Three Poems by Peycho Kanev

 

Fortune Teller

 

 

going home after a 10 – hour job…riding the bus 

with the blacks and the poor…watching through 

the window…the setting sun…the uselessness of 

the trees…the stream of the cars…the concrete 

of the sidewalk…the skittish cops…the blocks 

with the streets of houses and their windows 

and the faces behind…with all their blankness… 

and the guy sitting next to me – a large man  

with hands like tree-trunks – tries to start a stupid 

conversation…but I am not here…riding the bus 

with all these dead souls…I am out there…some 

where…and then I got out…on the empty street 

…leading to my place…with the burning walls… 

the empty chair…and I am here…I open the door… 

and then close it… I open the fridge…get the beer 

bottle…and then close it…I sit in the empty chair 

…and turn on the radio…luck with Brahms…I put 

 the green glass in my mouth…and the foamy liquid  

goes into my throat…and I just sit there…thinking… 

what this life is all about.

 

 

 

Melancholy

 

 

Watching the pigeons making gentle love 

on the windowsill. 

 

It is Sunday. 

 

Beaks and feathers warmed by the sun, 

touching each other. 

 

Sweet noise 

from their gizzards is 

touching my fingertips. 

 

Time slips by… 

 

Still Sunday. 

 

I am alone  

and 

they make love. 

 

I light a cigarette and let the smoke 

do the same with the emptiness of 

the room.

 

 

 

 

Roominghouse Song in Texas 

 

 

Listen, 

 listen, 

  listen: 

 

to the song of the squeaking elevators, 

the rooms with the unmade beds and the running 

roaches hiding in the greyish hallways,  

with the dusty Venetian blinds 

and the rugs covered with holes, 

 

 listen 

  listen 

   listen: 

 

to the sound of the footsteps on the stairways, 

the whispers in the bathrooms and the buzzing of 

the overworked air-conditioners muffling the gentle screams 

at 3:27 A.M., 

 

   listen 

    listen: 

 

to the woman next door through the stained wall 

singing a sweet lullaby to the spiders and the moon, 

stretching her legs in the bed alone like a swan 

during the mating season, 

 

    listen 

     listen: 

 

to the dripping sink and the hot water babbling  

in the rusty pipes creating the sound of the awakening 

beast that is this building in this enormous city in this 

concrete world so outworn by its own organic junk - 

us - the humans, that cannot learn nothing from  

the past,  

 

     listen 

      listen: 

 

to the shadows moving on the roof with the rats  

and the forgotten artifacts in the cardboard boxes, 

once preciously loved by their owners and now 

even the light from the old candles could not  

penetrate their darkness that they dwell within, 

 

      listen 

       listen: 

 

to the sound of the opening of the window, 

and the cars hissing below, 

and the people inside, 

and their radios, 

and to the garbage trucks,  

and the ice-cream trucks,  

and the kids on the sidewalks, 

and their dogs on long leashes,  

and the rising sun, 

chasing the shadows away, 

 

listen 

 listen 

  listen: 

 

to the yells coming from the lobby, 

of this old building, of this rotten Universe, 

 

listen:  

 

to the wrinkled landlady, 

with her hands in the air, 

crying: 

 

“Oh, please God, show me the way!”

Peycho Kanev is the author of 12 poetry collections and three chapbooks, published in the USA and Europe. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Rattle, Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hawaii Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others.