Any writer will give time and money to stand at a corner and watch the combinations of balance and misbalance, of good state in organization and social matters and bad state; there’s no need to travel the world to observe what can be seen in central Sofia, now a funfair of activities where reconstruction is tearing up a recent innovation to create the uniformity of style, and where small business at stalls and in shops is so motley that there are only a few people who ignore the variety, among them the pensioners travelling on the public transport at minimum charge or for free, relieving accumulated energy through confrontation, and the young business people travelling at business expenses, looking for profitable alliances and space to do two things at a time.

The three politicians in power and the three politicians in opposition are forming sparing partner couples to capture the different kinds of social ego: from the basic to the grades up, and from the highest level down into the specifics, in actions opposite to their policy and policy opposite to their actions, all legalizing the past and the future.

There are a few campaigns which employ part-time revolutionaries and public order wards, and the signing of dismissal orders to sack the government do recall the numerous periods of me looking for any job, at any school or in any restaurant kitchen.

There is a huge fire in the lovely woods of the Rila Mountain, which is said to have been caused by a lightning and is demolishing the sea of pine trees an English family, whom I accompanied round Bulgaria, admired so much; a family of teachers and their daughter who brought me so many books, and a camel coat too, that I have never been able to repay for their presents.

The new block, advertised as one tall building only, will certainly be seeing at least three streets and will replace more than one old house around, but will also be a perfect support to our block against any feared slide of the sandy hill, and will use in full the old underground infrastructure.

The ten people on the fake protocol of a meeting held a year back will represent the residents informed about the first stage of the future construction, and will prove to be a negligible protesting minority against the lots in silent consent, in due time and when the new block stretches up and aside.

In one word, there is much to be seen by any writer standing at a corner in Bulgaria, and this Poetry Retrospective needs no new poems or stories, it but must have my old poem about the tree:
A THUNDERBOLT
The skies
claim back
their light
and fire
The trees
claim back
their stern
foothold
The skies
come down,
trees
go higher,
and die
inside
the thunderbolt
V.P.T.

V.P.Toucheva 8.09.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria

There are four administrative flaws in the document which a neighbour asked me to sign after inserting my own among the typed names.
The postponed minutes of a meeting held about a year ago are to be attached to a protest against the building of a new block behind ours, which protest will be handed to the municipal authorities by the representative of the owners of flats, that is, by the elected house manager:

One flaw is that the man in the minutes, that is, the man said to have been elected house manager and passport registrar of our entrance did not attend the meeting, but only passed through, and greeted, the scanty congregation of residents gathered outside the block.

One Prime is that there is no block management but in the raising of money, and no passport registrar, due to changes in the law.

Another flaw is that the meeting elected another man, though the new one also has the support of ten residents, of which latter the list bears evidence.

Two Prime, the new man is in the bad habit of undertaking actions towards innovation, for which everybody pays, including me.

A third, a personal hue here, is the fact that the new man called me crazy once, probably in unison with his double economic foothold in a countryside origin and a job connected with the everlasting structures.

Three Prime is that I do not like to be treated with disrespect, no matter how crazy I might be.

And fourth, maybe the ten residents, against the missing ones on the list, know only too well that the block behind ours will be built with or without our protest, and are only too polite not to involve me.

Four Prime, my neighbour, a retired teacher like me, maybe needs a pal with whom to discuss the future when it turns into an imminent present and then into an irretrievable past.

This, if compared to translating a text from English into Bulgarian, and then back into English, mirrors the result of survival through stagnation, and stagnation due to attempted survival.
With an experiment like the one just mentioned, both the other person and me will be understanding the meaning to the extent allowed by our capacity and knowledge, and both will be making mistakes connected with the skill to reformulate and to summarize, the other person making mistakes due to interferences of the Bulgarian language constructions, and me making mistakes arising from losing trace of the content, the other person ignoring the language to keep track of the information, and me ignoring the information to rearrange language forms, the other person loyal to the subject matter to the extent to which it is understood, me loyal to the forms to the extent to which I know the language, and so on and so forth, moving this way and that way, all through and between the boundaries set by our personal capacity and the scope covered, in information and language formulation, by a text.
V.P.Toucheva 7.09.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria

