A Psalm of Life

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist 

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Thinking about it for quite some time
and having waited until they were all quite done 
she finally picked it up
It wasn't quite the vibrant, warm and deep colour she remembered it to be
It was dusty, and she even found some shards of glass embedded in its soft tissue
Some crevices had formed between the ventricles 
It's time to stop letting others wring out your heart, she thought, as she studied  her organ
palpitating irregularly 

Death and the Maiden

Edvard Munch, 1883/1884

She dreaded sleep

More precisely, she dreaded the time spent lying, alone, in the darkness - thoughts circling, acutely aware of her loneliness.  

One of Rodin's erotic sketches

How convenient that rejected and dejected rhyme...

She asked if I was a dancer,
Maybe in another world that's true


The wet pavement reminds me of this quote:


“When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.” 
     Simon Van Booy

That's the thing. 
Sometimes, you want a city to engulf you. To fade into the lights of the evening, the breeze, the noises of dusk - the brisk pace of your gait acting as a heartbeat. To feel anonymous, to feel free.

Another night of this?
Yes, I'm afraid it will be. 
A dreamless sleep, wavering between sleep and waking


The sleepless hours, hours
hours, hours


days