Them: Rilke.
Me: Really?
Everybody loves Rilke. This seems to be a universal phenomenon. It’s like the attachment you still have to the first person you fucked with mutual pleasure as a teenager. A lover, not a girlfriend or a barroom romance. I get it. He speaks to the soul with an overwhelming and fluent innocence and passion.
Not me. He’s just to damned German Romantic. (Cue a moody Wagner intermezzo).
When I need to go to my roomm slam the door on my adult life and crank The Doors while sneaking a cigarette half out the window, it’s Pessoa for me. He calms that impule right down. He stands halfway between florrid Goethe and cranky, practical Niccanor Parra, a sweet spot for me.
Take this poem. He carries the seed of morbid introspection through to its blossom as a metaphorically perfect sunflower.
LIKE AN ASTONISHMENT
IN WHICH
Like an astonishment in which
My childhood survives, I still have
Half my enthusiasm—mine
Because I had it back then.
I sometimes feel embarrassed
To believe so much in what I don’t
Believe. It’s a kind of dream
With reality in the middle.
Around its silent center
The sunflower, deceptively pleasing,
Speaks, yellow and astonished
By the black center that’s everything.—Fernando Pessoa
Well Bottom Blues 
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