CRUISE
I stand riven
between an ex gaffer:
“Don’t babble!”
and a future shaver:
“LOL”
I count the present
on the fingers on the prison rails
on the knitting needles and my aunts’ gobleins
It will be over it will be over it will be over…
tweets the cuckoo from my father’s wall clock
while a worn-out vinyl revolves
I will stab her eyes with this needle
Me. The spinster.
(I will, I swear on my mother)
“100 Years with Aleksandra Kollontai”
But I only wanted to protect and defend you
to bury every memory of painful embryo and woe
of social wrong
trenches and weeded roofs
I wanted to prick off your eyes with a golden hook
so you see
to act as your speed bump
that whore at the corner of the street
an orphan a patient a widow
a saint a sinner a boxing bag a spittoon
so you feel better
to drop off to the size of a bean
grey afternoon with no whiff
to be the voice of the first bugle
and that grindstoned sabre
from the hook and the rake
to unbury from the cradle to the grave
each an every sore pestiferous
and to be the first to lie in it by choice
For you I wanted to clench my teeth
to stretch you in the body of a timid runt
and back to break so I can prove
how much I love you with deeds not platitudes
To break all of your windows and your bogus nails
displays and the windshields
to drag you by your locks onto the waves
of a new revolution
a new word to make up for it
and not be left high and dry
on a ripped off declaration
on consumer basket with flour and oil
on an action sale
on a doormat at the “Delta” exit
on a bag of soup a sack of grits
To be your Lupa
to mother for you Romulus and Remus
should we build on those forums our world new and brave
so that upstream rushes all that still can breathe
free and out of the groove and forever
against the disgrace of us all
From the handful of ash I would have risen for you
if you could only pardon my extended hand
BEFORE RISING
/Between fucking and slaughtering/
Before all these layers of palimpsests
the claws and scales
in the soft meat under petty malice
bones parched
silkiness…
We could have loved so beautifully
tucked together before sleeping:
Before all those our
fucking and slaughtering
In the beginning, indeed…
tabula rasa
and the light shineth in the darkness
“ex nihilo” under the stars
And we wrote summons
reproof…
of new creation
stitching it in tiniest possible letters
We repeated the history
now cuneiform now in flat letter
within the zero hairbreadt
always around the same…
Cumbersome my wedge, bovine your board
We nailed every letter
Nothing new under the Sun
after it rises in early dawns…
But for hopes crushed into dust and ashes:
In between all of this major
fucking and slaughtering
on the pendulum of genesis
only different packings of one and the same shit
In the sweat of our efforts
we gnaw at this century
minutest minuscule…
Since we climbed down those branches
from the primal pecking
farming and warfare
compulsion and tribulation:
Between fucking and slaughtering
We gnaw at this century
(Yet we could’ve tucked each other nicely
in that soft pink meat
in the silk before rising… )
SHALLOW
When stretched under the bark
she
whose womb is torn up by her sons
and the fear has gone from
woman
mother
life
I will collect the hem of the pleated dress
and will sew in a new heart
to suit a solemn affair
as sewed on
this face and this picture
sick from anemia
- I need air
the cast of mining shaft
is recast in the last
cycle of alchemy
dried out tears from the cradle
When the sea spits out
the last bones of the domesticates fossils
I will be sitting on the beach
plucking stones from stones
positioned as the postcard girl
in that cliche
stuck
and unavoidably dreamy
in white
with that lovelock over the brow
smoothed down
I will pose in the glory of innocence
of the new birth
while, actually, I would want to scream
and destroy the frame
- I need air
under Heracles’ stairways
the Greek tragedians who glorified patricide
rape of
mother
earth
woman
justified it as ignorance
dead is my shame
and no-one came
to its burrial
it went straight to spam
When she gets up and streches
dusty
raped
ragged
scratched
earth
mother
woman
in the last cry
of epic finale
who stays breathless
