I Watch The Clouds

I watch the clouds

Pleasant, the ribs and tendons of cloud

I've lost nothing

Pleasant alone, I watch the folding light

My animals are quiet, my heart never bangs

I read in the evenings, there is no one to tell me

What is expected or not expected of me

There is nothing required of me

I'm at my last gasp with this unendurable racket

I kicked open the door and stood before them

Someone called me granddad and told me to button it

If they should button it, were I young?

One of them told me I was lucky to be alive

But I would have to bear it in order to pay for being alive

In order to give thanks for being alive

It's a question of sleep, I need something of it

Or how can I remain alive without any true rest?

Having no solace, no constant solace

Not even any damn inconstant solace

I am strong but not as strong

As the bastards in the other room

And their tittering bitches and their music and their love

If I changed my life, perhaps

And lived deliberately at night and slept in the day

But what exactly would I do?

What can be meant by living in the dark?

Now and again, I meet my drinking companion

And have a drink with her

She is a friendly woman, quite elderly, quite friendly

But she knows little of me

She could never know much of me, not really, not now

She's funny, she starts talking sexily to me

In the corner with our drinks, I laugh

She asks me about my early life when I was young

Never departing from her chosen subject

But I have nothing to tell her

About the sexual part of my youth

"I'm old," I tell her, "my youth was somewhere else"

Anyway, I don't remember

She does the talking anyway

I like to get back to my room

It has a pleasant view

I have one or two friends, ladies

They ask me where I come from

I say, of course, "from the country"