A famous poem by the Danish writer Johannes V. Jensen

Interference

The blue night is so silent. I lie here sleepless.

The silence expands and sounds.

It is the sound of thousands of miles of emptiness.

It is the monologues of space, whose rings meet with

circles of toneless time.

My pulse, the hot tautness of my heart keep me awake,

but I consider things with a cool mind.

A force passes through my nerves,

and I lie here as if lifeless.

For a long time I think with ice-cold calm

of the flaming impatience that is my fate.

Suddenly I feel quite composed and without my moving

an intolerable pain breaks out in my consciousness

and dwindles once more.

Tomorrow I will get up

laden with oaths and a zest for life

as on all other mornings.

Tomorrow I will be confronted with washbasin, shoe horn,

toothbrush and the whole story,

tobacco and sunshine and draught Tuborg.

And I confess:

This is either the top price for human happiness,

faithfully copied,

or a stupid and pitiful fiction.

There is no point in denying it,

I nurture a divisive process in my head, as

soon as I start thinking.

My consciousness works sharp-edged.

I destroy out of some urge, despite myself.

Nothing is true. Nothing is worth the trouble.

Never has more painful pride been felt

than that which I alone feel at the possession of my mind’s

systems of knives.

When the conception of the out-and-out miracle of the world

is met by the conviction of the finiteness of all things,

I feel alive.

This creaking of the axles,

the diabolical collision of physical sounds

release the transcendental vibrations of pain

that are the form of my innermost ego.

My consciousness expresses itself as mental interference.

The very screeching relation between all otherwise harmonious realities

is the piercing key of my inner life.

Two diametrically opposed life-consciousnesses meet and

are sharpened in my heart.

The blue night is so silent. I lie here sleepless.

The silence expands and sounds, whines, shrills

It is the sound of thousands of miles of emptiness

between the grinding stone planets.

It is the monologues of space, whose rings meet with

circles of toneless time.

Poems 1906