Poetry
The Kiss
A stumpy hippo hears the chattering teeth, smells the breath so onion and fresh, thus he wrinkles his forehead and tenses his foot to collide with the opposite relative. Lust with pumped muscles weaves itself into the slimy rope and tries to merge, yet slips away making a new twist. I hear the pulp mashing in our bellies, hear the peeling skin tired of rubbing without water. I am the torturous crack begging for the tongues to lube, for dryness will destroy our bond too soon. Lengthened masculine appendages, our brothers and fathers, flood us with a heavy heat, so we can swim like children in these rivers. And the squelching sound will remind us of the mortality of protein, how I love to dry up, to disappear on bodies obsessed with motion, to seep and walk down the aisle with your lips.
I love to be a stubborn stain on yellow walls. I love to bequeath some illnesses as a keepsake and share it with my dear. How much warm copulation inherent in the sickness, and how many clashes of mucous membranes are inherent in its lovely person? I feel less lonely when I suffer from concentrated intimacy, from the clot of devoted love without measuring the risk. The lonely soul, let me overflow into the cavity. Spread the plumpness of your twins and stretch the oblong muscle out – carnal limbs ache for hugs. I want to slide all over you, my precious sister, and to fervently regret having the affection and not being able to tear some flesh off myself. I am so tired of moving food, emitting words, having such a clumsy root at the approach to the throat. It is better to finger the bitterness of thrown-up right from tract gastric juices. How sweet it is to crawl out of a native burrow to copulate a lovely shell. Yet, it is still quite boring for me to be a petrified nightstand with rotten drawers filled with pain.
Only stumbling upon my bashful feet will remind you of me. This pink, seductive material. Get oneself hungry and take a bite of it. Cling onto my feet and promise me you drink the spit and blood when I want to leave, when I want to bring a concrete slab down on both of us. On the heat of the fire was baked the meaty crêpe oozing your condensing milk and blood of mine. Should it be no tempest, I will gather it myself. Hardly will you get us back apart when the seismic-explosivism will merge the two completely. So irreversible is it that it is easier to eradicate us. With your nostrils I will smell my sweat, with my hands you will go within yourself.
We are the prosthesis with no body. The lust that is free of law. Never will the compassionate rabble separate us. Never will they put us in different boxes. Saviors, the most merciless of creatures, I beg for you to bury us in buckets and take us out like rubbish to the dump. There we will find some peace, secluded in the kiss among the rust and rot.
Translated from ukrainian by Timur Leschenko.
Poetry is an inconstant field of creativity, in which, nevertheless, I am interested in writing poems that are sharp, experimental, figurative and full of allegory. My poetry may seem rough and offensive—perhaps it actually is—but I wouldn’t want it to be perceived as an ideological gesture. Rather, it is a reaction to the suffocating boredom of mainstream poetry, which, in my opinion, has become an ineffective element of political struggle. I enjoy playing with language, so I strive to develop poetry as an art form rather than a space for slogans. Poetry should be double-edged for all the polarities that have become so popular to construct at every turn. It should cut everyone, not the convenient image of the "enemy". It shouldn't once again affirm the already accepted and comfortable theses and opinions within certain circles. At the very least, I create the kind of poetry I would want to find and read myself if no one else is capable of providing it.
Only a small portion of my poetry has been translated from Ukrainian and Russian into English.