Adriána Kóbor


from As Well As The Mirror


The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of place, time, or circumstances. This magical cord may stretch or tangle, but never break.

The red thread has connected me, the girl without an ankle, the red threat,
not broken enough to choose the fate, the red threat has connected you,
the boy with strong ankles and a hand to throw, broken enough
not to choose. Now, we are broken enough. Regardless the circumstances,
we will throw soft rocks at the heads of strangers, grow keen green knees
to kneel in front of temples, as the red threat left society and our ankles
trembled, broken up, regardless the direction not chosen, floating
in the excitement of the free. The threads we left elsewhere - at the Ufficci,
the Fontana di Trevi, in Fountaineableu, at Mount Saint Michelle,
in Moscow, on the Mongolian Plain, at mount Ural - drinking coffee
in strong bold sweaters, usually outside of the season, talking about
the safe state of affairs in the world that surrounded us,
but never broke us. It shattered our faith in everything we knew though.
While I was determined to recite my most hidden thoughts in crowded bars
situated commonly in the suburbs, while you became a chauffeur of rich
folks, remembering what we have done wrong, to row away from
each other like red vermined boats, without the sweaters now, sweat-naked,
cultured like a cheese, drinking red wine out of the bottle, swearing at
the birds chirping on the shore of rivers, any kind of
happiness life should have given us. Now I’m watching
everything in reverse. Just like in a movie, it is spring, I quote
Shakespeare but do not know anything about dramas, comedies and alike,
my mind is only dazzled by the sacred unity of the three,
only the catastrophes are left there undulating
in the circular whirlwinds at real homes’ frontyards, their private lives
whitewashed and hung, colourful and valuable, the red threads hanging from
our necks, drooping, as if on faithful but wrong dogs,
which must have got the rabies and have been fooling around
with foamy mouths scarfing down
the earths and heavens. There is a thought there, a thought I’ll always
remember, that I invited you for dinner and you reclined. Red marinated long
ribs of the cow, with the nauseating smell of meat and honey.
I grab the red bakelite telephone and I think I am like Anita Ekberg,
so anyone would like to see me in a white light-woven morning cloth
gulping up coffee from a Bialetti machine.
My leaving hidden behind your first espresso,
my departure and your torso, my last simmering,
our lost adventure. I don’t depart and I do not feign departure again;
being elsewhere or leaving won’t clear the troubled waters I am in, nor
the mistakes I made when I conjugated the verbs deduced from: murder,
engagement, decline. White roses break the blinds and
the disastrous whiteness of the days. Our decision to be nowhere but
beyond that which would trouble us, true engagement, probably
a ring I let fall too deep in a well, filled with blood, the genes
and the gurgling sound of scraping throats, death throes
and heartthrobs. I walk the metros in search for that red ribbon, which was
unable to connect us, my broken ankle with your emotion deprived face
as I fold and wrench my legs around you, your empty chest, which
does not even rise from breathing. You are throwing a stone at
my face, ever faithful, never bound by anything at all, except negligence.



Here I lay wordless, X

The starts are fixed like the endings. Here I lay
wordless as an X, dreaming of
prefixes and suffixes.
Here I.

In the elevator, remembering porno with pop-
corn. Remembering the erectile
function and disfunction
mathematically
described.

Here am I.
A heterosexual with a laid horse
between her legs in riding position.
My father rides out farther on the hermionic fields.

The cellular mechanism of impotence
is hardly protected by the fact
that once what hangs
used to be erect.
I am a statue
in disuse.

The fetish of urban organization is supported
by the fact that buildings are
stamped out of the ground
on the fundament of one
holding the key
to heavens.

The globe is round, I grab space-balls and play with them,
as I used to do with the marbles. My eyes, resolute,
a substitute for nothing.
So do I kneel:
needless.

Where they erect they fall.
They erect where they fall.
Returning from work, standing
he ignores the midpoint.
Remembrance is pop-corn.

Where I lay I trust. Where I lay I axe it.
I am still identical: the beginning, the midpoint and the exit.
Remembrance, the lost potential of popping corn.
Where I lay I’m able to erect.

The axises, in the paradynamic closed inertia,
are the referentials for negligence.
We ride out. We are standing,
kneeling, popping and jobbing.

