It is painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born and by my body's action teach my mind the pain of being alive. Also because all creation is simpler than what some philosopher thinks. Descartes looks more outré than the painted wizard. Curse the dark hour that gave me birth. Never to have lived is best. I am alive only by accident. I alone awake at dawn. The gods have invented a terrible torture for us. I have suffered to have a soul still not yet pure enough. I'd give up years, yes, years of my own life for such. Everyone's life is the same life, if you live long enough. But better to die than live a mechanical life that is a repetition of a repetition. It is life inside life inside itself. When clocks and mirrors are reversed to show ourselves as only we could ever know.
If man is born so soon, if life is so brief like some sleep I feared I'd never wake from. We have so little time on earth that anyone does not ever make anything better. The same or less ambition only makes the ambitious greater. There is not time enough on earth for all I'd like to do. How strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on! Where is the life we have lost in living? It takes life to love life. I and this love are one. It is death, which our flesh dreads, is the very death of every night, which we call sleep. My eyes, with the weight of death heavy upon them. For the death of beauty is beauty. Inspiration comes from living the death. It is not easy to die, oh, it is not easy to die the death. I do think brave death outweighs a troubled life. To return to the celestial sphere where everyone goes. When all flesh had peace, and the efreet offers a brilliant void where our mind could be perfectly clear and all our limitations destroyed. The obsolete, epic scale. In death I believe I shall be as the flowers have been. We are like family who see each other only at funerals. The wax and honey of a mausoleum – the round dome is proof its maker is alive. O death, I cover you over with roses and lilies so that I may carry earned riches beyond death like the Egyptians.
Follow me with gilded shadows to my secret room where I read each poem entire. The poems you would have written had your life been good. I could have said more than I could ever have written in poems. Perfection, of a kind, was what I was after, and the poetry I invented was easy to experience. Experience is what you do not want to experience. All poetry is difficult to read but easy to misinterpret. The mysterious composition of poetry. No man has dared to write these words yet, but I do know, how the souls of all great men at times pass through us and our blood is mixed with their blood.
Some of you have written poems, usually short ones, and some kept diaries, seldom published til after death, but most make no memorable impact except on your closest friends and pets. The black young cat jumped onto my lap as I write. I have suffered the total isolation of the ***. I write for those who cannot write. We need not write the books men read to be poets. The flame in which I write burns in the dark alone. So for ten more verses I keep the light on. So much to be done before tomorrow. Let us be more productive like the gnomes. One drop of oil burning, to light up seven days of writing. Save me from damnation! The profession of writing where one needs one's brains all the time. I hate my verses, every line, every word, oh pale and frail pencil I did try. Must I persist in my errors. Words have no value for words that are not true. Truth shall grow great eclipsing other truths. But now all these heavy books, are no use to me anymore, for where I go words carry no weight. I am ready to swear never to write another word, away from books, away from art. Words were but wasted breath. The art of novel writing is dead. I know that you will pay the price of authorship and make the allowances an author has to do. To know in words that which we have always known in thought. Better than most mortal flower, yours are the poems I do not write. We who move every man at a deeper level than Mozart.
We read the Bible for its prose. Shall heaven so soon be the prize we obtain? How far is it to heaven? Since Heaven and He are one. In the sun that is young once only. Death comes but once. There is no other life, only one. Once is never the beginning of enough, is it? I do not pretend to know the reason anymore than it is. Oh, pity the dead that are dead. Who cannot take the longest journey. Who moan and weep against the huge adamant walls of life's exclusive city. A man like Houdini escaped death through his immortality. A shadowy durability for which we were not meant to live. A covenant of swords without the word. No doctor ever does the work of the carpenter if our nerve and ideologies die first.
A dream has power to poison sleep. I dream of a duel between myself and old masters. The underground road are, as the dead prefer them, always dark and lonely. This is the sort of tableau of my doom. The death of the poet piqued the interests of his peers. It was then that he became what he admired. And from death he won the fame he would be known for. O the bullet can never **** the soul. O downpour of rain! O sad anthem, when will you end? This is the flesh we are but never to believe. The flesh that dies but in death we pity. Without me Adam would have fallen with Lucifer in his grand city, he would never have been able to cry, “O Felix Culpa.” And whoever walks a mile full of false sentiment, walks to the funeral of the whole human race. Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep? How O how could the scorpion sting itself to death!
Awaken the leviathan of the heavy mind. What is death? A life disintegrating into smaller simpler ones. But in total emptiness, the sure extinction that we travel to shall one day be lost to us. Not here, not there, not anywhere, and soon nothing more terrible, nothing more true. I floated with the whole human family, those who are living, those who have died, and those who are not yet born. We passed into the chamber of the sleeper. We, who have died beyond the clock. Slowly the silence of the multitudes passed. Every artist must die when they sleep and sleep when they rise to face the living. Such, is the dream; you do not sleep, you only dream of your thirst for sleep. May you in your troubles not be ashamed of any suffering as ****** as it maybe, nor hear them like a hero in the grandest way.
Let us hear poets recite their poems and tragedies to crowds of listeners. We, poets, thanks to a tongue deprived of so many inflexions, can very easily turn nouns, if we wish, into verbs. Those who say in verse what others say in prose. Because in dying is a drama. There is no quiet drama. As quiet and chaste as a poet's own life. It is the dead who need no moon to dream by. Death, in the dark, in the deep, in the dream, forever.
