Borut Gombač

As I cautiously tread the imaginary line
between time and space,
holding a never quite symmetrical
balance pole,
someone
who doesn’t yet exist
awaits for the beginning to begin.

All their future decisions remain correct,
and ambiguities, such as there are, enrich
rather than detract.

Their name is their body.

Their language,
which describes reality with marvellous precision,
palpable resonance,
and boundless symbolism,
is easily translated to all other tongues,
the living
and the long dead.

They’re keeping pace with their shadow,
they’re ethereal,
transcendent
as well as tangibly corporeal.

Although they’re basically a torso,
they have a head
and a face.

Their eyes are clear,
penetrating,
and most of all, so vibrantly alive.
 

My frost-bitten fingers open the ribcage of a prehistoric ancestor,
then rub words against each other until
sparks ignite within.
 

The image stays blurry
until the translucent body in the depths of the horizontal composition
stares directly into my eyes.
 

Anyway, they say
the black hole doesn’t care what part of the identical is the same.

If I vomit out all
that I’m hiding within my body,

turn my skin outward,
let the caustic outside burn away the keratin,
what’s left
could hardly
be called living tissue –
rather a personified epithelium of emptiness,
a porous perimeter of nothing,
thinner than the thinnest meaning,
quieter than the quietest tone,
louder than identity itself.

If someday I do somehow manage
to vomit out everything inside my stomach,
I’ll therefore also vomit out the stomach in the process.

My scattered nature will die again and again,
being born repeatedly, but just in foreign bodies,
as a profoundly adaptable illusion of epidemic proportions,
a centrifugal centre,
aggressive passivity,
a drowned metaphor,
an air bubble at the bottom of an ocean of stone,
the forgettable hue of the print of all the world's newspapers.

The only thing that will remain
is a description, a metonymy of presence,
without scent or taste,
thoroughly superficial,
undigestible,
undecomposable,
inarticulate,
and unsigned.

And then a sudden jolt,
a kick off the side of the bed,
a collapse of the shadow dam,
a spasm in the negative,
the run of a headless hen,
a trembling flinch of a lengthy day
full of blind intersections
and dubious realities.

I’m still awake.
Not yet asleep.
This isn’t ground yet above my feet,
no words with wings yet,
not yet the structure of dreams, specific,
fantastic
but implacably consistent
in all its transitory constellations.

For now, there are just these tiny chance connections,
a quiet impermanence of symbols,
chaotic swarms under burning eyelids,
stifled explosions of sunspots.

I haven’t reached the other side yet,
but I’ve long been gone from this one.
 

And then a sudden jolt,
a kick off the side of the bed,
a collapse of the shadow dam,
a spasm in the negative,
the run of a headless hen,
a trembling flinch of a lengthy day
full of blind intersections
and dubious realities.

I’m still awake.
Not yet asleep.
This isn’t ground yet above my feet,
no words with wings yet,
not yet the structure of dreams, specific,
fantastic
but implacably consistent
in all its transitory constellations.

For now, there are just these tiny chance connections,
a quiet impermanence of symbols,
chaotic swarms under burning eyelids,
stifled explosions of sunspots.

I haven’t reached the other side yet,
but I’ve long been gone from this one.