The Devastating Fecundity Of Being by Heinrich Hiene
(translated by Harry Hiney)
I squirted hand soap on my toothbrush this morning.
This cannot be a good sign of things to come.
The things I ask myself while getting dressed:
How many days in a row have I worn this shirt?
Do these pants stink in the rear end?
Are there too many holes in these socks?
My Fräulein has left me for an artificial lawn salesman,
and the snow is piss yellow in my dreams.
The prosaic and dull lock arms with Saint-Simonian hoodlums
while my temper steadies and dips, and my spirit wanes.
God, would you look at this sad sack of Spätzle and
Sauerbraten?
My right to whine is uncontestable, though,
and I get around the more obvious mores with less pizzazz
than a subterranean mole.
Shapes that shape me,
the rough-edged powder-haired ditz of my ways.
I am offered less than lower seeps of try to give cares
their worn out where,
in the bundle of sheep-eyed morticians’ contoured
glibness.
Guess my weight.
Win a doorknob.
It is all I’ve got.
The Oiled Motions Of Avoidance by Pablo Neruda (translated
by Howie “Boy” Dukes)
Lowly, in sweeps the hybrid breeze to coastal nests and
climbs ringing
in surety. I too
have similar rants to match less wits than
those
who take home supper
late.
Seaweed pie and crabby hunches
I’ll never see--
aquamarine tides of thought lingered to forever’s bask.
Got placenta marmalade?
I platonically smash igneous rock to splintered chips, with
or without
detrimental attached worship of myself.
I glue glitter to my boxing gloves to avoid
malfeasance fees.
I oversee the feeding of Australian spotted qoulls in dreary
late-night outcrops
just like 24-hour cafeterias at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday.
Nobody hassles me for the time of day.
Nobody snitches.
There are more colugos and nitwit eutharians in all the
realms of
mystique and horror
than in any distant corner of the scrubbed and polished
world
we partake in.
Guessing the difference,
our scrabbling overwhelms us with visitors; and
it is not
too early for some
atrocity of selfish love to wreck in the wrack
sailing ships come to honeymoon
with Spicebush Swallowtails in the sea-green clouds of
destiny.
We are little, but
in touch. Forgive me,
mother, for I
have not
sinned enough.
In The Peas by Arthur Rimbaud (translated by Grayson Silver)
I’ll tell you how it’s going,
Jerk.
It’s going shitty.
Fire me.
I’m not worth my weight in wine.
Dying is about all I’m good for,
deposed and shit on by sun and moon alike.
Deprive me of one fist and I will only
punch all the more with the other.
Bloody sheets. Bloody shoes. Bloody mouth. Bloody life.
I’m putting all my francs in the death trade,
in the jaws of wolves and hideous men.
I’m an upstart slacker,
a horseless carriage with no rider,
and on the shit-brown shores of uncompensated lust,
I get by on borrowed swagger,
swindled out of my last suit,
left for alive in the short burst of tedium’s dread.
Lonely?
Shit, I’ve staved off madness for this long.
Might as well not give up just yet,
I guess.
Gooby’s Lament by Federico García Lorca (translated by Henry
“Shot Put” Cortez)
I
had a handle-with-care label affixed to my heart and a pack of temporary
tattoos in my back pocket. There was everywhere to walk to, and we did. Just
yesterday, presenting late company to be excluded, we lolled in tulips’ swiped
daffodil-yellow. She had all the jokes, and all I knew were punch lines that
didn’t go with them. A no-bell prize. A maybe knot. And in the sweeter tending
of hapless jabs at jobless wonder, we had it and lost it at once. It wakened
what wasn’t dangerous enough while the squirrel monkeys scrambled and fed,
while the hats slept beneath the bed, while hours counted themselves out before
we had time to be poor in days. A fold of up. An out of down. Brushed
off-and-on with a tug at shabby skies, we held out for less and got bargained
into more. For a ritzy shot at resisting rest, for a moss-and-string placard of
dust-colored chagrin reading, “Just Be Klutz” in the shape of a ginger rhizome,
for valueless valor, for creeps and jerks of old and doofus rage, we strained
backwards to a perfect fault and found backwash tinged with love in the lees of
our last together. Over lights. Covered under. Raining up with drunken kudzu.
Splashed dry, we tumbled and forgave kumquats their slow float. We skimmed the
nights with greedy eyes while the booze hummed my name below the music our
mouths made out of neon and saffron and cephalopod dreams.
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