May 2012
7 posts
8 tags
If you want what visible reality can give, you’re an employee. If you want the unseen world, you’re not living your truth. Both wishes are foolish, but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting that what you really want is love’s confusing joy.
- Rumi (tr. Coleman Barks)
8 tags
Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or come when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene'er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome.
You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it to rest
As the bird...
12 tags
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, and yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love, but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you...
8 tags
The wind blows through the doors of my heart. It scatters my sheet music that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys. Now the notes stripped, black butterflies, flattened against the screens. The wind through my heart blows all my candles out. In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy. From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups full of stars as the wind winds round, a mist of...
11 tags
Let the wild rumpus start!
- Maurice Sendak [RIP]
8 tags
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you? Hardly anything grows here, Yet the granaries are bursting with meal, The sacks of meal piled to the rafters. The streams...
9 tags
I want to sleep for half a second, a second, a minute, a century, but I want everyone to know that I am still alive, that I have a golden manger inside my lips, that I am the little friend of the west wind, that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.
When it’s dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me, and pour a little hard water...
April 2012
12 posts
8 tags
We are looking for your laugh.
Trying to find the path back to it
between drooping trees.
Listening for your rustle
under bamboo,
brush of fig leaves,
feeling your step
on the porch,
natty lantana blossom
poked into your buttonhole.
We see your raised face
at both sides of a day.
How was it, you lived around
the edge of everything we did,
seasons of ailing & growing,
mountains of laundry &...
14 tags
I am going to carry my bed into New York City tonight complete with dangling sheets and ripped blankets; I am going to push it across three dark highways or coast along under 600,000 faint stars. I want to have it with me so I don’t have to beg for too much shelter from my weak and exhausted friends. I want to be as close as possible to my pillow in case a dream or a fantasy should pass by....
9 tags
When the men leave me, they leave me in a beautiful place. It is always late summer. When I think of them now, I think of the place. And being happy alone afterwards. This time it’s Clinton, New York. I swim in the public pool at six when the other people have gone home. The sky is grey, the air hot. I walk back across the mown lawn loving the smell and the houses so completely it leaves my heart...
11 tags
It would be good to give much thought, before you try to find words for something so lost, for those long childhood afternoons you knew that vanished so completely -and why? We’re still reminded-: sometimes by a rain, but we can no longer say what it means; life was never again so filled with meeting, with reunion and with passing on as back then, when nothing happened to us except what...
15 tags
Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.
- Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching
12 tags
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and...
13 tags
The day is a woman who loves you. Open. Deer drink close to the road and magpies spray from your car. Miles from any town your radio comes in strong, unlikely Mozart from Belgrade rock and roll from Butte. Whatever the next number you want to hear it. Never has your Buick found this forward a gear. Even the tuna salad in Reedpoint is good. Towns arrive ahead of imagined schedule Absorakee at...
10 tags
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—- One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to...
10 tags
in Just-spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it’s spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer old balloonman whistles far and wee and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s spring and the ...
10 tags
At night I sleep poorly. When I dream of your face, the papery cotton sheets go cool as your hand used to be. Downstairs, you are there, in the box I will not look at. The world is askew without you, like a lock jimmied by a thief. When together now, four of us, not five, we eat quickly, nibbling the corn to the husk. Even the dogs have gotten quiet in your absence. The other morning, I...
12 tags
To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in...
8 tags
In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is on St. Mark’s Place too, beneath a white moon. I’ll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded against what is hurled down at me in my no hat which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall her eyes will be deep brown and her hair...
March 2012
11 posts
7 tags
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see or the child’s older self, a poet, a woman dreaming when she should be typing the last report of the day. If this were a map, it would be the map of the last age of her life, not a map of choices but a map of variations on the one great choice. It would be the map by which she could see...
7 tags
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is...
9 tags
WatchHow to Write a Screenplay or Tell a Better Story.
This is my first non-poem update. I wrote this deck over the last few weeks, consolidating things I’ve learned as I continue writing. Mostly I wrote it because it’s something I wish I had when I was starting out.
I’m not a super successful screenwriter, but I wrote/produced the documentary Second Skin, which premiered at SXSW,...
6 tags
A man standing at the bus stop
reading the newspaper is on fire
Flames are peeking out
from beneath his collar and cuffs
His shoes have begun to melt
The woman next to him
wants to mention it to him
that he is burning
but she is drowning
Water is everywhere
in her mouth and ears
in her eyes
A stream of water runs
steadily from her blouse
Another woman stands at the bus stop
...
10 tags
I give you back your heart. I give you permission - for the fuse inside her, throbbing angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her and the burying of her wound - for the burying of her small red wound alive - for the pale flickering flare under her ribs, for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse, for the mother’s knee, for the stocking, for the garter belt, for the call - ...
6 tags
The most troubling thing is everything. It’s all happening At the same time. Interpreting dreams while watching Let’s Make A Deal. Eating tofurkey & Cherry Garcia while practicing Yoga. Happy Baby. Down Dog. The temperature drops Sixty degrees in ten minutes. Stop signs wobble, wobble, & then everyone is outside watching the meteor shower. It is so contemporary of us to...
10 tags
We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.
- Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching
8 tags
I lay down in the empty street and parked My feet against the gutter’s curb while from The building above a bunch of gawkers perched Along its ledges urged me don’t, don’t jump.
- Bill Knott
7 tags
Still, there is hope this fading year that next year will be our year
for a winter hike to the island quarry. After the holidays, I’d propose.
