Some Ways of Living Sorrow

 
The love, the tenderness drawn in scrawls on paper's breast
...life doesn't flow that way.


Life flows...standing face to face.
In the friction and clash of touch upon touch,
...and then, in love.


Beside a few grievances
leave some broken fragments of love.
And beside some love...a few complaints.


When need arises, as circumstances shift,
from there, whatever you feel like taking, take it...


Still, don't let revulsion grow too far.
Don't destroy the beauty of relationship
by tearing it apart with logic and argument!


Every human being is essentially rootless, even...
more than our thoughts and our deepest needs.
People grow strong only in love...in love united.


You don't need to trust me.
I have no foundation, I am a drifting man.
Perhaps I have no existence of my own at all.
I am unworthy of all your faith.


That you don't trust me—no sorrow there.
My only sorrow is this: you're destroying all the faith I have in myself.
When faith in oneself is destroyed,
how does a person still go on living, tell me?


If somewhere in this whole world there were a place
where going there, your face would no longer be clear in my eyes,
right now, without thinking twice...I would want to go there!


Why I'm saying all this, I don't know.
I know, my heart knows—
even if you lay me in my grave
in the corners of these two dead eyes
your face will cling there still!