You want a social life, with friends. A passionate love life and as well To work hard every day. What's true Is of these three you may have two And two can pay you dividends But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends-- Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends-- To find the time to have love, work, and friends. Michelangelo had feeling For Vittoria and the Ceiling But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets Wrote all day but had no lockets Bright with pictures of his Girl. I know one who loves and parties And has done so since his thirties But writes hardly anything at all.

The bed of the railway links me to these days of hell. The bed of the railway just one night can do it all.

Love of the others you wear me out with great strokes of a stiff brush.

In a station of Paris is there a true love that smiles? In a station of Paris everything begins and everything fails.

Love of the others you suck the young blood of my life.

And the words of my big brother I still hear them on my cot. And the words of my big brother can it be he forgot?

Love of the others you are slow to promise a reward

So be it my child some people are never satisfied So be it my child some win some fall by the wayside

Love of the others you put out my eyes by dint of fevers.

Goodbye is a big handkerchief a big handkerchief of paper That you throw in the sewer once it's been spoiled with tears

Love of the others you leave in my mouth a taste of clay.

(Translated by John Ashbery)

A man told me once that all the bad people Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails You need; they are really claws, and we know Claws. The sharks--what about them? They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men In black coats who chase you for hours In dreams--that's the only way to get you To the shore. Sometimes those hard women Who abandon you get you to say, "You." A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn't move on its own. It takes sometimes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving. Then they blow across three or four States. This man told me that things work together. Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas; And a careless God--who refuses to let you Eat from the Tree of Knowledge--can lead To books, and eventually to us. We write Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.