Guitar
(For Spanish translation click here)

The pleasure of suffering, of hating, discolors

the throat with plastic poisons,

the swine who implants his magic order,

his bullish greatness, between the first

and the sixth

and the eight liar, all suffer.

The pleasure of suffering . . . Who? To whom?

Who, the teeth? . . . To whom, the society?

The carbide of rage of the gums?

How to be

and being, without infuriating the neighbor?

You are worth more than my number, lonely man,

and they’re worth more than all the dictionary,

with its prose in verse,

with its verse in prose,

your eagle-like function,

your mechanical tiger, soft fellow creature.

The pleasure of suffering,

of waiting hopes on the table,

Sunday with all the languages,

Saturday with Chinese hours, Belgiums,

the week, with two spittings.

The pleasure of waiting in slippers,

waiting fearfully behind a verse,

waiting with power and bad poison;

the pleasure of suffering, slapped with the left hand of a woman,

dead with a stone in the waist,

and dead between the string and the guitar,

crying days and singing months.

28 October 1937