Journal

“(...) death now began not, as we may say, to hover over every one's head only, but to look into their houses and chambers and stare in their faces. (...) People might be heard, even into the streets as we passed along, calling upon God for mercy through Jesus Christ, and saying, « I have been a thief, I have been an adulterer », « I have been a murderer » (...).” (Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year)

            1.

            i’m slipping noiselessly through spiderwebs of starings

            next to me someone stumbles and spills

            a cup of expresso over his velvet suit

            fluid gestures the horns of dark cars with sirens blaring

            ascending a small mountain of voices in the warm air

            pierced like a sieve by innumerable faces and arms

            stretched toward a psalm that cannot be heard

            2.

            hallucinated birds dive at your shoulders with half-open beaks

            whole flocks hurling themselves toward an asphalt of happiness

            and you hear something new for every step you take

            everyone speaks sweating in a hurry their faces chewed by rage

            shovelling words ceaselessly into burning fiery furnaces

            as if working on a grand text like a continuous hum of physical matter

            compressed inside the boiler of a huge locomotive

            3.

            you run through the howl of a thousand hungry mouths

            shrivelled up like paper in the blaze of the street

            further on someone will be pulverised

            crumbling to bone and cartilage and strips of meat

            we will slide on trembling exhausted on the brink of extinction

            when they say on tv that everything’s all right

            a skilled operator will film dogs frightened by visions

            whole packs of them begging for the executioner’s charity

            as he bears the axe of mercy through thin air

            sifting a sieve of burnt faces and arms in continuous

            dissipation, without escape.

            Translated by Stephen Watts

& Claudiu Komartin