actoúnico

“E citava Nazim Himket, que num breve e intenso texto comentava que é preciso levar a sério o viver-se, pois viver não admite brincadeiras. Temos de saber - dizia Himket - que viver é a coisa mais real e mais bela. E não esquecer que viver é a nossa tarefa. Estejamos onde estivermos, temos de viver como se nunca tivéssessemos de morrer. Mesmo que por exemplo, nos restem uns minutos de vida, devemos continuar a rir com a última piada, a olhar pela janela para ver se o tempo continua chuvoso, esperando com impaciência as últimas notícias da imprensa.”

Enrique Vila-Matas, Diário Volúvel

On Living

I.

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example–
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people–
even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees–
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

[..]

Nazim Hikmet

(http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-living/)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

1875, William Ernest Henley

i refresh your memory continuously.
i do not want you to die. you could
sit there. remember, we loved in that
chair. remember? you stare back blankly
as captives do. you’re not

there. i am here. the house is quiet
with all the noise you no longer make.

somewhere you’re upstairs, being happy
i suppose. i am left, not without you,
but with the loneliness that was mine
long before you loved it away.

i get to know it again. its butter choking taste, the
knifeline words delivered on the poem’s edge,
no, on the white walls spiteful as ever in the
lurking shadows grinding teeth. afraid as ever.
then the saltiness of sleep.

the morning mirror whispering suicide letters
in consolation for the deadness
that just awoke.

no, you could never love this.

you did well to leave.

–

anna s. buckley

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

- billy collins

these small remnants of life. photos, a letter to be written,
something to be made over.

i spread these things over the table, they’re my corpse.
i contemplate them slowly withering
away.

even words, ever a companion, have turned
to silence. hope whispers

from a tight loop. i faint myself
dead through the days.

i leave them there like tiny breadcrumbs
over a road you cannot go back through.
i save it for regret.

so tonight i toast to my fear, it is
my only company and i treasure it

so.

After I wrote this, a friend scrawled on this page, “Yes.”

And I said, merely to myself, “I wish it could be for a
different seizure–as with Molly Bloom and her ‘and
yes I said yes I will Yes.”

It is not a turtle
hiding in its little green shell.
It is not a stone
to pick up and put under your black wing.
It is not a subway car that is obsolete.
It is not a lump of coal that you could light.
It is a dead heart.
It is inside of me.
It is a stranger
yet once it was agreeable,
opening and closing like a clam.

What it has cost me you can’t imagine,
shrinks, priests, lovers, children, husbands,
friends and all the lot.
An expensive thing it was to keep going.
It gave back too.
Don’t deny it!
I half wonder if April would bring it back to life?
A tulip? The first bud?
But those are just musings on my part,
the pity one has when one looks at a cadaver.

How did it die?
I called it EVIL.
I said to it, your poems stink like vomit.
I didn’t stay to hear the last sentence.
It died on the word EVIL.
It did it with my tongue.
The tongue, the Chinese say,
is like a sharp knife:
it kills
without drawing blood.

Anne Sexton