Hands touch–set off another round of deals and betrayals! I only hope I don’t mistake whose lips and hands!

Don’t mix up all these break-ups and insomnias. When we let go, I’ll try, my friend, to charge my memory!

So you won’t languish and expire like the others in my poems (the garbage heap of all my Casanovas!).

So you won’t be washed by rains for millennia, buried in my breast (mass grave for a thousand breasts!)…

So you won’t –you, my two-starred utter dark!– end up one more corpse, gravemarker: Unknown.

(Translated from the Russian byCatherine Ciepiela)