I like to tells stories of crude little awakenings, second births that follow when something cracks in the shell formed by all we inherit as children... before having the chance to see it for what it is, or to politely decline.
JAROSLAVA
She was a woman who took three times longer to walk from her house to the bar than from the bar back home,
who for three days in a month changed her temper from a wolf to an owl to a calf
and who carried her lover as an ointment behind her ear wherever she went.
Her left breast was larger than the right,
and one of her eyebrows was forever arched in a surprise above a black eye.
She despised books and movies, and loved to tell fortune to the
unfortunate, accursed and despised.
She loved to be the second and the third,
never the first woman,
and she married only to have a second, a third and a forth.
She held that such loves hold the secret to her charm,
because fidelity is owed to a wife, and offered freely to a lover.
Before and after sleep she would eat bread with pig fat and garlic,
to chase away false friendships,
and in the mornings she would make bitter coffee and caramelized hazels,
for some tired travellers on their way from nowhere to the stars
that just might knock on her door.
Later she would lick a quill,
dip it in ink,
and write down all the wheat, water, coffee and salt that she had borrowed from yesterday,
to better know how to even out the score during the day.
In the town, her name was called whenever somebody needed to
brew the forgetfull soup for the mothers of dead children,
cure the lost from their lacking day,
and start the fiests in the streets.
She would call the town whenever the shadows disappeared from the streets,
when the smell of fried coffee was gone,
and no children could be heard shouting.
Then she would call onto town and its folk to fill for her
this horrible emptiness.
She was not of those whose face is only briefly wisited by a smile
which leaves no wrinkles,
visits only a few corners before it leaves the face for good.
She smiled a lot and for many things,
she knew the slow ways of the shallow, but wide happiness.
Her youth came from her finding out only in her thirties that she was indeed a woman,
and in her forties her cheeks still shone with the pink glow of puberty.
Then she named herself Jaroslava,
pulled her skirt behind her belt
and left for the sea.
DOESN'T MATTER ANY MORE
Heavy is the hand with which I write this. Heavier than when I use it to punch. Heavier than when I use it to lift the tenth glass of hard liquor.
I have hated and I will hate.
But that doesn't matter any more.
I escaped a house in flames when I was eight. Tears were coming down my cheeks. From sadness of from the smoke. Had I set it on fire, I don't remember any more. But that hardly matters now.
Two children drank from my breasts. Two of them died.
Poisonous milk, the village had said.
Poisonous village, I had said.
I wasted countless shoes on the road, going always forward, forward, straight as an arrow.
They have stabbed me with their words.
They have stabbed me with their eyes.
They have stabbed me with their deeds, sharper than knives.
I survived it all, even if a part of me is dead. How big of a part, that doesn't matter any more.
At the end of the first road I met god. He talked to me about love while smoking a cigar. But I have met his kind before.
Behind the cigarette smoke there always hides a cruel mouth, as behind the smoke of love hides desperation.
I spat at his feet and told him that he should better try his luck amongst the tricksters in a circus, which is anyways the only place men keep their fantastic promises.
At the end of the second road I found a house. Tailored just for me. With more windows than walls, and every window opened up to a different scenery, and each scenery reached the horizon. Those who don't learn how to cast their glances far, will always find their glances dripping down their nose. And what drips from the nose, as everyone knows, should be wiped off of a sleeve and forgotten.
I spent some nights in a bed made of hemp. On the third night I awoke from panic that I will never again see the skies. That I will start being afraid of the streets at night. That I won't be able to recognize thievery in stranger's eyes.
I ran out onto the street and put my hands under my breasts to calm myself down.
Those who are afraid of thieves, dark and cold... those need a house... and those who are able to see something new by always looking at the same scene.
I am of a different kind. I always see the same thing in an every changing scenery. What is it that I see, what is it that I have seen - of that we will not speak, that doesn't matter any more.
Who never roamed, who was born out of a womb of a happy woman to end up in the hands of a gentle man, who ate with a spoon, not with their eyes, who smelled flowers and daydreamed on grassy meadows, who put their nose in books with a faith of a young nun, that one will never know...
Never know why I roam.
I roam to surprise my Tomorrow, which is never quite ready for me.
I roam so that my Yesterday can hardly see me in the morning of the next day.
Freed from those two prison guards, I can:
- always eat the dates with a passion of a hungry child
- steal the bread with a conscious clear as that of Jesus
- beg for money knowing that what I have to offer in return is holy
- read the fortune from eyes and the bags under the eyes better than god himself, who is limited by his self-assuredness. Who has nothing, that one sees everything. Blindness comes from the fear of losing what we have. And of such fears I am free.
