slowly with you,

If there is only enough time in the final
minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance
I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,
...
There will be no time to order another drink
or worry about what was never said,

Dancing Toward Bethlehem [excerpts]
Billy Collins

Won't you

Won't you come into the garden?
I would like my roses to see you.

Richard Sheridan

always

There is always room for beauty

The Poetry of Earth [excerpt]
Florence Earl Coates

I Ask You

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,

I Ask You [excerpt]
Billy Collins

First Anniversary of The BP

Be patient that I address you in a poem,
                  there is no other
                                fit medium.

To Daphne and Virginia [excerpt]
William Carlos Williams

At a Window

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.


At a Window
Carl Sandburg

Come back to me.

Apocalypto

speaks to me

…a profusion
of pink roses bending ragged in the rain –
speaks to me of all gentleness and its
enduring.

To All Gentleness [excerpt]
William Carlos Williams

on jealousy

You see in other people what you want for yourself.

-Taxi Driver Wisdom

a pillow for my soul.

Your face is my palace,
your eyes – blue, near –
a pillow for my soul.

In the Palace of Your Face [excerpt]
Abraham Joshua Heschel

and I realize... Life is good.

Borrowed from a friend :)

I watch the water churn from the cold wind blowing out there and it soothes. There's a rainbow lurking out there (I saw it on the walk over) and knowing that makes me smile. Its calming and beautiful and as I sip my latte nodding along with the snow patrol that's blasting through my headphones I'm at peace within myself. Even if the feeling is fleeting, I own it right now... In this moment.

I am lying

I am lying because I loved you love you and because, my darling, a lie can be closer to the truth.

The Daydreaming Boy
Michelle Ahoroman Marcom

Nobody loves no one

World was on fire
No one could save me but you
Strange what desire will make foolish people do
I never dreamed that I'd love somebody like you
I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you

No I don't wanna fall in love
No I don't wanna fall in love
With you
With you

Nobody loves no one

Wicked Game [excerpt]
Chris Isaak

Bliss!

Bliss! A merry flag on the arctic wilderness of my calendar. One must make an effort when one receives an invitation. The art of it is seeming not to.

Notes on a Scandal

New York

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Water Serpent II

Gustav Klimt 1907

Whatever happens.

I will find you. No matter how long it takes. No matter how far. I will find you.

he smiles a real smile

and the sun crashes into the barcar like a
bull and the bartender sees that
I am feeling good
he smiles a real smile and
asks –
“How’s it going?”

On the Train to Del Mar [excerpt]
Charles Bukowski

You’ll see.

In my dreams, I’ll catch you.
Into my arms I’ll catch you.
Do you mind if I’ll always love you.

Heaven’s Gonna Burn Your Eyes
Thievery Corporation

There is no end to things in the heart.

There is no end to things in the heart. Somebody once told me that. She said it came from a poem she believed in. She understood it to mean that if you took something to heart, really brought it inside those red velvet folds, then it would always be there for you. No matter what happened, it would be there waiting. She said this could mean a person, a place, a dream. A mission. Anything sacred. She told me that it is all connected in those secret folds. Always. It is part of the same and will always be there, carrying the same beat as your heart.

Lost Light [excerpt]
Michael Connelly

it's just an honor to be nominated

I don't play hard to get. I am hard to get.

-Rabbit

Observe...Notice..Catch

Observe what’s vivid.
Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.

Cosmopolitan Greetings [excerpt]
Allen Ginsberg

difficult because of its simplicity

Fate loves to invent designs and patterns. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has just a few elements, of a grandeur we can never fathom.

Rainer Maria Rilke
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

in another city.

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

-George Burns

I do not want

I do not want to
love you

I do not want to
save you

I do not want your arms
I do not want your
shoulders

I have me
you have you

let that
be.


A Division [excerpt]
Charles Bukowski

anything.

If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.

Cosmopolitan Greetings [excerpt]
Allen Ginsberg

maxim

Happiness is a choice.

borrowed from the girl at the bar

He lays beside her as she's sleeping...

She says, "I just might leave tomorrow."
He says, "Tomorrow never comes."
So we'll just learn to love our sorrow.
I'll love you tender as you're sleeping.
I'll love you bitter through the day.


