Fernando Pessoa

I know, I alone
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law
...

Symbols? I'm sick of symbols...
Some people tell me that everything is symbols.
They're telling me nothing.

What symbols? Dreams...
Let the sun be a symbol, fine...
Let the moon be a symbol, fine...
Let the earth be a symbol, fine...
But who notices the sun except when the rain stops
And it breaks through the clouds and points behind its back
To the blue of the sky?
And who notices the moon except to admire
Not it but the beautiful light it radiates?
And who notices the very earth we tread?
We say earth and think of fields, trees and hills,
Unwittingly diminishing it,
For the sea is also earth.

Okay, let all of this be symbols.
But what's the symbol - not the sun, not the moon, not the earth -
In this premature sunset amidst the fading blue
With the sun caught in expiring tatters of clouds
And the moon already mystically present at the other end of the sky
As the last remnant of daylight
Gilds the head of the seamstress who hesitates at the corner
Where she used to linger (she lives nearby) with the boyfriend who left her?
Symbols? I don't want symbols.
All I want - poor frail and forlorn creature! -
Is for the boyfriend to go back to the seamstress.
...

I am tired, that is clear,
Because, at certain stage, people have to be tired.
Of what I am tired, I don't know:
...

Since we do nothing in this confused world
That lasts or that, lasting, is of any worth,
And even what's useful for us we lose
So soon, with our own lives,
Let us prefer the pleasure of the moment
To an absurd concern with the future,
Whose only certainty is the harm we suffer now
To pay for its prosperity.
Tomorrow doesn't exist. This moment
Alone is mine, and I am only who
Exists in this instant, which might be the last
Of the self I pretend to be.
...

Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,
In one black mystery two void mysteries blends;
The stray stars, whose innumerable light
...

Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee-
That entire death shall null my entire thought;
And I feel torture, not that I believe thee,
...

As a bad orator, badly o'er-book-skilled,
Doth overflow his purpose with made heat,
And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed
...

As the lone, frighted user of a night-road
Suddenly turns round, nothing to detect,
...

We never joy enjoy to that full point
Regret doth wish joy had enjoyèd been,
Nor have the strength regret to disappoint
...

When in the widening circle of rebirth
To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come,
And try again the unremembered earth
...

I do not know what truth the false untruth
Of this sad sense of the seen world may own,
Or if this flowered plant bears also a fruit
...

Something in me was born before the stars
And saw the sun begin from far away.
Our yellow, local day on its wont jars,
...

Thought was born blind, but Thought knows what is seeing.
Its careful touch, deciphering forms from shapes,
Still suggests form as aught whose proper being
...

The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie-
That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror
...

How yesterday is long ago! The past
Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day,
And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,
...

Even as upon a low and cloud-domed day,
When clouds are one cloud till the horizon,
Our thinking senses deem the sun away
...

I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
...

Good. I have done. My heart weighs. I am sad.
The outer day, void statue of lit blue,
...

My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man,
Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older,
Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,
...

My weary life, that lives unsatisfied
On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this,
To whom the power to will hath been denied
And the will to renounce doth also miss;
...