The sea has many aspects, one of them the seaside by which it is restricted and to which it is attracted.
Now that the Bulgarian authorities are planning to give 5 000 pensioners, selected by their unions, a holiday at the seaside, I guess it is high time that I guided myself into the chance to spend some days by the sea on either getting richer, though more active in defence of pensioner rights, or getting poorer, but picked out because of my reluctance to leave, be it for a week, my unsteady survival stability.
Well, it is a pity that, for about a decade now, I have not had the strength and the means to take a trip outside Sofia, let alone travel to the Black Sea, but the sea has the aspect to figuratively represent any principle, especially those of balanced sways between destruction and creation, and more so the principle of giving fine things to poor caretakers to handle or messed-up things to professionals in production to mend.
An old poem of mine sees only part of the above aspect, but is in line with the idea of Poetry Retrospective:
For Love

The waves of time sweep to the shore their foam
They wash their feelings deep and never seen
A huge blue flower, white-fringed, lies open
to kiss a sky of love, like does the sea

The later love comes, much it is the stronger,
as if it waited for a whole life
The later love comes, much it lasts the longer,
as if forever lasting and forever young

No time, no age can stop an old true love
It’s open to the hearts, to eyes concealed
It breathes the dreams of its blue, tall, skies
It sails on the waves of its time’s dreams

The waves of time sweep to the shore their foam,
then hesitate before they wash love’s feet
All round them the lovers find their home
All hearts turn up to breathe the dreamy wind
V.P.T. 8.04.2005
V.P.Toucheva 3.09.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria

I have simply had my self-publishing business deleted from the books of working businesses, but not from the records of history. Blown off by the winds with the same force with which I was swept, in 1991, out of the business of running language courses.

I wonder where I will be now finding room for the practical aspect of my writing hobby.
The world already has the person naturally and spontaneously developing, within the home structures, habits intrinsic to another nation, the fair-skinned youth riding his motorbike on the sidewalk and meticulously parking his helmet in the box and his motorbike at a mall’s door.
The world already has the person developing his natural aptitudes while waiting for something to happen in the structure of his belonging, the young special agent sitting with a companion at a table outside a café, picking his ear with his teaspoon and studyingly watching who is passing.
The world already has a stock of changes stimulated by the environment in the different people, and has the files of different cases where the environment seems to attract people and they enter it on their own will to reveal their need of balance or support.
The world has everything, but there must be a niche for my new poems and stories, the ones still unwritten for which this Poetry Retrospective is ardently waiting, poems as inspired by the need to produce something which I like as is this old poem:
DENIED EMBRACES
Even when I thought
I'd written my most sad,
my saddest song
Even when my road
was tortured by
new visions wronged
Even then
I knew I'd laugh
on seeing my sad, poor face
Even then
I didn't forgive love,
denying me
not poems, but embrace
V.P.T.
V.P.Toucheva 1.09.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria

The drawing, which explains that the city’s regulation plan has approved the plan for an eight-plus storeyed block to replace the old house behind our block, shows how the new shadow that will overcast the entrance where I live and will spare the two other entrances of our block.

Apart from us, it seems that the new giant will stand on tiptoe in the small side street and block one more view, that of another huge building in which there probably lives the person who bought the naughty old house opposite it.

The owners of flats in our entrance are now called on for protesting the decision, but the appeal for protests does not spread elsewhere, which makes me think that the historical era of laundering own interests through mass riots is still riding the transition wave.

I, myself, have written so many poems about the sunset, our small flat seeing none of rises, that a blocking of the view and a shade will only take me out of home and looking for new viewpoits.

One good thing implied in the campaign is that no tall block can stand in an overcrowded place that needs an underground car park for the expensive cars that spend their days, and the expensive cars that spend their nights, in the streets around; and another good thing is that the eight-storey block plus shops will really be built, only somewhere else on a swap of sites between the municipality and the owner, but not before some protest from the most concerned.