They ran after me and shouted that they will save me from evil.
My legs are always faster. My wits are always swifter.
I know what it is they want to achieve - they want to put me in a cage with them, so that they are less alone. But what they don't know is that I am way past fearing solitude.
Fortune tellers always stop me in the streets and offer their visions of future to me, for free. But this game I no longer play.
The first time that a fortune teller looked into my coffee grounds, something black entered her face and dread took the place of her eyes. As the last fear was coming out of her lungs and frightened life was leaving the scene of the crime, my lips parted in a smile.
A smile not from pleasure, nor bitterness, but understanding.
Oh, I know, woman, what it is that you have seen. I myself see it every day, on each street, in every skies.
But I am no longer afraid of it.
I know that for some people, those great gates that keep the flood out open wide just before their death. The life saves some from the flood for decades, and then, once freed, the waters kill them. Those people I safeguard from my eyes, and I always keep them down when I cross them in the streets.
And those other ones, I avoid them as well.
One drowning man never helped another.
I go and I stay. I eat and I digest. I drink and I exaggerate. I fast and I rest.
I look at the skies and I look at the stars.
What others see in them, that I don't know.
But I know that those are candles on the graves of those who died before their birth, but survived their own death by mistake.
I know that.
That and many other things, which come to one when one is completely alone.
All of this makes me the most living dead at my nineteen years of age.
SAVA - OR FOG BEHIND GLASSES
Like every day, as he was leaving his apartment, he carefully collected the fog that was gathering behind his glasses,
and as some people fix their hair or smoothen their eyebrows,
so he had mixed up the whisps of fog that were threatening to slip out of the valleys inhabited by his eyes.
"He who doesn't take care of his own fogs, soon realizes that one simply has nothing to look at", Sava thought since the loss of sight forced him to buy eyeglasses.
Here is how that came to be.
While he was still a little boy, Sava's mother worried greatly that her son, at the time still quick and an agile boy, always present in the moment, would become one of those people who recklessly forge their own destinies, beating whirlpools of the present around them, forgetting about the breast that had fed them.
Little Sava often acted as a magnifier for anything in which he took part, always carelessly pointing to the bare and naked reality, which could do little to frighten him.
Sava's mother, a woman hungry even of the most simple romance, as many of the women of her unfortunate generation, saw her son as a defiler of that cheap magic that she tried to gather in the corners of the house and hide, first from Sava's father, and then, soon after his birth, from little Sava.
To those things that she would find with her precisely trained intuition for the useless and the casted away, little Sava would be quick as lightning to find perfect functions, which, suddenly revealed, would embrace the thing completely and take up its original semblance and would leave Sava's mother alone again in a naked and exposed world.
Desperate and alone, Sava's mother had developed a gift of imaginations such as those that only caged animals that still remember their freedom can have.
In their visit to the zoo, while little Sava was deciphering animals with a precision of a surgeon, Sava's mother was looking at a monkey looking at her, thinking:
" He who knows the limits of his cage, can still have some kind of freedom."
She squeezed Sava's, at that time still plump little child's hand and began to see in the sad monkey's eyes the ships on the horizon of her madness and rainbows over the oceans of fog that in her sleep dampened the earth over which she trod during the day.
"Mommy, can one die from sadness?" little Sava asked, reading clearly in the eyes of the monkey that which most people spend their lives trying not to see,
not realizing that every act of reading presuposes the understanding of the alphabet,
and that we can understand only what is already true inside of us.
Still dreamily floating over the ships on the horizons of her dream, Sava's mother used one of those parental shortcuts to good education and calmly responded,
"Of course, my son."
SUMMER POEM FOR SIMONE AND HIS CLARINET
Will you hitchhike with me across Europe?
The road is, I think, ready.
I will have this one pink dress that already knows the road,
but you can have spare clothes, if necessary
and we can eat sardines out of cans, bean salad and fruits at the ends of the markets
/ and at people's homes - the best food /
I will wash only in the sea,
you can take more care of personal hygiene, if necessary
We can wash our teeth and armpits in accidental bars along the coast,
And spit the bad taste of a dusty
hard hot noon-morning
out of our mouths onto the wavery steaming concrete under that relentless sun
with a hangover made up of
/ in part wine, in part bad decisions /
while smiling at short movie clips of disinterested drivers,
you can sit in the shade, if necessary
[[ I am forgetting how to use things,
I have no place for them anymore,
I move way too often,
But I do have one small thing for you which needs no place in particular,
- a pocket will suffice - ]]
We can take with us an empty notebook as a travel guide ::
I tried it once, it takes you to the best places,
I love the sea, but if you have other ideas, I'll follow
But!
