Workers On A Bus

The night disolves
in a barracks, we travel
toward the intimacey of the roundabout.
It isn’t decadence, but
rather cooking
with refined ingredients.
It is the moment prior to dawn’s baking.
One supported by the other,
smelling each other, without retaining
anything from this daily recognition,
I know you will miss me at another time,
on another street. Perhaps the least
premeditated uniform and the romantic
nature of leisure.
If being alone is the price
of this equality, balsamic
modesty emerges
on the trip, body to body.
A streetlight shines on a blind man.
There is something fascinating and crude
in keeping afloat.
Protect the embers
of the house’s breathing.
We shelter each other
to be only one.
Every day your cheekbone is a custom
that I can neither love
nor let decompose,
that would warn with its loss
when it could no longer
live
this normality.

Translated by Curtis Bauer
“Workers On A Bus” is from Echado a perder [Spoiled] (Madrid, Visor, 2007); this English translation appeared in The Dirty Goat #25.

You can read and listen to the poem in the original Spanish here.