the unsure egoist is not good for himself

If you never do anything for anyone else 

you are spared the tragedy of human relation- 

ships. If quietly and like another time

there is the passage of an unexpected thing:

to look at it is more

than it was. God knows

nothing is competent nothing is

all there is. The unsure

egoist is not

good for himself.

listen to it here

 

[Robert Creeley {1926-2005} 'The Immoral Proposition', from The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975]