When father and brother and friend are gone
I will come back to that old place of ours
under the Iron bridge
I will cut out from cement the names long engraved
take them away
to Africa
I will become the ring of time
a verse
that closes the circle
away from the land of our ancestors
EMBRYO
On the day when Crnjanski over Nadia comes into my life
like child born awry
by forceps
it snipped my last efforts to fit into a prescript
regulated standards
(Nadia is a Russian peeress on an imaginary throne)
She supports living sewing cloth dolls
in London
at a time that heedlessly rushes
hisses
She
the joy
that one wilderness that broke into civilization
that wantonness that does not see the matrix
pieces her corrupted genocidal gapes
proud, silent and enduring
The day I am born through Nadia
the day on which I release rats
down the sewage
I burn the paper boats
I spit on Europe
– but, actually, the day of my biological birth
marked by shooting and planting a svetle pine
by the hand of my drunken father
the avenger for the mongrel life
(They said they’d never rejoiced a Montenegrin as they did me)
And that I was given the noble name
so that it lasts
memory on that measure of responsibility
– There must be always someone to defy
but it was long before the ability to choose
persecution or prophecy
– In your village never be that sheep
the burning victim
The day I dye my hair and sew the slots in my cavities
is the day that the cloth doll
I become
I pretend I am dead
– There is always someone from above watching us
I give
it
to the girls to dress it
throw it
to the boys to play with it
– Some events just score us for life
The day I start embroidering a shrine
the hell of a day
the day for the witches on their brooms
the newcomers who’ve cut
that pine on the corner of our street
(it interfered with the entrance to the new five-store building)
Never have I showed my real face again
Never have I let my natural hair grow
or a step across that nook cut away
I’ve eaten all the dark
when I stopped my word on honour
– Some events just scythe us
in a moment
and for life
THE HORMON STEAL
I love myself being newly born
only just stretched,
a soft puff of gentle pink, in love with poetry, calligraphy
and the stamps in the melted vax
And in that shirt with a big dot in the middle which I saved for you to lean on when you are here
I like to take my barge to Beška and write in princess Jelena’s style
I like lying in too, and straw hats with large brims and the handmade lace embroidery and lavender smelling in the underwear chest
But most I like when get bored with myself thus newly born and steal your hormones
kicking myself under the wardrobe and let the dust fall on the scrapbook
I put on that sweating bag and the headphones and I change into a snake body already before the new page on which I trust the full stop with my heel
answer to no one at all
and I rollick and wander around,
I throw the rope, drive the cattle, being familiar with everyone
just resting, lying on my hip with a lover in every town
and really don’t care where you might be
MORTGAGE
Exactly 364 days ago if we count nights in days —
he died in his warm room by a warm heater and a cup of warm coffee with milk exactly as
he would like it —
cooked for him his warm and soft and puffy wifey
with the last dumb call for help
he sent Facebook messages
He died craving for another to jar his fire
to whisk his panada
to burn him with the blaze design
on a curtain
to slip in his coffee a grain of salt
Tomorrow the administration of
Facebook
will wish him happy birthday
because the revenge of his puffy wife written on bills in the last 364 days
was his self-delusion
and her death for the haters
THE FUNNY POEM
It is good and I only feel like laughing and for no reason
And I only feel like singing and dancing and jumping
Not because I am light-footed or light-minded on the contrary
While you are so serious and grey
One real bogeyman always at a razor blade along the edges of weeping
Who is right and who is wrong
what you should and what you shouldn’t do
But perhaps my thoughts are deeper and heavier
Perhaps, if I let them go
I would smash off
your balance trays
Enough of that!
