The Day We Learn How The Streets Get Their Names Poem by Miroslava Odalovic

And plunge into geometry of the sharp blind corners
That live their lives between two dreams
The milimetres of strength might easily dissolve
Into both maps and paths museums at the crossroads
Into the traffic lights helplessly blinking frozen
When the wishes billboard the paths to hell
Or deceptive images of harsh entertainment
For the visitors who say
‘We’re now nice decent people
We no longer look at the dancing bear
Pinned by pokers on fire
Because we’ve learned his macabre pain
Now we put on the gloves
And walk to his Zoo
To ask him for an interview
Though he never said a single word’

The day we learn how the streets get their names
There appears an aphorism of pain
Squeezing a masterpiece address
It pulses ’make way make way for a knock
Without the name you are the dead street
I’ve come to cry with your doorbell ringing
Before the salesman of dreams
Who came just to say hello to the mother
As today he’s got nothing to sell
Not even God for a monthly revenue
Not a single recipe for a happy life
Today he’s come to ask the bedrooms upstairs
About the little boy who wetted the bed
Who hid his nightmares under the matrice
About a matrix design living in a toy box
Among one legged lead soldiers
And the doll girl with the matches
Deflowered under a Christmas tree’

The day we learn how the streets get their names
The trains stop mute on the rails
Blind passengers get off the platforms crack
The squares turn red with tomato revolutions
Flirting with the metaphors of blood
The pools breastfed by the mother courage
Dissolve in the droughts southward beams
And come back with the storks
That deliver no babies

The day we learn how the streets get their names
The walls peel off their paint tearfully looking
For the colour of someone’s eyes
In each pair the wallness to drown
And apocalyptically cryptic graffiti
They move the cobbled streets and all the streetcars
Named after the wheels of their time
To see the endless cities in space that mourn the air crashes
When with hands entangled we make the cityscape web
Like self eaten spiders weaving the traces of their own spit
To be neatly vacuum cleaned whenever the landlord
Has time to dust

We learn that streets can change their names
The way the snakes can change their skin
But never the way they wind
We learn of the thousands of nameless heroes
Who squat at the corners and beg for the place
Where the streets have no names
Who never earned the street named after them
Due to a historian who raped the footnote text
And washed the hands guilty of a crime
That makes the streets move wind
That makes the corners go blind
With visionless master of records dipping
His pen into the pools of
What’s meant to be a significant memory

©Miroslava Odalovic