The Poetry of Silence.



Mass

There is some dignity in death,
but we prefer to turn our heads.

In the ancient times,
the Greeks used to put coins on
the closed eyes or in the mouths
of their dead.

This way they were able to pay
Charon for passage across the river Styx,
because those who could not pay the fee,
or those whose bodies were left unburied,
had to wander the shores for hundreds of years.

The eyes of the living
are different today.

The soul of the living is wandering
without direction.

So many paths,
so many forgotten roads
lost in eternity, with so many milestones
covered in mildew,
and I am the only traveler.

The fading smell of God
is still sticking to the grass,
and I am walking;
my eyes are open.

But the eyes I look out of
are the same eyes the sky is looking
into.

And we are contented,
our time is now and it’s neverending,
but remember,

when we close the eyes of the dead,
they open our souls.



Peycho Kanev is the Editor-In-Chief of Kanev Books. A new collection of his poetry, titled Requiem for One Night, will be published by SixteenFourteen in 2013. His poems have appeared in more than 900 literary magazines.