Eyes are resolute.
Pop smiles.

Where I lay I erect.


Other then the circus, payment unacceptable

The concert started at the same time when it was finished.
The relativity of time hit inspectors and audience in the back,
there was spying, generalized spying, confused as looking at.
Till a badly payed clap fell onto the stage.
There was gasping. Anything that happened
happened in a minuscule point of the measurable time.
Limit. Time. Shorter it couldn't have been. No time. Limits.
A point. Apoint. Appoint.

The black bearded man well-seated next to a pig disrobes
gradatim the camera’s hidden behind the curtains,
implanted in the walls. But who were they?,
no one exactly knows.
Before the applaus had hit the iron stairs,
may the fools become lame and the play reverse.
Flights they say, to refer to the distance between one stair
and the poor, another. This should or should not
proof failsafe
for measuring the distance between east
and west.

The common always holds a knife. One ought not
talk about the common. One ought not talk. Chatter.
Chatter. Chatter.

Like tiny birds the pain and the passion is leaving the audience.
Pecking up tiny piecemeal of peace created and thrown there
by the actors. Dilettants!, like multicolor gerberas imperfectly
arranged in a vase. The dog on the stage growls and its
growling confuses, simpletons, spies and on-lookers
just the same. The pecking’s cadence is regular,
an order, the breathing of the folks proceeding
like a metronome’s ticking. After a decent
workday they can all use some culture.
Vulture. Culture. Culttrue.

One must admit what one hasn’t done, one by one, one must admit.
May the insisting applaus be the major proof of it all.
May the non-existing applaus be the major
disproof of it all.

Coins drop over the lats at last. Nobody is still watching how the play carries on. Credit cards fall. Bills do. Sometimes the worth of life drops. It all can be measured by the economical means
of trading. The tokens we play with. Our lives. Sustainable are only the jokes and the kisses
we exchange. All those money counts, once, twice, umpteenth, it counts for each and
many. Any. Many. Money. More. Any. Many. Money. More. How irresistible it is,
as love, it goes and golds. Unholds.
Money is a maniac. It’s old.

The tailor marks on the costumes are covered up. The suits are custom-made. They hide omnivous
insults, the personality of the person they conceal being as ridiculous as the robe in itself.
Where feet aren’t straight, backs don’t straighten and teeth won’t strengthen. That can’t be
by itself. The audience has hardly anything to look at. There is a hell of a heaven of a lot
underneath, where a manifold and a multitude goes missing, as they tear fear and reveal.
A mirror falls. The curtains yawn. The skies invisible inside, yell.
Still, everyone knows what the weather is like outside. They entered the theater
from the cunning cold. Cold and bold. Upheld.

Not much matters. The plot loosens and loses, it becomes interactive like a show.
The fortune wheel eats people and spy, the common and the well-dressed
all the same. It breaks their necks and collars as during medieval times.
All by the culture they were pressed into! The rats are happier outside
as they know how to survive in the sheerness of the lacks,
how to descend and ascend in and from dark holes.

When the folks return home they put on their pyjamas,
as a habit, regular, well-behaved and worn-out.

Only one actor stands out, after the building had blackened from inside.
He poses questions to the director who isn’t even in. He is absent.
Holding a red carnation in his hands torn from his breast pocket,
he sucks his fingers, telling himself that the hunger will be on
but over very soon. Our spirits stand behind the moon,
last edition, looking at all this.
Because of insufficient saldo,
payments are declined.

Except the circus. Except.



