Shred all those long sentences you’ve formed, and stuff them
into mattresses for others to thrash upon.
Those who remain
need the safe embrace of mattresses filled with straw sentences.
Those who have come to this world as overnight guests
need the security of hackneyed sentences.

You did not come as an overnight guest. If you had,
you would be satisfied
with a tiny empire of playpens and narrow rooms.
You would be at ease.
But you are not at ease.

Leave this knowledge behind, for shameless pillagers to use.

Look how merry, how pleased they become!
When they speak, they think important things are happening
on the face of the earth.

With organized, disciplined guile
they gather information in dark corners, to use when it gets light. Leave
your knowledge in this house, for them, as they find it, to rejoice.

As, strip by strip, the flesh rips off those trite emotions
they love so much for you to speak of. Make the emotions obsolete. For,
they have a price: someone could find and sell them, avidly.
Pillagers don’t recoil at the thought of packing shriveled emotions.

Give back those fleeting faces of encounters to their owners.
Give them back their eyes.
Those eyes, when yours, saw so many different people!
Try not to laugh at them when you return their imagined faces.
Don’t laugh! Or they’ll take you seriously.
They understand nothing correctly,
but they’ll quickly realize they’re being made fun of.
You’ll recoil, when the time comes to comprehend
how cunning they can be.

Leave behind these guffaws, these drinks and excursions. Let
the crowd’s children absorb the sweet
and slippery circumstances of night. This
is the painful picture of wretched souls’ attempts at diversion.

And don’t take these daytimes with you,
the stumbles of uncertain greetings,
the cowardice of planned encounters,
daylight’s tiring courtesies…
Those who can’t manage,
who don’t gaze at their own faces, are pummeled.

Hope creates the feeling that bad things will happen. Don’t take it with
you!
It invites bad luck. Hope is essential to lingerers.
Because they think something will happen—suddenly happen,
every one of them secretly believes.

The cowards say something terrible shall take place in the world.
Those who boast of their crippling courage
retort that everything will be splendid.
Whereas nothing suddenly happens.
Humanity’s time consists only of humanity’s time!

To understand is a past tense verb. You are in the present simple tense,
a spacious tense. You are moving toward a time of shared knowledge
between what has passed and what is to come.

Chafe yourself until all that is left is a knowing in the present.
Compose yourself of knowing—if you truly intend
to journey.
If you remain silent a while, you will see.

A journey is desolation.