Excessive Song V by Dan Sociu translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and the poet with Mihaela Ni’ă
Then, on the third day of the Congress, a boundless lethargy
overtook me on the balcony of your hotel room
while Claudiu was explaining why some poems
tolerate the comma with difficulty, like a foreign body. You
were a foreign body
to me, I slept next to your breasts but, too drunk and
too cowardly,
I didn’t dare touch them. It was raining outside, October
had smoked
a cheap joint and turned paranoid, the willow chairs, sodden,
the trees in front of
the hotel, seemed former child rock-stars sunk into
alcoholism and oblivion. The comma, the period are
often useful,
they mark censorship, or something like that, we were talking
about poetry and
somewhere a wife I no longer loved waited for me, a boss
whom I’d left
in the lurch and was going to fire me, I couldn’t
care less.
A lethargy that wouldn’t ease up, nausea, a bad-movie-like
sadness, “we poets enter our youth with
sadness
and we end in despair and madness,” these
poets’ meetings
are massacres, Claudiu could hardly stand upright,
I was popping
fistfuls of Colebils for my gut, only the old men were in shape, the most energetic of them, Flora, was to die in winter, I saw him on his last night and a week later I left the Bucharest to which I’d come for you, everyone else thought I’d come to try to make it big.
