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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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