Love was born but nobody had noticed
how terrible it was. They shower it with gifts
every day without understanding that it is ready for a program.
Love is placed on the walls like a painting.
On the houses, like flags for the Republic Day.
It is a cold bowl at first, cold since
it is made out of porcelain, fragile and displaced.
Between the bed and the phone it finds
a tiny space that favors it,
that will protect it.
I drew it and it looked like an enclosed circle.
I engraved into it all the faces
I knew, I touched
and laughed at them. I am faithful since I know what it is like
to see oneself in the eye of another.

The hollow pupils are senseless.
They are marked by victims,
by trivial deals.
Love sneaks into the belly, into the meat -
then it echoes and we recognize it as words.
I stretched myself out on the floor and stared
at the spot on the ceiling.
The nuances have evaporated from that state,
that state is cruel and unscrupulous.
It should not be expected to yield some
particular desires, or complete revelations.
Did I ever ask for something?
There is shadow on my face that feeds
on the blood vessels and leaves wrinkles around the eyes.

I know that here I can reach the ultimate
heights, transform myself into pure energy.
Now I feel that it is dawning,
although I am not yet able to see that.
But the time will come when we will
relax, get rid of the dreams.
When we will be as light as the scent.
I feel nameless and that apparently
liberates me from responsibility.
I would rather be a torrent which
floods indefinite motions,
which describes forebodings and devours fear.

I speak in the first person. Therefore I am not just
an instinct, an accidental voice.
And my sentences are keen like a heart of a flame.
I know that, I see and hear that.
I have read somewhere:
bread, silence, memory, zenith, eternity,
overwhelming unease. I knew that those are the words
that would not remain unspoken, that I would
take them up some day. That I would spill them
like a seed feeling then something more than
pleasure, more than a joy of spawning.
Now they still tremble, because I tremble.
Love trembles. Before it is spoken,
the word is only the air, the trembling air.

Translation: Tomislav Longinovic