State Poem by Hussein Barghouthi

I live and never lean on anyone, never feel sorrow
Never do flowers any wrong,
Like black viscous grease on a toothed wheel
In the belly of a machine, mechanized
All that is inside me, sparrows of rubber, in a cage of colored sand.
And my face a water fountain in winter, it runs,
And a new coldness in the air, I lean,
To where the 'forces' throw me: towards a memory
Of old cities, or towards a warehouse
Of words that resemble a luminous bar, and in it there's jazz,
And the customers dozed off on the tables, by it I pass, and in me
The sourness of a shadow and my eyes of boredom and metal.