I’m broke and practically homeless. This fatal city, Antioch, has devoured all my money.

An echo from my days given to sensuality, an echo from those days came back to me, something of the fire of the young life we shared.

My slaves empty baskets of jasmine and auspicious tributes revive the pleasure of ancient days.

We were lovers for a month. Then he went away to work, I think in Smyrna, and we never met again.

I’ve looked on beauty so much that my vision overflows with it.

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.

Yes, I know his new poems; all Beirut is raving about them. I’ll study them some other day. I can’t today because I’m rather upset.

I never had you, nor I suppose will I ever have you. A few words, an approach, as in the bar the other day—nothing more.

So one way or another, our plans are definitely working out, and we’ll easily overthrow Basil. And when we do, at last our turn will come.

I went into the secret rooms and lounged and lay on their beds.

On hearing about powerful love, respond, be moved like an aesthete.

Later, in a more perfect society, someone else made just like me is certain to appear and act freely.

And if he’d fallen now, he hadn’t fallen humbly, but as a Roman vanquished by a Roman.

Living and speaking like barbarians, cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.

In my imagination I kept picturing you the way they’d talked about you that afternoon.

At least let me now deceive myself with illusions so as not to feel my empty life.

He who hopes to grow in spirit will have to transcend obedience and respect.

I stood in the corridor. I didn’t want to go further inside because I noticed that the relatives of the deceased looked at me with obvious surprise and displeasure.

Today is not a propitious day— there were some murky shadows, I didn’t understand them fully.

And when he’d think I’d fallen asleep, he’d collapse at the edge of my bed as though out of his mind.