Ivo Stropnik

snake time (2) – DIA: Keep on taking readings
to Adam: Lustful is your testament! Keep on
winding the confirmation watch: it keeps stopping,
like any faith. Keep on piercing the eye of the
needle: stitch up the torn hoof to the snorting
horse, those are his wings spreading across the
loosened sky…
LOGUE: Keep on gathering the dewy dusk, red,
nobody knows before what night, and offering it
to the mornings glued together. Keep on planing
words: from the elder gnarl to the smooth lid of the
coffin. Keep on leaving the grid open for the sheep:
let them make a bolt for the world…
DIA: Keep on dandling your grandpa and
granny: keep on breastfeeding your father and
mother. Keep on reading the zero gravity of
the family crest. Keep on with the first-person
narrative: oh, keep on filling the world with
excrements! Keep on pecking the sweet fig,
mastering the dogma with open arms, and the sky,
the sea and the beaten-off dust in between them…

LOGUE: Keep on teasing transparently: come,
come, the fifth season! You who refuses to be
winter while not being spring… 

sense organ – LANGUAGE: When you report
for the history of small languages, be not too
humble towards my luxuriant growth, which you
have never seen. I was a supplicatory snake beside
you, and poisonous.
Language, pollenous in you, a burned-out glade,
I confessed to you the experience of love and death.
When you report of snakes and lions, do not
forget, I created them recognisably for you. I spoke
from the eyes of a mongoloid boy and came far, up
to the ground floor of your head.
I was already far removed from memory,
illiterate he created me, in signs of dust discovered
me, and when once he was just able to draw me
awkwardly, I remained – his unforgettable angel,
not god, but faith.

whistle (17) – I like riding a whistling train
across the landscape of Slovene poetry, where,
on the rusty rails of the Melancholy/Joyousness
route, always with a delay of several hours, I derail
transverbally, opening up again a huge can of
worms: “Let’s end up where others had started;
gnaw at me!”