Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.



There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars.



This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.



Can we only love
Something created in our own imaginations?
Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable?
Then one is alone, and if one is alone
Then lover and beloved are equally unreal
And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.



In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth.



Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars.



Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?



But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment.



O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.



So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.



The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.



And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.



For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.



If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same.



the requisite shameless self promotion.