He is a fool which cannot make one sonnet
and he is mad which makes two...
John Donne
COLD SHOULDER
First, it comes uncalled for. Slam! A jeering, fist-
impacted black, and blood, and splintered glasses.
Can anybody help me? Hey, this is not my fault ...
It was a clear-cut criminal act, out-and-out assault!
The cardboard police choose not to press charges
the waiting consensus assembles to whisper
through the icepack pressing on that broken face:
You were always different. You were never one of us.
You asked for it, like any victim. Dont play innocent -
cant you see, in fact, you beat yourself unconscious?
You stink of trauma, trauma stinks like onion breath,
next time, do us all a favour— beat yourself to death!
I'm grateful to the locals for the private lesson
in primary, secondary and tertiary aggression.
CONCRETE POETRY
For this house we were so optimistic:
we'd been looking for somewhere poetic.
It seemed to beckon us, to have endured
Šiška's explosion of concrete, and wars
weather, neglect, and even the traffic
for us. Our crumbling dreampalace attic,
a place to make sacred. So. Ambitous
multiple diplomatic offensives
to buy a few square meters, and for us
seven feathers to mark seven senses.
But now we dont clean the kitchen table
and not one brick wishes us to own it.
The house confesses that it is unable
to love us, much less deserve a sonnet.
DEPOSITION
In this season, those insane
clouds could have taken peyote
for the way they go about so green
and selfish with their property
hoarding up some private watery
hallucination instead of rain.
And black on nulled yellow
that sullen bird poses on a spiky
leafless crucifix. In blue shadow
below congregate all the flickery
people and their TV channels.
From these pissed-in clochard flannels
comes a sign of ceremony fled: t
he stink of someone two days dead.
DINE BAHANE*
Symbols aside, what I find seductive
is the laughter inside that story of
a people migrating from world to world
because the men cant stop messing around
with other women and getting expelled,
and women enraged, who still stay loyal
and move on with the men, no doubt pissed off
but probably pregnant again. And all
walking a story that's not written down
and not to be read. Only to be told.
Only to be told when it is braided
into the shimmer of ceremony t
he meltdown, breakout of identity
into a welcome elsewhere, where faded
silver-nitrate figures sit together
and show they have always sat together.
Only then to be told the end of the
story, that there is an end, and there is
a reason to be there, and to listen.
We came only for this, this one feather...
One supernatural feather, to hide
people on this side from the blinding face
on the other, that annihilation
that absolute white-hot sun, creation
unfaceable. Hence, like all things sacred
the stop-sign binding you into the tribe:
feather as borderline. When you wander
to know where you return. To be settled
here, to accept the settled sign, the fixed
frontier and the end of the adventure.
Feather. Swastika, tribal sign. Saltire
of occasional raiders, local men
who listen to the story's humble end
and laugh and turn away to face the fire.
Men still in their seperate singleness
in women's eyes, and a story willing
to forget itself to stay the common
story, stay forever in the middle:
women forever pissed off but
loyal men forever maddening the women.
*Dine Bahane (Din'eh Baha'neh) is the name given to the creation myth of the Dine, the Navaho Indian people of North America
DOUBLE ACT NATURE
This endless raucous
intercourse of earth and sky
this looseness and this lechery
this riotous arcana. And this
mindless mother, this butchery
this splitting. And this foetus
this gobbeted half-formed lava.
And Art. To counteract the swell
of language, the pitch and roll
and the sensuous come-hither
of sea-monsters. A pair of rings
a gimbol, an ingenious coupling
that smartly engineered symbol
that jeweller's knack for fastenings.
GALLERIA NON GRATA
Even though it's free on Sundays, the
old disincentives still hold. It took me
six years to break the taboo and even
approach. The way the new Slovenia
remodelled the old Yugoslav Army
Museum brushed aside uncertainties
that people are not prepared to waiver.
The doors slide discreetly and the interior
is awkwardly aware of being utterly empty.
The warders oblige and seem pathetically
grateful that anyone will pay attention to
the new audio-visuals, and the collection of
leftovers that have hung around in witness
to the unproud forced path of their history.
People avoid it because they can see
where, outside, the JNA tank used to be
and they miss it. Because they are nostalgic.
But I go every Sunday. For communion
with the quiet mannequins and bric-a-brac
of maps, uniforms and languages. For me
the old machineguns are very cathartic.
Pesmi so iz zbirke Angus Reid: WHITE MEDICINE,
ki je izšla pri Mariborski literarni družbi v zbirki Oglej.
ISBN 961-6329-96-0
