INVITATION TO VOMIT
Cover your face
and cry.
Vomit
Yes!
Vomit,
thick slivers of glass,
bitter straight pins,
worm-eaten words,
stifled shrieks of fright;
puke on this pus-flood of innocence overflowing its banks,
this slime of sickening iniquity sloshing from its trench,
and this fetid, denatured submissiveness brewed
from a flatulent broth of terror and starvation.
Cover your face
and cry...
but don't hold back.
Vomit.
Yes!
Vomit,
retch in the face of this macabre paranoiac stupidity,
heave all over this delirious stentorian cretinism,
and this senile orgy of prostatic egotism:
foul coagulations of dried-up disgust,
pulped bulks of impotence already drowned
in a rancid gravy of boredom,
rotten chunks of soured hope...
hours split open by neighings of anguish.
Oliverio Girondo
Translation by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
Scarecrow and Other Anomalies, trans. by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert (Riverside, California: Xenos Books, 2002).