Embark with the author to places far and near. In times when one can often travel only as a hobo among the stars, you can visit a beach in Goa, India, a shack on the slopes of Caviahue, Argentina, a cabin on an ocean ferry, or a seat in a taxi in Bombay. You’ll easily fly through a sky full of rock stars back home, to a swimming pool, to empty Prague streets and to children’s rooms. These places and more are where the omes in Pavel Sobek’s third book entitled At Night can take you..
...
At night, Dads emit fume.
A glass of whisky in their hands, they zigzag
Between landmines
That have transformed into little ponies.
They become surgeons
Saving torn organs
A coarse teddy with rough patches,
An eye for an eye.
At night, Dads emit fume.
They fall asleep like flamingos,
Standing on one foot,
A toothbrush in their left hand
A blade in their right.
Warning! A plastic dolphin on the portside.
At night, leaves fall from Dads
But do not be scared.
For a child’s smile, for a decibel of laughter,
For a cunning look in a child’s face,
Dads purchase energy
With a wink of their eyes
In an intergalactic space.
...
Beautiful Parvati
embodies the energy of the god Shiva,
our guide is whipping,
you brat you,
why are you listening,
you didn’t pay for the guided tour,
a naughty child with a wooden switch
on the third terrace
of a cave temple in Badami
and our protests,
far from the headquarters
of the Helsinki Commission
are lost among the cliff faces.
His smiling reincarnation
turns back to us.
From that point on,
both he and the switch are exemplary.
Before we argue, on the fourth terrace,
about whose fault the dead camera battery is,
so we won’t have a selfie,
and it took us six hours to get here,
he’s standing down by the sheet metal kiosk
and drinking Yogi.
I’d also like
to be whipping up and down
stone steps like that
at the age of eighty.
...
I definitely have to take you
to the Gandhi Museum.
You’re a Muslim, right?
Consideration.
Unifier, mahatma,
that’s what the poet Tagore called him.
Do you like poetry?
And you?
I haven’t read Tagore,
at most I know that George Harrison
learned to play the sitar from Ravi Shankar.
Nobel Prize winner.
Not Shankar, Tagore.
OK, maybe I should drive a taxi instead?
Back home they gave it to some Jaroslav Seifert,
also a poet.
OK, whatever.
You have to fly to Uttar Pradesh,
it’s beautiful there.
Do you go there?
I swallow the last syllable.
A smile in the rear-view mirror.
Stupid question for someone
whom you’ve just paid two hundred
to drive you around Bombay all day.
Princes on Coke is subdivided into three thematic sections. The first reflects current social topics. The second harks back to a childhood during totalitarian times and the era of socialist realism. The third is a continuation of the Collection of Love Gnomes and deals with tangled relationships.
The Collection is also on Facebook
The Collection of Love Gnomes is intended for all seven billion hearts on this Earth that are constantly struggling with love. While reading it you will find yourself in a fragile landscape of love poems that manage to be simultaneously playful, tender, and brutal. At the same time, they will force you to remain hopeful that real love exists.
The Collection is also on Facebook.
I was born, something that is doubtlessly true. I currently live near Prague in the town of Roztoky. Aside from three collections of poems I’ve also got lots of advertising and promotional texts and campaigns on my conscience, including for Amnesty International, Avon against breast cancer, the Czech Philharmonic, and other brands, as you can easily find out on www.textar.cz
You can order signed copies of the collections by writing to the above email address
or via the website of No Limits Art publishers.