Pain and Despair

What a thrill— My thumb instead of an onion.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.

I have done it again.

It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing. But often the shadow feels more real than the body.

Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.

You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk of death.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

How can I die alone. Where will I be then who am now alone, what groans so pathetically in this room where I am alone?

God has pity on kindergarten children. He has less pity on school children. And on grownups he has no pity at all, he leaves them alone, and sometimes they must crawl on all fours in the burning sand to reach the first-aid station covered with blood.

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back. He thought they were old friends.

One day beside some flowers near his nose He will be thinking, When will I look at it? And pain, still in the middle distance, will reply At what? and he will know it’s gone, O where! and begin to tremble and cry. He will begin to cry as a child cries Whose puppy is mangled under a screaming wheel.

Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

The light is buried under chains and noises in impudent challenge of rootless science. Through the suburbs sleepless people stagger, as though just delivered from a shipwreck of blood.

Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

That was a time when only the dead could smile.