Tomorrow Never Comes
Big Head Todd and the Monsters

not one lasts.

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

Autumn Movement [excerpt]
Carl Sandburg

I will catch you

If you're lost you can look
and you will find me - time after time.

If you fall I will catch you
I'll be waiting - time after time.

Time After Time [excerpt]
Cyndi Lauper

they are experiences.

Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions - they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.


Rainer Maria Rilke
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

marvelous error!

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last Night As I Was Sleeping
Antonio Machado

The Weary Blues

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more--

"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."

And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.


The Weary Blues [excerpt]
Langston Hughes

posthumous NM post

A Missouri men's basketball game is a witch's brew of sweat, spit, stink and inbred rage spilling onto a basketball court, mixed together with a shocking lack of understanding of the game. Fat buck-toothed women scream hoarse obscenities and drunken men in drag hurl empty beer bottles. Missouri basketball makes a WWF tag-team match in Alabama look like a Mensa convention.

Norman Mailer
January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007

your greatest love

For A&M, who marry today out of their greatest love... 
You marry out of your greatest love or your greatest fear.

bodies only tell the love.

Look, just as time isn't inside clocks
love isn't inside bodies:
bodies only tell the love.

On Some Other Planet You May Be Right [excerpt]
Yehuda Amichai

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of Three Blind Mice

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife
or anyone else's wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon,"

which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.


I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of Three Blind Mice
Billy Collins

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

Death is a great teacher. It’s just too harsh.

I wish I could tell you that through the tragedy I mined some undiscovered, life-altering absolute that I could pass onto you. I didn’t. The clichés apply – people are what count, life is precious, materialism is overrated, the little things matter, live in the moment – and I can repeat them to you ad nauseam. You might listen, but you won’t internalize. Tragedy hammers it home. Tragedy etches it onto your soul. You might not be happier. But you will be better.

Tell No One
Harlen Coben

the road of excess

You'll never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

William Blake

Just you and me

Look at me
Who am I supposed to be?
Who am I supposed to be?
Look at me
What am I supposed to be?
What am I supposed to be?
Look at me
Oh my love, oh my love

Here I am
What am I supposed to do?
What am I supposed to do?
Here I am
What can I do for you?
What can I do for you?
Here I am
Oh my love, oh my love
Look at me, oh please look at me, my love
Here I am - Oh my love

Who am I?
Nobody knows but me
Nobody knows but me
Who am I?
Nobody else can see
Just you and me
Who are we?
Oh my love, oh my love, oh my love


Look At Me
John Lennon

for R&L

It's you I like,
It's not the things you wear,
It's not the way you do your hair--
But it's you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you--
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys--
They're just beside you.

But it's you I like--
Every part of you,
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you'll remember
Even when you're feeling blue
That it's you I like,
It's you yourself,
It's you, it's you I like.

It's You I Like
Mr. Rogers

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door-

Only this, and nothing more."...

The Raven [excerpt]

Edgar Allan Poe

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost...

All That is Gold Does Not Glitter [excerpt]
JRR Tolkien

The Cheshire Cat:

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll

still not a butterfly.

A caterpillar,
this deep in fall-
-still not a butterfly.


A caterpillar
Matsuo Basho

Wishlist

I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good

Wishlist
Pearl Jam

new love

While you are away
My heart comes undone
Slowly unravels
In a ball of yarn
The devil collects it
With a grin
Our love, our love,
In a ball of yarn

He'll never return it

When you come back
We'll have to make new love


Unravels [excerpt]
Bjork

It's A Beautiful Day

Goddamn right it's a beautiful day.

It's A Beautiful Day
Eels

on identity crises

Whatever you become, someone will long for what you were.

-Taxi Driver Wisdom

the unattainable.

…I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird [excerpt]
Henry Miller

should not have let you go

When the truth is,
I miss you
Yeah the truth is,
that I miss you so

Warning Sign [excerpt]
Coldplay

tame dove, then wild dove,

A precise woman with a short haircut brings order
to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,
moves feelings around like furniture
into a new arrangement.
A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided
into upper and lower,
with weather-forecast eyes
of shatterproof glass.
Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,
one after the other:
tame dove, then wild dove,
then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,
the wild dove, tame dove, dove dove
thrush, thrush, thrush.