Who the Fuck’s Alice a.k.a. The Handmaiden’s Gin

is being put and poured out of proportion. A hydrogen driven Zhiguli, Pater Zastrugi Familiaris, in front of the frozen Windows as Microsoft Word is staking the saving of the opened documents during the highly recommended update of the operation system, a saved one behind Each West Bank, to be utilized by those automatized home maids brewing, in their horrific maidiness, in a home constructed bath drone, leaving to the local convenience store to do groceries, but mainly to buy tabac and fertilizers, out of proportion and one at a time as the doorbells ring in their inborn cadence and the bluebells are knocking their heads against each, head-banging their highly developed but soft clearablue heads into the pavement they have been planted next to. Marie raises her bedridden radium fingers above the bed to raise the sensation of having been allotted solely to dreaming. The elevations the streets choke into are the elevations of the frightened: contorting their daily, maidiness into gastroscopized wine-walks, watching and turning on cheetahs wasting their tongues inside the radio. The deception is yet to finish this time. The Baltic States had declared independence and deep regret and sorrow about their abandonment and isolation, good isolation doesn’t let through artificially induced heat, the Churchill blues remembered from a long time back at least from the point of view of the Yalta conference, one crab at that time, lillies-of-the valley and winter snow, reacting as complete strangers locked-in in atom reactors on the arising doubt of something more, for example: cancer. By that time Henry Miller already was dumping capricorns into his swimming pool in the deep edge of California. We, handmaidens were running berserk, during the banal-blatant bicentennial binaries of the system. We aren’t as useful as nuns and nurses are and we are far more innocent. The edge of the forest is a fuzzy tale. We sell it to soldiers and infants all alike. Once, I’ve known a cultural fertilizer called Kellogg’s, breakfast cereals, America and finally the entire world could be booming with highly sensitive and creatively fostered children, party-grown conceptual artists to be put into the parties and beyond: into the D. Trunk, to finally be set into the fields, the Peasants’ Union to sub for hard men’s labour. The handmaiden is now filling jackets with sands that will be worn in schools by ADHD-children called the squeeze jacket which will substitute the calming hugging effect of a real-described body. Teachers can’t compensate for the affective lackage of our homes, Mother Disastrous the Saint. Patrick Conrad was a real dandy, he said, a father I suppose, he doesn’t talk about Sergio Leone watching the final extinction of the vultures, neither about Richard Gere, nor the Nespresso machine I was planning to buy, nor George Clooney, nor Clive Owen in the Children of Men, supporting the Black Madonna into parturition, against any environmental recommendations of the times, tearing out the menstrual cup we were introduced and washed and disinfected by on Job’s Wonder. The handmaiden needs to alternate her manners, the pussy, in order to reproduce the plastic, shed real blood in non-recoverable tissues. We have been awakened by such kind miracles and put to sleep by them very early. Those were environmental solutions and our dying environmentalists, a sort of Walden, raised and destroyed by GMO-corn, for example. She still drawls along in a crochet-cornered morning cloth in Heideggerian fashion, as she dwarrels and dwells, using the same vacuum cleaner and tumble dryer as an ampersand the family received during the International World AfFair right after the WWII, when the Golden Record had been put into Voyager-16 for everyone, and shot into space. Being a handmaiden lately is being labelled as the hardest rocking rocket science. In her dreams she is checking the stock market prices of live stock, as if she had appended her eyes on a Swiss watch, Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, still Wagnerian, Persona-like, especially the market value of those domesticated bovines placed on the purple emballage of her milk chocolate she could easily glide out on, weren’t there banana boxes to guard her way and hold her. Boots are made for chalking, wherever she walks her steps detect some more dead bodies, deceased by being overlooked, she perceives with heightened clarity. The lonely manners of a fox lead her into an operation room in the Wild East, Robert de Niro laying on a memory foam mattress waiting for the breast enlargement of a friend he will be witnessing turning into a girl, in order to get a directorial blowjob at United Nations, his/her greatest dream, to complain only somewhat later about sexual harassment at a government ill-body protected by an organisation’s lifelong innocence since the electors made systems largely undetectable in their effects, avoiding to speak up about rural matters and shout to be protected against the black and blue knock-out-blue-dots of the century. I replace them: with my tongue rolled up as a roll’o, downplaying the death of the swan in Bubble Gumm, Tsaikovski’s ballet, watching Marina Abramovic selling an illustrated Golden Pages on the corner of some umpteenth street at a kiosk, for 25-50 thousand dollars, each, the artist, homeless for a fortnight, present as