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Index of poems:
Often I feel life Shaped by mould for vanilla biscuits And how there, I bid good night when The majority bids good morning. Often I look at the whiteness of a long street And shop windows made of sandpaper and flour. Often have I smelled, with my hands, The changing traffic lights On island of fabricated eternity, Where you stand torn away and new, Looking at the multiplication tables and You divide charity like slices of orange. Often I feel pride That children of this city still go home In waking time of plastic seats On the linear means of travel. People live in the pavement. Do you see how their faces Become yellowing leaves In this time of frequent need of rest? Often I hear someone lecturing how There is nothing more beautiful Than an unopened bottle, Or at least it looks that way sometimes. Often I feel that I boil In my shadow like a plague Turned towards weapons that kill And give birth to a thought deep as a pocket. Win me over for yourself and keep me Hanging from the spikes of your yard gates And feed me oil for smearing life; And watch how my eyes become crop fields And pools of enriched metal. Maybe I will become an insect or a sting I will live in sooty dew of this world of ours That sails along the quicksand. Often I feel the distance of books. Often I feel that someone, Through the aromas of fruit Still remembers me.
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Dostoyevski and Nietzsche are dead, and I don't feel very well either. I catch with my hand my pale reflection in the mirror, like a swear word someone chucked at me, and I shut it in a jar leaving it sealed over winter. The skin I put on this morning has the scent of a newly bought Bible. My hearing and I live in a quarrel. For only a moment, I looked into the mirror's eyes; It sighed and said to me: Doesn't it seem that all people inhabit a single fired torpedo? Men - with headaches large as Russia; Women - as loyal as ice cubes in a glass. I wash my mouth by reading Szymborska aloud. Perhaps I'll find out whether poetry is an illness or a chemical reaction. Even the books have darkened from reading like whiskey left in a barrel. Maybe the new millennium will place keyboards on mirrors so we can adjust our reflection at will, like sterile poets adjust their language. Galaxies are just pills in a hand, and black holes throats of allergic men. I will swallow these verses and drown myself in a dream. That's how Bruce Lee died.Back to top
Like a Dandelion
© Nicholas Cobic
I don’t exist, you don’t exist either, And nor does the dandelion that I tied in your hair On one river island. Only a piece of air exists In which forever lives frozen Our first glimpse of each other. Every memory has been discovered a long ago And described by movements of suicidal poets Except this which I in vain Try to carve into fire with a crystal knife. I would put you in my suitcase made of ashes That I carry with me around the world Because I am a burnt out bird That has by mistake landed on an electric wire But I will fly over canyons again Where second hand smiles of Dusty souls that renounced love Fall down. I don’t know whether the smell of your pillow Hides the tears of the dead dandelion. I don’t know whether your bed sheets Are tailored of broken wings of swallows; I don’t know whether your sleeping gown at midnight Recites the words from my poems I don’t know any more if now shyly Down my cheek flows A drop of sweat … or a tear.Back to top
Palimpsest of a Whore
© Nicholas Cobic
Walking behind, they saw her sailing in her shoes along the wet pavement. Her feet grew out of milk that had a taste of mother. They saw her leaning against the measly wall while the moon coughed out the midnight. Medicine students drew lines along her stomach, butchers along her back. Underneath each bitten fingernail she has one Holy Commandment. Sweat drips down her forehead. It has the taste of the Ninth Symphony. She said: Bed sheets often bite my back in this room where rats howl through their broken teeth. She is a boxer. Her life is an attempt to prevail another round. They saw her joining an order. Instead of a past she wore a tattoo. She said: the food here has too many adjectives. She confessed her shame to insomnia. They only claim to have seen her. She has no grave. The wise say: Who has no grave – never lived, and who never lived – cannot be dead.
The Scorn of Reason
© Nicholas Cobic
I didn’t notice how the smile Of your childhood got entangled In my eyelashes Unchanged by time Stretching from east to west Sometimes made of rubber, sometimes watery. From your smile I ate winter, I inhaled your words Often so obese and cold That my throat would turn Into a gas pipeline. Call it by any name From your dictionary wrapped in vanity. Call it the abyss Dug out by my persistence. Your smile is fruit that believes In afterlife. I am a mosquito Thirsty for my own blood From the glass shadows Delineated in the fog of my confessions. Your smile is a continent For whose defence I am ready to die And create. Your smile is an aquarium Decorated with music of instruments Sunk in ocean. Your smile is chained to the jaws of My hands that eat you away To non-existence. Your smile…
“The places we love
We cannot leave”
Ivan V. Lalic
We used to be eagles
Now we only fly south
On un-walked streets I connect the part of town
In which the air for the first time
Itched my lungs
With the one where I will watch blood
In some more beautiful colour.
The tongue of the street is a trap.
In it I fall as into a folly;
The buildings are teeth, sharp expressions,
Artists renouncing their masterpiece.
Troops of chimneys keep watch above
Guarding the dark not to leave the estate.
I am running by the marketplace;
The fishmongers shout something my way.
Their word catches up with me, sweaty,
Chewed up like a blade of grass.
Will this soil
Out of which arms of all mornings grew
Be able to embrace us
Like mother by the sickbed?
The words are a blanket
For covering truth.
At a touch they disappear.
The dead are leaving black and white photographs.
We used to be eagles
Now we only fly south
Tobacco Tales
© Nicholas Cobic
They brought the coffin with my 4th floor neighbour Out into the yard today From the flat in which Weeds and children once grew. His dog, the king of nearby streets, Whined in front of the staircase. That man who drew in The Gulf current on his forehead, Died neatly – of stroke Less than a month after retiring Because this world was fed up with him. He used to greet me in the lift, That admirer of large print headlines And made up stories of war wounds. That lifelong coat hanger With a nylon bag in his hand. Sometimes he would talk to his walking stick As to a son that he disowned; All that belonged to him were Boat in a bottle and ashes in the sink. He chewed tobacco and stank of seclusion. I didn’t pity him even when I heard That for two days he gurgled on the floor, I only recalled how he Punctured a ball with which Some children broke his window. In the end, I loved him truthfully For he was a part of my growing up, And yet he died, never dreaming that the world, With which he eternally wrestled, Will keep him alive in tobacco tales.
