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Lali Tsipi Michaeli Poem
Train
At the age of 7 I left Georgia as an immigrant to Israel with my parents and two brothers.
We arrived at the train-station with the feeling of a one-way ticket. We travelled until Moscow
and before passing one whole day and night in a magnificent hotel we took another train to
Vienna from there we took a plane to Israel. We landed on another planet. It was mid-
January 1972. Since then from my point of view trains have been symbols of departure. Of
self-analysis. Of new life. Of loss. Not to mention the Jewish DNA that runs on the collective
memory of the train-tracks or vice-versa. There is nothing for me that symbolizes so
strongly the wandering the displacement and human sadness like the train. Even if it's a new
train racing along tracks raised on columns to allow the world's other creatures non-stop
transport. When I want to bring these things to light in my memory everything changes to a
collage of the trains I've seen in my life, in reality as well as in films, documentaries or art-
house. The train has turned into trainness and I don't know to whom I belong.
translated from Hebrew by:
Alexa Christopher-Daniels
in English
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw16nGcLfHE
in Hebrew (my voice)
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3923511,00.html
Copyright © Lali Tsipi Michaeli | Year Posted 2010
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Lali Tsipi Michaeli Poem
Life Is A Brothel
Life is a brothel she says
Zipping ten centimetres up the crotch of her
Diesel jeans
How many jobs do you have to take to remove your nose
from the rotten-egg stench; how many chances do you have to give
the adjustable lighting
to sweep away for you the connections
to breath-gaps?
translated from Hebrew:
Alexa Christopher-Daniels
Copyright © Lali Tsipi Michaeli | Year Posted 2010
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Lali Tsipi Michaeli Poem
At Cafe Bacho
This evening we sat in Cafe Bacho on King George street after
House of the Flying Daggers
The most poetic film I ever saw
I said
And I sank into a romantic triangle
which is not possible with this bizarre
waitress with a chopped hair-cut
I said to her
that she is special
She said
So are you
Then I reminded my ex-husband that a sentence can lie within another sentence
He used to hold my hand with courage for courage's sake
Tears fell down my cheeks and sank in the jasmine tea,
which the waitress
Brought
Maybe it’s she who really made me cry
She seemed like a Christian Georgian woman in a homely pub in Tbilisi
You said:
The cushions are over here
You mentioned that Erez called and didn't mention me
You said:
He got burnt
Not a word about
You
I said that I also thought about him
I said that Oren called
And you explained how she died a mysterious death she the poetess
Who went after anyone who wanted her
In Eilat
An investigation won’t bring the words back
I spoke with a free spirit
But the butterfly didn't fly
translated from Hebrew:
Michael Simkin
Copyright © Lali Tsipi Michaeli | Year Posted 2010
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Lali Tsipi Michaeli Poem
Every time we make love
I stand with
one hair
In my mouth
To get to you I need to cross Dizengoff via Ben Gurion
Nathan Zach through Rabin Square and Iben Gvirol
To turn in to King David and make a right
Ascend the step
Rolling towards the silence of the blossoming stairwell
To the lift that always
Opens like a Mercedes
And drives me directly to the streets of your arms
By the way,
Do you remember my throwing up in your car?
It was from love.
From Hebrew:
Alexa Christopher-Daniels
Copyright © Lali Tsipi Michaeli | Year Posted 2010
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Lali Tsipi Michaeli Poem
Ways of death
In my being there are cracks filled with death
how much I lack
in holy language this becomes
“your servant”
and cracks my knees
catches the wrinkled desert earth
thirsty for the life taken from her
death speaks to her from within
the darkness of passages
death is inside it
she is so quiet
not yet knowing fear.
translated from Hebrew:
Michael Simkin
Copyright © Lali Tsipi Michaeli | Year Posted 2010
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Lali Tsipi Michaeli Poem
Paint Me Ablaze
paint me ablaze
like Rome
start from the head eyeballs mouth nose
castle
hills via neck
harnessed
dusty roads
long hands fingers of
books
waist stomach
kingdom of sorrow
all the king's seats
streams of the fields
and valleys of love
my thighs and knees will slowly burn
for a sign of my future shame
paint
a birth mark
my calves that are trained to go stright ahead til the ankles
convents
feet
toes
the king's army
like an air my name will burn
my meaning will be strewn from my ashes
any sense from my tendons will be free
translated from Hebrew:
Michael Simkin
Copyright © Lali Tsipi Michaeli | Year Posted 2010
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Lali Tsipi Michaeli Poem
Next to the Blue House
Next to the blue house there was silence and an espresso machine
For six shekels
I could break off my rumbling stomach’s static economics
And enter the collected films of Felinni
We had sex before
Parallel to another couple in the adjacent room
She loved his dick
At the moment that you glued quietness to the ceiling of the shabby hotel room
Again Fellinni with bags of cottage cheese crosses the street lengthways
A man in the heart of the desert night
And we are there
In a new edition of existence
And I’m already not laughing about your quantum proof of God’s
Being
translated from Hebrew:
Michael Simkin
Copyright © Lali Tsipi Michaeli | Year Posted 2010
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Lali Tsipi Michaeli Poem
Legend of the body
Well, I was gone
it was on the day the mouth widened open in front of
a vacant audience
a hall world, devoid of ears
and started shouting
As it happened
the hearing merits were sealed
and the hall world faded out to mute
and silence was hovering over the face of the earth
such
a white silence
well bleached
You know,
unlike a wedding dress
like Butoh dancers
white linen cloths with a pinch of pure soul within
white washed face
and a drizzling drop of blood that escaped the ear's cave
all of that, in front of a vacant audience
Do you know how it feels to shout in front the hollow hall world
Familiar with the colossal reverberation?
If the hall world does not mute
the eardrum could explode
hence
there is no voice, nor any that answers
you stand alone in the life capsule
open wide within a body
translated by Nadavi Noked
from: Tractate of faces, Ahshav publisher, Israel, 2015
Copyright © Lali Tsipi Michaeli | Year Posted 2017
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Lali Tsipi Michaeli Poem
Body
I know I'm a spirit and I have a body
I know I'm a spirit and I have a chair
I know I'm a spirit and I have a floor
Right wall left wall front wall and back wall
I know there is a wooden floor beneath me and a high ceiling
I know I have a chair I have a place I have a tombstone
Why mention these things
Improve improve yourself
Once again
I have a table
I have a chair I have a body
Anyway I'm
A spirit
wandering above the body and what's the body to me
body micro-body
what has it got to do with me
Why all of a sudden did I decide to take a body
my micro-body well-kept
in which I labour
So much labour for the spirit
Body for spirit
Body
from Hebrew:
Alexa Christopher-Daniels
Copyright © Lali Tsipi Michaeli | Year Posted 2010
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