On a larger plan, it is still hot though the autumn is felt in the air with litter and small yellow leaves huffed by the slight wind at will.
The people are much more relaxed after the months that provide more food than can be bought and more warmth than can be stored in the skin and the muscles.
The confidence of the home lads is balanced by the confidence of the tourist lads, which makes the city a silent laboratory where generic similarity splits up the location into groups and places, and the so far lying horizontally economic diversity in standard which the different countries had, is being raised into a vertical scale of income or profession differentiation, the latter making one feel at home almost anywhere in the world, well, if not valid for everyone, for some people at least.

Well, I have a colour film and my old camera, so I had better take a few pictures of the landscape view from my windows to illustrate my poems in case they do erect the tall block some ten metres from the tall block where I live and some twenty metres from the tall block on the corner of the small street.
If you asked me, the plan, protests, and construction, are only keeping us engaged in a game with the companies that will not get the chance to build family houses in new residential areas on the huge plain where Sofia is planning to stretch its legs and arms and embrace the sky. Pathetic!
V.P.Toucheva 28.08.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria

I am glad that little has change since August 23 of last year for whatever the changes, they are rarely a thing to welcome.
One thing I have continued to practise during this period, and it is to please the people who naturally do not like me.
It is a dumb thing to do, living the hard way in a city where people come to have easy lives. But one needs the time to see what is going on and all the things that will outlive one. If one sees these things, the generations to come, who will have missed this part of history, may feel the eternity of time through what they are told or through the city itself, but only if they are not overwhelmed by the attempt to use all the opportunities around.
Sofia is gaining back its old buildings with just a whitewash brush, like a lot of old brides putting on their wedding gowns.
The young wedded couples are filing into a church through a door at which champagne toasts are drunk, and are leaving through another door at which photographs are taken.
Tourists from all over the world are finishing up their seaside holiday with sightseeing tours.
Officials are coming to air the construction of connections on levels unreachable for those who were privileged staff.
The marketplace is again crowded with squatters who will probably screen a new policy in controlling the producers through the markets.
A cheerful tall foreigner seems to have chosen a cheap way of taking pictures for advertising or for album purposes, and a stall saleswoman is posing behind her stock of raspberries.
A couple of slacked men are chasing a teenager who is screaming for help in the street, the shopgirls and a young broad are looking with a little of indignation and much of concern.
The sun is blazing, and everything seems to be the same, but isn’t.
V.P.Toucheva 23.08.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria

I was going out, like every day, only this time I also had to buy a present for the fist anniversary of my blog.

The weather was hot and indescernably dusty.

A black shiny jeep was going up, its driver had decided to take a right turn but had not thought it wise to waste time and thought on giving the light signal.
I stepped down to cross the turning he was taking, he abruptly stopped and waved at me to pass, blocking another car behind him.
I bowed and thanked with real gratitude, though if he had indicated his intention, I would have waited for the car to take its turn.

Some distance on, a tall lean man, who seemed to have lived or been born abroad, gave me the surprised look of someone who had seen a white elephant among the polar bears.
I would have greeted him if I had thought of it, just to wave away any of his fears about there living rivals among the aboriginees.

Some distance on, I came behind an old colleague of mine, one of the younger generation who learned administration methods in battles with my generation, a colleague who would not consider my application for classes when I was unemployed and she had been promoted.
I pretended not to see her.
Then I overtook her, and she pretended to be looking aside.
Then we both stopped at the crossroads and both seemed to be watching the other’s reaction.
Then she took the lead and I stared at her back, but she stopped to look at a shop window, I passed by and entered the door behind which bills were paid.
Someone entered behind me, but I did not turn round to see if it was her.
When I turned round, there was nobody behind me, only the girl in eastern dance attire that had tried one desk window and had been dispatched, was standing aside of me, quitely claiming priority of enrty.
The bills proved to be all right, no wonder of it as I had paid them all, but they had to be rechecked as a neighbour had given me another couple of due-to-be-paid which she had been given to distribute.

I seemed to have forgotten about buying my blog a present.

On my way back, on the crossroads, there was a flattened thing that looked as if a trail of cars had run over a dead pigeon.
The thing looked as if all the feathers of the pigeon had not been plucked out to write love poems, but had been smoothened into a parchment to draw the map of life on it.

