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Rescue Me

Pain comes like this: packaged in a moment
of hubris with a backing band too big
for its own good. It isn’t the same present
as back then. It’s always another gig,
one vanished around the last corner, gone
into empty air where pain lives forever,
where it waits to be discovered by anyone
to whom the bearer is obliged to deliver
a package so desired and so much feared.
We wait for it now as we must always wait.
We beg to be rescued by what has disappeared,
by all there is in waiting. Fashions change
but this does not. Time will not rearrange
the days for you. It’s your song now, your fate.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

's many books of poetry have won various prizes including the T. S. Eliot Prize (2004), for which he is again shortlisted for Bad Machine (2013). His translation of László Krasznahorkai's Satantango (2013) was awarded the Best Translated Book Award in the US. The act of translation is, he thinks, bound to involve fidelity, ambiguity, confusion and betrayal.

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