Raindrops puddleripple,
Detonating miniature ground zeroes…
How many musics the rain has gifted me!
Pleasure and instinct walk with me,
Like twin poodles, coiffed and jacketed!
A soul is not a soul that is not secret.
My tale is all memory and sighing regret,
Too little manly action in the world-
For what is real to me? What is actually there?
A devilish collector of passions am I-
Always charging towards the next frustration,
The next refinement of disappointment.
Only art has saved me from frivolity
In this shabby shoddy world;
And only frivolity has saved me from art.
What has saved me from suicide, I don’t know!
(I confess, I freely cheat at cards…
No need to be a loser, in order to suffer-
I do that well enough as it is!)
The hours consumed in spacing a chord,
Seducing obstinate vastness into shapes,
Relieves me from the devious selfish coward,
The self-pitying cantankerous swine.
The unresolved, the unfinished,-
That is my bizarre seductive Orient!
Disintegrate: is that my vocation?
The promise of crisis works through me,
Achieving occult ends in the world.
I forget nothing- such is my curse!
None are so ferocious as the timid,
Charged with the horned god’s burden.
Spendthrift sailor of precarious voyages,
Given to shipwrecks and marooning,
And exotic liaisons on South Sea isles,
I prove myself another Columbus,
Doomed to discover accursed shores.
All Paris, like a Javanese dancer,
Sways before me to the gamelan’s rush,
Balanced with hummingbird poise.
O, water-sprites, full of rainbows,
Transport me with shades and timbres,
Your cascading eddying tones!
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