Something dangerous is beginning: I am coming late to my…

““Something dangerous is beginning: I am coming late to my own self. I made an appointment with my thoughts- the thoughts were snatched from me. I made an appointment with Faulkner- but they made me go to a banquet. I made an appointment with history, but a grass-widow dragged me into bed. Worse than barbed wire are birthday parties, mine and others', and roasted suckling pigs hold me like a sprig of parsley between their teeth! Led away for good to a life absolutely not my own, everything that I eat, eats me, everything that I drink, drinks me. I made an appointment with myself, but they invite me to feast on my own spareribs. I am garlanded from all sides not by strings of bagels, but by the holes of bagels, and I look like an anthology of zeros. Life gets broken into hundreds of lifelets, that exhaust and execute me. In order to get through to myself I had to smash my body against others', and my fragments, my smithereens, are trampled by the roaring crowd. I am trying to glue myself together, but my arms are still severed. I'd write with my left leg, but both the left and the right have run off, in different directions. I don't know- where is my body? And soul? Did it really fly off, without a murmured 'good-bye! '? How do I break through to a faraway namesake, waiting for me in the cold somewhere? I've forgotten under which clock I am waiting for myself. For those who don't know who they are, time does not exist. No one is under the clock. On the clock there is nothing. I am late for my appointment with me. There is no one. Nothing but cigarette butts. Only one flicker- A lonely, dying, spark...””

— Yevgeny Yevtushenko