MARTON SIMON: NIGIRI

Look, I really would have liked

to have put something cold, precise and

to the point in front of you,

if we don’t have time anyway, the continents

are about to drift apart again, and

nature can in any case be divided in two,

one part we leave cold, the other

we’ve already destroyed, even though

I kept going through the reading.

That’s why I thought I’d talk about

my favorite films instead,

if now the point of everything

is that nothing can be asserted,

that history is trifle and trash,

that the majority is drunk with self-abandon,

like a promotional pen, when in biology class

during a contraception demonstration

they use it as a prop.

See, if everything goes well, we’ll

talk about the final few minutes of your

favorite basketball player’s career

over what’s left of our gas station sushi,

and it won’t take much for me to present

my theory, according to which

there is only one constellation,

all of the stars belong to it,

and its name is despair.

At the end we’ll post up on the roof,

but the sentence, which I left below

locked in the bedroom, I am circling

a black crater, I am circling

a black crater, will break free,

and while we’re up there talking about

how what keeps the pagodas together

is what moves in them, it’ll be downstairs

destroying the flat.

Yes, all of it, yes. We can rename it,

sure, but I don’t think that changes anything.

(Translated by Ryan Lane)

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