My Enemies
on W.S. Merwin
My enemies slide through the crowd oily as snakes
They are Death dressed in a coat of smiles
My enemies are part of the war in which they
do not care for the enemy
but kill their comrades in the trenches
My enemies continue to live
undisturbed in darkness
gently they inhale and
exhale
My enemies are suffocated by the obscurity
chasing them everywhere
upon the seven continents and
the dirt is afraid to pronounce their names
If Krakatoa erupts – those are their ovations
The shaking of Japan turns wild the cheering in their souls
My enemies without faces live inside the stone
in the speech of the water where they try to talk to eternity
before they turn into dust
My greatest enemy has many names which he goes out
in the night to practice
My enemies have never been loved
with tiny steps like Japanese prostitutes
they enter the rooms one after another
In these empty houses they are bloody clots in the corridors
My enemies all of them came out of the paper mill
where I produce matches
for their paper hearts
they are the nightmares of the people I dream about
in those nights when my soul
takes a break
My enemies in their dreams fly in the sky
the cocaine lines of the airplanes are their
smiles
My enemies pronounce words resembling worms
which dig deep in the dirt of the wasted lands
and they wander blind
In the morning the sun rises only for their half-shadows
At the end their skin will begin to bark their fingers will bloom
under the gravestones
without names
She
She loves to play with my feelings.
Without any obvious reason she acts insulted,
unwilling to give me any explanation.
She looks at me for hours with that air of superiority,
then she walks across the room and when I reach out
slowly, she quickly moves away.
Sometimes we do not talk for days.
I ask her what have I done to deserve this?
Was I checking out another one of her lovely sisters,
did I kick her out of my bed, or maybe because
we no longer take baths together?
Silence. She looks at me and turns her head.
She turns her back on me, too, then walks to the window
and for hours observes the trees outside.
What should I do? Well, I left it at that.
Eventually she will come to her senses. After all
she is just a stupid cat.
by Peycho Kanev
