Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among objects: nothing mattered or had a name: the world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, tunnels where the moon lived, rough warehouses that growled ‘get lost’, questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, fallen abandoned, and decayed: inconceivably alien, it [...]

There in Rangoon I understood that the godswere enemies of the poor human being,just as God is.Gods of alabaster, lying downlike white whales,gods gilded like wheat,serpent gods coiled roundthe crime of being born,naked and elegant buddhassmiling at the cocktail partiesof empty eternitylike Christ on his horrible cross,all of them ready for anything -to impose on [...]

You have given me fraternity toward the unknown man.You have joined the strength of all the living.You have given me the country again as in a birth.You have given me the freedom that the loner cannot have.You taught me to kindle kindness, like fire.You have given me the rectitude that the tree requires.You taught me [...]

Fleas interest me so muchthat I let them bite me for hours. They are perfect, ancient, Sanskrit,machines that admit of no appeal. They do not bite to eat,they bite only to jump; they are the dancers of the celestial sphere,delicate acrobats in the softest and most profound circus;let them gallop on my skin, divulge their emotions,amuse themselves with my blood, but [...]

The young maricones and the horny muchachas,The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,The young wives thirty hours’ pregnant,And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,Like a collar of palpitating sexual oystersSurround my solitary home,Enemies of my soul,Conspirators in pajamasWho exchange deep kisses for passwords.Radiant summer brings out the loversIn melancholy regiments,Fat and thin [...]