Night After Night

Only a virgin can enter by a closed door
her own bedroom
in which everything that is called assurance
has long smelt of masturbation's sheets,
of violence, of spittle in a well or wreath of resin
flung voluntarily on the tower of man.
If he is a poet, all will be ruined,
if a murderer, then nakedness will reign here
and there will be an applauder,
an applauder hired from the marble quarries of Aeschylus.

---Vladimír Holan