In January, when dormant hardwoods clatter in the wind and only a stray spruce
or cardinal lives for color. At such times the quarry sleeps ice-locked
beneath sifting skins of snow. If it’s safe and thick enough, I’ll take you...
7 tags
Sometimes he looks across America, and wonders “where the country I fought for has gone.” Where is the selflessness that drove him on his knees across a carrier deck, with shrapnel singing in the steel above, to search a stump that was a crewman’s leg moments before, and grip an artery, until a doctor could break free and help? A shack is like a cave, part of the land.
...
9 tags
In the spring I asked the daisies If his words were true, And the clever, clear-eyed daisies Always knew.
Now the fields are brown and barren, Bitter autumn blows, And of all the stupid asters Not one knows.
- Sara Teasdale
February 2012
8 posts
7 tags
Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one word will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I’ve cried, ...
9 tags
Not a star will remain in the night. The night itself will not remain. I will die and with me the sum Of the intolerable universe. I’ll erase the pyramids, the coins, The continents and all the faces. I’ll erase the accumulated past. I’ll make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I gaze at the last sunset. I am listening to the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no-one.
- Jorge Luis Borges
8 tags
My path is sweet on either side All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs— But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach, And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling, The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake, Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road A gateless garden, and an open path: My feet to follow, and my heart to hold.
–...
12 tags
Daydreams have endlessly turning paths going over the bitter earth, winding roads, parks flowering, in darkness and in silence; deep vaults, ladders against the stars; scenes of hopes and memories. Tiny figures that walk past and smile sad playthings for an old man, friends we think we can see at the flowery turn in the road and imaginary creatures that show us roads … far off …
-...
10 tags
Lost, lost in gray hallways. At night the lightbulbs hiss like signals of sinking ships. We read books forgotten by their authors. There is no truth, wise men repeat. Summer evenings: festivals of swifts, peonies erupting in the suburbs. Streets seem abbreviated by the heat, the ease of seeing. Autumn creeps up surreptitiously. Still sometimes we surface for a moment, and the setting sun...
8 tags
You have to let things Occupy their own space. This room is small, But the green settee
Likes to be here. The big marsh reeds, Crowding out the slough, Find the world good.
You have to let things Be as they are. Who knows which of us Deserves the world more?
- Robert Bly
8 tags
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid....
6 tags
I double-check my reflection in plate glass & wonder, Am I passing another Lucky Thompson or Marion Brown cornered by a blue dementia, another dark-skinned man who woke up dreaming one morning & then walked out of himself dreaming? Did this one dare to step on a crack in the sidewalk, to turn a midnight corner & never come back whole, or did he try to stare down a look that...
January 2012
8 posts
11 tags
There is a girl inside. She is randy as a wolf. She will not walk away and leave these bones to an old woman. She is a green tree in a forest of kindling. She is a greeen girl in a used poet. She has waited patient as a nun for the second coming, when she can break through gray hairs into blossom and her lovers will harvest honey and thyme and the woods will be wild with the damn wonder...
7 tags
There is something of the accidental, the eye of the collector, inadvertent
and endeared to the small, odd gift. Perhaps I was anchored
and the lanterns lit my limbs like dried sticks, deciduous
and prone to tiny thrushes lining the rungs of my ribs.
Now all the dresses are worn and unwashed, their hems dwindling
to floss, and something to be said of obsession, this locked box,
and voices...
7 tags
For your listening pleasure, I turn as old as I was born, stroke the bumpy skin of our whisky illness, manage the pyramids we’ve never climbed or crawled within, enter the Morocco never wrapped by your feet kissing pebbles, visiting your veins, telling you mythologies that include how we are the sores of hope riding the backs of tomorrow, mountain peaks we climb and shout the names of...
12 tags
The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- W.B. Yeats
11 tags
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
- T.S. Eliot
6 tags
It instructs me on the ways when need be to hide It awakens the serpent inside to throb, to burn It pulls the arrow from my ear And it whispers, whispers, whispers a last word What seems the last vapors of a long dream Like Baraka wrote, like James Brown sings Whispers, “please, please, please.”
- Jim Carroll, Praying Mantis
7 tags
I reached up into the top of the closet and took out a pair of blue panties and showed them to her and asked “are these yours?”
- Charles Bukowski, I Made a Mistake
9 tags
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows He gripped her hard so that life Should not drag her from that moment He wanted all future to cease He wanted to topple with his arms round her Or everlasting or whatever there was Her embrace was an immense press To print him into her bones His smiles were the garrets of a fairy place Where the real world...
December 2011
11 posts
11 tags
I like to understand your Terror, now, the way you took her Deflowering her as you’d gut a fish, Leaving in the morning with talk of a wife. Now that I Know about the fear of love I like to think of her white-hot body Greenish as a fish just landed, quivering and Slapping on a rock–fallen into your Lap, man, shuddering like your cock, A woman crazed with love, hot off the press, sharp as a tool...
10 tags
Oh then I stood up in my gold skin and I beat down the psalms and I beat down the clothes and you undid the bridle and you undid the reins and I undid the buttons, the bones, the confusions, the New England postcards, the January ten o’clock night, and we rose up like wheat, acre after acre of gold, and we harvested, we harvested.
- Anne Sexton
10 tags
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost, And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves A shining...
10 tags
I dreamt that a storm of phantom numbers was the only thing left of human beings three billion years after Earth ceased to exist.
- Roberto Bolaño