Then, on the third day of the Congress, a boundless lethargy
overtook me on the balcony of your hotel room
while Claudiu was explaining why some poems
tolerate the comma with difficulty, like a foreign body. You
were a foreign body
to me, I slept next to your breasts but, too drunk and
too cowardly,
I didn’t dare touch them. It was raining outside, October
had smoked
a cheap joint and turned paranoid, the willow chairs, sodden,
the trees in front of
the hotel, seemed former child rock-stars sunk into
alcoholism and oblivion. The comma, the period are
often useful,
they mark censorship, or something like that, we were talking
about poetry and
somewhere a wife I no longer loved waited for me, a boss
whom I’d left
in the lurch and was going to fire me, I couldn’t
care less.
A lethargy that wouldn’t ease up, nausea, a bad-movie-like
sadness, “we poets enter our youth with
sadness
and we end in despair and madness,” these
poets’ meetings
are massacres, Claudiu could hardly stand upright,
I was popping
fistfuls of Colebils1 for my gut, only the old men were in shape, the most energetic of them, Flora, was to die in winter, I saw him on his last night and a week later I left the Bucharest to which I’d come for you, everyone else thought I’d come to try to make it big.
Dan Sociu (born 1978) Romania
Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and the poet with Mihaela Ni’ă
Source: Per Contra
1: Colebil - a drug used for treatment in various dyspeptic disorders
Thank you for this
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