Mayakovsky
Your thought,
musing on a sodden brain
like a bloated lackey on a greasy couch.
I'll taunt with a bloody morsel of heart;
and satiate my insolent, caustic contempt.
No grey hairs streak my soul,
no grandfatherly fondness there!
I shake the world with the might of my voice,
and walk – handsome,
twentytwoyearold.
Tender souls!
You play your love on a fiddle,
and the crude club their love on a drum.
But you cannot turn yourself inside out,
like me, and be just bare lips!
Come and be lessoned –
prim officiates of the angelic league,
lisping in drawing-room cambric.
You, too, who leaf your lips like a cook
turns the pages of a cookery book.
If you wish,
I shall rage on raw meat;
or, as the sky changes its hue,
if you wish,
I shall grow irreproachably tender:
not a man, but a cloud in trousers!
I deny the existence of blossoming Nice!
Again in song I glorify
men as crumpled as hospital beds,
and women as battered as proverbs.