I entered the small market place on my way and bought a plastic jar of expensive milk, thinking of all the milk the farmers were pouring on the highways in protest against the state’s indifference to their business problems.

Then I bought a cup of coffee and carried it towards my garage where to drink it while watching some workers fell the shrubbery and trees in the neighbouring old garden. I could also wonder at the stages through which the demolition of the old house and the building up of the site could go, and the patience with which the neighbouring blocks would be tricked into accepting the shadow of another large building.

Some distance on, I was most cordially greeted by the mother and son who kept a coffee kiosk at a double radii distance in the opposite direction. They were sure I was all right, and said they were all right too. They, however, seemed to be learning a new fact when I told them I did not expect to get any classes in September though there were lots of ‘revolution’ job positions that took in a teacher only to replace her, or him, with another teacher some time later, and create the uncertainty that balanced the keeping of other teachers and school heads in one place for thirty years.

Some distance on, an old colleague, one of those who has had more professions than one, and more income sources than the obvious, commented on my slimness and my former professionalism, including some comment on his lost chances to prosper, though he seemed relaxed, and inquiring into my political belonging, though it was evident from us having worked at the same place.

At the entrance of the block, I saw a removal van into which they were loading some taken into pieces furniture. The thought that they were taking away the dismantled cupboards and wardrobes that I had got rid of for the sake of space, and kept jammed in my small attic, stung my heart, and I took my coffee into the entance to see where the wooden planks were carried out of. It proved that one of the flats on the first floor was being re-let again.

Then I remembered my present for my blog, and an old poem of mine rushed to help me out:
FOUND MY POEMS
Was looking for a whole heart:
in dreams, in books, in hell
Tried hard to beat an old love,
though needed, prized so well
Found routes aside and smiles found,
and roads straight to hell
On my back carried loads stout
of people, things, known well
Got rid of all my patient slumbers
Broke free of sticky hands
Was lonely, was one in the numbers
Used tricks, took tests, played games
Made everything round me go swimming
My brain on new days fed
All found was a true love living,
but in a poem sad
V.P.T.
V.P.Toucheva 22.08.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria

This dialogue happened in those days when experiments were carried out on global levels, mainly in the spheres of compatibility.
In one place that had naturally evolved the production of vegetables, the idea of producing new kinds of fruit was introduced and subsided through the local authorities.
In another place, where fruit was kin to the climate, green vegetables were started to be grown.
The local population, in both places, was not allowed comment on the reasons for change, or to consume the produce, but was provided with jobs connected with the venture.
The produce was exported, from the place where the innovated genetic kinds were tested in places where the population was used to, but had to denounce, growing and consuming their local kinds.
Of course, if you import, you must export too, and when a chain is created, the liaison connection between the different locations is created on the social level, the economic level, the stimulated adaptability level, the research level, and all the other levels which will export both farmers and species to the settlements on the moon.
The dialogue concerned the right of one woman to boss over the other, and of the second woman to compete with the first.
Woman A had a lot of stable background, and had learned by heart the names and the achievements of her lineage which was mostly connected with turning any social organization into a privately owned or controlled business.
Woman B, due to her low origin, had developed a fear of the higher social levels, but also the skill to guess at the manipulation of Woman A.
One woman was outstanding the security which her past business-orientated generations had created so they could stay out of the mass to be organizing them, the other woman was outstanding the simple fact that no person could claim to be more intelligent than her on nobody’s ground, nor steal the ideas which she had no structure to help her develop.
The first had been brought up to fear any alteration or malfunction of the structures her background had created out of hard-working elements like her, the second had been brought up to see in people like Woman A both the individual who was an ordinary person like any other in the inner balance of mankind, and someone blessed with a stronghold which could not be battered or taken over.
‘This is it; you have finally agreed to meet me on neutral ground: not where you are trained to outstand a supportive position, nor where I have trained myself to improvise survival in the winds of unexpectedly inflicted change.’ It was what woman B said.
Woman A answered: ‘I can give proofs of the opposite, I have seen the records.’
Woman B said: ‘You give the proofs you select from the records, and you have the records to yourself only.’
Woman A added to her own idea: ‘I have explored and investigated all the facts.’
Woman B added to hers: ‘it is because you own the exploration desks and the investigation clerks.’
Woman A continued: ‘The conclusions we have drawn, and it is not only me who sees things like this, point to the opposite.’
Woman B baffled: ‘It is because you hire people who will not contradict.’
Woman A said: ‘They are good specialists.’
Woman B said: ‘The ones you need to battle away your intellectual rivals, the ones that will not allow you to step on them, and the ones you fear to let stand by your side.’
Woman A: ‘There are so many publications of the opposite of what you say.’
Woman B: ‘It is because your relatives own the business of publishing and will pre-select what to let the world learn about and what not.’
Woman A: ‘If you ask the learned people, they will tell you that I am right.’
Woman B: ‘Because you own the academies that teach your cause.’
Woman A: ‘Don’t you think you are pushing your luck with this confrontation?’
Woman B: ‘Don’t you think that the world is a maze of businesses that rule it?’
It somehow happened that a strong wind blew, into the neutral ground, some dust and crust: the dust from the paths which Woman B had walked to reach the meeting place, and the crust from the business machinery of Woman A, which was looking for the innovation that Woman A could now neither produce, because she was incapable, nor steal, because of the transparency of individual performance that had, in the meantime, established itself on the earth due to the rapid expansion of the businesses of Woman A, and the spontaneous growth achieved by Woman B and her own background.
The meeting place, no longer a neutral territory, ousted the two women and they parted to go and protect their own changed by the winds worlds.
V.P.Toucheva 19.08.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria

