/lit/ - Literature

This is a monologue I just wrote. A dictator realizes that his life is just the act of killing and torturing his way forward, that everything he does now is simply crawling through a swamp of blood and violence and that living has no more flavor, but it's just an endless web anxiety and boredom. The original is in Portuguese.

My delights are now all dead.
My grape-bunch of tomorrows, my suns yet
Unborn, they are already all abortions
Of boredom, anxiety and violence,
An eternity of slaughtering and mold
In the bloody womb of the future:
My horizon hibernates in rotten wine.
From wreck to wrack I drag my creeping spirit,
I force my moldy carcass to chew
Every minute and to ignore the heartburn of existence.
I wander in an anemic desert
And endless procession of rachitic suns.
Time coagulates in a dimmish
Wandering of corpses: my apathetic days,
For dead days do hatch dead days,
And dead days do hatch dead days,
In an endless march in which fresh tortures,
Still hot and sweating blood and pus
(The warm dew that raw flesh cries)
Walk upon the fossils of ancient agonies
Of the past, ancestor pains, and this big and rotten open
Pustule that is my kingdom never silences
Its bloody canticle, that will continue to flow
And gush, echoing horrors, until the breaking of the misterious
Hourglass that we know by the name of time.
My life is also my prison; breathing is an incarceration of the mind;
To get up from the bed is a torture:
The gummy and blear light of dawn invades me
With nausea, to the point that I want
The night to crown herself eternal crown and that the sun,
With his smile, no longer erode the darkness,
But that the blanket of the dark drown all humanity
And that all bud-button of life
Would be suffocated in silence. Life, what is life?
Life is a brief dream and dirty shadow,
A nightmare that creates flesh and, for
A grain of dust and ephemeral spark
Of time, shrieks, howls and contorts
In the polluted stage of existence
Until a single blow do solve it in smoke:
The breath of dying do melt the flame
And all that remains, sited on top of the candle-wick, is an eclipse.
Life is a disease that stings
The coarse scarecrow of inanimate
Matter and makes its aware of itself, makes it notice
The very absurdity and meaninglessness of its own existence;
It is a lightning roaring the fleeting
Rumble and chaos of its voice and then dives
Again in the eternal swamp of darkness
And infinite silence of emptiness;
It's a frantic spark and confused torch,
A chimpanzee modeled in fatuous fire,
Stranded and lost in a dark jungle, that reabsorbs him again
Even before the poor beast invents
Any form of sense to the sudden flash
Of being, his existence: the soap-bubble
Caravel that, without any destination or port,
Navigates through a sea off savourless mists;
A ship of nothing, that nothing has conceived
And that, after floating for a few seconds, will drown in nothingness.

I want to be a good writer (at least the best writer that I can be). I have been working with the craft of literature and smithy of the word for more than 15 years now.

I also suffer with anxiety and other emotional problems, and want to use meditation and Zen as ways of achieving peace of mind.

I don’t know, however, if the ambition of creating great art can actually go together with the Zen practice. I think they might go along just fine (since even martial arts can be a path towards enlightenment), but books about the matter would be of great help.

Are there any good books about the relation between a career in the arts (especially literature) and Zen practice?

Thanks.