(English version)
I walk down empty streets that wear a city shroud of smoke,
While attendant ghosts merge with the air
As they loosen flesh like coats.
Dimensions glimpsed within the black
Show chaotic nothingness
While the shapes of buildings rise and warp As through an alien cement.
The road is grasped like tortured flesh
In the stark reminder of a rape;
As clouds of stone turn taste to coal,
Toxicity penetrates.
The birds will fly through glass tonight
As the smoke smeared sky bites back.
The sun is spat as pesticide is marred
And spiked by light’s attack.
Lemons boil. Corrusive juice is gargled
By sharp winds. And the souls we’d prize
On city streets will never rise again.
The morning train is heard to weep, while
Silencing the heart that knows no journey can transform without the will to start.
The broken, shrill, metallic song is drowned
In oil by motorbikes, as butter fries and
fattens food even comfort petrifies.
At every step another brain is flattened
Like dog turds as no one tries to save or claim what that rancid smoke now blurs.
Strewn sandwiches of mobiles, speech and the matter that brought life
Lay discarded as the sidewalk ends
In a noir like film of urban strife.
Like Oedipus I scratch at my eyes
To reject the waste and oversight.
As darkness becomes darker still
I burn in the first car’s scorched headlight.
The rancid city now consumes
The memory of earth.
When society forgets itself
Man’s ransacked heart will burst.
Elena Caldera
Translated and adapted by David Erdos
Drawing: Elena Caldera