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FAQ page / ask / submit / online poetry directory / featured posts
FAQ page / ask / submit / online poetry directory / featured posts
Posts tagged poem.
Frank O’Hara
(via hookedonsemiotics)
9
I broke your heart.
Now barefoot I tread
on shards.
17
Why is the word yes so brief?
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,
so that upon reflection you could stop
in the middle of saying it.
18
—Sing me The Song of Songs.
—Don’t know the words.
—Then sing the notes.
—Don’t know the notes.
—Then simply hum.
—Forgot the tune.
—Then press my ear
to your ear
and sing what you hear.
What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.
A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.
Still, the heart is a river
pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.
It opens on a bay
and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in,
it carries the cry of the loon and the salts
of the unutterably human.
A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river
salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide
upstream until he disappears
into the nothing from which he came. Only the thought remains.
Lacking the eagle’s cunning or the wisdom of the sparrow,
where shall I turn, drowning in sorrow?
Who will know what the trees know, the spidery patience
of young maple or what the willows confess?
Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.
Listen to what the water says.
Wind, be a friend.
There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.
Sam Hamill, What the Water Knows
Evan says the idea that you can be transformed by love
is melodramatic and childish, the kind of thing you leave
behind at the last slumber party or give up the day you stop
actually pondering the existence of unicorns. He says
love unveils you. That whoever you were you still are.
Only now maybe you’re more so. You can afford courage.
Evan says it makes you shameless- that it’s safe now
to reclaim whoever you were before you became embarrassed.
He says we all masquerade as impassive people because
passion exposes ourselves as assailable (a word that means
defenseless). That love unmasks us and that’s risky. But
essential. This past year, I’ve sat back, quit asking for anything.
Evan says that love lets you be greedy, allows you to grasp
what you need and keep it. That we can’t be cheap with each other.
Sometimes he tests me from behind the lens of the camera,
Tell me what terrifies you. Tell me who is most necessary for your
survival. If I fidget he’ll insist I’m not answering honestly. Replay
the tape to show me where my eyes shifted away from him.
Evan says that he doesn’t trust people who don’t take drugs,
since that signals an inability to surrender to someone else.
Even early civilizations built rituals around narcotics. I don’t see
what’s so ceremonial about Evan and his friend smoking pot
to play Vice City, what sort of emotional integrity gets celebrated
the nights he cuts a few lines so we can screw longer. But I’m young,
Evan says, lucky he’s patient. He wishes I’d just let him instruct me.
Eireann Corrigan, The Tutor
1.
In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.
2.
Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do not understand is crying. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. She is holding a letter. She is in love with Peter. I am in love with her.
3.
Stand on the floor where it’s marked X. I am standing by your side where it’s marked Y. We are a shoulder’s length apart. I’m so close you can almost smell the perfume. If I step ten paces away from you, there could be a garden between us, or a table and some chairs. If I step another 20 paces there could be a house between us. If I continue to walk away from you in this way, tramping through walls and hovering above water, in 80,150,320 steps I will bump into you. I can never get away from you, and will you remember me? Distance brings us closer. There is no distance.
4.
In 1961 I was in Berlin. It was a dusty Sunday in August. In the radio news was out that Ulbricht had convinced Khrushchev to build a wall around West Berlin. I remember it precisely: By midnight East German troops had sealed off the zonal boundary with barbed wire. The streets along which the barrier ran had been torn up. I lived in that street. It was the day after my birthday. I remember the dust covering the sky. I remember being scared. Father had not returned from the other side. The Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse had orders to shoot anyone who would attempt to defect. Father had not returned.
5.
Happiness is simple.Sadness forks into many roads.
6.
Before the time of Christ, Aristotle believed that the earth was the center of the universe because he needed a stationary reference point against which to measure all other motions: a rock falling, a star reeling through the sky, his heart beating against his chest like a club. He needed to believe in certainty, in absolute space. Without it, the world would not be known absolutely. Without it, the world cannot be known.
Twenty centuries later Hendrik Lorentz needed to believe that every single molecule in the universe must move through a stationary material called the aether, as every human being in his various turnings must move through God. Scientists looked everywhere for proof of this aether. And everywhere they found nothing.
7.
I have sometimes been accused of being a bore. I beg to differ: people laugh at my jokes, and I’m handsome. I would like now to talk more about myself: I don’t like going to airports and hospitals. They make me uneasy. In both cases, somebody is always going to leave. I was born in 1983, and have never been to Berlin. But I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961. I have a memory of something that never happened.
I would like to elaborate on myself, but you will understand if I talk instead about the sky in Berlin in 1961: it was covered with dust. There were no birds. There was no sky.
8.
Memory is brutal because precise.
9.
She said: give me more space. I said: don’t you love me anymore? She said: give me more space. I said: why? Did I do something wrong? Is there something wrong? Is there someone else? When did you stop loving me? In what precise moment? In what room? What city?
I held her tight as one who’s about to lose his own life holds on. Then she said: give me more space. I said: no.
10.
I have only one purpose: to live intensely.
11.
I wish I never met youand I wish you never left.
You taste like a river in June.
12.
I’m going to say something important. Look at my face. Ignore my eyes. Just listen to me. But listen only to the timbre of my voice, not to what I am saying. They are different. They are two different rooms. The first is an exhibition of despair, the second only an explanation.
The first is all you have to listen to. So listen carefully because I cannot repeat myself:
“Everything/ one suspects to be true/ is true.”
13.
