After experience taught me that all the ordinary Surroundings of social life are futile and vain. . . . |
And you, whiner, who wastes your time Dawdling over the remorseless earth, What evil, what unspeakable crime Have you made your life worth? |
Before we drained out one another's force With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce And the treachery. |
I happened to find Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold, Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard Who has turned up a severed hand. |
I haven't read one book about A book or memorized one plot, Or found a mind I did not doubt, I learned one date. And then forgot. And one by one the solid scholars Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars. |
Of all things, only we have power to choose that we should die; nothing else is free in this world to refuse it. |
Someone will have to weed and spread The young sprouts. Sprinkle them in the hour When shadow falls across their bed. You should try to look at them every day Because when they come to full flower I will be away. |
Sweet beast, I have gone prowling, a proud rejected man who lived along the edges catch as catch can; in darkness and in hedges I sang my sour tone and all my love was howling conspicuously alone. |
They wear their godhead lightly. They look out from their hill and say, To themselves, "We have nowhere to go but down; The great destination is to stay." |
You must call up every strength you own And you can rip off the whole facial mask. |
You still whispered you would not die. Yet in the nights I heard you cry Like a whipped child. . . . |