Air Defense

Kiki Dimoula
(translated by Evan Jones)

 

Through good and bad the absolute silence
inside me always wears her slippers.
Downstairs live desires.
Naturally they profess deafness.
These delusions profess blindness too
but they can smell and see
from behind their dark glasses,
stripping one bare of one’s belief in them.

One doesn’t believe them. In their blindness
these organists appeal to me sitting down
to some cool satisfying passage of music
tickling their ivoried succès,
in their blindness they appeal to me because
vulnerability never falls from fashion.

That is why good or bad let them wear
let them wear earplugs
through my emotional arrangements.

One should however privilege the dead.
One should privilege the dead
if one wants to pity an illusion.
They are at least not passersby.