Du må ikke sove

Jeg våknet en natt av en underlig drøm
det var som en stemme talte til meg
fjern som en underjordisk strøm-
og jeg reiste meg opp: Hva er det du vil meg?

- Du må ikke sove! Du må ikke sove.
Du må ikke tro at du bare har drømt
I går ble jeg dømt
I natt reiste de skafottet i gården
De henter meg klokken fem i morgen

Hele kjelleren her er full
og alle kaserner har kjeller ved kjeller
Vi ligger og venter i stenkalde celler
Vi ligger og råtner i mørke hull!

Vi vet ikke selv hva vi ligger og venter
og hvem der kan bli den neste de henter
Vi stønner vi skriker - men kan dere høre?
Kan dere absolutt ingen ting gjøre?

Ingen får se oss
Ingen får vite hva der skal skje oss
Ennu mer:
Ingen kan tro hva her daglig skjer
Du mener det kan ikke være sant
så onde kan da ikke mennesker være
Der fins da vel skikkelige folk i blant?
Bror, du har ennu meget å lære!

Man sa: Du skal gi ditt liv om det kreves
Og nu har vi gitt det - forgjeves, forgjeves
Verden har glemt oss! Vi er bedratt!
Du må ikke sove mer i natt!

Du må ikke gå til ditt kjøpmannskap
og tenke på hva der gir vinning og tap!
Du må ikke skylde på åker og fe
og at du har mer enn nok med det!
Du må ikke sitte trygt i ditt hjem
og si: Det er sørgelig, stakkars dem!
Du må ikke tåle så inderlig vel
den urett som ikke rammer deg selv!
Jeg roper med siste pust av min stemme
Du har ikke lov å gå der og glemme!

Tilgi dem ikke, de vet hva de gjør!
De puster på hatets og ondskapens glør!
De liker å drepe, de frydes ved jammer,
de ønsker å se vår verden i flammer!
De ønsker å drukne oss alle i blod!
Tror du det ikke? Du vet det jo!

Du vet jo at skolebarn er soldater
som stimer med sang over torg og gater
og oppglødd av mødrenes fromme svik
vil verge sitt land og gå i krig

Du kjenner det nedrige folkebedrag
med heltemot og med tro og ære-
du vet at en helt, det vil barnet være,
du vet han vil vifte med sabel og flagg!

Og så skal han ut i en skur av stål
og henge igjen i en piggtrådvase
og råtne for Hitlers ariske rase!
Du vet det er menneskets mening og mål!

Jeg skjønte det ikke. Nu er det for sent.
Min dom er rettferdig. Min straff er fortjent
Jeg trodde på fremgang, jeg trodde på fred
på arbeid, på samhold, på kjærlighet!
Men den som ikke vil dø i en flokk
får prøve alene, på bøddelens blokk!

Jeg roper i mørket- å, kunne du høre
Det er en eneste ting å gjøre:
Verg deg, men du har frie hender!
Frels dine barn! Europa brenner!

Jeg skaket av frost. Jeg fikk på meg klær
Ute var glitrende stjernevær
Bare en ulmende stripe i øst
varslet det samme som drømmens røst:

Dagen bakenom jordens rand
steg med et skjær av blod og brann
steg med en angst så åndeløs
at det var som om selve stjernene frøs!

Jeg tenkte: Nu er det noe som hender.-
Vår tid er forbi - Europa brenner!

- Arnulf Øverland

Lana Del Rey + Mumford & Sons

Torskemiddag og Lana Del Rey. Vin og Mumford & Sons. Quiz og vin på U1. Mer vin på Glød. Enda mer vin på Evergreen og verdens morsomste nachspiel. Også denne fredagen tok jeg nattbussen hjem altfor, altfor sent. Denne uken har vært fin.

Spilleliste: Godt gammeldags vorspiel

Sombrero

På fredag lagde vi taco, drakk vin og dro på byen. Der drakk vi mer vin, danset litt og fikk telefonnummeret til en kjekkas. Så fikk jeg tak i en sombrero og dro i all hast fra utestedet, jeg kunne jo ikke risikere at mexicaneren ville ha den tilbake. Vi lagde pizza, Lisa sovnet og jeg gikk kveldstur på St. Hanshaugen, dro på nachspiel, hørte på deilig musikk og da klokken nærmet seg syv tok jeg nattbussen hjem.

Bjørneboes "Ti bud til en ung mann som vil frem i verden" tar virkelig dagens samfunn på kornet. Diktet bør leses med en god dose ironi, men jeg har likevel den oppfatningen at mange lever helt eller delvis etter disse budene. Vi har blitt så opptatt av å være godt likt at vi legger bånd på oss selv. Jeg er ærlig og direkte, på godt og vondt. Jeg har både positive og negative sider, ingen er jo perfekte, men i bunn og grunn er jeg fornøyd med personligheten min. Jeg står hundre prosent inne for hvem jeg er og hva jeg sier, og er heller ikke interessert i å forandre meg for at andre skal like meg. Ta meg som jeg er!

Når det kommer til ærlighet er det en rekke faktorer som spiller en rolle. Først og fremst er det stor forskjell på hvem du velger å være brutalt ærlig med, men ikke minst om du er kvalifisert til å ha en mening. Dersom du er en person som sjelden har en egen mening virker det kanskje rart om du plutselig ytrer deg høylytt og ærlig, er du en person som har en mening om alt og alle bør du kanskje tenke deg om av og til. Skal det virkelig være slik? Eller er det slik at vi kan si hva som helst og at det kun er avhengig av måten man sier det på? Er det slik at ærlighet alltid varer lengst?