A precise woman: on the bedroom carpet
her shoes always point away from the bed.
(My own shoes point toward it.)


A Precise Woman
Yehuda Amichai
Translated by Chana Bloch

and grinned.

You aren't much, I said
one day to my reflection
in a green pond,
and grinned.

The Moths [excerpt]
Mary Oliver

as in dreams

...as in dreams things are and aren't.

Adolescence [excerpt]
P.K. Page

in retrospect

He had spent seven years of life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera

say anything

Dear Diane,

I'll always be there for you.
All the love in my heart,

Lloyd

action

I would rather regret the things I have done than the things I have not.
— Lucille Ball

For your own protection, over their affection...

Nobody broke your heart
You broke your own because you can't finish what you start
Nobody broke your heart
If you're alone, it must be you that wants to be apart

Alameda [excerpt]
Elliot Smith

To Cure Itself

Poetry lifts itself away
from its origin, so as
to maintain itself, so as
to speak, so as
to cure itself
of death and of life.

To Cure Itself [excerpt]
David Ignatow

A Bitterness

I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.

A Bitterness [excerpt]
Mary Oliver

how you made them feel.

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Carl W. Buechner

I'm still angry with you.

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
-Seneca

a skill

Waiting is a skill like anything else.

The Killing Floor
Lee Child

burns at both ends

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light!

First Fig
Edna St. Vincent Millay

October

Look, I want to love this world
as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

October [excerpt]
Mary Oliver

War

In a letter he wrote, but never mailed, to his future wife, fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson said:

For the past two hours, I've been sitting here alone in my tent, trying to figure out just what I should do and what I should say in this letter in response to your letters and some questions you have asked. I have purposely not told you much about my world over here, because I thought it might upset you. Perhaps that has been a mistake, so let me correct that right now. I still doubt if you will be able to comprehend it. I don’t think anyone can who has not been through it.

I live in a world of death. I have watched my friends die in a variety of violent ways...

So far, I have done my duty in this war. I have never aborted a mission or failed to dive on a target no matter how intense the flak. I have lived for my dreams for the future. But like everything else around me, my dreams are dying, too. In spite of everything, I may live through this war and return to Baton Rouge. But I am not the same person you said goodbye to on May 3. No one can go through this and not change. We are all casualties. In the meantime, we just go on. Some way, somehow, this will all have an ending. Whatever it is, I am ready for it.

Quentin Aanenson

nothin'

Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.

Paul Newman
Cool Hand Luke

Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.


Under the Harvest Moon
Carl Sandburg

This morning

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart,

Peonies [excerpt]
Mary Oliver

Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Citizenship in a Republic
Teddy Roosevelt

I'm so

I'm so nothing, I'm so everything -

Summer [excerpt]
Abraham Joshua Heschel

Shall I cry out in anger,

Those I have loved, though now beyond my view,
Have given form and quality to my being.
They have led me into the wide universe
I continue to inhabit, and their presence
Is more real to me than their absence.


Shall I cry out... [excerpt]
Rabbi Morris Adler

your breath alone

The perfume of your body dulls my sense.
I want nor wine nor weed; your breath alone
Suffices.


Flower of Love [excerpt]
Claude McKay

Bar Napkin Sonnet #11

Things happen when you drink too much mescal.
One night, with not enough food in my belly,
he kept on buying. I’m a girl who’ll fall
damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he
was hot and generous and so the least
that I could do was let him kiss me, hard
and soft and any way you want it, beast
and beauty, lime and salt—sweet Bacchus’ pards—
and when his friend showed up I felt so warm
and generous I let him kiss me too.
His buddy asked me if it was the worm
inside that makes me do the things I do.
I wasn’t sure which worm he meant, the one
I ate? The one that eats at me alone?


Bar Napkin Sonnet #11
Moira Egan

Contigo mi vida,

Contigo mi vida,
Quiero vivir la vida.
Y lo que me queda de vida,
Queiro vivir contigo.

