HOW TIRESOME IT IS

to say sometimes at the door

good afternoon and how are you

to smile.

How difficult it is to storm out of breath

with your little songs

into a serious institution

and provide each clerk with her due attention.

It’s difficult to be chronically ill

and not be spared sitting in the rain

by friends that are bored

and that like limpets

impose on you

to kill their time

of pointless existence.

My trousers are soaking

but they don’t care

and they repeat all the things

they could have become

but didn’t.

They cry over the children

they didn’t bear

over wrongly chosen husbands.

They describe

how they shake

from black coffee

and cigarettes on an empty stomach.

In the meantime

they complain and call me like an ambulance.

Translated by Ulvija Tanović