For meg er ærlighet en viktig verdi. Det finnes absolutt ingenting jeg setter mer pris på. Et vennskap for meg er å kunne snakke sammen, både når det gjelder de gode og vonde tingene. Alt annet syns jeg er feigt. Selv om jeg står for alt jeg sier er jeg fullt klar over at jeg av og til kan tøye grenser. Derfor er det viktig for meg at en venn kan si "Maud, nå er det nok" eller ta det opp med meg dersom ting ikke fungerer. Jeg snakker alltid rett fra levra og ofte litt for mye. Jeg vil selvfølgelig at folk skal syns jeg er både høflig og hyggelig, men jeg har ikke behov for at alle skal like meg og ønske å være venn med meg. Folk er forskjellige, man må være enige om å være uenige, men man kan vel verken like alle eller være like godt likt av alle? Dessverre har vi blitt så opptatt å være like at vi ikke lenger er frie. 

Ja, sånn har det blitt.

Howl av Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.


II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!


III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

         where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

         where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

         where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

         where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

         where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

         where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

         where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

         where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself   imaginary walls collapse   O skinny legions run outside   O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here   O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

         in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Siamue Silk Dress

På fredag betalte jeg et lass med regninger og brukskontoen er så tom som aldri før. Hadde jeg derimot hatt 3000 kroner til overs hadde jeg løpt til By Malene Birger i Hegdehaugsveien og kjøpt denne kjolen. Faen.

At dager, uker og måneder går så altfor, altfor fort har jeg fått kjenne på kroppen i det siste. Snart er det påske og allerede i begynnelsen av mai er det eksamen. Ellers har jeg lest altfor lite pensum, hørt på deilig musikk, jobbet, vært en tur hjemme i Larvik, kjøpt billetter til Neil Young, drukket altfor mye vin, besøkt hjemmefrontmuseet, brukt mye tid til å tenke på hva jeg skal gjøre med livet mitt og skrevet ferdig en helvetes oppgave i metode og statistikk. Studentlivet ass.

David Bowie - The Stars (Are Out Tonight)

Selveste David Bowie, Tilda Swinton og Iselin Steiro i en og samme musikkvideo. I LOVE IT!

Gatelangs i St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg er som alle storbyer full av kontraster, men likevel umåtelig vakker. 

Jeg er glad i Oslo altså, men noen ganger savner jeg våren i Paris.

Foto: Mari

Til ungdommen av Nordahl Grieg

Kringsatt av fiender,
gå inn i din tid!
Under en blodig storm -
vi deg i strid!

Kanskje du spør i angst,
udekket, åpen:
hvad skal jeg kjempe med,
hvad er mitt våpen?

Her er ditt vern mot vold,
her er ditt sverd:
troen på livet vårt,
menneskets verd.

For all vår fremtids skyld,
søk det og dyrk det,
dø om du må - men:
øk det og styrk det!

Stilt går granatenes
glidenede bånd
Stans deres drift mot død,
stans dem med ånd!

Krig er forakt for liv.
Fred er å skape.
Kast dine krefter inn:
døden skal tape!

Elsk -og berik med drøm -
alt stort som var!
Gå mot det ukjente,
fravrist det svar.

Ubygde kraftverker,
ukjente stjerner -
skap dem, med skånet livs,
dristige hjerner!

Edelt er mennesket,
jorden er rik!
Finnes her nød og sult
skyldes det svik.

Knus det! I livets navn
skal urett falle.
Solskinn og brød og ånd
eies av alle.

Da synker våpnene
maktesløs ned!
Skaper vi menneskeverd,
skaper vi fred.

Den som med høyre arm
bærer en byrde,
dyr og umistelig,
kan ikke myrde.

Dette er løftet vårt
fra bror til bror:
vi vil bli gode mot
menneskenes jord.

Vi vil ta vare på
skjønnheten, varmen
som om vi bar et barn
varsomt på armen!

Grex Vokalis har satt musikk til dette fantastiske diktet. Tenk, lytt og nyt!

Dropkick Murphys

 

 I går var jeg på konsert med det som går for å være et av verdens beste liveband; Dropkick Murphys.

Oslo. Hjerte.

Man skal vel egentlig ikke rusle rundt i området langs Akerselva nattestid. Noen ganger gjør jeg det likevel.

Ludwig van Beethoven to his 'Immortal Beloved'

Letter 1.

Good morning, on July 7

My thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved
I can live only wholly with you or not at all -
Be calm my life, my all. Only by calm consideration of our existence can we achieve our purpose to live together. Oh continue to love me, never misjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved.
Ever thine
Ever mine
Ever ours.

Ti bud til en ung mann som vil frem i verden

I Det første bud er ganske lett: De som er flest, har alltid rett.  
II Tenk alltid på hva folk vil si. Og ta den sterkestes parti. 
III Og tviler du, så hold deg taus til du ser hvem som får applaus.  
IV Tenk nøye ut hva du bør mene. Det kan bli dyrt å stå alene.  
V Følg ingen altfor høye krav. Men si, hva du har fordel av.  
VI Si alle hva de gjerne hører. Gå stille gjennom alle dører. 
(For sannhet bringer sorg og nød, mens daglig løgn gir daglig brød.)  
VII Gå aldri oppreist. Snik deg frem. Og gjør deg varm i alle hjem.  
VIII Husk: Ingen mann kan roses nok. Slik bygger man en venneflokk. 
(Og i et brødre-paradis har du din beste livspolis.)  
IX Av sladder husker du hvert ord til bruk i neste sjefskontor. 
(Men ingen taktfull sjel forteller et ord til ham som ryktet gjelder!)  
X Hvis siste bud blir respektert, da er din fremtid garantert! Følg dristig med i kamp mot troll, 
- men vis fornuftig måtehold! Skrid tappert frem i livets strid, - én time forut for din tid!    

Jens Bjørneboe «Samlede dikt»
Gyldendal Norsk Forlag 1977