The Western World

'Este es el mundo, amigo, agonía, agonía.'1 

I see them: drains clogged with livers,

seeping thinned-blood, sweating cold sand,

and hear words slur from misty-eyed girls,

folded on streets and trembling with

some befriended stranger beside, 

stroking their bleach-blonde hair: 
where's the woman with doves in her breasts?
where's the old man with his beard full of frost?


Whilst they rest later in swirling beds,
after stumbled fumbling, sawdust sex, 
a thousand ants swarm over dawn, 
stifling its light to form men's shadows
that darkens great cities behind them - 
cities without a mouthful of flowers: 
where's the woman with doves in her breasts?
where's the old man with his beard full of frost?  


1. Federico García Lorca, Oda a Walt Whitman, Poeta en Nueva York