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 Thoughts, go your way home.

Embrace,
 depths of the soul and the sea.

In my view,
 it is
 stupid
to be
 always serene.

My cabin is the worst
 of all cabins - 
All night above me
 Thuds a smithy of feet.

All night,
 stirring the ceiling’s calm,
dancers stampede
 to a moaning motif:
“Marquita,
 Marquita,
Marquita my darling,
why won’t you,
 Marquita,
why won’t you love me …”
But why
 Should marquita love me?!
I have
 no francs to spare.

And Marquita
 (at the slightest wink!)
for a hundred francs
 she’d be brought to your room.

The sum’s not large - 
 just live for show - 
No,
 you highbrow,
 ruffling your matted hair,
you would thrust upon her
 a sewing machine,
in stitches
 scribbling 
 the silk of verse.

Proletarians
 arrive at communism
 from below - 
by the low way of mines,
 sickles,
 and pitchforks - 
But I,
 from poetry’s skies,
 plunge into communism,
because
 without it
 I feel no love.

Whether
 I’m self-exiled
 or sent to mamma - 
the steel of words corrodes,
 the brass of the brass tarnishes.

Why,
 beneath foreign rains,
must I soak,
 rot,
 and rust?
Here I recline,
 having gone oversea,
in my idleness
 barely moving
 my machine parts.

I myself
 feel like a Soviet
 factory,
manufacturing happiness.

I object
 to being torn up,
like a flower of the fields,
 after a long day’s work.

I want
 the Gosplan to sweat
 in debate,
assignning me
 goals a year ahead.

I want
 a commissar
 with a decree
to lean over the thought of the age.

I want
 the heart to earn
its love wage
 at a specialist’s rate.

I want
 the factory committee
 to lock
My lips
 when the work is done.

I want
 the pen to be on a par
 with the bayonet;
and Stalin
 to deliver his Politbureau
reports
 about verse in the making
as he would about pig iron
 and the smelting of steel.

“That’s how it is,
 the way it goes …
 We’ve attained
the topmost level,
 climbing from the workers’ bunks:
in the Union
 of Republics
 the understanding of verse
now tops
 the prewar norm …”


Transcribed: by Mitch Abidor.

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