SEQUENCE OF TENSES
Versify me quietly, you say
from the other side of the pronouns
the verbs are reflexive, then unreflexive
choose with whom and how
you'll make the tenses agree
and change over (for one night)
the nouns and adjectives, in gender and number.
Do not exclude the first, infamous
dehydrated person singular, yet
can you be personal
and speak in someone else's name?
To have the correct
elevated melancholy
avoid it, in the formal sense of the word.
In poems the symbols hum, they are wise and passionate
lusting one after another
- promiscuity of ideas -
but meta-bullets are not senseless
the lines are secret emotional associations.
You are not satisfied
with travelling in a known direction
you want to pronounce nostalgia
without being conventional:
a patriotic illness, for example
"erotism is nostalgia for the native land"
(you are born and you finish there)
it has a warm, juicy ground
and it reacts to touch, it drizzles
and loses its mind, legally and illegally
I am not always in the I-form
I is: you am: he are...
Translated by Ilija Casule and Thomas Shapcott
