I

The little lads of great evil
stoke the stove with old ideals

Industriously scraping together their daily bread
in between the beetles of mutual understanding

All hot and bothered the statues of old
but at night they fall apart with mould

Working flexibly until death attends to him
a man makes a life with a vengeance: he plays

He plays on electric vomiting guitars
going down on sagging altars we get screwed

Night falls and the poet slaving over the
final words fatally pussyfooting falls also

Falls round and ripe like shiny fruit he's saved
radiantly on lightweight paper, shrieking with glee.
II

Having shaken loose fragments of words
like a jogger in the woods does his legs

So each one of us tackles time in his own way
his body strapped in the corset of form
until everythings snaps, with a bang or a whimper

Ideas and utopias remained like waste
on the dung heap of history to come he regards
its dismantlement embracing it without hesitation

Maybe he was the last prince to nurse a great thirst
trampling all the gardening gnomes with his seven-league boots
until nightingales from liberated arbors could sing freely

And so he sang you and me and all the senses free
to deep in the forest where neither paths nor trail
markers go but chaos alone and glamorous appearance.

Translation: Scott Rollins