Morality of sleep

Ropes of farnesses ropes of glimmers

Ropes of sheer hope flung to the missing

The idleness of children

The flower its everlastingness

The storm its might

The conquests of good weather

The female her way whithersoever

The female nature’s flame

Weaving the sun’s weft

And delighted to delight me

Amid flighty horizons

Making and unmaking her beauty

The forest drapes her shoulders

Her silent hair

With one sole sound of wings one lone song

Crop of space

But everything hangs together in my realm

The better to bow me down and humiliate me

Light and joy convulsed

Lose their brightness their freshness

My suffering becomes visible

Wild fighting on the dais

Face of blazing black horsehair

Smell of soot tar ceiling

Unmuzzled bear tracked panther

Twilight of fury

the empty cages are shut

A dry goat in the starry sky

Grows old reckoning its age

The afternoon was of twigs

Of ways to be customary

A clasp of sickly hands

Ten fingers of vacillating images

Veiled with soft white rings

Thus my delirium thus my disaster

Thus my broken-down strength

A rolling laugh

Which the game brings back to the sweet table

Of your slight breasts

Night of snow vague night

Upon a trembling bridge sleep

Crumples time’s shirt

Life

And your belly’s curve

Keeps it on the edge of an abyss

*

The bars are fixed my bands do their work

Your locks the pain of cutting the darkest one

I shall prune the darkness

Of my room that’s shrinking

Would I could break the earth that surrounds

Find again the details the walk each step

Te spring pale or radiant

The river with head held high

The slender bridge

A current the ocean

The flesh immoderately open

The bursted screen of the sky

The fruit the breath the health

Of a body that will not be used up

Mirror the nuptial pond

Heart in common of appearance

My eyelids my brow in scales of desire

Bear yet my innocence

the flora’s on the flower

I’m in the water I invade the water

I adjust deserted shores

I shall have news of you

If i penetrate the sun

*

I no longer am the mirror

Where for the first time

Shadowless you talked to yourself

Thrilled to have a limpid companion at last

You thought you were spoken to you heard a great shout

And you woke up with a start

Your shadow resumed the way of your body

The doors shut

The windowpane fell into oblivion

The portrait wore out under your clenched gestures

And the evening assigned parts

A loaf to this one to all the others a loaf

Food least bad

From an old-fashioned tower rises a dying flame

From another tower already outmoded

Slides the hard spur of one sole caress

Obedience barricade

Desolating adventures

Simulacra squandered treasures

On the altar of mirages

In the linens dulled by useless tears

Ennui triumphs over colors

*

Death inscribed on his flank a vagabond was born

The muck the lime kiln the diminished sidewalks

The rags I’ve understood their definition

Among all the living I have no next of kin

The palm hollow as a volcano

The eyes made unto spittle of pity and hate

I only play at dying and denying and I adhere

To the sharp-pebbled clay

In shelters of ash in the chaos of broken bones

Of the most certain of abandonments

To the scrambled mosaic

Of the last of the virtues

Derisory disorder

I’ve unset the traps

the dead are not asleep

They do not reflect anything

And nor water nor wind nor sun nor dawn

Can distract them

I see the town of your dream

That you alone shall people

With the whirlwind of your beauty

Refusal rupture

Paul Eluard