FROM A RANCID CITY – CITTA’ RANCIDA (2)

(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

 

 

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