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Thoughts, go your way home. Embrace, depths of the soul and the sea. In my view, it is stupid to be always serene. My cabin is the worst of all cabins - All night above me Thuds a smithy of feet. All night, stirring the ceiling's calm, dancers stampede to a moaning motif: "Marquita, Marquita, Marquita my darling, why won't you, Marquita, why won't you love me …" But why Should marquita love me?! I have no francs to spare. And Marquita (at the slightest wink!) for a hundred francs she'd be brought to your room. The sum's not large - just live for show - No, you highbrow, ruffling your matted hair, you would thrust upon her a sewing machine, in stitches scribbling the silk of verse. Proletarians arrive at communism from below - by the low way of mines, sickles, and pitchforks - But I, from poetry's skies, plunge into communism, because without it I feel no love. Whether I'm self-exiled or sent to mamma - the steel of words corrodes, the brass of the brass tarnishes. Why, beneath foreign rains, must I soak, rot, and rust? Here I recline, having gone oversea, in my idleness barely moving my machine parts. I myself feel like a Soviet factory, manufacturing happiness. I object to being torn up, like a flower of the fields, after a long day's work. I want the Gosplan to sweat in debate, assignning me goals a year ahead. I want a commissar with a decree to lean over the thought of the age. I want the heart to earn its love wage at a specialist's rate. I want the factory committee to lock My lips when the work is done. I want the pen to be on a par with the bayonet; and Stalin to deliver his Politbureau reports about verse in the making as he would about pig iron and the smelting of steel. "That's how it is, the way it goes … We've attained the topmost level, climbing from the workers' bunks: in the Union of Republics the understanding of verse now tops the prewar norm …" Transcribed: by Mitch Abidor.