you step into your own ring and ending always where you stop making circles.
there’s eye shadow on your lids, aluminum on teeth and chalk on lips.
your memory
is spit out like a blob of chewing gum.
people are rolling from screen to screen,
turning away from wet skin. next time you wish to spin the ring,
you lick the chalk, smear the eyelids, saw up the aluminum; where you’re absent,
you step on chewing gum.
where do I stop splitting in two as my concentric circles
cling to the set of circles from some memory.
hands that once rubbed the stains of clotted plasma off the tiles touched
your walls, beforehand they had shaken a foreign hand and scraped
the grime off the table, they had handled a door handle previously handled a thousand other times, touched
the keyboard, torn paper and wiped feces off skin, they rubbed against
each other under water. afterwards they ate, trained the thinning of
gesture. where do words multiply after splitting; where do I
end when the face stops beginning, where another face faces mine in disbelief. where
the smile of the face is the mirror’s smile where bliss exists, but the other face doesn’t
know
where. where
the set of circles from the memory and the set of circles from the mental images
join in the touching of hands. where?
(translated by Andrej Pleterski and Ravi Shankar, from Aluminum on the Teeth and Chalk on the Lips 2012)
language is suppressed inside your mouth.
it librates
liberates itself in poetry. this is poverty,
an invalid communication. so you see.
so you see.
(edited by Ravi Shankar, 2016)