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