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from The Book of Afternoon Sleeps, by Liviu Campanu
That dream again: I’m hooked up to a transparent drip
full of hours, to replace the lost hours spent watching
the rain bead up the window, feeling the sex
dry on the thigh like the second skin it soon became:
the aggregate of all those public holidays we spent in bed
while your fat-fingered husband (he’s light-
fingered too – how does he manage that?)
inspected troops or tractors, collecting his Politburo
arse-blisters, his parade-ground pins and needles.
He’d sit in Capsia after a hard day’s delegating,
blow his nose on the embroidered napkin
he’ll wipe his mouth with later,
and put a two-man tail on the House Special.
While we – two boats cresting the same slow wave, or,
to put it more prosaically, two bodies carried by the same long fuck –
'd enjoy our all-day docking at the jetty that kisses the water.
This winter, I have each gone minute of our time
stored up like city heat in bricks; in other words,
they’re seeping out faster than I can hold them in.
In yet other words, they’re not stored up at all.
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Editor's Note: This poem purports to be a translation of a poem by Romanian poet Liviu Campanu. Campanu is a fictional character, who appears in Patrick McGuinness' novel The Last Hundred Days.