Emotions and Feelings

Let us have madness openly, O men Of my generation. Let us follow The footsteps of this slaughtered age.

May the gentle mountains and the bells of the flocks Remind us of everything we have lost, For we have seen on our way and fallen in love With the world that will pass in a twinkling.

I’d have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

How had I come to be here like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn’t?

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals…

Until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

Lord, hear me out, and hear me out this day: From me to Thee’s a long and terrible way.

Brooding on God, I may become a man. Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.

Brooding on God, I may become a man. Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.

A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.

Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.

Tugging all day at perverse life: The indignity of it!

O let none say I Love until aware What huge resources it will take to nurse One ruining speck, one tiny hair That casts a shadow through the universe.

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.

In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark.

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window Or just walking dully along.

O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed. The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

The greater the love, the more false to its object, Not to be born is the best for man; After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle, Break the embraces, dance while you can.