“A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn’t he?”

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.

I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.

What an old maid I’m getting to be. Lacking the courage to be in love with death!

Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.

A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.

Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

You feel on your lips a kiss Fluttering, a tiny scrap of life.

As for me, I am intact; and I don’t care.

The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.

I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!