he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that--
it had kept them going when
all seemed
truly
hopeless.
putting the blade on the table, he
flicked it with a finger
and it whirled
in a flashing circle
under the light.
who the hell is going to save
me? he
thought.
as the knife stopped spinning
the answer came:
you're going to have to
save yourself.
still smiling,
a: he lit a
cigarette
b: he poured
another
drink
c: gave the blade
another
spin.

Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
.

Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933)

Being Late


Something dangerous
is beginning:
I
am coming late
to my own self.
I made an appointment
with my thoughts--
the thoughts
were snatched
from me.
I made an appointment
with Faulkner--
but they made me
go to a banquet.
I made an appointment
with history,
but a grass-widow
dragged me into bed.
Worse
than barbed wire
are birthday parties,
mine and others',
and roasted suckling pigs
hold me
like a sprig of parsley
between their teeth!
Led away for good
to a life absolutely not my own,
everything that I eat,
eats me,
everything that I drink,
drinks me.
I made an appointment
with myself,
but they invite me
to feast on my own spareribs.
I am garlanded
from all sides
not by strings of bagels,
but by the holes of bagels,
and I look like
an anthology
of zeros.
Life gets broken
into hundreds of lifelets,
that exhaust
and execute me.
In order
to get through to myself
I had to smash my body
against others',
and my fragments,
my smithereens,
are trampled
by the roaring crowd.
I am trying
to glue myself together,
but my arms
are still severed.
I'd write
with my left leg,
but both the left
and the right
have run off,
in different directions.
I don't know--
where is my body?
And soul?
Did it really fly off,
without a murmured
"good-bye!"?
How do I break through
to a faraway namesake,
waiting for me
in the cold somewhere?
I've forgotten
under which clock
I am waiting
for myself.
For those who don't know
who they are,
time
does not exist.
No one is
under the clock.
On the clock
there is nothing.
I am late for my appointment
with me.
There is no one.
Nothing but cigarette butts.
Only one flicker--
a lonely,
dying
spark...

.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

(Tradução inglesa de Albert C. Todd)
.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn(1606-1669)

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

[4] I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

[10] Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?

.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden
.

Hurt

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
goes away in the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Michael Trent Reznor

Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

Bill Watterson (1958)
.