I kiss every whore on the lips,
I kiss every pimp on the eyes,
My passivity lies at the feet of every killer,
And my Spanish cape shields every fleeing thief.
Everything is the raison d'etre of my life.

I've committed every crime,
Lived within every crime
(In vice I was not this person or that person
But the vice-in-person carried out between them,
And these are my life's most arch-triumphant times.)

I multiplied myself to feel myself,
To feel myself I had to feel everything,
I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out,
I undressed, I yielded,
And in each corner of my soul there's an altar to a different god.

This old anguish,
Which I've carried around for centuries,
Overflowed from its vessel
In tears, in wild imaginings,
In nightmarish dreams without terror,
In sudden huge emotions that make no sense.

It overflowed.
I am at a loss to know how to live life
With this malaise that is crumpling my soul.
If at least I could be positively crazy!
But no: always this in-betweenness,
This almost,
This it might be that . . .
This.

An inmate in an insane asylum is at least someone.
I'm an inmate in an asylum without an asylum.
I'm consciously crazy,
I'm a lucid lunatic,
I am alien to everything and equal to all:
I'm sleeping while awake with dreams that are madness
Because they are not dreams.
I'm . . .

Poor old house of my lost childhood!
Could you ever have imagined I'd so desert myself?
What happened to your boy? He went nuts.
What happened to the one who slept soundly under your provincial rooftop?
He went nuts.
What happened to who I was? He went nuts. Today he is who I am.

If at least I had some kind of a religion.
The religion, for example, of that idol from Africa
We had at home (the one I've mentioned).
It was unsightly, it was grotesque,
But it contained the divinity of everything that is believed in.
If I could believe in some idol or other --
Jupiter, Jehovah, Humanity . . .
Any one would do,
For isn't everything merely what we think it is?

Shatter, heart of painted glass!

Cleopatra lies dead in the shade.
It rains.

The ship was dressed with the wrong flags.
It continues to rain.

Why do you gaze at the distant city?
Your soul is the distant city.
It rains a chill rain.

And as for the mother who rocks a dead child in her arms --
We all rock a dead child in our arms.
It rains, it rains.

I see the sad smile left on your weary lips
In the way your finger won't let go of your rings.
Why does it rain?

I seem to be growing calm.
Perhaps I'm about to die.
There's a new and gentle fatigue
Around all I wanted to want.

I'm surprised to find my soul
So resigned to feeling.
Suddenly I see a river
Shining in a grove.

And they are a real prescence:
The river, light, and trees.

This may be the last day of my life.
I lifted my right hand to wave at the sun,
But I did not wave at it in farewell.
I was glad I could see it -- that's all.

To be able to laugh, laugh, laugh uproariously,
To laugh like an overturned glass,
Completely crazy just from feeling,
Completely disfigured from scraping against things,
My mouth cut up from biting on things,
My fingernails bloody from clawing at things,
And then give me whatever cell you like that I may look back on life.

(That woman whose smile suggests the peace I don't have,
In whose lowering of the eyes there's a Dutch landscape
With the female heads wrapped in white linen
And the daily effort of a tidy and tranquil people . . .
That woman who is the ring left on the top of the dresser,
And the ribbon that is caught when the drawer is shut,
A pink ribbon, I don't like the color but I like the ribbon being caught,
As I don't like life but like to feel it . . .

To sleep like a spurned dog on the open road,
Definitively for the rest of the universe,
Run over by every passing vehicle . . .)