What Are You Looking For?

By: Blaise Cendrars

Photo: Erik Rittenberry

You make me laugh,
with your metaphysical anguish,
it’s just that you're scared silly, 
frightened of life,
of men of action, 
of action itself, 
of lack of 
order.

But everything is disorder, dear boy.
Vegetable, mineral and animal,
all disorder, and so is the multitude
of human races, the life of man,
thought, history, wars, inventions,
business and the arts,
and all theories, passions
and systems.

It’s always been that way…

What are you looking for?
There is no Truth.
There's only action, action obeying
a million different impulses,
ephemeral action, action subjected
to every possible and imaginable
Contingency and contradiction.

Life.

Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, 
lies, disgust, stupidity, sickness, 
volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, 
piles of corpses.

What can you do about it, 
my poor friend?