If we're on the sea, we have all the reasons in this world to be naked all the time
Concrete Adam and Eve
After having committed the primordial sin of library membership
Thrown out of the city-emanation of utilitarian human-conceived paradise
Adjusting their library eyes to the natural habitat of
/ el cielo & el sol /
Playing on the beach like children
Watching the unseeable sea in its /virtual /reality /simulation /patterns
drinking cheep beer with that summer-evening-cold creeping into our bendable spinal formations
- you know - normal sea stuff -
So as never to say:
"Life was not such so as to prepare them for unusual things"
Running in all directions
but never in that of the orchard with family trees
whose genealogy we left behind without looking back
// knowing we can be neither roots nor branches //
// but maybe the dirt beneath or the sky above or nothing in particular in that whole accursed imagery //
Navigating the stormy pattern seas of all the /-isms/
which passively diffused into our unsuspecting children minds some 20, 50,
or some thousands of years ago -
I was for years a bit afraid of humans
because of their behind-the-scenes green motivational binding-together-of-things
but no more
/ free man's worship /
exercised not in the way the world allows for it
but in the ways our own habits don't
in ways you need to look for under the stones of roman roads
in the watery eyes of apes
and all of that on the seaside!
- with good wine
and good tomatoes -
and dripping chicken pate, the hallmark of the Adriatic
I quickly become morena,
you already are
Let's go to a country where we both don't speak the language
so as to better reduce ourselves to our bare necessities
bare necessities, Simone,
two bodies carrying joy-seekers and backpacks,
leaving behind us a trail of old women's leathery hearts
softened once more by your smile
you magic man!
Let's make up a drunken god on the way
with a cock the size of a baobab tree
and a goddess with a huge dripping vagina soaking the world
they can have sex in their sky kingdom while we pretend to watch the stars
waiting to catch a genesis of a whole new engulfing universe take place
and when the portals open up for the mortals of our realm
we can slip inside before the suited-up entrepreneurs find out
and chart the noneuclidian continents of swirling orange-blue-magenta
pulsing tree-like hive minds
in which the atoms work like bees
feeding on the nectar of noncausality and discontinuity
weaving their cosmic honey combs
Let's chart it for the first time
we'll write down everything
meticulously and in detail
only to come back to see that our long sentences and geodesic attempts
were but colorful blots and dots on creased paper
/ not all realities allow for words /
we can give them later to psychoanalysts (or better yet, to psychos) for
/ standard procedure Rorschach testing /
to tell us what it was that we had seen
so that we can laugh
Let's be vulgar in watching our skins magnified to a point
of disgusting organicity
Let's take in the sun on the beach
with five books and seven secrets shared between us
Knowing without memories - how
:refreshing:
sending out messages
to establish not an acquaintance
/ But a rhythm /
Synchronicity with a necessary time delay
Of head digestion
I will write you my number on your hand while you're sleeping
so that you can maybe find me when I accidentally trip over the Russian border
or in some years
unsuspectingly
wanting to buy a tent in some capital of some country
innocently stopping to listen to a sound of a woman singing
in that barbaric language of the east
whose poets and journalists have disappointed their countrymen
selling their words in front of cameras to some vaguely specified ideal
emerging from the fog in the west
in mediocre sentences
medium sized men with fearful eyes and things to lose
// fuck their bureaucratic poetry! //
I can show you an empty island with /ultimate /transparency
from the bottom of the ocean
all the way up to the stars
we can disguise ourselves into dead fish floating belly-up
talking nonsense in our hungry belly-sounds
everybody makes up their own language of signs and meanings
but not everybody renounces the ideal of precision
/ let's do it /
I do it, and I don't
I am a syntactic animal / is what Aristotle was trying to say /
I want to show you the plains of my science
which makes things into maps of human yearning for
prediction
systematization
divination
with the coordinates of /whens, /whys and /hows
with a blurry center knotted into the first utterances of language
clearing up to the branches reaching into bright visions of spaceship dreams
Science is one agreement of humanity
- on principles, not on truths -
- the best kind -
why are scientists so often these cold cubes of men
when they are on a brink of the jungle-magic of the world?
The don't let themselves dissolve over ideas and thoughts
they don't dream, Simone!
- I asked them, they don't -
they haven't remembered a single dream in years,
!when did ever a village need a mage like that?
