TOMAŽ ŠALAMUNThe Leopard Doesn’t Squat
Come, break me, reduce me. I’m becoming
the Czech’s foamy milk bowl. The siren will
kill me. Tear her dress off like Vergil to make her
a fat, abashed gelatine. I’m mashed by rocks.
She devours me like a tempest, she devours
the tattered flag. I'm an ice cream cone
melting in the child’s belly. Smashed
grapeskins. The yawning of sybaritic gazelles.
As an elephant I squirted. As a leopard I
squatted on the cow’s heart, the big one, at the edge
bordered with pearls. Bamboo was stuck in
the heart’s small nooks which on the other side
kept opening like mouths that had just passed
through the gelatine. The arrow, the wing,
the fish fins, the diamond nib of my liquified
brain. This makes the empire. Lust.
Appoint the sirens in the valleys, but I
swallow you out of myself. I enjoy
you out of myself. And I want more.
More, more, more, still more, ‘til the pain
with its heel squeezes my soul like toothpaste
from my throat. To have a good cry again and to
tremble, to shake like an overhead machine
and to sob. To need you. To need you. 