HIDDEN MALE-AGE

Like a shipwrecked man cast adrift on unknown shores by the fierce waves of a fancy-tail - I try to live, and it is no consolation that I am constantly bumping into more and more unrealistic crowds of people and daredevils. I cling to unstable ground on outstretched support ropes over precipices, like a sucker-rope-dancer, facing the threatening spirals of whirlpools. 

And if I know that something is not going as the constant change of certain things allows, I step with stubborn self-consciousness over the crippling barbed wire of actions and deeds! And when so many dismissals have been read and levelled against each other, and when they would strike the unsuspecting manual labourer as helplessly as the freelance lawyer's clerk and the ant-working civil servant, there must be some inner hopefulness that follows from themselves, which can guarantee that certain, tiny Good in the depths of Existence! 

For the little people can hardly have any other promising choice: man now lives with arbitrariness and effective protectionist interests, and if he cannot attain a goal for himself at any price - well, imagine: what if he had run over everyone? And he who penetrates into the depths of his conscience may perhaps recognize in him the law of necessity; may the man of honour still live in him, who would universally warn of the good, and seek influence for his guilty soul! 

BUT because he secretly fears that he can neither dare nor do, he can no longer believe, as he once did, but stands at every crossroads, torn or self-contradictory; - wild, spiteful age, if it threatens with unpleasant generality, ruffles the dull moods; nothing remains of me but dust or a tuft of hair! 

My willful defiance, saturated with my indifference, can only understand separate peace, if my Dearest may once hold my hand! Her swan-finger, soft feather-feather, velvet-hand, gently, comfortingly caresses me: in one romantic sigh I would listen to what her redeeming love, hidden in a heartbeat, secretly exchanges!