I love you here and now

I love you here and now,
Not secretly - for show;
I'm burning in your rays - neither before nor after.
I do not want the past,
The future I don't know.
I love you here and now, with tears and with laughter.
"I love you" is so sad,
it is colder than the dead,
All tenderness in me it will hamstring and kill, -
Although it was the poet of poets who said,
"I loved you once: that love, perhaps, is still -"

They speak thus of the faded and the lost,
There's pity here, a touch of condescension,
As for a king long from the throne removed.
There is a mild regret here for the past,
A longing slightly marred by apprehension,
A sort of faint distrust towards "I love."

I love you here and now,
Without a stain or loss.
This is my day and age - I shall not slash my veins!
At present, during, now and in the course -
The future leaves me cold, the past won't come again.

I'll swim or wade or crawl
To you - then come what may! -
Lugging my fetters and a heavy yoke.
Cut off my head, but never make me say
"I shall" after "I love", please, not even in joke.

About "I shall" there's bitterness, alas,
It's like a forgery, or some such disgrace,
A hatch to use when in suits you to go,
Clear poison at the bottom of the glass;
A slap in honest present tense's face,
A twinge of doubt about "I love you" now.

My French dream makes no sense,
I struggle with each tense,
The future is all wrong, and in the past I stammer.
I'm pilloried, it seems, in every sense.
I'm locked behind the barrier of grammar.

This barrier, I guess,
Is worse than any fence.
But we shall seek and find
A way from this impasse.
I love you, dear, in every blessed tense -
Even the future and the compound past!

by Vladimir Vysotsky.