The street is full tonight.
Raw and reddish light,
A world too steep.
Ethnic table,
A place to eat.
Nebulous music,
Sentimental swing of suicidal impulse,
From a black ghetto blaster,
Seemed to recede, to recede, to recede.
In a walking dream,
I went through people different from me:
Europeans of strange tongues,
Arabs of snoutish faces.
All sickly lust
For mad and filthy orgies
With supple obedient girls
Of no identity.

There’s a bar called Nancy’s.
Jaded air,
Sick roses standing.
Giddy voice,
Some dying bodies.
Their eyes glow
Like faint meteors in the gloom,
Boldly defying,
Driven by craving,
For pleasure, for life elegancies,
Paid generously by some unknown man
From a foreign country.

But when winter nights come,
And orgiastic riots end,
They are only jilted lovers,
With joyless eyes,
Like doomed roses
Bloom and fade,
Easily forgotten
By the hands
Of their maroon-tin paramores.

Shadowed faces, bat-like souls haunting me,
Transfigured by a lecherous cunning
After times of vainawaiting,
Drift amid life
Like the barren song of a phoebe-bird,
Mourning the death of its wings.