Elegy 1938 by Carlos Drummond de Andrade — Read

You work without joy for a worn-out world whose forms and actions set no example.

You laboriously perform the universal motions, you feel heat and cold, lack of money, hunger, and sexual desire.

Heroes fill the city parks where you drag your feet, and they preach virtue, renunciation, fortitude, vision.

At night, if it drizzles, they open bronze umbrella or retreat to the tomes of sinister libraries.

You love the night for its power to annihilate and you know, when you sleep, the problems stop requiring you to die.

But you fatally wake up to the Great Machine existing, and once more you stand, minuscule, next to inscrutable palms.

You walk among dead people and with them you talk about things of the future and matters of the spirit.

Literature has ruined your best hours of love.

You've wasted time for sowing, too much time, on the phone.

Proud hearted, you're in a hurry to confess your defeat and postpone collective happiness for another century.

You accept the rain, the war, unemployment, and unfair distribution because you can't, by yourself, blow up the island of Manhattan.