It is obvious that Big Politics is changing its policy for Bulgaria.

The imported fruit and vegetables- too exotic in socialist times, and during the past eighteen years of transition, too expensive for me to buy fresh but almost accessible to my wallet before they get dumped in the container- have taught me to accept rotten food as something natural to my social status, which is a memory now endangered by time’s erasion on Big Politics’ new policy, but also a memory that can answer anybody’s question about why I wrote ‘Dorman’.

It is obvious that Big Politics is retaining some of its policies.

The bookstalls, with one outsider exception, that refused, in the early nineties, to have my pocketbooks of poems on their street tables, are now selling books published in Bulgarian only.
This can answer anybody’s question about why nobody bought my works.

Well, now that Big Politics has almost admitted to the fact that not every Bulgarian city dweller has a food larder in the countryside, some of the Bulgarian producers may be allowed to enter the city markets.

And now that I am no longer in the business of self-publishing, Big Politics needn’t fear that I will spoil any part of the cultural atmosphere formatting the nation with my, to quote an internationalist of Bulgarian origin, ‘broken English’, but she also called me ‘a schizophrenic’ so anything she said about me can be ruled out.

Well, well, Big Politics seems to have its dark and bright sides like anybody asking questions.
V.P.Toucheva 18.08.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria

I guess that limping in galoshes in the heat of summer, not that I do not have another pair of hated footwear, is rather testy to someone who thinks she is a talented author on the verge of sitting on the threshold of a cheap restaurant while hating the posh shaven faces in the air-conditioned cars, but it is more relaxing than feeling ingratitude or fear.

Well, now that the administration did their best to help me- and I must say that I managed, in one single day today, to be polite and unhostile, to pay the fee a second time, and to be promised support which I will probably get unless some upper floor decides there is more to be got out of me along the line of observing reactions and adaptability- I must reread the classics to look for those things in their lives that gave them the reason to write in the most subtle of humour and with the greatest of caution.

So far, so well, in about twenty days, I will be informed if there is something undone or stale, and all being well, I will be a simple pensioner soon and will be able to consult a doctor about my blood pressure.

Not that I could not have seen a doctor or a dentist already, but I have seen an act like this as unfair to the law that exacts double health and social insurance if one is both hired and a self-employed tradesperson, and unfair to me, as well, to pay without getting revenue from trade.

In about twenty days….I will have reread the classics.
V.P.Toucheva 14.08.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria