Taras is right when he says:
Alarm clocks should not drag us up in the mornings.
Morning is a time of doubt anyway,
total nostalgia. The worst that could happen.
The necessity to survive the rest of the day somehow
pins you to the bed. Win another half hour.
Consider what you saw.
Considering dreams –
An attempt to bring order to the night adventures,
to give form to the plots, brightness to the pictures.
What really happened? Why the hell
did a drunken Tomas leave dry
excrement under the seat? The sexy nun,
was she demanding something, when she pointed
at me? I still remember the clock.
There was an ocean of time before departure,
but no way of leaving the trailer
crowded with friends. Why not?
It’s much worse, when you go, with a bunch of flowers,
to visit someone who was actually
killed a month ago, for a celebration evening.
Why the celebration? Another two minutes
and I’ll explain, I’ll chase the nun
I’ll make Tomas
clean up after himself…
Considering dreams
leads to nothing but parallel conclusions:
life passes. The problem of mornings
lies in the fact that life gets shorter and shorter.
Only in dreams, where everything is stupid,
does life look real.
And so, eternal. Win another half hour.
A horse with bound legs is nothing but a seahorse.
Almost everyone thinks: will he show it or not?
Almost everyone thinks it’s already the end.
Yaroslav Dovhan reads the last line.
Those present mostly applaud, joyfully.
The end didn’t really come, at least you couldn’t see it.
Almost everyone sighs in relief.
Some think: thank the Lord, it could have been worse.
Yaroslav Dovhan explains
that Mayakovsky read just this way, in the place where his statue now stands.
Where will Yaroslav Dovhan’s statue stand?
Yaroslav Dovhan states: ‘Poetry – is openness, defencelessness’
Dropping the trousers – a gesture of love, agreement, capitulation.
A man without trousers – is like a soldier without a fatherland, a Wee Willie Winkie.
Masculine death hunts those without trousers.
Masculine death hits below the belt.
You need courage to read poetry aloud, to announce it, to get naked.
Like Anna Sereda,
Yaroslav Dovhan
could write:
‘When I read you poems –
I undress from the waist down,
but not entirely’.
I hope we’re not going to call the doctor?
Translated from the Ukranian by Sarah Luczaj