A Cloud In Trousers - Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Born: July 19, 1893, Baghdati, Georgia

Died: April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia

A Cloud In Trousers - epilogue

Your thoughts,
dreaming on a softened brain,

like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart's bloody tatters I'll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice
I go by — handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.

Gentle ones!
You lay your love on a violin.
The crude lay their love on a drum.
but you can't, like me, turn inside out entirely,
and nothing but human lips become!

Out of chintz-covered drawing-rooms, come
and learn-
decorous bureaucrats of angelic leagues.

and you whose lips are calmly thumbed,
as a cook turns over cookery-book leaves.

If you like-
I'll be furiously flesh elemental,
or - changing to tones that the sunset arouses -
if you like-
I'll be extraordinary gentle,
not a man, but - a cloud in trousers!

A Cloud In Trousers - part I

You think malaria makes me delirious?

It happened.
In Odessa it happened.

"I'll come at four," Maria promised.

Eight.
Nine.
Ten.

Then the evening
turned its back on the windows
and plunged into grim night,
scowling
Decemberish.

At my decrepit back
the candelabras guffawed and whinnied.

You would not recognise me now:
a bulging bulk of sinews,
groaning,
and writhing,
What can such a clod desire?
Though a clod, many things!

The self does not care
whether one is cast of bronze
or the heart has an iron lining.
At night the self only desires
to steep its clangour in softness,
in woman.

And thus,
enormous,

I stood hunched by the window,
and my brow melted the glass.
What will it be: love or no-love?
And what kind of love:
big or minute?
How could a body like this have a big love?
It should be teeny-weeny,
humble, little love;
a love that shies at the hooting of cars,
that adores the bells of horse-trams.

Again and again
nuzzling against the rain,
my face pressed against its pitted face,
I wait,
splashed by the city's thundering surf.

Then midnight, amok with a knife,
caught up,
cut him down
out with him!

The stroke of twelve fell
like a head from a block.

On the windowpanes, grey raindrops
howled together,
piling on a grimace
as though the gargoyles
of Notre Dame were howling.

Damn you!
Isn't that enough?
Screams will soon claw my mouth apart.

Then I heard,
softly,
a nerve leap
like a sick man from his bed.
Then,
barely moving,
at first,
it soon scampered about,
agitated,
distinct.
Now, with a couple more,
it darted about in a desperate dance.

The plaster on the ground floor crashed.

Nerves,
big nerves,
tiny nerves,
many nerves!
galloped madly
till soon
their legs gave way.

But night oozed and oozed through the room
and the eye, weighed down, could not slither out of
the slime.

The doors suddenly banged ta-ra-bang,
as though the hotel's teeth
chattered.

You swept in abruptly
like "take it or leave it!"
Mauling your suede gloves,
you declared:
"D' you know,
I'm getting married."

All right, marry then.
So what,
I can take it.
As you see, I'm calm!
Like the pulse
of a corpse.

Do you remember
how you used to talk?
"Jack London,
money,
love,
passion."
But I saw one thing only:
you, a Gioconda,
had to be stolen!

And you were stolen.

In love, I shall gamble again,
the arch of my brows ablaze.
What of it!
Homeless tramp

A Cloud In Trousers - part II by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Glorify me!
For me the great are no match.
Upon every achievement
I stamp nihil

I never want
to read anything.
Books?
What are books!

Formerly I believed
books were made like this:
a poet came,
lightly opened his lips,
and the inspired fool burst into song
if you please!
But it seems,
before they can launch into a song,
poets must tramp for days with callused feet,
and the sluggish fish of the imagination
flounders softly in the slush of the heart.
And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth
of loves and nightingales,
the tongueless street merely writhes
for lack of something to shout or say.

In our pride, we raise up again
the cities' towers of Babel,
but god,
confusing tongues,
grinds
cities to pasture.

In silence the street pushed torment.
A shout stood erect in the gullet.
Wedged in the throat,
bulging taxis and bony cabs bristled.
Pedestrians have trodden my chest
flatter than consumption.

The city has locked the road in gloom.

But when
nevertheless!
the street coughed up the crush on the square,
pushing away the portico that was treading on its throat,
it looked as if:
in choirs of an archangel's chorale,
god, who has been plundered, was advancing in
wrath!

But the street, squatting down, bawled:
"Let's go and guzzle!"

Krupps and Krupplets1 paint
a bristling of menacing brows on the city,
but in the mouth
corpselets of dead words putrefy;
and only two thrive and grow fat:
"swine,"
and another besides,
apparently - "borsch."

Poets,
soaked in plaints and sobs,
break from the street, rumpling their matted hair
over: "How with two such words celebrate
a young lady
and love
and a floweret under the dew?"

