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• 
  Hook_emHornsfan_74 → nolaegghead

  That lents guy is talking out of his ass. Hopefully what I said made sense about oil. 

  0 ·

  March 3
• 
  nolaegghead

  Aubade

  BY PHILIP LARKIN

  I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   
  

  Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   
  

  In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   
  

  Till then I see what’s really always there:   
  

  Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   
  

  Making all thought impossible but how   
  

  And where and when I shall myself die.   
  

  Arid interrogation: yet the dread
  

  Of dying, and being dead,
  

  Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
  

  
  

  The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   
  

  —The good not done, the love not given, time   
  

  Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   
  

  An only life can take so long to climb
  

  Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   
  

  But at the total emptiness for ever,
  

  The sure extinction that we travel to
  

  And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   
  

  Not to be anywhere,
  

  And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
  

  
  

  This is a special way of being afraid
  

  No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
  

  That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
  

  Created to pretend we never die,
  

  And specious stuff that says No rational being
  

  Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
  

  That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   
  

  No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   
  

  Nothing to love or link with,
  

  The anaesthetic from which none come round.
  

  
  

  And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   
  

  A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   
  

  That slows each impulse down to indecision.   
  

  Most things may never happen: this one will,   
  

  And realisation of it rages out
  

  In furnace-fear when we are caught without   
  

  People or drink. Courage is no good:
  

  It means not scaring others. Being brave   
  

  Lets no one off the grave.
  

  Death is no different whined at than withstood.
  

  
  

  Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   
  

  It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   
  

  Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   
  

  Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
  

  Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   
  

  In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
  

  Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
  

  The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
  

  Work has to be done.
  

  Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

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  January 19