I work all day like a monk
and at night wander about like an alley cat
looking for love... I'll propose 
to the Church that I be made a saint.
In fact I respond to mystification
with mildness. I watch the lynch mob
as through a camera eye.
With the calm courage of a scientist.
I watch myself being massacred.
I seem to feel hate and yet I write
verses full of painstaking love.
I study treachery as a fatal phenomenon,
almost as if I were not its object.
I pity the young fascists,
and the old ones, whom I consider forms 
of the most horrible evil, I oppose
only with the violence of reason.
Passive as a bird that sees all, in flight, 
and carries in its heart,
rising in the sky,
an unforgiving conscience.


Pier Paolo Pasolini