At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
While the poet wrestles with the horses on his brain and the sculptor wounds his eyes on the hard spark of alabaster, the dancer battles the air around her, air that threatens at any moment to destroy her harmony or to open huge open empty spaces where her rhythm will be annihilated.
Little black horse. Where are you taking your dead rider?
Death laid its eggs in the wound.
The snow is falling on the deserted field of my life, and my hopes, which roam far, are afraid of becoming frozen or lost.
The wounds were burning like suns at five in the afternoon, and the crowd broke the windows At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon!
Life is laughter amid a rosary of death.
Relish the fresh landscape of my wound, break rushes and delicate rivulets, drink blood poured on honeyed thigh.
New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world’s greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.
Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.
Even money, which shines so much, spits sometimes.
My tongue is pierced with glass.
The important thing in life is to let the years carry us along.
The groom is like a flower of gold. When he walks, blossoms at his feet unfold.
In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.
I’m afraid to be on this shore a trunk without limbs, and what I most regret is not to have flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my suffering.
Green how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches.
What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don’t you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.
With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand.
Those who are afraid of death will carry it on their shoulders.