Say Goodbye to Poetry

/, Literature, Blesok no. 74/Say Goodbye to Poetry

Say Goodbye to Poetry

(extract)

She told me she loved me as a verse-creating object, as something with an enormous shaggy tail, something absurdly spectacular and at the same time hopelessly primitive, old-fashioned, prehistoric; I love you as a most magnificently versifying object, Klárika would murmur through kiss-curved lips before everyone had fallen asleep and let nothingness alight upon the earth, till then unended, I love you as an object of poetry, as a swarm of animate corpuscles, as a race of irredeemable tramps …, while all were not yet sleeping Klárika was in her element, she raved into the blue sky like a crossed-out conscience, she spat out her ice-cream over bastards and roared laughing, she did handstands and cartwheels, she stripped off her T-shirt in the public squares, ripping the hearts out of old men, she was splendid and beautiful, she would dream with open eyes of inaugurating the reign of folly, then immediately fall into gloom and vicious cursing – the chaff to death, the cornucopia for life! She wanted to try out everything that’s been said about poetic madness, she wanted to be like a poet, like his celebrated bowel, long and sparkling, she craved to drink herself dumb and deranged, as only poets do when they’re in form and don’t know the meaning of stop, she craved to make poetry with me, to let drip from her tongue the slaver of verses and questionnaires, the self-interrogation that means unbounded misery; she was resolved to fantasise, to call upon the light, radiance, marvels, the foreign legion of solitariness, she wanted everything, a shock, a kiss, a blown-up condom that goes bzz when you let it go, she wanted everything, everything, she made love with me to exhaustion, to the last drop of sweat and blood – everywhere, anywhere, always and anyhow, in all the positions, above, below, tenderly, brutally as a monster, or fragile as a mollusc, oh come on, come, poet of mine, I adore your clumsiness, your smell, come bite the maybugs off my nipples, I’m all on fire and I want it very very much, give me him here, that upright ostrogoth, with his jerks and his rattles! Watered with lorryloads of champagne, she would show me her breasts browned by the May sun, flinging them up at me to unhinge and inflame me on a railway platform, in government buildings, in a cage at the Zoo, she laughed at vulgar laddish jokes, guffawing throatily, hoarse as an old yarn-spinner, everything in her was noble because she was burning with love, tenderness, and ill-concealed public suicide, everything around her was real, the genuine article, solid, suggestive to the point of dogmatism – being things that cannot be handled delicately, fortune-telling, killing, winking, choking, the abounding pressure of feelings, black to the pitch of lunacy. And suddenly something would fly through her little head and she’d be lost in brooding, she’d sink in a silence beneath her level, like an aesthete in a sunspot; she’d be hushed, submerged in the enchanting centres of her transient existence, in her grave – and I knew that she was thinking of the spiders, the flies, the worm that no one could love, it lashed her like a whip, she was sainted forever and ever, with eyes swollen from dissipation, bardically, poetically, lyrically, a famous poem in prose, a strophe, a spondee, an embracing rhyme … and suddenly up she jumped again, flung out those first-class legs and launched into some gurriers’ ballad, screeching full-throated like a castaway, she sucked the sap of life through every pore of her flawless skin, through every little aperture of her body: secretions of euphoria through her nose, the cheering of scatter-brained angels through her ears, anticipated misfortune through her vagina, when the bus inspector was coming she thrust lighted cigarettes into her pockets, she flung about dog-eared banknotes, she swigged stout from the bottle like a dipso, she bought half-pints of vodka and poured it in transports of feeling behind her collar, she gripped me powerfully by the hand till it took my breath away, and whispered that she loved me, she loved me catastrophically … I love you, poet of mine, it’s beautiful with you, everything with you is about love and frightful suffering!
She’d hit the nail on the head. Because the poet is an inexplicably mysterious creature, delicately concealed, the poet is a being without time and space, the angels of blasphemy are roving in his veins and craning out as far as his devil’s hooves, hence the poet is an oddity of creation, eccentric, non-stereotypical, an etheral, astrophysical, jaded figure, he hides within himself armies of woe and dreadful pain, which are all the time exploding in his heart like summer storms, and simultaneously he despatches into the world regiments of unlimited bliss, the poet is scorned, spat upon, buried underground, made a saint of, chopped in little bits, he’s an instinctive predator, hated and loved, hating and loving, och! how a poet can love: like a snotty-nosed whiner, like a spectre out of nonsense, the poet will muddy himself from head to toe with faith in agapé, and afterwards from unhappy love he’ll turn on the gas or slit his veins, vulture-vulture, everywhere of a sudden there’s an awful lot of blood, blood, real blood, it’s flowing into the neighbours’ place, what has that madman done again? His daisy-flower has left him and he’s making an ass of himself, his black blood is everywhere, it soaks through the ceiling, drips from the tap, a bloody rain, a rain of blood, the love-struck lunatic – and afterwards the poet with his shredded veins hotfoots it through the entire town, going somewhere away to blazes, to knock on the doors of madhouses, aha, look what I’ve done to myself!
The poet is a pariah, a man-miasma, a blow-in, he is a conjuror, a perfidious disarranger of a reality which doesn’t matter a fart to him, a sensualist, a shaker-about of beauty and stolen diamonds, a toper, a layabout, a solitary nature, a name-dropper, a bed-hopper, a lick-arse, an obscene plagiarist of everything that moves … The poet is beggary, fulminated a functionary of government, all his life long he doesn’t have the price of a crust of bread, and so he scrapes through life by whatever means, unscrupulously, in any way he can, for a while he’ll be digging trenches down to the mains, the pipelines, labouring with his hands like a man, then suddenly he’ll down tools and jack it all in and start lying about under the naked clouds, just like that, like a beast from the circus, like an old broken-down jade, motionless and echoless the poet can endure whole hours lying gaping at the rainclouds and picturing the stupendous jewels of a devil’s paradise, the poet cultivates in himself the sweetest melancholy of humanism and humanity, the embracing, the licking all over; like a zany he would be happier if he could give himself all away, he would like best to share out all his molecules, not keeping back as much as a scrap of chewed shell or a tuft of hair or a gill … the poet with the whole of his leaping heart stands for love, for love that swallows up all, for eternity on the heights and after death, and at the decease of his most holy spirit everything will fly into the air, boom, bang!

AuthorIvan Kolenič
2018-08-21T17:22:53+00:00 September 8th, 2010|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 74|0 Comments