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. [...]

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 [...]

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example,’The night is shatteredand the blue stars shiver in the distance.’ The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines.I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my armsI [...]