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Our sins are stubborn, our repentance mean;
pretending to pay fatly for what we vowed,
we run back gaily to the muddy road,
thinking with cheap tears to wash off the stain.

- Charles Baudelaire

*****

Perhaps the wounded soul sweeping
To take its revenge
Repents it and wreaks
Other vengeance on me.

In my blindness and folly
I, gladly deceived,
Beseech disenchantment
And desire it not.

- Juana de Asbaje, AKA Inez de la Cruz

*****

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all the way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

- T. S. Eliot

*****

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

- T. S. Eliot

*****

For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti