To o is for Ophelia
I am a cashier in the Hypermarket of Love.
February agonizes on the streets that are soaked with sun
I am coming home with a bouquet of rusty flowers
bought out of pity to myself and that old woman's hours
that she spent selling them at the exit of the postoffice. She has gout.
I'm getting out of my coat's stuffy woollen embrace to taste the drought.
A transit vehicle freezes amid the dark tunnel's grotto -
the thoughts about blow ups romp in my head though
I myself carry three tones of love in trinitrotoluol equivalent under my heart,
I have taken them from the Hypermarket's of Love broken shopping cart.
Nora doesn't invite me -
she presents with a fait accompli,
she insinuatingly says: “We should haste”.
I say: “I need to put my socks on, can you wait?”
My apartment is unbearably smoked and fumed through,
I leave my windows open, Nora says I'll catch the flu.
Nora's neighbour grows Chilli pepper and has a vinyl player.
He swaps discs for an Eros'-arrows-five-pouns-per-one-conveyor -
I stole it from the Hypermarket of Love as soon as the oneness defeated my pride.
Our host takes off the needle as if it had yellow Jesus inside
as if the disc was his flesh and vein. The podgy joint never skips
our mouths as we listen to the blues and sugary smoke and taste of our lips -
they sound like unskilful and weather beaten tunes. They sound like “Gloomy Sunday”.
He and Nora move the countless poufs together thus asking me to stay.
They lie down; I switch off the light and sit on the scratchy floor,
I read the lines on my palms even when they begin a tempting pillow-war
I know the exact date of my period, removal to the nursing home and the funeral.
Then when the voices at least fade out
I leave the house leaving behind no trace or doubt.
February is waiting for me on the street
with a handful of the frost and fog as a gift.
I feel that I'm alone; I think that I am scared,
But between these definitions there never was a relation shared.
I walk in the light of the winding chain of amber lanterns
along the tramway while the calm hum of the gas station scuttles
the dense air of the false dawn.
I am drown in the echo of my footsteps. I yawn.
I hear the tram the four stops before it appears on the horizon,
I clench my fist attempting to catch the warmth already wizen
that disappears while my nails cut into the flesh of the palms.
There is a big black hound right on the tram's passageway -
it may growl at me but we both know that in my pocket I have his prey -
remains of the bitchs' sexual frustration in the bone-like shape,
that's what the Hypermarket of Love taught me to carry wrapped in a drape.
The bridge; I see the light of all the city lanterns breaking in the waters
of Vltava. I see myself as one of the Lorelei's daughters.
I have to leave the warm tram's belly,
I slumber on the street, empty, familiar and smelly
and I look in the broken windows of the train station
where loves to toast all our homeless nation,
but tonight it's closed so I turn to the subway
placing myself under gentle air flows, even the temperature may
be not higher than that one of night outside.
At home I cook the soup out of one egg and decide
to get the leftover sleep from this night
despite knowing that my eyelids will brake by the morning light
everything becomes silent: birds outside, drainpipes and neighbours above
as they know that my shift starts in three hours in the Hypermarket of Love.