Poems from the poetry book A Coloring Book for Friends
Translated by Markas Aurelijus Piesinas
waking up, complaining
yes once again i won’t start something endless
the whole day will bode brevity the end
will have arrived into things
so taking anything up won’t be worth it
really open your eyes do you see
how the children we could now beget without any condom
wrinkle up get cancer must go to shitty jobs dissolve into dust
**
a rug hangs drying in gray drizzle
futile is the word which aptly describes
everything everything fuck why should i
explain it to you the fringes of my thoughts are completely
raveled
-
light falls
on roofs on leafage on hands
i sketch plants
no lines just chiaroscuro
because we don’t really see lines
a line is a thing of control rather than sight
a tiresome thing
birds fall planes fall light falls
all plunging to death
**
what splits us apart
curses drama silence
anything we come across splits us apart
and yet we can’t split up for a gray couple of weeks now
though it seems years it seems i was always like this
i say you don’t get me and at the other end of the landline
at the very end of a landline that nobody has used for two decades
slowly inaudibly
a gray
dog
is dying
-
withered mimosa branches
a small canvas still depicting them alive
two thirds of a bottle of anise spirit
colored ink dots on the sink
you were here you were here you were here
this is so real and yet
these are the ruins
of a small town
that bears no likeness to twin peaks
-
someday
reality will become worthless
your pockets
will fill with sand
-
do i wish to leave now – i don’t
breathing calmly as if breathing smoke
i say nothing neurosis grows
over my face like a bruise till we let go
witch
someone will surely notice the stains
soppy tuesday evenings
when the week snaps and the end of a rope juts from your hand
you let it slip out
a few pints of bitter rain
quick-drying fragments of conversation
preparations
to jump when tearing at solitude’s throat we’ll emerge each on our side
of the street while gray
dusk sets in as people will turn to look saying what stains
what stains in one’s head that even the wind gets smeared
losing is infinite
I. FROM THE VERY BEGINNING
when i saw my father was not a man
since that moment i gave up understanding
i quit playing now troubled and looking about
when i was a child i thought like a child until my head was bashed in
by the older kids or maybe i was just skinny
then i stopped understanding infinity
as something which hasn’t been lost
II.
when i started climbing up through the window
and eavesdropping on darkness speaking behind doors
listening to how rich redness and sunflower seed shells
fill the courtyard at sundown
i came quickly to see this was happening
under destructive circumstances
∞. ONTOLOGICAL
a bus crawls through
the city outskirts
a clumsy mass
of loosely fixed parts
held together only by curses and the foul smell of feet
if there were
some battle which hasn’t been lost
some stretch of mind untouched by the rainbow of motor oil
some professor’s spine not shattered by masses of books
any
object of value not yet pissed on
a bus like this one wouldn’t be possible
0. HISTORICAL
what else could i steal back
from this long defeated city
it was bombed to bits and rebuilt into bits
give me what i can’t earn myself
a mauser c96 pistol
and the playful cry of the tsar
and the way he childishly flutters his arms
when the wasp of gunpowder stings
give me free money and a home for five nights
a few comrades empty notebooks and a layout of the city’s underground pits
because we are capable of something else
than taking turns making love in closed rooms
something else than writing collective automatic pamphlets
against everything that is a loss
***
(for K. Navakas)
it’s about seven am
i’m drinking morning beer
smoking my morning hookah
cigarette butts leftovers fragments
all is done the fucking is done
i see the taxi got home safely
i love my ring
this morning suits me
it is precisely the reason why
my mother gave birth to me
if i had to die now
i wouldn’t hesitate at all
i’d answer firmly
no
