III
From the book Ballads and Self-Portraits
Translated by Amanda Castro
My friends erected with their huge swollen hands
Cathedrals of ice
Cathedrals of oblivion
And silence
They adored tormented roses of earth
Suicides reddened with words
And they drank and suffered and wrote in silence
Another silence
Filled with anguish and semen, they blindly professed
Their sorrows and they deflowered countless misfortunes
And Death, walking through the broad avenues
Among the glass fragmented by rain
Lured them into her best trap
The night threw scaffolds into the mud voices and hands
Lost gazes and dreams telephones
Crazy and letters with no destination
Johann Sebastian Bach has died without a flower
In the fire of the roads and my friends
Unsheltered foretellers of doom suicidal pyromaniac
Submerged themselves in the perplexity of the empty cathedrals