AS PLANNED

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them ( Read more... )

Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
     to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we're lying.
If we say No, we don't see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that ( Read more... )

I am the next act waiting in the wings
I am an animal trapped in your hot car
I am all the days that you choose to ignore

You are all I need
You are all I need
I am in the middle of your picture
Lying in the reeds

I am a moth who just wants to share your light
I'm just an insect trying to get out of the night
I only stick with you because there are no ( Read more... )

When I Met My Muse
by William Stafford

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at ( Read more... )

When I am with you, we stay up all night,
When you're not here, I can't get to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.
-Rumi

I wish it wasnt tho. Part of me says its too soon though. i dont know. i dont ever know. Im not good at knowing these things nor i doubt id ever be. I dont think i deserve to be happy.

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
"It is futile," I said,
"You can never - "

"You lie," he cried,
And ran on.

-stephen crane

Perhaps the tragedy (and beauty) of writing is that you remember everything. the memories of loved ones and friends long gone. perhaps the enemy is not writing per se, but the committing of things to memory.

Reply to the Question: "How can You Become a Poet?

take the leaf of a tree
trace its exact shape

the outside edges
and inner lines
memorize the way it is fastened to the twig

(and how the twig arches from the branch)

how it springs forth in April
how it is panoplied in July

by late August
crumple it in your hand
so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness

chew ( Read more... )

Les Noyades

byAlgernon Charles Swinburne



Whatever a man of the sons of men

Shall say to his heart of the lords above,

They have shown man verily, once and again,

Marvellous mercies and infinite love.

In the wild fifth year of the change of things,

When France was glorious and blood-red, fair

With dust of battle and deaths of kings,

A ( Read more... )