Now the nights are hard and falling hard.
Booming days again are flowing through me,
A dismal human deluge from the world.
Vacant all these faces, vacant the hour:
Life is leaking through the sieve of earth
While the clay of the slow cityscape
Is remolded by full-handed years.
I am sorry for the little acts-
Love, the labors and the tweets of birds-
Which moments all dissolve into themselves.
Time goes on to k** us round the clock,
And, my friend, despite how things appear
From the constant neural imagings
You are now no longer that same you
Who stood up before the fall of evening
At the very exit of the day,
Or who ran a gauntlet through the thorns
In the jungle-growth of dream at midnight.
All existence is its own perdition
Which destroys itself to keep on running.
This our life is the fire-fueling fabric
Of reality, or just the fire.
So the white bed loses its allure,
And the nights are hard and falling hard:
Falling, whispering "to live is to die"