Sometimes it seems as if I'm living on borrowed time
my friends are dead and scattered across graveyards
wiped of the slate just like that, none of them even thirty
those people I used to break bread with
those people I slept in the same bunkers with
those people I walked the same grass with, climbing onto tanks and falling down
hitting my face against the ground showered with bullets and shells
(oh sweet quiet earth you know our prayers)
their ghosts still come back with the last of the echoing voices:
is there more juice? asks one who will die in an attack
take care of my brother, says another who will be killed by tank
the third one is trying to remember who he is and where he's coming from
while his brain slowly switches off (he'd been hit in the head)
what's over there? asks the fourth clutching a glass of red watered wine
his gaze fixed over the hill where an ambush has already been set up for him
and a fifth is silent but his eyes are able to pronounce:
Death.



sometimes it feels as if I'd broken off the chain
I wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air
hearing the hum of fourteen storeys through the open window
(the smell of burnt flesh rising out of wooden caskets)
Christ the Redeemer is a lasting fresh wound among the black clouds
electric fireflies scurry, curse and celebrate
the time when pigs fed on human flesh
down there is a house that once, a hundred years ago, used to be blue
now it is a roofless ruin with frameless windows like empty eye sockets
the inside is all wrecked but somehow at night it becomes alive
the forgotten balconies fill up with flowers and light
while round black women with turbans lean against
corroded fence and tiny echoes of their conversation
whisper that there are three hundred thousand dead people on those fields
where my boots lost their soles
where my eyes drowned into the mud of the universe
where my heart was like an iron rope cut off from its anchor
whizzing through the air in blind circles:
aimless, aimless.