Three poems by Peycho Kanev

The girls of today

The girls of today live in hollow state of mind,
their hearts have teeth and redundant fury
(mine is full of wine and bitterness and pain)
they are ugly from inside and dry as leaves
and like to talk about things that no one cares,
and not to care about the next president and/or
the state of the world’s affairs, love to jabber
about liberation and the male chauvinist pig,
they are motionless and sterile and apolitical,
but imagine just for a moment that all of the
chocolates factories of the world stop production.

====================

Continuity

Crane jumped in the deep waters,
Berryman followed him,
Papa blew his brains out with the shotgun
and Mayakovsky too.

A year ago I saw one poet with a tattoo on his back
of Emily Dickinson,
other poet with tattoo of Frost’s words
on his elbow,
there is this new lit. magazine that accept poems
about tattoos.

I do not consider suicide and
my skin is clear like baby’s fanny.

The birds continue to fly in the same fashion as ever,
the gravity hold our heads down, the fame keep them higher
and our noses, the gopher run in the darkness still kissing
the worms, and maybe, just maybe there is some reservoirs of
buried ice on Mars,

but we are just the same,
as the poetry move itself.

Inside out.

+++++++++++++++++++

The killer gets ready

We put them in front of the wall,
their hands and ankles in shackles.

Five men with beards and grey robes,
sentenced to death.

One of them was different,
his eyes were wide open and clear,
they blazed with brightness.

The prosecutor read the indictment
and then the sentence.

“Our Tsar, Nicholas The First,
sentence these men...”

I was taken by this man eyes,
almost mesmerized.

“…in the name of mother Russia!”

Our sergeant raised his hand
and we raised our rifles,
we aimed…fingers on the triggers,
waiting.

10 minutes…

and then he put his hand
down.

The prosecutor said:

“In the name of our Tsar…
change the sentence to…
four years of exile with
hard labor at a katorga prison
camp!”

One of the other gunmen
pointed a finger at the man
with the beautiful eyes and
said:

“You see this man? He is some kind
of writer!”

and then they were pushed in inside
the barracks.

I looked between my boots and there was
this beautiful flower,
I picked it up and laughed,
because today I killed something.

Sixteen years later I was told that the strange
man wrote some big novel –
“Crime and punishment."

Author bio:

Peycho Kanev's work has been published in Welter, Poetry Quarterly, The Catalonian Review, The Arava Review, Nerve Cowboy, Clockwise Cat, Chiron Review, Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, In Posse Review, Southern Ocean Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He is nominated for Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago. His new collaborative collection "r", containing poetry by him and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II is now available at Amazon.com.