6.
Do not love
It is possible that nothing is true anyway

That we live in a forest of begriffons
And that even we ourselves are begriffons, it is possible

That I am not saying what you think I am saying
And that you are not hearing what you think you are hearing,

But that we are scratching and howling on a branch in the dark
To signify our loneliness and desire for mice and other delicious vermin.
Do not love
For when you pop open a human being

All you find is forty feet of intestine
And how lovable is that?

Being a body is an infirmity and an indignity
It sags over time like a deflating balloon

If it toots your horn to embrace something that eats at one end and excretes
at the other,
Why stop at people, why not direct your emotions at cows?
Do not love
For love will come to grief

And if it doesn't come to grief, it will come to grief anyway
Since one of you must die first

What is the point of anything when everything has an end?
The world is like

The fiddling of a deaf musician in an empty room
He finishes, bows—to whom?—and modestly leaves

And then there's silence.
How is the silence afterwards different from the silence during?