Kafka's Forbidden Poems IV

Your name on my shoulders;
around your waist,
        the next crime.

Lovers,
their throats cut
          on the table
  witnessing a romance’s
          eternal recurrence.

My battle, over your eyes;
You, raising my war
     past the shadows' echo.

Lovers:
      stellar jealousy made of
          star-shattered hearts;
      crystals forging
          the grammar of defeat,
      cutting through the river
          of the fallen.
      to summon a theater
          with neither fate nor victory;
      its curtains open,
          to open a new spectacle.

But here,
      in my world,
  everyone is an enemy,
  they love and they hate;
in yours,
  it’s half love and half hate.

So then,
  what crystals cut the table for two
  who never make a losing move?
If we don't spill our own,
but others’ blood.

You,
  whom I can neither win nor lose.
yet your voice reassembles fragments
  into an echo that screams
  two clashing destinies:
    conquer and surrender,
    prevail and fall;
  both, in the same breath.

And finally confess it:
    your lovers
          —are all I desire.
Kafka's Forbidden Poems IV ·