LONELINESS

Dear Sis . . . . .

Upon returning from Minnesota frozen north and

reading the lonely Swedish poet Tranströmer I realize loneliness is

still growing all the time in this country — an enormous loneliness

still all over America — and perhaps soon that will be all that’s left in

the world — which was always there perhaps — an existential loneliness

that’s at the root of everything, and it keeps growing, and I will

have to grow too, to keep up with the growing loneliness and not

shrink away into nothingness myself, or else loneliness will fill up

my whole room, and nothing be left outside of me except the demon of

loneliness who grows all the time because he doesn’t want to be alone

in an empty furnished room, with pee-stains on his underwear, like

Gregory Corso said in his poem about getting married. It occurs to

me that I am that loneliness itself and that I have a terror of myself

always growing larger and larger and more lonely, so that eventually

I will be the last person I know on earth and everyone else strangers,

and maybe that is the fate of all the very very old, and maybe this

final loneliness doesn’t actually happen until the day of death and

then the corpse fills the whole room?

— Love — Me     


(carta incluída no livro Time of Useful Consciousness, novo volume de poesia de Lawrence Ferlinghetti)