Rule or keep quiet. Don't squander yourself, giving what you don't have. What good is the Caesar you might have been? Enjoy being the little you are. The hovel you're given is a better shelter than the palace you're owed...

Autumn Returns

A day in mourning falls from the bells
like a trembling vague-window cloth,
it is a colour, a dream
of cherries or grapes buried in the earth,
it is a tail of smoke that restless y arrives
to change the colour of the water and the kisses...

I do not know if I make myself clear:
when from on high night approaches,
when the solitary poet at the window 
hears autumn's steed running and the 
leaves of trampled fear rustle in his arteries,
there is something over the sky,
like the tongue of a thick ox,
something in the doubt of the sky and the
atmosphere.

Things return to their places,
the indispensable lawyer,
the hands,
the olive oil,
the bottles,
all the traces of life:
the beds,
above all,
are filled with a bloody liquid,
people deposit their confidences in 
sordid ears,
assassins go down stairs,
it is not this,
however,
but the old gallop,
the horse of the old autumn that trembles and endures.

The horse of the old autumn has a red beard
and the foam of fear covers its cheeks
and the air that follows it is shaped like an ocean
and a perfume of vague buried putrefaction.

Every day down from the sky
comes an ashen colour that doves
must spread over the earth:
the cord that forgetfulness and
weeping weave,
time that has slept long years within
the bells,
everything,
the old tattered suits,
the women who see snow coming,
the black poppies that no one can look at
without dying,
everything falls into the hands that I life
in the midst of the rain.

Is this the life ?