I have some ideas on how to become a good scientist for the first time,
I will tell you when there will be /no cars to take us to /nowhere in particular,
and of the pheromonic conversational skills of yeast
and of the abstract energy zero-sum game
and of the beautiful physical implementation of an enormously large logical function
which is a computer
of the path from the visions of the universe to the scribbled sign-language
on the paper of a physicist
which takes, after all, a human mind to travel across,
and is thus, to be honest, not much in terms of what science believes itself to be,
but it is beautiful, beautiful and wonderful
I had to hug a woman once because of something she said about numbers
in a village some years ago
What will you tell me?
when there are no cars to take us to the next village?
I wonder, I wonder, I really do
I may have helped you start writing again
but you have made me start writing for the first time
it was such a good moment of whatever it was -
an agreement on intellectual correspondence between two fools
- we are doing it well - what I mean to say -
- we are good fools, aren't we? -
Stupid just enough, to be good,
Stupid just enough to buy a bottle of rakija on this
imaginary trip
from an imaginary old man
steal a boat with the aim to sail to Italy
only to wake up two days /in the past/ on the same coast we started from
that's what rakija does to you sometimes
/ balkan style time travel /
Let's do it once and no more
what do we care
we no longer need to merge that gap between the heart and the stomach
We no longer need to merge
- that gap
- - between the heart
- - - and the stomach
which, as P.R. likes to say,
in the schizophrenic pain of division needs to be glued together with ethanol
after ethanol comes Moloch
/ Moloch who helps / you take your part
in the world of forms and power structures
when the inevitable solitude of the /human/
starts pulsing through the skull ---
/ in the world of forms and power structures /
pasted onto the modern man as a remembrance of kings and slaves
as a poorly fitting suit
after the suit come sentences
those by which you know men have grown old and gray
those sentences repeated to the point of dogma
sentences like bad breath
sentences like cheap liquor
designed to beat down all spark of humanity
designed to simplify the unsimplifiable!
sentences you cannot share between friends
because saying them and having friends lies on the opposite ends
of probability
sentences articulated not in the brain
but in that incompatibility between the heart and the stomach
// whatever the horny women of the west may think
a tie doesn't look good on a naked man
and renunciation doesn't look good on a free man
whatever the voluntary serfs of the world may think //
Let's go for all of those things
with our thumbs up - a well established sign for life
and also for watermelons
I love watermelons
and spitting the seeds
and table tennis as well
and swimming
and strawberries
and figs
and clarinets.
IN THE THICK OF THOUGHT
- I -
A swinging-legged walker with thighs that seemed almost to shake off of her bones stopped right in front of me.
The helmet of hair that she proudly carried on her head was immobile, skillfully sculpted out of hairspray for fixating dreams, with a crown of little jewels - beads of sweat condenzating around the helmet.
Her hands puttered around her figure in an endless motion of fixing, now the blouse, now the dress, now the crown, now the scarf.
Hands of a displeased sculptor.
Hands of a thief.
Movements devised to hide their true nature.
Tips of her fingers were homes to little pools of blood red polish.
I was frightened by the possible visions of her face.
"Observe bravely, imagine with caution!" I told myself, and I directed both of my eyes the best I could to the place where everything pointed should contain her face.
But what had I found there - a calm bearded man. Maybe she is hiding on the other side of the head, I thought gratefully. And really, in a blink of an eye (because that was priceselly what had happened) the bearded man was struck by a horrific metamorphosis.
Bellow his head there settled down some bony body with arms too long, while in the space formerly inhabited by his face there settled a face of full, tame cheeks, a face of eels and pebblestones, with eyes so alive that they seemed to bounce out of the head.
And that is how I had seen her for the first time... I remember it as if it had happened yesterday.
And the landscape surrounding her hips that was mostly made out of bus station exhaust pallette of colors and toxic smell of combustion and public toilets.
And I remember her scarf on which, shot with a hairpin, an indian elephant was falling to his knees. And I remember her bearded man that with a scornful eye was keeping her away from too strong of an intensity of anything. I could not envy him of that task. It had already costed him some good years.
She had something of a cowboy around her hips and I was just waiting for her to twirl up her mustache and spit on the floor, and because of something, that remained unknown to me, that thought had pleased me greatly.
That was maybe the first time I had understood some things, in that ungodly exageration of flesh over which clothes were being lost, in her complete externalization, in which I could almost see thoughts swarm out of her head, flicker in the wind and gather knowledge about air, sun and moisture, and not of some sour tautologies other people have as thoughts.
