You enter my room uninvited

so quiet, like rust

or oxygen

You enter my womb

and flounder

while I helplessly fly out the window

towards you 

should we not exchange places

And so while you intrigue me

in the silk of your cobweb

you steal my thoughts and dreams

so easily 

For the first time I think of love

But your flesh is not here

And it will be many years before 

I tell you how much I hate

this platonic love of yours

However it will probably be 

much too late

because you will inevitably

have yourself tatted 

now a victim 

and like a spider in a web 

I watch you floundering 

and by force

hallucinating 

I

The glow you exude, dear

simply sitting in your castle

is making the whole world envious

I can hear your words in the wind

but there's no code book.

Are you there, God?

I can’t let go, I can’t!

But you’re not mine

Tell me, did she cut her hair?

Send me a wisp

I need it for a witchery

You shine, my dear

yet the whole world longs for you

These gray streets tell me

you still love me

and the scent of dry vanilla spreads

***

Traffic lights wake me from my dreams

I wish to give to someone new

I flinched!

If you deserve this poem, my dear

I’ll sing it to the wind

II

Years have flown by, lingering

It feels like all this time

I have been lying in the same sheets

while your hair covered me

although, you’ve never left your 

tower

neither on earth nor in heaven

You’ve gazed at many eyes

as if they were mine

but they all faded

I’m not yours

I’m not yours

But you don’t let go

***

Spider on the ceiling

Different thighs warm mine now

Lights in the Boulevard go out

Another morning without you dear

But for a long time now 

your stare doesn’t hurt

***

No lights in the tower

III

Do you ever drink for the old times

as if I was by your side

on Tuesdays, at midnight?

***

I raise my glass but

it doesn't weigh the same

I can't let go

I can't let go

A broken mirror lies somewhere

in Nikola Tesla Boulevard

or by the sea

***

Traffic lights now wince me from the dreams

I have no one to give to

Her thighs aren't like yours

IV

Spider on the ceiling

I buckle my belt

The black and white of the piano

smells of resin

***

I cut your hair out of my apartment

and washed your skin off my hands

and my mind

You didn’t even know

I left you to the grey

Froze your imagination

and laid you down sleeping

on the stony plates of your hometown

I am keeping your flaws secret

Stay perfect to the world

Don’t let go

of just a memory of a rare glance

This world couldn't bare more

I stretch my smile, innocent in front of strangers. The past has arched up to the surface. You escape skillfully from the deep corridors I know so well, with your sticky horns.

From the profundity, one penetrates slowly, bending, feeling unbodied, feeling heavy like a planet, and down there, the sun never shines.

The present is ripped and from the firmament of what is to come, underripe cherries are dripping on me. We are being separated by three years, ten thousand kilometers and countless pubic hairs pulled out. Your 

desires fly out of me and soar into the Mexican sky. 

I'm in a hurry while you use the moment to slowly dig into my ambitions. I am hiding from you that you are a newborn in my arms, the blade and the glue. Helpless, again, with my will torn apart, I fly towards you, so 

that we would merge together, but it is too late. Creation can not be interrupted, we are separated, I know, by that word - patience. Life emerges to the surface fresh, blind, cruel, divine, implacable and I will never be 

able to explain to you how painful they are the swollen nipples of a woman nursing.

Only love can break through its own labyrinths.

**Jinn, in Serbian is a word play, because the demon in Islam — Jinn and a word for a giant are spelled the same. Which means something to me personally, but I don‘t think is crucial for the poem. You tell me.

Yesterday I had a dream about the yard where I used to often fall down as a child. It was one of those strange, awfully long dreams, as it seems to us later while we wash our faces.

The yard was deserted for a long time, like hospital halls at dawn. Maybe it was just that the time passed so slowly, I can‘t find the right words. Suddenly a bird flew by low, coming out of the apricot treetop, which 

looked a lot more lavish than it really was years ago, before age set in and had completely dried it. It was a crow, I think — it flew fast. Finally, the yard lit up, letting color in, and a child stepped under the tree. It 

looked like my sister, but it was younger, I’m not really sure any more. It wasn’t smiling, and yet, it was 

happy. It was standing at the bottom of the courtyard, speechless, slowly swaying its arms.