I don’t care
not even to utter
It is good even when it is not
And nothing is wrong with me
I only feel like laughing
SENSELESS NOISE
And you will allow the sticky looks of contempt and envy borne of the blemish blindness
and despair piled up in backbone and wrinkled arms
You will allow the misfortunes and torments
yours and those of the others
You will shoulder both what you have to and what the others load in your saddlebags
equally here as everywhere else
in this wide world
one and the same life for everybody, through and through
You will be seizing the life of the others and the others will be taking it from you
ground in the same mill
till we meet our maker
till the very end
and whoever receives the ticket to hell and whoever to heaven
You will allow everything down the water
when everything and everyone flow away and leave
every Tom, Dick, and Harry
But you’ll remember only those silent days
when all of this is over
in which you were lucky to find your own teddy
to cuddle under the covers
and everything suddenly pauses and stops
becoming a senseless noise
INDIAN SUMMER
When that time comes
which has always been added onto and subtracted from
and somehow with cyclamen it always
comes
When grape overmellows
and mouths water in showers
and the old go back to their stone dwellings
Who knows at that moment what for
And I mix the wheat and the tares
and I don’t know how I manage to live
how I have managed and how I have found
just every emptied can
a blind hen
How could I love
both you and him
and this one and that one
repeat
always the same
small sweet words
bind myself to trifles which all look as one
and all are promised and all are honey
to die
until that one to come
Could there be love if it weren’t till death
Or we are but consumables
all of us
us
with no difference
How could I have ordered the pictures
played with glass beads
nerves
plucked living
limbs
demolish then recollect again
from the toes to the head
from you to him
until that one to come
Blessed are those
who have never seen farther
from their houses and their hearths
never anything
just he saw her and she saw him
and that little piece of cultivable yard
on the sunlit side
it is all
and of everything
When that time comes
when I answer for my actions
I tie my barge
to the shore
and somehow with cyclamen it always
comes
to enrapture
I mix the wheat and the tares
and jump on
THE MASOCHIST POEM
It is winter.
It opened a little wound on my left palm, there will be some money, it’s what they say when your palm itches.
The little wound is a crater now, I’ve rummaged it out (the gold diggers would rejoice!) in a masochist in a lustful way
I push all my memories inside it.
They are many and they clang terribly (you used to hate when I make noise):
1. one football gaiter through which you touched my foot (our first touch).
2. a radiator which I’m using these days instead of a blanket
3. an eternally empty bottle of plum brandy (homemade)
4. and an eternally unfinished manuscript
5. (even the wardrobe in which I wanted to stack your ironed shirts).
It gulped all my words and my female nagging,
the screams and the downpours and the inflated balloons which you never wanted to run after (and that’s why you punctured them?).
Gulped your boyish swaggers and your need to punish me with silence, manly.
Heavily and for a long time.
So it grew every day more and it got inflated too, one hyperbole, bluish and ugly an unspeakable toad.
I am waiting for her infectious sublimation so it may burst, so the dirt leaks out.
So that you too are gone.
So that I too am gone.
So that we leak out with it.
So that the memories and all the insults with which we spilt blood fighting
leak out too (when for the first time we, as one symposium, shoot the noise together), because we were not for each other.
Because we were (were we not?) alike, as once we used to be, as we are now. As this little wound, a grotesque, in the crater of winters.
And it is only now that we are the same.
The perfect identity.
Perfectly punctured and empty.
And yes.
Now we would be the match: The perfect couple.
FLASH-BACK
I cannot stand rainy afternoons
jazz and always the same flashbacks
Looking back at our car drives at sunsets while with my folded knees curled on the seat
I’m finishing up cigarette in flight
nailed to your profile your beard, two or three days old and that cavity above your upper lip,
one funny hair from the mole on your nose,
I cannot stand tasteless chewing gum
strawberries and the bursting of balloons that sweet teasing without inhibition
Petting my thighs at the traffic lights
in a standstill
Lolling out
in stunts
when I throw my head out of the window
and the wind ruffles my hair
They remained cramp tied I cannot stand
tears or hangouts by the road chips for jukeboxes
and cappuccino from the machine poetry evenings
And always the same lesions that break my shins at every new step
Or long-distance love
I cannot stand this accursed weakness that burns every bridge
but in vain its attitude
it strands me on the very bar spats me on that very shaft
with a spray of mud through an eternally open wound
Which again only pours me out
instead of killing me
I cannot stand rain
neither the sound of jazz
These flashbacks intermittently always along those unchangeable rails
The burst in the temples
and the smell of burnt by the road
always from those unchangeable ashes
SIMULACRUM
– I am leaving you this simulation of life
a bag with instant coffee and the cherry pie in the microwave
and those shoes – your present for my birthday /a whole one number too big/
the appropriated fakes… feigned screams
in the dorms from suburbs
scheduled for you for this week
/and the paper scrap – the reminder of the appointments at the dentist and the urologist/.
