Nedžad Ibrahimović

From the book FAMILY AND OTHER TERRIBLE SONGS

IN ORAŠJE IN ŠIROKO
The hot afternoon pours its rays.

Groundskeepers are trimming linden branches above

the pavement . Traces of summers which are
gone and never will be again.

I miss the people in my city

who did not love me.

With whom to disagree now

about literature?

WITNESS
News shots from Pakistan: demolished
houses in Model Colony. From 98
Airbus A-320 passengers more than 80
have died. The others are gone. Still
gone...

A young man - in a television frame

in front of a ruin (black beard
and a messy tuft) testifies that he
first saw smoke in the sky –

- is signed as Allah.

(22-05-2020)

MARGIN
The scents of linden reach the room and
flower wreaths will soon
fall to the ground.
In the hospital by the river, mother
tells of her roommate in the third
person. This shrewd patient
smiles gently and peeks from
the margins.

Neither of them seems to mind.

LOVE, A DEFINITION
A good death is one where your earthly
remains are being dealt with by some unknown people…
(JM Coetzee)

There are people who suddenly stop

loving, and don't tell the other, and then
they love each other disproportionately and asymmetrically.

And then, after a while, he

gives to her a stroke, she to him a heart attack,
and then again they watch over and safeguard each other, just like
at the beginning.

But there are also those selfish ones, who within their heart
do not mix anyone else. Death especially appreciates that.
It likes to surprise everyone else.

AN ACCIDENTAL ENCOUNTER
I met my ex-wife at the station restaurant.
Just came from a trip, she says, while
she wipes the black jam from her lips with a napkin. Bićanić
wrote beautifully about her acting. The show won
numerous rewards and, then - so, how's life, and such?
Between plays and television, the child is led, she says,
from school to home, from home to school. Weaned
from me, she looks back as if towards someone invisible
to whom she makes an unspecified complaint. A void thrives around us.

When she’s acting, she’s a lot prettier, and she seems to

know this too. Say hello to the kid, I say, and leave quickly.

Until she hasn't.

STORIES ABOUT GAPS
Nobody buys books anymore. Petar and I sip brandy from
a slivovitz flask in front of a bookstore. Although the good-looking
waitress crosses the square wearing a mini skirt in the cold,
we don't order from her anymore. The jerk owner somehow figured out
that his business is going up and he raised the prices. In a parrot
yellow coat and with eyes devoid of hope a black-faced migrant enters
the perimeter and bypasses us. A stray dog was sniffing
in front of the cafe door - it knows nothing about inflating
price. With the cold wind from the Sava river, a memory
of the son appears.

My Bela is pregnant, says Petar, while sipping and stomping his feet
in place. That's about a hundred marks per puppy. We quarreled
and I, very much like a father, smacked him - and that was
that - six years ago. Seven!

The stray dog now pisses down a church wall and the vine twists towards the grain
pea. An acquaintance, a hydrological engineer, told me that because
whirling coastal waters this part of the town hovers over the void.
It will be warmer tomorrow, I say, I look into the void and leave.

***

After unknown worries and strange fears, after

preparations and sketches, everynight thinking, stealing
of characters and personalities you met, you finally decide, and
like a diligent and organized crook, you get up at half past five in the morning,
you make tea and eat polenta. There, you are finally in front of your
void and you write, you make note and you delete what is written. Beneath
the windows the employed precariat is in a hurry, the police exhibitionists

sirens are howling, the ambulance alarms are screaming and

schoolchildren in love are typing messages in the rain. You cross words and signs,
shortening sentence strings and forming paragraphs with spaces.
And so on every God-given day, for years incessantly – all until
it's all over. After all, you are finishing and throwing out that
burden from your soul. Afterwards, everything is same as before. Nothing
makes sense and nothing made it in the first place.

And then under the ceiling, in a corner above the desk,

you see a spider's web, large and spacious. You saw
it on time, because it almost came down to you. At night spiders search
for water and creep into the nose and mouth, mostly in childhood when you sleep the
hardest, and you realize that you have been formed by hundreds of grams of
raw spider and that there is nothing else you could do but
by that inner compulsion to knit from your own body.

All you needed for that was emptiness. And now you're waiting.

Only hunger makes sense.

***

Ask and you shall receive! Seek, and ye

shall find! (Mt 7: 7-8)

It' warmer. The short streets between the crammed shacks

smells of fish, river mud and wet willows. Petar sold
two puppies, and I sent my son another letter. The first one maybe
he didn't see, maybe he didn't understand it, or maybe it hurt him?
Maybe I asked too much of him, it’s possible he
thought I was being condescending. He doesn't trust me anymore.
I therefore crammed this one with beautiful stylistic figures, imported it with mild
verbs, and asked for nothing. Now every day
I'm checking my other profile. (He blocked me
on the first one.)

But, if he also had an other profile, he would have a new name, the two of us
could then, like two naked snails, extend our horns one
to the other and start our history from scratch. Only mutual
lie could save us.

Someone said ask and you shall receive! Seek and ye shall find !, laughs Petar.
By the church the waitress in the mini skirt carries two shots with brandy.

BABYLON, 1
By delving into the boundaries of language
the reason gets bumps.
(L. Wittgenstein)

I wish I didn't read.

I wish I walked through the city like through a spring forest.

Not reading the inscriptions on the shops, the glittering
commercials and illiterate advertisements, communal
notices, texts on stores, names and
surnames on lawyers' offices and notaries' entrance
 doors, billboards, discounts, names of
bakeries and meat boutiques, I wish didn't even read
obituaries anymore.

I wish I was a dog that doesn’t get off the leash and
that in this chaos I only rest my tongue.

BABYLON, 2
“Welcome children! Eat,
and after that you can come in and I will give you cake! ”
The Brothers Grimm

A teenager who starts smoking. I was writing in the hope

of getting laid, and then I broke into this house suddenly
And here I am now. Locked. The language is now
my shirt and my tail, my shoes and my gloves.
I don’t know when there will be enough of it, and when too much, for
all that I would like to say. Mine... Mine? These words are my
legcuffs and handcuffs lurking after my head to eat it with delight.
the language is now both my father and my mother, and my mother's mother
and my mother's father, and, worst of all, my language is also Her language.
Thus, my father and mother and Her father and mother.

I am repulsed by this sticky tongue saliva that we share.

Everything I say is also said by Her. Everything I write,
She has already written, everything I want to say, there she is, and through
the barred window she threatens from outside with her skinny finger
and grins cynically. I have a premonition, and only premonitions are mine,
that – just like a hanged man is killed by his own body,
and the cherry-plum in front of the house by its own fruit – one word will kill me,
the one that I will not know to be the last one, the strong one, Miljkovićev's one.
It will be the key to the sugary door that She will get her hands on,
but that word will ultimatley be mine alone. And that is what
I am modestly looking forward to. I am a wolf who, for my freedom,
gnaws its front paw.

The years of captivity are getting harder and faster, and when
I get tired and give up, I don't get off the leash anymore.
Through the spring forest then the two of us pass as
through a city where I no longer read inscriptions on the shops,
the glittering commercials and illiterate advertisements, communal
notices, texts on stores, names and titles on
lawyers' offices and notaries' entrance doors, billboards,
discounts, names of bakeries and meat boutiques, nor obituaries
do I read anymore. None but mine own.
The old ones, before I fell into Her house.