Apricots started falling from the sky like cannon balls — quiet and soft. The child grew up, like forced, and became a man. Was it me whom he said: ”Waiting is silence and confirmation”? He disappeared.

Cannon balls continued to fall down when I was already rubbing my bleary eyes.

To shrug. To shrug

always seems like a good idea.

Trucks are blinking, days are dying.

You slept with him, it's a shame, sigh.

Thousands of eyebrows rise in this instant;

he can, I still only falsely.

My lips stretched,

my step bloody,

I go into oblivion.

It was two in the afternoon in Bogotá,

The cabby didn't know what Belgrade was,

the homeless man didn't know he was being framed.

In cute little steps,

with his left pant leg rolled up slightly,

he circled with his nose fixed to the floor

around a guttered part of the sidewalk,

cane tapping as if he was going somewhere.

I thought of the vicious vastness,

and knew that it would break my heart

the coming nightfall,

the ripped plastic bag hooked to the old man's backpack,

the cabby's eyebrows in a spasm.

Poetry cannot do a thing, still,

I drown in buffets,

pleasant conversations,

same new streets,

silver pens and purses,

seems like a good idea

to shrug.

Latches in public toilets are clanking,

and I realize that my grandpa

understood what emptiness was

in Slankamen,

while we were having lunch on the Danube.

On the desert’s high seas,

your hairfloating,

Arizona,

you are the harsh morning of my life,

and an even colder night.

1863 days I sit still

in your lap full of sand.

You are beautiful, mum Arizona.

A little longer and I’ll sink

in your hip and your thighs,

Hesychia of stone,

and we will become one

— red silence.

Your smile doesn’t shine

like it used to so you clench 

your bloody lips 

into the snow

Bitten 

swollen 

cheeks of parched desire

The empty reach of

two slothful hands

is all that remains after us

Now I think the only blank

will remain in memory

The silver screen 

of our symbiosis

doesn't flicker anymore

and you hate me

don’t you?

Chipped down to the bone marrow

we’ve reached the point of

being unrecognizable anew

We stripped each other naked

of our flaws

only to put them back on

and it  hasn’t helped 

and it will not help to keep 

coming back to the beginning

or leaving for the end

If you had been any stronger

my heart too could have been

petrified in this agonizing linger

Blank

Now I only wonder 

what is keeping you here?

I am what I am

and everything I am not

I tried everything

to be the old version of me

leaving every verse free

of your absence

I tried everything 

until I realized

all the casualties

of human intentions

and that you don't even

see me inside

The blanks multiply

Only sometimes I wonder

If your mind once in riot

has too gone 

more quiet?

As I fly and I swallow the salty water around me,

I close my eyes to avoid the burning:

Babies jumping to the sky in rage,

Afrin river sinking into the red dust.

Blood is marching through my head hard,

to stifle the screams of childless mothers

overflowing the boats nearby. Thank god.

As dark clouds approach us in silence

to drop olives on our heads, I fly and swallow

my life, irrelevant and free, for death is heard

only after the dark clouds have fled.

From Vrbanja bridge,

all the way to the Hungarian border,

through these crags blood

cuts it's bed

leaving behind a bitter graft.

Click!

Pig heads

impaled by stakes

couldn't offend 

ones who have to pass through.

Their home is ahead,

dust is behind as they flee

from the poisonous blood river.

18th of May, 1992.

Four feet bravely pave the wade

between the secrecy and a testimony.

Rattling guns

Ten fingers intertwined

know everything about freedom

In a few moments

everyone will know the same,

but will not speak.

Sarajevo-valley is echoing.

The bridge is speechless.

You stole the apple from Adam‘s hand and

fled through a mist of arms.

Your hair is wild, it escapes me like time.

You stole the noise from my heart.

The silence is wild, even laughs at god.

I am standing here still, sinking in tempest.

Have you got any bites left, Salome?