rich as Snicker’s. Do you know how she looks like, the handmaiden? She incorporated the show: her belly is an ironing machine, her hands are cloth wires and so are her vocal chords, as she sings armenian folk- or-love songs for Little Merrit, a black bird, looking into the deep nukeclear white winter, looking for food for good, her mouth a sink so anything you put in it just disappears and regurgitates, some like chitchat. The handmaiden was present for centuries until called feminist by not exactly their own sort. But what do feminists do with their lives? What feminists do with their independent lives is more remarkable than a handmaiden ever managed before. They produce independent porn movies for the lite. De-lite! They examine their bodies, their right legs and their wrong legs, still looking like the rod of a dwell, a rodent in a dwelling, hiding under leaf forks, baring their decorative pink gums, cushions one can disappear into. No man will put his face into it, nevertheless to calm his macho phase induced by all that female independence, as a form of overcompensation, the fraternal leave, meaning something completely different than the night-shop abandonment of their own seed - they wake up as the first one and go to bed as first, without the urge to be touched, without the urge to masturbate themselves. The most beautiful lonely souls are condemned to stay home masturbating themselves to death. Then, in the dark, I pose the question in twenty-three poses in the dark enlightened by itself, my arms welly put, my hands resting on my belly-button, pleased palms, but I prove unable to force out the answer. Ants are afraid that I would destroy their hills, as I walk around with the garden hose, and I am afraid of the ants will build a larger and more perfect society than ours. We send white pictures with roses for the Artists’ Birthday, without knowing when art was born (porn). I remember those handmaiden-necks disappearing in those large grips, stubby fingers, thin fingers, bony fingers, all type of fingers I can indolently quite imagine. Everyone had touched a woman in a wrong way, as a woman can only be touched in a wrong way when not asked for and her inclinations are supposed to be missing (wild innocence). A woman is hard to reapply once detached, and you know what becomes supervised first and only: the l-one-ly. The amount of dust in the universe mainly realized by supernovas and red giants and freshly born stars. I think Ferrari. I telltale them I’m still looking for my Lamborghini guy and I’m planning to turn myself into a barbie. My sorrow must be for a rich one. First they laugh then they are keen on giving me advice, although I can’t imagine the thought to pinky swear for something more than becoming a lifelong handmaiden to accompany a plumber or a car mechanic yarning dusty tales beyond my grey-lit windows, with a hydrogen driven zhiguli behind each, my uncle holding me as a freshly born star, the car’s deep blue sinking into my eyes and ears, the mad picture of Dumbo, dumbheld by an aerial artist, I had, that I could talk about to no one. My belly is an iron. Untrue metal. My face, as well. I disappear in my own work, without ever having been called happy. The canopy is the single place where a handmaiden can truly be cheerful and cherished. The Caged Birds sing in discount. Fly low. No man could stand I was a writer, which means given, and based on my early gained knowledge, I can’t even blame them. I call them Mockingbirds. A writer is the most disastrous boring of a kind on a sortly planet. While I apologize, I shitted on them, like a bird, in the utter inattention of my true flight, I wash the crescent from the windshield. My favourite porn is becoming a moon phase, as I’m driving through the lonely night alone, a loose pyjama in a drive-in in a panama hat, sitting next to a man, a widow, never able to lead me for the better or for the one of the betters, singled out. I’m listening to an article read aloud from the Guardian on menstrual cups and the final shutdown of the system of the Handmaids, before a huge wall would rise in me, outside of my being, named after the place it has been built into, in this case, put simply, the heart. The handmaiden’s hands weren’t made for one thing, that’s to jerk you off, or jerk you off through writing. A handmaiden is thorough, so much in the need of a thoroughbred, with a vulcanized rubber dimmer in the throat, that shimmers in the dark. The maid just must go on. I’m watching the stock-price of feminists on the stock market and I truly realize my inherent value that has been there for a long time. She prefers to suck on bacon, you love to drink her home made gin.

József Bíró: from As Well As The Mirror

Adriána Kóbor (Hungary, 1988), active in the Netherlands and Belgium since 2006. Her poems aim to explore and extend the boundaries of language. The major part of her work is written in English, though her verses and stories written in other languages — Hungarian, Dutch etc. — have gained attention as well. Currently she is busy with the final touches on her unpublished work preparing it for publication. Besides that she recently created two books in collaboration with a visual poet and a collagist waiting to be pulled through the press. She is regularly submitting and publishing in the international literary media.
 
 
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