With you in my life,
I want to live life.
That which remains in life,
I want to live with you.

Suerte
Shakira

Poem

The rose fades
and is renewed again
by its seed, naturally
but where

save in the poem
shall it go
to suffer no diminution
of its splendor

Poem
William Carlos Williams

no house now

Whoever has no house now will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
And wander on the boulevards, up and down...

Autumn Day [excerpt]
Rainer Maria Rilke

on choosing a mate

You can't go with the person who loves you. That means nothing. You have to be with the person who you love.

-Taxi Driver Wisdom

to make others happy

To love justice, to long for the right, to love mercy, to pity the suffering, to assist the weak, to forget wrongs and remember benefits -- to love the truth, to be sincere, to utter honest words, to love liberty, to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms, to love wife and child and friend, to make a happy home, to love the beautiful; in art, in nature, to cultivate the mind, to be familiar with the mighty thoughts that genius has expressed, the noble deeds of all the world, to cultivate courage and cheerfulness, to make others happy, to fill life with the splendor of generous acts, the warmth of loving words, to discard error, to destroy prejudice, to receive new truths with gladness, to cultivate hope, to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn beyond the night, to do the best that can be done and then to be resigned -- this is the religion of reason, the creed of science. This satisfies the brain and heart.

The Creed of Science
Robert Ingersoll

wild promise

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world... "Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought; "anything at all..."

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Morgensonne, 1952

Morgensonne, 1952
Edward Hopper

Choose

THE single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
Choose: For we meet by one or the other

Choose
Carl Sandburg

only when you believe it

Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it's only faith that gives love its strength and joy.

Night Watch
Sergei Lukyanenko

elevate his life

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Henry David Thoreau

but you're not here

violently happy!
'cause i love you

Violently Happy [excerpt]
Bjork

We read

We read to know we are not alone.

C.S. Lewis

Confession

To say I'm without fear -
It wouldn't be true.
I'm afraid of sickness, humiliation.
Like anyone, I have my dreams.
But I've learned to hide them,
To protect myself
From fulfillment: all happiness
Attracts the Fates' anger.
They are sisters, savages -
In the end they have
No emotion but envy.

Confession
Louise Glück

on uniqueness

Don't worry if one person is not showing the same love that someone else has shown you. No two loves are the same.

-Taxi Driver Wisdom

on meaning in life

You must have things that you care about. Otherwise you are empty.

-Taxi Driver Wisdom

And if we kept traveling west,

...We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.

You Shall Know Our Velocity
Dave Eggers

L'Etranger

I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

The Stranger
Albert Camus

terminally numb

This one girl who I had been watching most of the night stood squashed in the middle of the front row, and when she caught me looking at her, I gave her a smile. She made a gagging look and turned back to the band, swaying her head to the beat. And I got really disgusted and started thinking, what was this girl’s problem? Why couldn’t she just have been nice and smiled back? Was she worrying about imminent war? Was she feeling real terror? Or inspiration? Or passion? That girl, like all the others, I had come to believe, was terminally numb.

The Rules of Attraction
Bret Easton Ellis

one of those rare smiles

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

if I sing

And if I sing you are my voice,

[excerpt]
e.e. cummings

all you can ask for in a friend.

[My friends] looked at me. And I looked at them. And I think they knew. Not anything specific really. They just knew. And I think that's all you can ask for in a friend.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chobsky

To call myself beloved

did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

The Fragment [excerpt]
Raymond Carver

before I saw you.

You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you.

Slow Show
The National

and there it stayed.

When I fell in love with her...I really had no choice. My heart jumped into her and there it stayed.

Silent Joe [excerpt]
T. Jefferson Parker

better to live

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

"Adam's Diary" [excerpt]
Mark Twain

worse than a lie.

Generally speaking, we can and should say everything. We just have to choose the right time, otherwise the truth can be worse than a lie.

Night Watch [excerpt]
Sergei Lukyanenko

stay black, and die.

Work?
I don't have to work.
I don't have to do nothing
but eat, drink, stay black, and die.

Necessity [excerpt]
Langston Hughes

burn together

The seeds of love have taken hold and if we won’t burn together, I’ll burn alone.

