Roman Payne

I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.

In my errant life I roamedTo learn the secrets of women and men,Of gods and dreams.I've known all the countries of our world,I've lived a thousand lives:Many lives I lived in love, Other lives I squandered.For in my life I never traveled, All I did was wander.

I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.

I fear it is my lot, to bide my days in hunchbacked thought, to find what I forgot.

As for men, they must learn bravery and live for Pleasure and for Beauty. More important than those two things should stand only one thing for him... Honor. A man's honor should be more sacred to him than his life _ especially in our age, a time when very few men know what honor is.

Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came.

_, Muse of the Heart__ Passion,let me relive my Love__ memory,to remember her body, so brave and so free,and the sound of my Dreameress singing to me,and the scent of my Dreameress sleeping by me,_, sing, sweet Muse, my soliloquy!

May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him.

Wherever you go in the next catastrophéBe it sickroom, or prison, or cemet__yDo not fear that your stay will besolit__yCountless souls share your fate,you__l have company!

Life is Not a perpetual climb towards Greatness.For our family, ourselves, and friends,It is but sad Decay, so,Let every girl die after her Hebé (ἲ).And every man after his Aristeia(_ι__εία).

I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold.

The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

This was the first time I thought of S_ that day. Her music was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her body was beautiful. Even the dirty little pads of her feet were beautiful. I cursed myself then. For once, heaven had sent me Beauty in its most perfected form and I abandoned it. She might not have been a girl after all but an angel: a force to guide me on this hazardous path of life I hurry down. How can life be hazardous if it can only end in death?

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I__e no regrets.

Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.

I__e only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.

It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.

I saw this moment as attached by threads to eternity and woven between all the other braided moments of my past and my future.