History Is a Woman, Let’s Be Gay: Treatises on Political Economy

by Tomaž Šalamun

Translated from the Slovenian by Sonja Kravanja

I

When I’m happy, when I pour it all out, I don’t need
a poem, you glow, who are returning to me. You are my
eye. I see how you sleep, I see how you
breathe, safe. You say to me, rascal, how do you
manage to handle thirty people at the same time.
Time changes, the air, walls shift,
when you are beside me. You are my Colt. When I
kiss you I don’t wash myself afterwards. Like my father in
Bohinj in 1919. He didn’t wash his hands for three
days after the king shook his hand. And
yet. You can erase me just like
a person erases an insect. I am frightened
I’ll use you because I know something you
don’t. You are the only death after my measure.

II

God, you are stealing my language and paper.
Work has become your body.
I’m killing you, killing myself, I love you,
I love myself. Give me a footbridge, lightning.
I am blind. I am mute.
I’m lying on sand, adorned with jewelry.
You are under my fingers, under my fingers.
A bunny will come hopping by, or a farmer
rolling a tire. I’ll eat
with a spoon, I’ll always eat with
a spoon. In the heavens there are shock rooms
and a flame that people blow on
spawns. I’m your parallel man,
I’m your parallel man.
I’m anointing you so that nothing will be left of you,
so that you’ll be mine. Legendary is the spacing
between your thumb and middle finger, a silent blitz when the thing
falls. Why hasn’t it yet? Why do you still
hold me? I don’t believe I’m
mortal when I look at you, when I caress you, when
I eat you.

III

Your teeth are like
a mountain under which rolls the snow.
O, snow! O, Mt. Krn! O,
Lake Krn! I’ll turn the palm of my hand around.
What are you doing? I have no skin left. A Malay
is biting my skin. I sent him trains
as a present. Electric
trains for him
to play with. He put them on
a sofa. He’s biting my skin.
Steamboats race. A person puts a scab
on a steamboat. A person feeds a seagull.
The seagull eats dung. Hey, opera-glass!
I don’t use you to watch planks of wood. The devil is watching
them. I’m watching tar.
I’ll bite the head off the entourage.
I already have one head on a piano. From
Ghana.

IV

Ripen, bloom!
I killed you in the air.
I can’t go past law.
It’s not placed in me.

V

You carry me in your arms, but I am
not your arm.
I am not your coat.
I am not your beast.
Your teeth are my soul.
I’m conversing with a dormouse.

VI

Those positions that allow both
plague and grace,
banks and fluid, the eye of humanity and
plucked eyeballs on
a plate, that smell like
fish of fresh air as
eggs fry the class
struggle and have such a wide span–
a lexicon!–enabling them to flirt
with the Slovenian proletarian fate and
trilateral tycoons, who, with their
left hand support Brecht and hold,
in their right, a knife, a trident; who
extinguish themselves in women so as not to burn
and are, at the same time, a notorious bait,
a honey of homoerotism, who play their
innocence so convincingly as if they can’t
count to five–just so they can pave
with a panther’s speed the road to those in
high positions, these are the evident positions of
tired nihilists, who channeled their
charm into the exact channel
where every charm ceases to be. Into
the reaction that smears itself on the walls like
a magma of history.

VII

Those positions that make a woman
the happiest in the world,
just to, shortly afterward,
dry her out completely, that breathe the earth
brilliantly just to stab her with
a knife, that bewitch the most beautiful and
upright children so that they
approach with quivering steps wanting for
fire and leaving their homes’ addresses
in their books, when their
blood has already been calculated for a long time in
charisma, who howl from the most
terrifying longing just to later
sport their cuff-links, who, in the most
delirious erotic insanity, whisper:
I want you to be, which is nothing but
a black order, these positions are evidently the positions
of the exemplary class enemies who
fancy they purchased
all the stocks of the century and are now
preying only for death which will
magnify hundredfold their
capital.

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