The Rules of Attraction
Bret Easton Ellis

ghosts

poetry always demands all my ghosts.

Always [excerpt]
Rane Arroyo

recurring dream

borrowed from ???

completeness

It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

Everything Is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer

still, in my love,

There is still, in my love,
so much room and so many words for you.
Your entire world can fit
into my open, spread-out arms.
Come, plant your gaze in me,
make a home for yourself in my memory.

The Forgotten [excerpt]
Abraham Joshua Heschel

On the Metro

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her. I sit, take out my own book — Cioran, The Temptation to Exist — and notice her glancing up from hers to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.) She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.

On the Metro [excerpt]
C. K. Williams

laughter for no cause

...I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful...

Vita Nuvo [excerpt]
Louise Glück

The City

Everyone has something.
Everything is someone's.

The City and Its Own [excerpt]
Irving Feldman

so many variations

we marvel at the many things there
are to say: so many variations
and colors of the same thought, so

many different lengths in the words
that line up together on our tongues.

Sometimes Never [excerpt]
Joyce Sutphen

a little love,

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

At a Window
Carl Sandburg

on a Friday.

I never thought I would die on a Friday.

The Rules of Attraction
Bret Easton Ellis

only you

my heart
is a pen
in your hand

it is all
up to you
to write me happy or sad...

...please make
my future
better than the past

Only You [excerpts]
Rumi

The woman who loves you.

Left off the highway and
down the hill.
At the bottom, hang another left.
Keep bearing left. The road
will make a Y. Left again.
There's a creek on the left.
Keep going. Just before
the road ends, there'll be
another road. Take it
and no other. Otherwise,
your life will be ruined
forever. There's a log house
with a shake roof, on the left.
It's not that house. It's
the next house, just over
a rise. The house
where trees are laden with
fruit. Where phlox, forsythia,
and marigold grow. It's
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing sun in her hair. The one
who's been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,"What's kept you?"

Waiting
Raymond Carver

all right

Don't you know it's gonna be all right...

Revolution
The Beatles

And I don't want to.

I don't know my future after this weekend. And I don't want to.

Big Time Sensuality
Bjork

pucker up

In the Most Distant Closeness

The hours move on in eternity
while my lips move no farther than
the rose-red threshold of your long, sweet fingers
and it seems to me as if I kiss the world to come.

In the Most Distant Closeness [excerpt]
Abraham Joshua Heschel

always ready for you.

My eyes are always ready for you.

The Rules of Attraction
Bret Easton Elis

Sex without love

Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best.

Woody Allen

30

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
-Abraham Lincoln

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
-Anais Nin

I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.
-Elizabeth Arden

I want to die young at a ripe old age.
-Ashley Mantagu

I am going to start living vicariously through myself.
-Rich L.

dream

Think about when you were a child...What did you dream about?

borrowed from a TV commercial

that sacred passion, that divine swoon

Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.

Love. [excerpt from Orthodoxy]
Robert Ingersoll

telling the truth?

Do you think not getting caught in a lie is the same things as telling the truth?

Three Days of the Condor

its existence undisputed

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini

it is about family.

As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about family.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian
Marina Lewycka

If Not For You

If not for you, babe, I couldn't find the door
Couldn't even see the floor
I'd be sad and blue if not for you.

If not for you, baby, I'd lay awake all night
Wait for the morning light
To shine in through
But it will not be new if not for you.

If not for you, my sky would fall, rain would gather too
Without your love I'd be nowhere at all
I'd be lost if not for you
And you know it's true.

If not for you, my sky would fall, rain would gather too
Without your love I'd be nowhere at all
Oh what would I do if not for you?

If not for you, winter would have no spring
I couldn't hear the robins sing
I just wouldn't have a clue

Anyway it wouldn't ring true if not for you
If not for you, if not for you.

If Not For You
Bob Dylan

the pair cast a single shadow

borrowed from/for Liz:



Love and Pain [also called Vampire]
Edvard Munch

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Wild Geese
Mary Oliver

maxim

It's only temporary.

borrowed from the desk of KG

And miles to go

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost

the life I've led...

