Ivan Herceg [Croatia]

   

  

I Correspond

I correspond with the Universe.
I tell him: Stop!
Respect the words you're made of.
But there is no answer.
As if the black holes
are the syllabaries for the chaos
I used to charm him.
 
I correspond with you
as the ghosts are peeling off my skin
bit by bit sticking them onto
the night sky.
Onto the canopy
covering your overvalued world.
 
How many letters are needed
for the dust to fill us inside
and to know how and where
this life disappears?
 
 
 
The Prophet's Hut
 
They visit me only by night,
as I get number and number, shivering like an old man,
rambling something about my little
prophet's hut, euphoria and rage.
Then they begin squeezing the air for blood,
howling defiantly like they're suffering from some incurable illness, 
mouths full of shimmering spawn.
 
They come from faraway places, the spheres
wherein the dead are embalmed with purest honey,
only to become the planting ground for high watchtowers.
They come to tell me
that words like war and death
are neither crazy nor cruel.
They just resemble the ground.
 
They always appear at night
and circle around me in their victorious formations
like pupils of marble snow.
Then they chase me down to the bottom
of the abyss - the black and white photographs
of screams, connecting and disconnecting frantically 
inside that bodiless head.
 
 
 
Forgotten
 
Each one against himself. Forgotten, we are forgetting.
Hallucinating. Language is happily buried.
Layer by layer. Into a metaphor. Into nothing.
 
The flood is at its peak. Waiting on God. To forget.
Built into a warm sediment of You-Me.
 
We are afraid of nothing. Freedom is an unpleasant nothing.
We discover each other's memories, but we don't remember anything.
 
Slowly, slowly we become a forbidden poem,
a cosmic glue and the tenth dimension.
And you just want to be forgotten.
 
Forgotten, we are forgetting.
 
 

 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Ivan Herceg (1970), poet, prose writer, and editor, was born in Krapina, Croatia. He holds a BA in Croatian Language and Literature and South-Slavic Philology from the University of Zagreb. He is the editor-in-chief of the Zagreb-based journal “Poezija”, the editor-in-chief of “Poezija Editions”, and the organizer of the “SUR (Stih u regiji / Poetry in the Region) Poetry Festival”. He is the author of six books of poetry: “Our Other Names” (Zagreb, 1994); “Night on Asphalt” (Karlovac, 1996); “Photographs of Earthly Sighs” (Zagreb, 1997); Angels in Mourning (Zagreb, 2004); Irregularities (Zagreb, 2007); and “When Will Babylon Arrive” (Zagreb, 2013). He received several awards for his poetic work, most notably the Goran Prize for young poets, the Zdravko Pucak Prize, and the Rikard Jorgovanić Award. He also published “Naked” (Zagreb, 2011), a collection of short stories. His poetry has been widely anthologised and translated into a dozen languages, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, English and Chinese.
 
(photo by Goran Čižmešija)