El Gordo Triste

For his poet look of a sparrow with hair gel,
for his voice that is a cat on hidden cymbals,
the mysteries of wine caress his eyes
and a pain perfumes his lapel and the stars.

The bull eagle screams as it lands on his fingers
summoning the children on the crest of dreams:
to cry like the wind, with tears held high!,
to sing like the people, with milonga and tears!

With the arm of an archangel and a thug
they go with their glasses from two puddles,
to see for whom the wisterias grieve,
Pichuco of the silent bridges.

By the grace of dying every night
he never meets a fair death,
the stars never seem loose to him,
Pichuco of the mass in the markets.

From which lunfardo Shakespeare has this man escaped
who a match has seen the storm grown,
who walks straight on twisted music stands,
who organizes gazebos for dogs without moon?

There will never be a Buenos Aires native so experienced with dawn,
with his sad trees falling standing up.
Who repeats this race, this race of one,
but who repeats it with all the struggles?

For a slum aristocracy,
he has only been thin with himself.
Even time is fat, and it doesn't seem,
Pichuco of the hands like courtyards.

And now that the waters are calmer
and inside his bandoneon kids sing,
remember and dream and live, lovely fat man,
beloved by us. By us.