Mikhail Kuzmin

Not best friends – I bid my simple buddies:
They are good for friendly parties else, 
What is gone – I never ever mourn this,
What’s in future – why to try to guess?
Not debauch – the tidy celebration,
Very smooth and very pleasant words,
There is not hangover of libation,
And your head is cleared of the thoughts.
Every hour is filled such ‘dili-gently’ – 
You would bear for forty days this stuff,
And your skin is trickled very gently,
By the thing we ever call ‘a love’.
Try to change more often any faces, 
Do not get be used to any friend.
Is it truth that I had had the fancies
Of the green and friendly distant land?…


Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, November, 2000