Whetted Paths
(since my feet will not walk on anything else)
I look for you like a needle in a haystack
Like an iced plane
On a melting island
On which I could
Put a polar bear
So that it feels a bit
Safer
I look for you like I would a mirror's reflection
Hiding my age
Like a bicycle hidden in the attic
In order to ignore my youth
I look for you like I would the knife
Of the neighbor who slaughtered our footballs
Or like the net, the fish trap, the sack
We went fishing with
Along the half-dried up river
I look for you like I would for the Manila hemp thread
Torn off the kite
That flies away in the endless blue
We would patiently go and pick it up
So that we could try
Anew
I look for you like I would my secret crush
From the days of childhood folly
Or like sandpaper
To sand off the beer bottle caps
So they'd slide down the tarmac
When we played
A game of Paths
And I know you are lost on a path
Searching for something
And you would turn round
And speak my name
Like you would a pledge,
or an ancestors' forgotten shadow
As proof that homo ludens exists
To demonstrate there is
No pool we haven't leaped over
That hasn't tried to do us harm
And there is no man that has scared off
Our presence
There is no child unborn wanting to break
Our unframed family
Mirror
- of course seven years of bad luck
Will befall us,
If not a lifetime...
We are human,
That's why we've fallen
Here.
A Recycled Trimester, a Sign of Relief
(days in which we collide, but in which, as frames from the wrong movie, we get
alienated, we pass one another)
We throw away time like it bares meaning
We let the rain wash off
We approximate sins daily as we go on
With our game - you started it!
These nights get their warmth from the last of the fires
Vernal paganism and neoplastic nerves
- old journals, the scent of unheard tales
Under the street pines you can hear the wind rustling
You'd want to drain the marrow out of air's ribs
Our interest is exclusive
Our attention - shocking
The desire to change something - Hurry up!
We throw hope in the maze of despair
Then squeal like white mice stuck in bitterness
Like most beautiful animals do
We beg to have our fur stripped
All the while feeling the flaying an inch at a time
The next day we wake up
With coffee consoling us
And at the bottom of the mug
Someone's put poison
To make our day shorter
And wherever we may go, we'll be
Welcomed with cake
We invest in the wrong sighs,
We are all a 'but' in the wrong theater
We lose what little we have
From what we are not enough
To purchase more often:
Time, patience, gazes, warmth and smiles
Constant (re)appearing
Heavenly, otherworldly delights
A trap is every attempt to close the door
You've never opened before
We're miniscule souls, specks of dust lost in the cosmos
Dreaming of the grand gardeners' magical gardens
Yet we never seem to plow our own
We're nowhere near producing food
Yet we're considering flowers
We miss the busses
And pay through the nose for taxis
We forget our phones on the seats
And let our dreams be eaten
And in the end we get fevers
And cold sores of the soul
And the odd anthill in our weakness
Which,
Again pollutes our joy.
The Forgotten Retort between Two Gazes
And so we role-play clockmaker and time
Both with hammers aimed at mutiny's head
And a clock is a bigger bastard than both man and everlasting sun
As we forget burnt words and human dust
Ugly tongues and nasty minds
They drag the lent of the soul
The inner voice doesn't (ever) go out,
Like angels' dander or hell's gasoline it just booms
Skips the small lightning bolts
Twists the lowest mountains
The force of forever would, like a mother to her son,
Bind
And barely ever
Alienate
In the rood of our heads
Like snails
We hide our true home
Not realizing that the slime of our soul
Leaves traces of disquiet in our sleep
We keep the stars in our hands,
Why is it when we throw them
They strike like heavenly boulders?
Stones have learned to resound
Yet our dulled hearing needs to wake up!
Both fire and abyss alike
Are eternal
Just like our pensive, darling souls
Just like a shard in marbles, when our bell breaks
We are of piercing glass, yet
Troubled as the soul remembers
But knows not to reciprocate
We're birds that have decided to build their own cage,
We sing of the freedom we've created
But the space in which we act is
Barely as large as our wingspan is
Be the river that desires to break through the cold
And the ice of the mountain whose home is winter
We all want to see the whole
We all want to be a part of someone's whole
We want to add to the whole, bid for it,
Increase it, make it rich
Or
Cripple it without realizing
As we don't grasp for understanding we're nothing but cutouts
A squareon a Rubik's cubepersevering, searching for its match
On the other side of the cube
We're seemingly moving in a circle
Rolling all over the globe like a stolen bobbin of yarn
From grandma's old chest.
We leave our people like
Forgotten church bells in our soul
Though we'd like their thoughts to echo
But you'd only hear the blood of your words
And angels pacing on the cobblestone road
Leaving without making a sound,
With a touch ingrained in us like a scar from child's play
Like a mother's hand holding a teaspoon of soup
Like a father's lesson of how to chop kindling
Without losing a finger
We cut and we carve, but the truth can't be carved
Because, if we do, it will carve us back
And bury us six feet under
Even though we never brewed enough coffee
Even though we never leaped over enough bonfires
Even though we lied when we said that spirits came
when we summoned witches
And the fairies choose our shadows as their mates
No, our shadows, like us, would rather hide in verses
And battle quietly for their hidden lives.
We'd rather be snow: white, clean, untarnished,
But you can't keep snow in a jar, it won't sit still,
Neither will love
Trapped, lonely, not shown, framed.
Love floats alone in a frame, like a cross-stitch
Of a woman spinning yarn as her wool is coming to an end.
Let's make our minds ascend in a global fire
And resurrect the enchanted souls.
A forgotten retort between two gases
(therefore)
Please leave me
Leave my
Predicaments be
It's not the time in which
The soil on its own and
By its own volition
Did turn over
And roll over
We all move
Twist, roll over
As we live we do not remember
Or notice,
While we're dead
'we do not eavesdrop
As others gossip about us'
And
Probably all spine issues are gone
Leave the world be, darling,
It is not a part of you
Can't you see in your naiveté, how,
Through your breath of lunacy they pass you by
They skip right over you
They won't even cough anymore?
Leave the trams, darling,
In them, fewer wishes are travelling these days
Towards you,
Inside you,
Next to you,
No more hands reaching out
No more raised voices
- we drown in our own outcry
We hope that hope as our last refuge
Will pay our debts
Will turn off the light
And in the end
Just like us all
Will leave
And go
To hell.
Translation from Macedonian language: Aleksandar Mitovski