In the poets' wake
thousands of street folk:
students,
prostitutes,
salesmen.

Gentlemen!
Stop!

thousands of street folk:
students,
prostitutes,
salesmen.

Gentlemen!
Stop!
You are no beggars;
how dare you beg for alms!

We in our vigour,
whose stride measures yards,
must not listen, but tear them apart
them,
glued like a special supplement
to each double bed!

Are we to ask them humbly:
"Assist me!"
Implore for a hymn
or an oratorio!
We ourselves are creators within a burning hymn
the hum of mills and laboratories.

What is Faust to me,
in a fairy splash of rockets
gliding with Mephistopheles on the celestial parquet!
I know
a nail in my boot
is more nightmarish than Goethe's fantasy!

I,
the most golden-mouthed,
whose every word
gives a new birthday to the soul,
gives a name-day to the body,
I adjure you:
the minutest living speck
is worth more than what I'll do or did!

Listen!
It is today's brazen-lipped Zarathustra
who preaches,
dashing about and groaning!
We,
our face like a crumpled sheet,
our lips pendulant like a chandelier;
we,
the convicts of the City Leprous,
where gold and filth spawned leper's sores,
we are purer than the azure of Venice,
washed by both the sea and the sun!

I spit on the fact
that neither Homer nor Ovid
invented characters like us,
pock-marked with soot.
I know
the sun would dim, on seeing
the gold fields of our souls!

Sinews and muscles are surer than prayers.
Must we implore the charity of the times!
We
each one of us
hold in our fists
the driving belts of the worlds!

This led to my Golgothas in the halls
of Petrograd, Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev,
where not a man
but
shouted:
"Crucify,
crucify him!"
But for me
all of you people,
even those that harmed me
you are dearer, more precious than anything.

Have you seen
a dog lick the hand that thrashed it?!

I,
mocked by my contemporaries
like a prolonged
dirty joke,
I perceive whom no one sees,
crossing the mountains of time.

Where men's eyes stop short,
there, at the head of hungry hordes,
the year 1916 cometh
in the thorny crown of revolutions.

In your midst, his precursor,
I am where pain is everywhere;
on each drop of the tear-flow
I have nailed myself on the cross.
Nothing is left to forgive.
I've cauterised the souls where tenderness was bred.
It was harder than taking
a thousand thousand Bastilles!

And when,
the rebellion
his advent announcing,
you step to meet the saviour
then I
shall root up my soul;
I'll trample it hard
till it spread
in blood; and I offer you this as a banner
.

A Cloud In Trousers - part III by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Ah, wherefrom this,
how explain this
brandishing of dirty fists
at bright joy!

She came,
and thoughts of a madhouse
curtained my head in despair.

And
as a dreadnought founders
and men in choking spasms
dive out of an open hatch
so Burlyuk, panic-stricken,
crawled
though the screaming gash of his eye.
Almost bloodying his teary eyelids,
he crawled out,
rose,
walked,
and, with tenderness unexpected in one so obese,
announced:
"It's fine!"

It's fine, when a yellow shirt
shields the soul from investigation!
It's fine,
when thrown at the gibbet's teeth,
to shout:
"Drink Van Houten's Cocoa!"

That instant
crackling
like a Bengal light,
I would not exchange for anything,
not for any ¡­

Out of the cigar smoke,
Severyanin's drink-sodden face lurched forward
like a liqueur glass.

How dare you call yourself a poet,
and twitter greyly like a quail!
This day
brass knuckles
must
split the world inside the skull!

You,
who are supremely worried by the thought:
"Am I an elegant dancer?"
Look at my way of enjoying life
I
a common
pimp and cardsharp!

On you,
steeped in love
who watered
the centuries with tears,
I'll turn my back, fixing
the sun like a monocle
into my gaping eye.

Donning fantastic finery,
I'll strut the earth
to please and scorch;
and Napoleon
will precede me, like a pug, on a leash.

The earth, like a woman, will flop on her back,
a mass of quivering flesh, ready to yield;
things will come to life
and their lips
will lisp and lisp:
"Yum-yum-yum!"

Suddenly,
the clouds
and other cloudy things in the sky
will roll and pitch madly
as if workers in white when their way
after declaring a bitter strike against the sky.

More savagely, thunder strode from a cloud,
friskily snorting from enormous nostrils;
and, for a second, the sky's face was twisted
in the Iron Chancellor's grim grimace.

And someone,
entangled in a cloudy mesh.
held out his hands to a caf';
and it looked somehow feminine,
and tender somehow,
and somehow like a gun carriage.

