No thank you

I shall never sink to be a musketeer!
What then must be done? Find a powerful protevtor? Seek a patron and, like an obscure ivy that outwits the tree and makes of it guardian as it laps the bark, rising by craft rather than its own strength? No thank you.
Dedicate as they all do versus to fanciers, transform myself into a clown, in the vile mind of seeing, on the lips of a minister, a smile that is not sinister? No thank you.
Make lunch every day of a toad, have a belly that is used for walking, slithering, a skin that becomes dirty fastest on the knees, shed my skin, cultivating a supple spine? No thank you.
I would turn down the apple. Having some forked flattering tongue always in someone’s ear.
A literary lion for a circle of old ladies. A courtier with a fist full of madrigals, filling my ears with the sighs of dowagers. No thank you.
Make the editors print my verse by paying? No thank you.
Get myself the name of pope, by the councils that are held in the cabarets of imbeciles? Work to build the reputation on one sonnet in the place of making others? Discover talent in the mediocre, Be terrorized by vague gazettes? Love to make a visit rather than a poem, draft letters begging for favors, make myself presented?
NO THANK YOU!!!!! NO THANK YOU!!!!! NO THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!
But to sing, to dream to laugh, to pass to be alone to be free.
To have an eye that sees clearly and a voice that vibrates.
But when it pleases me, to wear y hat askew.
To fight, make verse, travel without worry of vain fortunes and fetid glory. Such a voyage I dream of to the moon. To write nothing that does not come out of me. Satisfied with the fruits of my own garden. And, if some chance triumph arise, not be obligated to render anything unto Caesar. Face to face with myself, disdaining to be parasitic ivy, not rising high perhaps, but all alone.
It is my vice, displeasing is my pleasure. I love to be hated. If you knew how one walks better under fire, the volleys exciting the eyes. You, my dear friend, surround yourself in soft friendships, like those Italian collars, Hemstitched and loose so your neck grows feminine. One is more at ease. But me? Hatred each day obliges me to keep perfect posture. A tight collar that forces me to raise the head; each enemy the collar tightens. Hatred is a gallows, but also a halo.