Klutzes
A woman is howling like a dragon because I’m a poet. No
wonder. Poetry is a sacred machine, the lackey
of a faceless deity that kills on an assembly
line. How many times I’d already be
dead if I didn’t have
languor, calmness of spirit and
arrogance in me,
wiping out the wings with my
instrumentation. Fly, fly forward, sacred
object, that’s not me, I’m reading
Delo and drinking coffee with workers in blue
jumpsuits. They also could kill
themselves when they climb up poles and install
electricity. Sometimes they really do. Poets kill themselves
repeatedly. I was killed by too-strong words
scrawled on a piece of paper, my
vocabulary did this to me. But
no one will tell me that these aren’t
klutzes. In all professions they’re
klutzes. Any pedestrian can kill
himself if he doesn’t know what
a crosswalk is.
Note: Delo is a Slovenian newspaper. The phrases in italics are in English in the original poem and have been italicized here to distinguish them from the other text in the poem.