In 1879 a boy is born in Germany. At age five he’d throw a chair at his violin teacher and chase him out. In time he would develop the capacity to withdraw instantaneously from a crowd into loneliness. At twenty-six he would publish his theory of relativity in Annalen der Physik. He looks crazy, but he is certain: there is no aether, no absolute space.
14.
Sometimes they thought it was the words.What they wanted to say could not be said.
They fixed the TV, vacuumed the rug,dusted the furniture, looked out the window.
Sometimes she would purposefully lose hold ofa plate and it would smash to the floor.
Then they would have something to say,only to begin to say it then stop.
15.
Look at this box. It is empty except for a diary, a book, and this picture in my hand. Now look at this picture. It weighs nothing and occupies almost zero space. I can slip it in anywhere and it will fit: inside the diary, under the box, through a crack on the wall. If I tear it several times, it will occupy a different volume, many and various. It mutates, you see. If I burn it, it will smoke into the air. It will take up a whole expanse.
16.
How many more timesare you going to let the worldhurt you?
17.
My father is an incorrigible storyteller. He would tell the same stories in different ways. I wouldn’t know which ones to believe. So I believed all of them. “There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu.
Father would point at the TV. He would repeat lines, rehearse the beginnings and ends, explicate with his hands the elaborate twists and turns of every road.
He said: “I am dying.”
I said: “But aren’t all of us dying.”
18.
And I thought the worldwas about this leaving,not about anybody’s leavingbut about this leaving.The next day it was the same.
19.
A beautiful woman walks into a room. The room is dark. There are no windows. There is one light bulb but any time now it will go off. I pretend not to notice and look away, my heart beating against my chest like a club. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. What other forms of happiness are there than this?
20.
In 1989 the Berlin wall falls down.
21.
I believe in love only when it rains.
22.
To appreciate the value of land, one need only look into a painting: so much beauty. Buying land means buying the layers of beauty directly above it. It means buying the sky above it. And the birds above it, the clouds, the gods.
In truth you are buying a corner of the universe. You are saying: this is my room. You are saying: I live here. Here I exist.
23.
Your sadness is immaterial. You didnot come into the world to be happy.
~
You came to suffer/survive.
24.
How many words have you spoken in your life?How many did you mean?How many did you understand?
25.
Somebody picks up a phone. He dials a number. His voice travels a thousand miles into another country. On the other end somebody picks up and hears the voice. Who is this?– This is me. The phone is hung up. The voice travels back a thousand miles.
Elsewhere somebody picks up a phone and before he could dial forgets the number.
26.
Sometimes wars are waged because there are too many people in too few rooms.
27.
Memory is incomplete–lost.The world is incomplete–vanishing.
Nothing more happens. You open your eyes and it’s over.
Memory is brutal.Memory is precise.
28.
In the next room people I do not know are talking with hushed voices. Their secret slips out the window like a cat. It is raining, and I press my ear to the wall. I imagine that one of them is smoking a cigarette. I imagine that one of them is covering his mouth in surprise.
29.
When my aunt died the doctors said the fat clogged her arteries. Every week she visited the hospital, and every week the vein on her wrist had to be ripped out so a catheter could be stuck into her body to suck out her blood. You could see the plasma pass through a filter and then back to the body. If you put your ear to her wrist you would hear her heart.
Before my uncle died the heart attacks were so excruciating he said he’d prefer to just die. They transported him to the hospital, and on the way to the emergency room his heart gave. Mother said my uncle ate too much pork and drank too much beer. She wonders if he’s going to be happy in heaven.
30.
In some house in some province in some country in some novel there is a story of a man a father a child a lover who dies because of too much sadness.
31.
Nobody thought that what was wrong was the love.
32.
She said: give me more space.
Arkaye Kierulf, Spaces (via fuckyeahfilipinopoets)
Because the night you asked me,
the small scar of the quarter moon
had healed—the moon was whole again;
because life seemed so short;
because life stretched before me
like the darkened halls of nightmare;
because I knew exactly what I wanted;
because I knew exactly nothing;
because I shed my childhood with my clothes—
they both had years of wear left in them;
because your eyes were darker than my father’s;
because my father said I could do better;
because I wanted badly to say no;
because Stanley Kowalski shouted “Stella…;”
because you were a door I could slam shut;
because endings are written before beginnings;
because I knew that after twenty years
you’d bring the plants inside for winter
and make a jungle we’d sleep in naked;
because I had free will;
because everything is ordained;
I said yes.
Linda Pastan, Because
Charles Baudelaire
There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can’t remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and
people
Who love God but can’t remember where
He was when they went to sleep. It’s
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time
To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,
You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
And greatness has a defender, and even in death
you’re safe.
Robert Bly, People Like Us
Your anatomy
could be
our destiny.
You have:
2 aorta
hot, red and sweet
2 ventricles
that suck and pump;
4 chambers
that make
you throb
inside.
Make a fist.
They say your fist
is roughly
the size of your heart.
I’m looking for
the well-hung woman.
Daphne Gottlieb, personal ad
We met in a coastal village
spent a lovely night without leaving an address
going separate ways. Three years later
we meet again by coincidence.
The whole
three years spun a novel
we abandoned:
They fail to recognize themselves
as though meeting in another story
for an encounter.
One asks: Who are you, so cold and weary
The other says: I only know a thread is loose on my sweater
The more you pull it, the more it lengthens
until I completely vanish.
Hsia Yü, To Be Elsewhere
