Joan Margarit

The bubble of light within the tunnel
carries our faces away with it into the dark.
Although I recognize some trace
of that war-time child corrupted
by the gloomy myth of purity,
I look at myself in the glass of the metro carriage
with a mineral indifference,
because I already know that nothing inside me will change.

An old man’s love is as hard as the fig-tree
with its dusty, horribly contorted limbs, his heart
is dark and hidden, like the heart of the rose
among its crimson petals that are big but weak.
Cold passion is even more blind.
Sex puts up a fight in a hovel
with hardly any light, at the back of your mind.
Outside, death waits to come in.