The city turns people into waifs
Into thorny, poisonous, well-dressed orphans,
Teeth grow wild at lonely meals,
Daytime serves to hoard revenge,
If there’s a crowd in the streets
Everyone—though they conceal it—
Secretly seeks an embrace to overturn

This is why the invisible auras around them
The tangents of light… the tangents
Always touching each other
tangents
intersect

So as not to forget their own voices
Some people say “hello” every night
Every broken aura must be made to look accidental:
For soon, people
Will pour shamelessly into one another’s seas

By morning, one of the auras certainly fades
Stricken, one certainly falls
The murderer attaches the victim’s aura to his own
Every morning the rotten flesh, the corpses
That roam the city, prefer the hidden routes.

Every city dweller, at the moment of “hello”
Reckons whose mouth will gush blood in the morning
Urbanites are good at this reckoning
Every tooth seeks an aura it supposes frail

Somewhere in the night, a deft city dweller creeps, like
a blue-black jaguar. He flows from the crowd’s air vessels
to his prey. Apocalyptic eyes seep toward the other’s flesh
with the compassion of blood.

For now, his teeth mustn’t frighten the fresh other. The
novice stands imprudent, white flesh fully exposed. Still
so new, the novice does not yet know

those who’ve renounced life the most in this city depend
on fresh flesh. Ah! Those who appear fullest are, in fact,
the hungriest. Behind their gentle rhythms hide zealous
anteaters.

The novice’s fresh flesh is scraped at the first greeting.
Then, all throng the smell of blood. They never reveal
it: all want to revive their mica hearts by pressing their
mouths to the scrape. The jaguar initiates the feast. The
others, for now, cloak their appetites with learned pa-
tience. They must wait until the first drop trickles from
the novice’s nape.

In the city
Where everyone kills someone
Where one is certain to kill another
Broken hearts are passed from hand to hand,
In the city everyone’s blood
Is on everyone’s tongue
He who fears bleeding most is fastest in the handling of murder…

In the city no one capsizes
The body of someone they can’t kill
No one lets the capsized go without killing him first

And so, since blood always flows,
Flesh drains fast.
The city needs flesh
Or the anteaters
Will tear one another to shreds.
Everything must begin again,
Once more, yet again, with a greeting
So the city doesn’t fall.
Claws will always beckon to novices
And the city, with the novices’blood,
Circulate its own blood

Third Play: The Opium of Claws

After the villainous night
The novice, observing the cut on his nape
Secretly admires himself
Traces, with his finger, the city’s first mark upon his flesh
There, where the mirror reflects the cut on his nape.
The city’s opiate lock unfastens
Draws the poor youth inside

From now on, the city’s new arrival,
Hoping every night, every time
For a victory against the city,
Dwindling, of course, as he follows packs of jaguars,
Will go, will enter the inner ring, deeper and deeper…