Pessoa - Momus

Seventy mes with their pen-names

In an age of barbarians

My name is multiplicity, disquietude, indeterminacy

Life is drama, life is verse, life is written in the universe

Live for now, don’t rehearse, seventy mes fit one hearse

My name is multiplicity, disquietude, indeterminacy

A maelstrom in a vacuum, walking stiff

Through the geometry of the abyss

Ferdinand Pessoa put it cleverly

When he said we have seventy mes

Seventy mes with their pen-names

In an age of barbarians

The past is all I failed to be

The future all I’ve yet to be

Sick of having just one me

I created seventy

Seventy mes from the same egg hatched

Siamese twins unattached

Souls impatient with their limits

Each one trying to be what it isn’t

The meaning of my life has been to dream

To casually observe what I think I mean

To fill my hands with that sand called gold

Open my fingers and out it rolls

I am happy to be no-one

The outskirts of a nonexistent town

The margins of a withering page

The prologue to an unwritten age

If what happens to me happens to you

Then to tell you tells you nothing new

But if what happens to me happens only to me

Nothing I can say will ever make you see

The past is all I failed to be

The future all I’ve yet to be

Sick of having just one me

I created seventy

By woodside grove and woodland rushes

There’s hush and crush in the brush and bushes

On left the holt, on right the meadow

O hey, it rings and sings in sunshine and shadow

Seventy mes with their pen-names

In an age of barbarians

My name is multiplicity, disquietude, indeterminacy

Life is drama, life is verse, life is written in the universe

Live for now, don’t rehearse, seventy mes fit one hearse

The past is all I failed to be

The future all I’ve yet to be

Sick of having just one me

I created seventy