On Pabst's Joyless Street

The brothel keeper and her helper
climb the stairs at the very last
like crippled rats, like black, upwardly
mobile fog, back into the Hotel Merkel:
this is their home where they will live
to let the lives of other bodies
— tomorrow, today.
The butcher — no lust at all in that final
grimace — sinks into his cellar of meat
then goes the way of all flesh …
(Could he have seen
through the blinding, bloodied glass
the shadow of a demonic animal
shoot into the streets of Vienna?)
Meanwhile, the innocent heroine covers
her mythic breasts and goes home —
fortunately, not quite despoiled.
Through empty streets she leads her father.
Relieved, her American suitor picks up the trail;
his love is as bountiful as the Marshall Plan.
The anti-heroine — also unknown by man,
but forever — watches her prison wall.
She strangled her loved one's lover —
another quiet death at the Hotel Merkel.
Now only her shadow knows it all.
Breasts, pearls and money on his mind,
he kissed her plain fingers at the police station;
his eyes were fixed and staring, too.
Now she tiptoes gently round her black room;
earlier on, she had kissed his tie;
corruption draws him back to the living:
O all-consuming spider! O mortal, helpless fly!
Will he remember while music sweats and money talks
the drama of the chaise longue, that fatal assignation?
He kissed her pearls, ecstatic, upon leaving;
later, stretched unadorned in the Hotel Merkel,
the morning light shrove her vacant body:
her husband stood, grieved beyond words or money.
Our Argentinian millionaire sucks a fresh cigar.
That girl he wanted frightened him to death,
acting out her murder in the Hotel Merkel.
The robes and pearls he bought were given back —
the woman shook off the trammels of the goddess.
Soon she'll be dead; he puffs his lecherous cigar.
The heroine at home eats cabbage once more
The brothel keeper smiles slyly to the dark
The millionaire broods with money to burn
The husband weeps — no tears, no sound
The honest lover begs, dying to be true
The girl within the cell turns, turning into stone