21

May noises bore into your teeth like a dentist's drill, and may memory fill you with rust, broken words and the stench of decay.

May a spider's foot sprout from each of your pores, may you find nourishment only in packs of worn cards and may sleep reduce you, like a steam roller, to the thickness of your photograph.

When you step into the street, may even the lampposts dog your heels, may an irresitible fanaticism oblige you to prostrate yourself before every garbage pail and may all the inhabitants of the city mistake you for a urinal.

When you want to say "My love," may you say "fried fish": may your own hands try to strangle you at every turn, and every time you go to flick away cigarette, mayit be you who is hurled into the spittoon.

May your wife deceive you even with the mailboxes; when she snuggles next to you, may she metamorphose intoa blood-sucking leech and, after giving birth to a crow, may she bring forth a monkey wrench.

May your family amuse itself deforming your bone structure, so that mirrors, looking at you, commit suicide out of sheer repugnance; may your only enterainment consist of installing yoursle fin the waiting rooms of dentists, disguised as a crocodile, and may you fall so passionately in love with a toolbox that you can't desist, even for an instant, from licking its clasp.