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He eats a pepper steak in a pub

then 'grabs a cab' as they say in this town, then

wanders past stalls piled sky-high with colour.

Here in the South where night never falls

He watches money counterfeit love with female strangers—

His heart is half rotted away by now.

Once in a while   from a jumble of icily intelligent words known as poetry

he looks up

like a fly on its pile of rubbish.

Written in 1994

Translated by Simon Patten