Translations from Lorca

If I die the internet buzzes on.

A little boy shaving his cute moustache,

fingers of ice cream,

trailing vapors of dissonance

behind the already-dead mother

laced in gunpowder.

The girl and her paltry bathtub.

The stigmata of science fiction roses.

A garrulous morning outside the

hedonist balcony, facing the glass

tower of silence. How many

wires of torture run through this

gay workers’ paradise?

You came to my banquet a flabby boy.

I jittered obese skin from zero to zero.

Boy, give me your death rays,

your video coronations, your stalactites

of corn and cocaine and cadence.

You speak like a Brooklyn sodomite.

A naked palm tree hallucinates

your next moment of death.

We walk across the dynamite bridge.

The business school has a face of indigestion.

You wonder about the organs of my name.

I am on my death-spiel about bureaucrats.

Some think airports are paradises.

I touch your rose skin with my name,

before the mullahs rise for prayers.

To be looked at on rainy afternoons

beside the halls of Iron Curtain greatness

like a redeemed possibility, bride

to gestures, twice the ordinariness

of supermarket shopping, hollow eyes

tracing the signifier settling down,

sighing, giving up torture,

compromising for food or drink.