- II -
Oh, how many days I had spent wet and sweaty,
spilt over the creases of her skin.
And it was so easy to lick from that skin the sensation that I was
strong and beautiful and that in me there is life,
ancient life made of lianas, hunger and sabers.
While I was holding the skies over us and was bringing to her freshly caught wild words,
she was slowly depositing around us some foundations that I, as flustered as I am, couldn't understand all that well.
Like the wind, I was breezing through her attics, and in the mornings she would get up to open the windows, to let spill over the dreams that I had dreamt of during the night, for she knew that it was bad to keep dreams in the house.
I didn't know how to find an end of her - in which ever direction I would go, I would find myself with her in a crazy night that broke over our unlived centuries.
This is how I started doubting: she never asks herself what it is that she understands, but self-consciously recieves into her warm hands some soft knowledge, given to her by her personal God that had been saving her from all the doubts of this angular world.
In the evenings she would flicker above me like a desert mirage. Behind her smile I could barely see her face.
Oh, my brothers, I am completely lost.
- III -
​
She was cleaning fish at the sink.
I never did know how to assemble her image next to sinks, cars and dentist offices.
I was afraid that I was stealing from her the backgrounds over which she could paint herself, and that I am jelously saving her for that one background, barely sketched, destined to always be in the future.
Sometimes I would think that I can almost see that one, horrible background, when in the village fiests, she would bless with beads of her sweat the wanting fishermen with their black hands. I would then curse the city dreams of my parents that prevented me from being a fisherman, from wanting her with some simple hunger, the city dreams that made me wonder along the empty roads of language and split the world into romatic and plastic.
But I had already known by that time - I am her short excursion into the world in which words mean something, and she is only waiting to get lost again among the snails and cabbage, where I had found her.
But still, here she was, cleaning the fish above the sink. I brought her a wild garlic flower.
I was trying to console myself like this: fish scales are also little mirrors, and fish bladder is also a sink.
It did little to help me.
- IV -
That was the month the Grouch had moved in with us.
She and the Grouch slided off of each other, never really touching.
He fell out of some car close to our house, and as he found any place as good as any other, and seeing with his squinty eye of a thief that the two of us had developed no barriers for unwanted guests, he basically moved in with us without asking.
He hated me, and he envied her. He would tell her things, things such that I had to close my ears, and she would gloriously not-understand him, which would forse me into bitter laughter, which would then enflame the Grouch, and I would know that later he would go around the house stepping onto the young salad leaves.
But, soon I started realizing that he was preventing me from experiencing her fully. He wanted to drink from my spring, and I was never one of those that would direct the river flow into their own backyard.
I was standing on the side, waiting for them to experience their sexual antithesis, sadly sailing on the lake that I had sweated out in my misery.
No longer could I lick that life from her skin, I was no longer strong and beautiful.
The three of us were having lunch together, and my eyes kept getting caught in the circles of coffee on the table, and traces of flies on the walls. I was withering away, slowly but surely, to that point in which she had found me a year ago, when the skin around my eyes was turning grey and my neck was rushing down towards my chest.
I had disolved into some puddle on the floor and was asking myself: am I in any different than the Grouch?
She was often looking at me through a mirror and pushing in front of me plates with food. She would stop before me long enough so that I could feel her smell of lavander tickling some corners of my spirit for which I could no longer tell if I had posthumously condemned to become lies.
This internal separation hurt me bad, because everything was telling me: you are a Grouch, and he is just an ordinary man - an interloper that had discovered your secret temple before you had a chance of dying.
To be honest, I didn't really know what was hurting - the fact that I had been replaced, useless, unneeded, clumsy - as a dictionary of forreign expressions - only temporarilly interesting, or maybe the fact that she is just a figment of my imagination, not special at all, just a normal, healthy woman.
That afternoon my father had arrived, he took the Grouch by his ear and took him out of our house with words:
"Why is it that only honest people doubt??"
and I saw the Grouch suddenly, standing in the middle of the road, no longer endowed with that stale magic with which he had settled himself between my ears. He looked naked, almost like a slug, in my pants that were too big for him, and with no hair on the top of his head.
She put the coffee on the stove, smiled to my father and went to the room. That was the first time I had heard her cry.
And that is how I had found myself again at the same crossroads as with many others before her. I wanted her to be the one, the unique, with no one quite alike, but it was all for nothing, because I had remained always the same.
Again I had decayed and again I was all run down.
I was left with a dull taste in my mouth, taste of fried fish and wild garlic flower.
Secretly I had started to pack my bag.