Brane Mozetič








 

from BANALITIES





21***

 

This miniature Sao Paolo is obsessed with
itself. The swarming heat and the unbearable
human stench convince me that it would be nice
to remain between four walls and give in to
despair. If I still manage to go out with some
acquaintances, the topic of conversation is
where we’ll eat. I obviously made
a mistake when I left my home
town where the main question always is: where
and what we’ll drink. Actually, there’s no question.
From the painful obsession with food and drink
I retreat to an obsession with sex
or something like that, I’m not sure what to call it,
because it’s all becoming more abstract. It hasn’t become
so bad that I’d spend hours and hours on the internet
for pleasure, but it is disturbing, because I stare at
people for no apparent reason. Perhaps
it doesn’t bother them, it bothers me, because I feel
that this habit is becoming an addiction.
A dose of observing beautiful bodies, faces, skin,
I have to increase it each day, fragments appear
to me in dreams, I awake frequently
in a sweat, I’m haunted by cruising streets,
somehow I can’t cope anymore. Perhaps I should stop,
using some strong will-power
to give up this behaviour. Perhaps I should
admit that I’m addicted, join some
self-help group, or kill
the fantasies in bed with unknown bodies,
sweat, stench, stupid words,
and emptiness.

 








23***

 

Only when thousands of kilometres away from you
do I dare admit that I’ve fallen in love
with your sperm, with the death that it brought.
I watched it, spilled out over your stomach,
and drowned my face in it. Its scent, which became
the scent of death, brought me
endless orgasms. As though I were using you
for my self-destructiveness.
You know it
too, just in a different way. I’ve
pulled thousands of words from your sperm,
put them to music which held me
on the edge. It seemed to me that I wasn’t worthy
and that you’d leave me too.
I couldn’t get rid of my father who
didn’t think it worthwhile to stand beside me.
That’s why I didn’t find it unusual when you left me
a thousand times. And each time I
returned to the edge of your stomach with wet
cheeks I lay there waiting for you
to get up and leave once more.

 








25***

 

The trip that was truly ours was not to

London, New York, Tokyo or Sao Paolo,
that wouldn’t have been wild enough. We
had to go amongst blacks so we could constantly
be afraid, so there was tension, huge
cockroaches, the blood of a dead bison and lions’
jaws that were tearing up its meat. During the blackouts
in Nairobi, we were barely able to steal away to
our broken-down rooms. That’s how it had to be
so we could have only each other, so we were
able to cling to each other like frightened monkeys.
I don’t even recall if we gathered up enough
energy for sex. But still, it was all
sex. Birth and death. Stoned children who
aggresively roamed the streets, exhausted
bodies that lay on piles of garbage, uncertain
as to whether or not they were alive, all kinds of soldiers
and buses that got stuck in the mud in the middle
of the wilderness, the sun that rose from
the sea, a remote cinema in which
women smoked, the endless horizon
that makes one dizzy. It would have been better to stay there
in a tent in complete darkness when you pressed up against me
while animals on the roof made mischief.





Translated by Elizabeta Žargi and Timothy Liu

 

 

 

 




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