the wheel

by Tomaž Šalamun from justice

o, like a little puppy i slept on the floor,
washed myself in the window.
i didn't trust your honeyed heart.
we ate breakfast when you
smelled like the urmother of hours,
mortally dangerous to me.
i tied you up.
you forbade me to steal horses.
they'll come by themselves!
they'll come by themselves!
and i smacked my lips.

only you are here
to burn you and forget you,
my property.
collapsing wet brown houses,
how should i get up.
how should i drink your gulps
in this thick, poisoned
sea air.
you by yourself broke your eyes and
pulled out your
scent with your rattle, your
banal black moan.
you give a damn what happens to me.

come, break me, reduce me. i'm becoming
the family milk bowl. the siren will
kill me. tear her dress off like virgil to make her

a fat, abashed, gelatine. i'm mashed by rocks.
she devours me like a tempest, she devours
the tattered flag. i'm an ice cream cone

melting in the child's belly. smashed
grapeskins. the yawning of sybaritic gazelles.
as an elephant i squirted. as a leopard i

squatted on the cow's heart, the big one, at the edge
bordered with pearls. bamboo was stuck in
the heart's small nooks which on the other side

kept opening like mouths that had just passed
through the gelatine. the arrow, the wing,
the fish fins, the diamond nib of my liquified

brain. this makes the empire. lust.
appoint the sirens in the valleys, but i
swallow you out of myself. i enjoy

you out of myself. and i want more.
more, more, more, still more, 'til the pain
with its heel squeezes my soul like toothpaste

from my throat. to have a good cry again and to
tremble, to shake like an overhead machine
and to sob. to need you. to need you.