Requiem in the Dust

Flight Over The Moment

I hurt those who have helped me.
I hurt them like a fugitive
reaching the limits of his madness,
chased out over and over again
betrayed by the moment.

There is nothing before that
and nothing is coming after.
Meanwhile, everything is done in fever
like a scream during a quickie,
or a roar of torture.
And this is the betrayal by the moment.

Eventually a few things remain
to tease our memory.
When we try to catch them,
they scatter into powder,
running down through our fingers
together with our time.

This is the last betrayal,
a flash that plays
and takes us beyond time.
I want to die with this music
in my head.
But I am afraid
that I will not remember it anymore.

Dear Lady Afterdream!

I've already had a bath and shaved as well.
I'd like to ask you
to fulfil my testament,
which you know intimately.
The prostitutes ramble in their pleasure,
the beggars thank for their alms
with the twisted mouth of God,
and the drunkards try to keep their balance
on heaven's sharp blade.
You really cannot imagine
how much I care about them.
I know what they are short of.

They are trying to get somewhere,
to find some point of support
where they can put their heads down.
They miss each other.
I am so sorry
to hear them calling us loudly for help,
when they are not heard from the bottom.
I'd like to alleviate their suffering,
but I can't even help myself.
Remember me, like you do them.

Forgive me. I killed myself,
because I loved you too much.

Your Smalldream.

On Pictures and Reflections

You avoided me
as if I was carrying your dead
after the azure engagement.

You threw the mirror between us
and got me stuck in its glass.

The symbol of our merging,
whatever remains visible inside it,
devours me like a disease.

From every side
it is thrust upon by emptiness.

The Fall of a Punitive Hand

An insane man sowed the seed
then ran off after the picture
of what will grow without it.

It has oozed away, but torment
has brought him back reeling,
for those who suffer tend
to wake up into gloomier dreams.
A radiant little flower is frozen
to icy glass before the touch.

The horrified double fell down,
his throat slashed,
and split inside into halves.

The Everlasting Pain

A whiskered lunatic with the soul of a child
is pulled away from a nurse,
while elsewhere a few punks
drive a skull with a thighbone
for a hole in one.
Later one vomits into the crypt
of an ancient aristocratic family.

God fled from the chapel,
when he'd had his fill of transience,
the wolfpack hastening after its prey
clamped its eyes on his footprints.

Nothing Under The Skin

Are we an ancient couple in the hay,
or are we new-age lovers in bed?
You are watching the way
they fall into place
(as if there were someone else lying here
instead of me) together.

This is me! Can you hear me?!
It is just my seed.
It is only me, however I is everyone.
When I take off my clothes, you'll see nothing.
That which you sense under the skin,
is customarily skin.
Take look at me for the first time!

I don't understand how I appeared
in this skin – it could have been later
or never! Who am I?
The question recurs
without any of them belonging to me!
This looks like a mother
stroking her poor son,
while meantime he pushes a sharp cross
into her back. It's just
my feeling, as long as it lasts.

I've become so cold I am unable to cry.
(It used to work with this song before.)
That's just what used to make me cry,
but the tears have frozen along with me.

The Forecast

Whoever looks ahead
can see his death,
and who looks back
will encounter it.

Half-sleeping I enter the cave.
The opening behind me
was erased with the blast.
I am losing my face.

Rid me of the ring
that binds me with the dark,
for this night is sacrificed
among the last ones.

Quo vadis?

I am standing face-to-face
with naked being.

My head got stuck
at the base of it,
and then it coolly stripped me
of my existence.

Thinking has caused more pain
than all the tears on earth,
collected up at every step
and drunk down to drying point.
Is there anything at all bigger?

Any kind of activity
merely wastes my time,
and its bitter-sweet fruit
is crushed here underfoot.

As if homeless
I have nowhere to sleep.
I miss love
in a warm, safe place
that I can always return to.
All sense has left the road.

Spurned, I wait for mercy.
It's possible to be or not to be.
What is better?

Mixture of an Odour

As the thorn was gently stuck in
Fragrance became stiff with excitement.
A spasm straightened it into the eternal position.
A fluttering within – the quaking of stones
opening an earth-fracture. Crevasses,
a cut head's wrinkles and its plait of vipers,
where things are plaited in the dusk:
the hunted will become the hunters,
while all the teeth fall out
from the bloody gums of the stricken.

Perfume wafts with a corpse's odour.
Whatever you do,
nothing will be written down in the dust.

Translated from the Slovak by Andrew Billingham