INSTRUCTION MANUAL

A) If your friends start to get you bored,
don’t leave them speaking to themselves.
Serve more wine, so that each of your silences
shut up one another. Don’t call for solitude:
loneliness is like the moon,
it’s got no image and no soul of its own.
If it drops a milky fog, it’s neither semen nor bloom,
it’s the sun’s stolen warmth that’s become
almost a gloom.


B) If you lose your way, don’t try to bring it back.
Absence doesn’t render the distances or moves them.
On your returning, the street won’t bump
into a younger you.
The stars that guide our fates
will keep on flickering indifferently
on the bottom of a mossy pool.


C) If you feel homesick, don’t think of your hearth.
You won't find in it more fire than you had already robbed.
It will rest forever on the same spot,
eternal, unattainable.
And the memories that it still brews
you brought them all
long ago with you.


D) If you feel like, don’t ask.
Try to pick out another desire
to add to the last or get it suppressed.
No point in hiding from them,
as the shadow that flees the light
unaware it stems from its fright.
The same way water and fire
have legs, and the earth’s got scents,
a soul is full-blooded desire.


E) If your yearnings are just not enough,
then provide that they are spared.
More awful than getting lost by them
is thinking you could get loose one day.
To lose desire equals as a symptom
of ageing with shedding hair.
Then let them just wear out on their own,
unveiling how strongly they preserve us
or swerve us.


F) If they contend, don’t solve it right away.
Why should you worry beforehand?
Care only by the time to select them.
Though life is made up of choices,
each choice chooses its hour,
what may delay, but never comes in too late.


G) If you see a door, don’t open it.
The greeting word and the smiling fit
often leave in the mouth a vacant split.
They simply traverse it
as a doorstep bound to an outdoor street.
Every door slit hints to another side,
but gets us as always knitted
to the same old street.


H) If light sheds all about, now don’t disclose your eyes.
Don’t expect that things will move just to get you saluted.
(Except in case the drinking binge
has rimmed you far off the edge-
and, this being the situation, first place,
sit on the sill and keep there still,
or even before that, if it can’t be waited).


I) If you encounter a letter, don’t read it.
They never lie the lies we needed to listen.
We are all full of shortages,
we just don’t always know what their source is.
Feelings never land on speech,
if per chance they feed on it,
it ends up scarcely sufficient
to put them appeased.


J) If you don’t manage to rest, relax.
Drink from the news or harvest from work,
there is value (though not too often)
even to those things we do the most.


K) If the hour moves forward,
grieve for the expiring moment
as briefly as you should. If we reckon time,
it is because we have of it a reckoned input.
But the day that left us behind
has not truly gone missing.
If it did get lost, then it was certainly because
we weren’t keeping a close eye on it.


L) Don’t waste
the remains of the day
on planning
the day.


M) Instead, if sleep yawns,
don’t postpone it,
though it seems no point.


N) After all of this,
don’t only dream,
go be it.