Vladimir Mayakovsky
Adulthood

Adults are busy.
With bills in each pocket.
Love?
Sure!
For a hundred or so.
But I
wandered broke,
homeless
and ragged,
having no money
and no place to go.
It's night.
You put on your finest faces.
On wives and widows, you practice your moves.
I’m
choked in Moscow’s loving embrace
in the ring of its endless Sadovaya loops.
In the heart,
almost clock-like,
the lovers are ticking,
in passionate bedrooms, alone lovers flare.
but I heard the thundering heartbeats
of cities,
sprawling across the Strastnoya Square.
My jacket’s wide open,
with my heart on my sleeve —
I've opened myself to the sun and the street.
Enter with passion,
climb into my soul!
My heart is now free! I’ve lost all control!
In others, I know where the heart had been placed.
Everyone knows — it beats in the chest.
But even anatomy
is absurd in my case —
there’s just one massive heart
and no room for the rest.
In the last twenty years,
how many springs there,
in my sizzling body, have gathered?
Their weight, still unused, is too much to bear,
and not just
in verse,
but in reality, rather. 

Translated by Andrey Kneller