ELECTIONS
I would vote for the poet. I would go to him
and give him my vote. I would vote for him with silence, white,
so silent, forgotten and alone,
as are the unheard words of all poets, workers
and proletarians, their fleeing from the mouth that cannot pay off language,
therefore, if you feel me serving you, please
vote for the crumbled, sullen, ugly poet, crushed from work,
sprinkled over paper, his straw of dry grass,
let’s pay him the elections, not with whichever money,
but with poetry, the mediator says that gold will gain value,
look at them, poets,
for the language candidate they would all give their loans,
debts, word, paying off to beauty, to her, sitting on the edge,
consoling him softly and worriedly, she who is carried by the non-elected poet,
knows without words that we stand on the same page of the book, he who writes and I
who reads and no migrant border between us,
no chemical agents, parties, currencies, plastic bottle caps,
and since this is not enough, between us there is that
which is less than silence, nudity, lemon or a goal,
no, the two of us are like water, washing ashore a book
for engines, tubes, vending machines, comfort, oil, continents to flow off it,
and ultimately even language slips beyond dark matter, where
totality is still without smell, rhythm, and shape, do you still believe,
that there I would find the poet’s madness and embrace it,
shorter than breath, memory, joy, or déjà vu,
so much shorter that even the poet would be taken away from me,
so he would not escape with me and I would leave him in my imagination,
since only there a candidate with a PhD could be elected,
yet without a job, a shiny pendant, spectacle from a box,
human replacing human, relative, townsman,
just as all the foreigners across the wires of the purchased sky,
you and me just as he to himself a loyal follower, who cannot exit imagination with me,
only him I would tell that in the keyboard
an ant, an artery, an ideal, dirt are stuck, or that the form from the bureau
reeks of wrath of a working woman’s day, the sweat of her unemployed husband,
the smell of her hand, it touched a toy, she won’t bring it from the store,
not just any toy, but the toy-car with the price of the gaze of their child
a day before. Only to him, the bestial poet, without stars or muscles,
I would trust, that I got an apartment by knowing the right person,
no taxes, arithmetic, fillers or bureaucracy, only parents
on the ground floor of the house. He would approve atomic bomb, since time
without shortcuts, appliances, bonces, servants, and brilliantine
without birthdays, holidays, visits, rides, and chocolate is so damn long,
that you erase the events, which should have happened, so that a half of year would be
like a month without a pay, life of an empty banal planet,
with crooks, tycoons, dirty fellows, the naive, bureaucrats, smugglers,
with trained elephants, logic bills, as an apparition
or only a cynical poem of the day, covered in ice and its top,
a barefoot wish in a pine forest, like deserted snail shells,
dried saliva, left without greed, as it is just how it is supposed to be,
in this sucked-out world, without houses, door, roads, field, without event,
like space that life will pick up off the floor one day
to leave a mark on the bottom,
not in my, but in your imagination,
you, who I will vote for, because I cannot vote for myself,
yet I can carry a poem for us both.
Translation: Petra Meterc