I was dumped today.
I got the back wind.
I am picking up my retouched reality from the glove compartment
forgotten manuscript
and that last unsuccessful attempt at simultaneous translating
from me to you and back
/from logical to the level of reality/.
I am leaving you your every blindness
keyboard keys stuck at your fingers
corneas like brambles
falling out on inbox, online chat, and cyber sex
Into the second degree modelled reality
/of your watchtower carefully projected
on the foam of clouds/
Of your alter ego
The creator of a parallel universe
of this virtual land and sky
I am leaving you.
I am not simulating.
I never simulate.
“LOVEr”
He comes in
he laughs
Right from the door I explain
how I have finally managed
to apply the critical theory of society
on my new satirical play
And as I am hugging and hugging him
excited
he covers me with his arms
– You make drama out of everything
as if you have discovered America
He is playing with my hair
he is lolling out
– Who cares about that,
my little crazy wretch
uselessly the most beautiful
He pricks my soap balloons
only to wash me in them
He is my earth
an always tough
element
a supplement
to every my snack
I am his beaded string embellishment
He dresses me in his shirts
enjoys as I do striptease in them
tears of my panties with his teeth
He knows by heart
the position of all my moles
the clichés
in which I am most secure
and which can never be worn down enough
only by moths
he draws my body with his fingers
slips his tongue down my valleys and up my hills
He discerns my every complaint
even when I’ve ceased remembering them
he keeps me on his lap and brushes my hair
and as he is doing this
I like to lick his earlobe
He breathes out my face
My every fiber is alive
as he blows into my glass
and draws heart on the befogged side
I like tickling his nose
I don’t feel like going out at all
He is my border line
my only guest
My last page
between the dirt and vanity
my favourite earth colours
basic and pure
My ebony
He is
THE THIRD TANGO
My daughter is playing on the square with the city band
a contraption
which stands for a classical piano
synthesizer it is called–
abusively says my dad
who is horribly unnerved by noise
synthesized time unites all the sound and sense
and I still somehow hope that it will unite all the old
Slavs
he kept beseeching god that she not be like me–a naked whim
not to stitch for score
She plays the waltz from the First Echelon
of a Soviet film I’ve never managed to see
but I do remember some of the remakes
local allusions
to the theme
Komsomolets on for the steppes of Qazaqstan
on to get rich overnight
I didn’t have to see
well, haven’t I seen the one
the Kopaonik excursion
the years in which rock’n’roll died
and there was no one to drive with me on the midnight train
when drunk I shed my hymen with the first machinist man
from the discotheque
in an unease less I’d be the only chaste
before the certificate of graduated maturity
and to be continued
some domesticated and already famed bone-breakers
— who translate every imported idea unspeakably literally —
pulled the first guns against real bullets
of some
who had but billiard cues
there is again a fault in the brain
and the conk broke before it flowered
our shortened graduation excursion
through our shortened land
No one danced with me at the graduation dance
for there were thirty-two of us skirts at that language school
My daughter is playing the first tango from the Echelon
she really stamps on it with her left foot
yet still in the drained land
I am dancing to her earthquake
on my own path
and I know already
that it has never been for anything
that not I am
she
that she will pay them my debt