You believe
the sun was tenderly
patting the cheeks of the caf'?
No, it's General Gallifet,
advancing again to mow down the rebels!

Strollers, hands from your pockets
pick a stone, knife, or bomb;
and if any of you have no arms,
come and fight with your forehead!

Forward, famished ones,
sweating ones,
servile ones,
mildewed in the flea-ridden dirt!

Forward!
Painting Mondays and Tuesdays in blood,
we shall turn them into holidays.
Let the earth at knife's point, remember
whom it wished to debase!
The earth,
bulging like a mistress
whom Rothchild has overfondled!

The flags may flutter in a fever of gunfire
as on every important holiday
will you, the street lamps, hoist high up
the battered carcasses of traders.

I swore,
pleaded,
stabbed,
fought to fasten
my teeth into somebody's flesh,

In the sky, red as Marseillaise,
the sunset shuddered at its last gasp.

It's madness.

Nothing at all will remain.

Night will arrive,
bite in two,
gobble you up.

Look
is the sky playing Judas again
with a handful of treachery-spattered stars?
Night came.
Feasted like Mamai,
squatting with its rump on the city.
Our eyes cannot break this night,
black as Azef!

I huddle, slumped in corners of saloons;
with vodka drenching my soul and the cloth,
I notice
in one corner  rounded eyes:
the madonna's, which bite into the heart.
Why bestow such radiance of the painted form
upon a horde infesting a saloon!
Don't you see! They spit
on the man of Golgotha again,
preferring Barabbaas.

Deliberately, perhaps,
I show no newer face
amid this human mash.
I,
perhaps,
am the handsomest
of your sons.

Give them,
who are mouldy with joy,
a time of quick death,
that children may grow,
boys into fathers,
girls  big with child.

And may new born babes
grow the hair of the magi
and they will come anon
to baptise the infants
with the names of my poems.

I, who praised the machine and England,
I am perhaps quite simply
the thirteenth apostle
in an ordinary gospel.

And whenever my voice
rumbles bawdily
then, from hour to hour,
around the clock,
Jesus Christ may be sniffing
the forget-me-nots of my soul.

A Cloud In Trousers - part IV

Maria! Maria! Maria!

Let me in, Maria!
I can't suffer the streets!
You won't?
You'd rather wait
until my cheeks cave in,
until, pawed by everyone,
I arrive,
stale,
toothlessly mumbling
that today I am
"amazingly honest."

Maria,
as you see my shoulders droop.

In the streets
men will prick the blubber of four-story craws,
thrust out their little eyes,
worn in forty years of wear and tear to snigger
at my champing
again! on the hard crust of yesterday's caress.

Rain has drowned the sidewalks in sobs;
the puddle-prisoned rougue,
all drenched, licks the corpse of the streets by cobbles clobbered,

but on his grizzled eyelashes yes!
on the eyelashes of frosted icicles,
tears gush from his eyes yes! from the drooping eyes of the drainpipes.

The rain's snout licked all pedestrians;
but fleshy athletes, gleaming, passed by in carriages;
people burst asunder,
gorged to the marrow,
and grease dripped through the cracks;

and the cud of old ground meat,
together with the pulp of chewed bread,
dribbled down in a turbid stream from the carriages.

Maria!
How stuff a gentle word into their fat-bulged ears?
A bird
sings
for alms,
hungry and resonant.
But I am a man, Maria,
a simple man,
coughed up by consumptive night on the dirty hand of the Presnya.

Maria, do you want such a man?
Let me in, Maria!
With shuddering fingers I shall grip the doorbell's iron throat!

Maria!

The paddocks of the streets run wild.
The fingers of the mob mark my neck.

Open up!

I'm hurt!

Look -my eyes are stuck
with ladies' hatpins!

You've let me in.

Darling!
Don't be alarmed
if a mountain of women with sweating bellies
squats on my bovine shoulders through life I drag
millions of vast pure loves
and a million million of foul little lovekins.
Don't be afraid
if once again
in the inclemency of betrayal,
I'll cling to thousands of pretty faces "that love Mayakovsky!" for this is the dynasty
of queens who have ascended the heart of a madman.

Maria, come closer!

Whether in unclothed shame
or shudders of apprehension,
do yield me the unwithered beauty of your lips:
my heart and I have never got as far as May,
and in my expended life
there is only a hundredth April.

Maria!
The poet sings sonnets to Tiana,
but I
am all flesh,
a man every bit I simply ask for your body
as Christians pray:
"Give us this day
our daily bread!"

Maria - give!

Maria!
I fear to forget your name
as a poet fears to forget some word
sprung in the torment of the night,
mighty as god himself.

Your body
I sh