Dark with knobbed growths, peppered with pock-marks like hail, their eyes ringed with Green, warty fingers clenched on their thigh-bones Their skulls stained with indeterminate blotches Like the leprous discolorations of ancient walls; In amorous seizures they have grafted Their weird bone structures to the great dark skeletons Of their chairs; their feet are entwined Morning and evening, on the rickety rails! These old men have always been one flesh with their seats Feeling bright suns drying their skins to the texture of calico Or else, looking at the window-panes where the snow is turning grey Shivering with the painful shiver of the toad And their Seats are kind to them; coloured Brown with age, the straw yields to the angularities of their bu*tocks; The spirit of ancient suns glows, bound In these braids of ears in which the corn fermented And the Seated Ones, knees drawn up to their teeth, green pianists Whose ten fingers keep drumming under their seats Listen to the tapping of each other's melancholy barcarolles And their heads nod back and forth as in the act of love - Oh don't make them get up! It's a catastrophe ... They rear up like growling tom-cats when struck Slowly spreading their shoulders... What rage! Their trousers puff out at their swelling backsides And you listen to them as they bump their bald heads Against the dark walls, stamping and stamping with their crooked feet And their coat-bu*tons are the eyes of wild beasts Which fix yours from the end of the corridors! And then they have an invisible weapon which can k**: Returning, their eyes seep the black poison With which the beaten b**h's eye is charged And you sweat trapped in the horrible funnel Reseated, their fists retreating into soiled cuffs They think about those who have made them get up And, from dawn until dusk, their tonsils in bunches Tremble under their meagre chins, fir to burst When austere slumbers have lowered their lids They dream on their arms of seats become fertile Of perfect little loves of open-work chairs Surrounding dignified desks Flowers of ink dropping pollen like commas Lull them asleep, in their rows of squat flower-cups Like dragonflies threading their flight along the flags - And their membra virilia are aroused by barbed ears of wheat