"My doing nothing as I walk the streets lives on
and is released into the night’s multiplicity.
The night is a long and lonely celebration.
In my secret heart I justify and glorify myself.
I have witnessed the world; I have confessed to the
strangeness of the world.
I’ve sung the eternal: the bright returning moon and the faces craved by love.
I’ve recorded in poems the city that surrounds me
and the outlying neighborhoods tearing themselves apart.
I’ve said astonishment where others said only custom.
Faced with the song of the tepid, I ignited my voice in sunsets.
I’ve exalted and sung my blood’s ancestors and the ancestors of my dreams.
I have been and I am.
I’ve fixed my feelings into durable words
when they could have been spent on tenderness.
The memory of an old infamy returns to my heart.
Like a dead horse flung up on the beach by the tide, it returns
to my heart.
And yet, the streets and the moon are still at my side.
Water keeps flowing freely in my mouth and poems don’t
deny me their music.
I feel the terror of beauty; who will dare condemn me when
this great moon of my solitude forgives me?"