(translated by Berni Armstrong).

In the Distance, by Moonlight

In the distance, by moonlight,
In the river a candle,
Serene in its passing,
But what does it reveal?

All I know is that my being,
Is ever more distant from me.
I dream without seeing,
The dreams that I have.

What anxiety entwines me?
What unspoken love?
It is the candle which passes,
In the night that follows.

A God is born.  Others die.  The Truth
Neither comes nor goes: only the Error changes.
Now we have another Eternity,
But the previous was always better.

Science: blind, useless spade work.
Faith: crazily living its cult dream.
A new God is only a word,
Don't seek or believe: it is all hidden.

In the firmament
Frozen as the Moon.
Nebulous wind
Seen to come from the sea.

Nearing the ebb tide,
The questioning hour
And a cold anxiety
Vaguely in vogue.

I don't know what I am doing.
I don't know what I am thinking.
The cold won't go
And the tedium is tremendous.

I have no feelings,
Nor soul, nor intentions...
I am my own oblivion...
Sleep, heart, sleep...

The poet is a faker.
Faking so effectively
That he counterfeits pain
When he truly feels it.

Those who read what he wrote
Feel in that written pain
Not the two which the poet lived through,
But only that which they have not got.

Along those lines rolls,
Entertaining reason,
The clockwork train
Called the heart.

....................................................

Autopsychograph  (rhyme as in original)

The poet is a total fake,
He counterfeits his pain.
Writing out the phantom aches
That burst inside his brain.

The reader is another fraud,
He doesn't feel a jot.
The agonies the poet roared,
The reader has not got.

Along these lines the clockwork train,
We call the heart has rolled.
Entertaining mind again,
With forgeries untold.

There are worse things than being ill.
There are pains which do not even affect the soul,
Yet still are the most painful.
There are anxieties - only dreamt of -
Which are more real than real agonies.
There are imagined sensations,
Truer than real life experience.
There are so many things which have no reality
Yet exist - I am sorry to say -
I am sorry to repeat that they are ours
And we are them.

Above the murky green stretch of the river,
The shrill cries of seagulls....
Above the soul the useless flapping
Of much that was not, could not be,
And yet is everything.

Hand me some more wine - Life is worthless!

Dreams, systems, myths, ideals.
I watch the water lapping against the dock,
And like flakes of torn paper,
I watch her give me up to a just fate.
I follow it all with eyes,
In which there is nothing,
But vaguely compliant unease.

How can they console me now?
I who do not even weep in my distress.
Who in my desolate heart and barren mind,
Have only shadows - and memories of shadows.
For me it is all in vain - always -
I am even tired of the Gods - who do not exist!

What do they say?
They forget.

What don't they say?
They've said it.

What do they do?
They do it badly.
What don't they do?
The same.

Why do they wait?
It is all a dream.

What a pleasure it is
Not to do one's duty:
To have a book to read
And to leave it to one side.
Reading is hard work
And studying is worth nothing.
The sun shines
Without literature.
The river flows on and on
Without need of a first edition.
And the wind is so natural in the morning,
That with all the time in the world
You never see it hurry.

Books are paper stained with ink.
Through study we cannot even think,
Of the difference between something
And nothing.

How much better, if there's a mist
That we join the waiting list,
For classes that are all the same,
From lecturers that never came.

Great is Poetry, the Dance and Decency....
But nothing in the world is better than infancy,
Flowers, Music, Moonlight or the Sun which sins, no doubt,
When instead of creating it dries things out.

But greater than everything above
Is the heaviness of Christ's true love.
And he knew nothing of bribary,
Nor is it mentioned he had a library.