I was somewhat reluctant to publish a note about the publication of my third book, mostly because with this volume I reached into the depths both unattainable and also undesirable for many writers. To my dismay, I do not know if this volume may be available to do Romanian public, however, I will try to publish on this site the poems I believe it would be a shame to be kept hidden from those readers and/or writers for whom the depths and their darkness are the place where, as in the darkness of oceans' depths, poems pulsating their own inner light, live. For those with Amazon access, here's the link, https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BVC1YDQC and the book's description:

“When your mind is in the wrong place...

"at the age of fifty found his mind in his heart"

from Don Quixote, by Nazim Hikmet, 1947, Translated from Turkish by Taner Baybars

Strange... Of most people it would be expected to have been mentally settled by the age of fifty; how wrong.

Fond of Cervantes' Don since my windmilled childhood, it wasn't though the lone rider's quest for Dulcinea which struck my senses, but Hikmet's absolutely elemental statement, which at the start of this 2023rd year of my becoming six decades old, bears a rather stormy significance.

It's been a week before Nazim Hikmet's passing on the 3rd of June 1963, when I came into the world from which he was about to leave. If I would have known everything he knew at the time, I would have rather stayed. My mother's womb's darkness would have been a better place to rot than this hopeless world, where defiance alone still holds me. It's Hikmet's own discovery which bought me on my own knees, realising that it might not be long before being too late of using my mind from the place where it always should have been.

I have always been somewhere mid-left, genuinely believing to this day, that a social democracy stripped of its parasitic "leaders", is a much better option than those where "vox populi" is just the number of votes needed every x years, by an elite ruthlessly playing the usurped "vox Dei" on their behalf. About 35 years ago, I was advised to quit a political school I just begun, because of an essay which critiqued Romania's ("Animal Farm"-type) "socialism", based on my wept over memories of Friedrich Engels' "The Condition of the Working Class in England", (published in English in 1887), which I have read when I was about, (yes), thirteen years old, as a reality earthquake, between the works of Romanian, French, German, Latin, etc, classics.

I was totally convinced, as I am today, that it's not its philosophy to blame, but its wrong grasp and (mal)practice in a world where (hedge-politics oligarchies) have subdued most aspects of life, to their own mercantile interests...

Back to my mind...

Without claiming similitude with Nazim Hikmet’s tormented existence, I have fled in 1990 my homeland as a political refugee, just months after the December 1989 Romanian Revolution, accused of "instigating the peaceful population, in an attempt to destabilize democracy”, after having initiated a silent, public protest/signature gathering in my home-town, in solidarity with the student protests at most major Romanian Universities, against their state coordinated, brutal and bloody repression, and the new government's subtle, yet clear derailment of our hard paid-for liberty, into a Mikhail Gorbachev inspired, one-party controlled "glasnost and perestroika".

However, it wasn't the coordinated, covert-police’s physical assault against our harmless little group gathered at the feet of the Romanian Soldier’s Monument in the town’s park, which compelled me to leave my beloved Transylvania; it was the frightening memories and the smirking, commandeering tone of the major leading the officers who surrounded us with blue lighting police jeeps, requesting my documents, the realisation that the "gentlemen" of the day were just the "redecorated" "comrades", at times when again, "undesirable" people such as myself any many others, started to “accidentally” fall into allegedly malfunctioning elevator pits, mind you post-, not pre-revolution.

I can't do any better for now, from the wheelchaired “comfort” of my probably temporary, West-Midlands home, than cherish being “allowed” to hold onto either this hope of a free “daylight”, or its deluded illusion.

“What time is it?

Eight.

That means you're safe until evening.

Because it's the practice of police

Never to raid homes in broad daylight."

Nazim Hikmet , "After Release from Prison", fragment, https://allpoetry.com/After-Release-From-Prison