In my motorcycle mirror I think about the life I've led...

Borrowed from Nimrod's Son
The Pixies

Lifedance

the area dividing the brain and the soul
is affected in many ways by
experience –
some lose all mind and become soul:
insane.
some lose all soul and become mind:
intellectual.
some lose both and become:
accepted.

Lifedance
Charles Bukowski

DG's Tattoo

"Amor Fati" - Love Your Fate

home

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Memorial Day

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

attributed to Plato

Knife

Something
just now
moved through my heart
like the thinnest of blades
as that red-tail pumped
once with its great wings
and flew above the gray, cracked
rock wall.
It wasn't
about the bird, it was
something about the way
stone stays
mute and put, whatever
goes flashing by.
Sometimes,when I sit like this, quiet,
all the dreams of my blood
and all outrageous divisions of time
seem ready to leave,
to slide out of me.
Then, I imagine, I would never move.
By now
the hawk has flown five miles
at least,
dazzling whoever else has happened
to look up.
I was dazzled. But that
wasn't the knife.
It was the sheer, dense wall
of blind stone
without a pinch of hope
or a single unfulfilled desire.

Knife
Mary Oliver

Beguiling

She is so beguiling
That when she beckons
I can run a mile
In twenty seconds.

Beguiling
Roger McGough

forever in my garden.

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.

Attributed to and borrowed from:
Claudia Ghandi

The Gift

This morning there's snow everywhere. We remark on it.
You tell me you didn't sleep well. I say
I didn't either. You had a terrible night. "Me too."
We're extraordinarily calm and tender with each other
as if sensing the other's rickety state of mind.
As if we knew what the other was feeling. We don't,
of course. We never do. No matter.
It's the tenderness I care about. That's the gift
this morning that moves me and holds me.
Same as every morning.


The Gift [excerpt]
Raymond Carver

one book

Are we not like two volumes of one book?

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

St. Ives

As I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives
Said he, 'I think it's much more fun
Than getting stuck with only one.'

St. Ives
Roald Dahl

Love Sick

I'm sick of love; I wish I'd never met you
I'm sick of love; I'm trying to forget you

Just don't know what to do
I'd give anything to
Be with you

Love Sick [excerpt]
Bob Dylan

Bluebird

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

Bluebird
Charles Bukowski

For Mom(s)

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around - and why his parents will always wave back. ~William D. Tammeus

My mom is a neverending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being. I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune. ~Graycie Harmon

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie. ~Tenneva Jordan

like their mothers.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde

what I am feeling

I never know what I am feeling until it’s too late.

Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides

the joy of your approach

There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you
and you alone
but it must wait
while I drink in
the joy of your approach,
perhaps for the last time.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, Book I [excerpt]
William Carlos Williams

Borrowed from "the Book of Dreams"...

I dream of when I met my wife, fifty years ago, and it’s exactly as it happened. I dream of our marriage, and I can even see my father’s tears of pride. It’s all there, just as it was. But then I dream of my own death, which I have heard is impossible to do, but you must believe me. I dream of my wife telling me on my deathbed that she loves me, and even though she thinks I can’t hear her, I can, and she says she wouldn’t have changed anything. It feels like a moment I’ve lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.

Everything Is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Sex Without Love
Sharon Olds

I Am Not Yours

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

I Am Not Yours [excerpt]
Sarah Teasdale

Cake

i wanted one life
you wanted another
we couldn't have our cake
so we ate eachother.

Cake
Roger McGough

Pettiness is the first casualty...

Hospitals strip a lot from you - your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it.

Would you like this magazine? I'm done with it.
Oh, let me remove my coat. Take the seat. Take the seat, take it.
I'm going to get a soda. Would you like one?
Is this okay, or should I keep flipping?

Even the employees in the gift shop and the cafeteria and the food court and at the coffee carts, are to a person, respectful and courteous. Never solicitous, but kind. Because they don't know if your son just died, your wife just received chemo, you've been told you won't see June.

There is a basic human concern in hospitals.

ICU [excerpt from Coronado]
Dennis Lehane

Where the Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

Where the Sidewalk Ends
Shel Silverstein