The air is soggy, we’ve smoked all hope
come evening, come sundown, this cold;
our hands put out cigarettes against roses,
and braid them into the few stray locks
Of moonlight; We revel in shared hostility.
To every man who looks,
She is lovely. But my lovely, you and me,
We avert our gazes discreetly.
For only the perpetrators bear witness
to the true doing even as theorists cower
in their hypothesis and the victims
in their disbelief.
Why roses, sweet sultry roses?
oh there are enough holes in our jeans.
We drink solitude to dissolve the yellow
from our ugly teeth; Outside dew trickles
in vain to put out ashes.
We savour the criminal thrill
of moonlight vandalism, all our figurative
crimes like smoke rings blown from
Magritte’s Pipe.
So play the ending notes my arriviste
as we linger in high society and clink
to our swindlers’ fancy; No penance
is so snide as that of a criminal made to
feel unworthy of a crime.
If you looked closer, you must think,
who shot the moon and what a poor shot!
They got the roses in her hair, those imbeciles.
The threat of dawn wails like air raid sirens
on our intellectual horizons,
All the debauchery of thoughts suspended
like enemy bombs every night passes on
as we confide in sleep, shelter alike
with enemies and enemies.
It is not so ridiculous to fear light
as the inflictor of shadows, we must
begin to fear ourselves.
Every morning I walk the path
of midnight leaves with sallow eyes,
a waning smile, crunching them under my
fascist feet and wait to be wanted
even if only on posters in alleyways.