Борче Панов (Северна Македония)

I hold the sky with a string like a helium balloon

“In Praise of Folly” it is written on it

I breathe under a hazmat suit in the middle of viruses

and The Folly holds a needle

while holding a speech

in front of the sugar wool in my other hand

with a pink worm, because the wool is pink too

in front of the seconds with white gloves

that drive yellow scooters escaped from a madhouse

in front of the swallow of the future green places

charged like the bullet of the migration with gun powder

and immigration of people

in front of the shadows of the night that stumble

from the syntax of the meridians

in order to move the time

in front of Ghrelin – the hormone of hunger

inflating the stomachs of the skeleton children

and Leptin – the hormone of inappetence

eating the sugar in the blood of the hungry people

My Folly is holding a speech on the top of the needle

over which the blindfolded angels are dancing

and I argue with the four riders of the apocalypse

whether she should name them

after the hormones of appetite and inappetite

and whether the white rider

will sow grains on the top of the needle too

My Folly is holding a speech

in front of the storm that twitches its muscles between the eyebrows

and floods our day with unreal existence

in a reality in which our two hands

are sweeping the street with the beards of the Gods

that have fulfilled our gaps

in a shadow play in the city

crushed from the hands that fall from the sky like bombs

My Folly is holding a speech in front of the street sweepers

that polish the marble in which exorcists have their reflections

politicians, pilots,

psychiatrists, water polo players,

informers, statists and ecologists,

lawyers, prosecutors, court dresses dressed up in judges

and artists who walk their theatre like a little dog

that with its pink little anus under the upright tail

speaks the truth

that the future will return to us from the future

like supersonic airplane

that will suddenly stop in the middle of the sky

and will drop colored clowns

and the sky will be clear like a tear shed from joy

and that upright tail will be wagging

and that shameless little anus will talk insolently

in front of their clients, hamburger statists and ecologists

that enter with high speed in a train that is faster than the sound

with a commercial that ruffles like a pierced air wall

and says to us

hush, be quiet, please

My Folly is talking

to a chimney sweeper for whom we cannot say

whether he or his shadow blinks with the eyes of a beautiful day

to a giraffe that says Don’t walk on the grass

to the neighbor that hangs the rain along the cloth lines

in order to dry the level of the mad North Sea

and in the middle of Dam in Rotterdam of Erasmus

it says to him let’s clap our hands again, to live to the fullest

and to drink and to eat from the tree of the good and the evil

that serves as a gigantic ecological commercial

like an air wall in the middle of the sky

and says to us

hushhhh

Translated by Daniela Andonovska Trajkovska