Le petit bout de rien

There's no cause for vanity and none for pride: it's just a matter of assembling words in lines, then dividing them up (or letting them divide themselves), hoping they sound good or bad. (What's important is that they sound like something.) It's all a question of staying alert so that red doesn't bleed into orange or orange into yellow or yellow into silence. There's no cause for rejecting silence and none for accepting it, either. We should speak when there's noth- ing to say and be quiet when others talk. That's the poet's business, so get used to it. There's nothing glorious about it. The future doesn't count for anything and the past just laughs at us. There's no cause for writing this poem and none for deleting it, either.