Love In The Time Of Cabriolet Poem by JG Correa

All the paths converge to the metropolis.
Love's ways, however, reach up to the infinite.
At the extremity of the fog, stores,
and stairs travel to the upper plateaus
of the sky, which, like a hallucination,
exhumes itself as the city grid's tentacle
turns into a river of naphtha, pus,
and solemn carcasses: that's the domain
of ardent octopuses and remains.
The city has bridges and ironed trellises;
its bundles of airs, its blocks and its columns,
its gargoyles of marked faces, its districts,
towers and upright slate roofs dominating
the Belgian lanes configure the ideogram
of the Tentacle-Metropolis neighbourhoods
We're in the Ottocento; to this day
night has sheared ebony into the firmament
high up while the sculpted city afar
expanded the plains abroad and beyond
in colossal series of nightly efforts.
Emile Verhaeren glimpsed therein a symbol
of future mankind; this IS Ottocento!
Lift-trucks creak like hinges and joints while noisy
quays sound boisterous under their lorries' clashes.
We live and love. This is the time of cabriolets.