It's so hard

It's so hard to forget pain, 
but it's even harder to remember sweetness. 
We have no scar to show for happiness. 
We learn so little from peace.

- Chuck Palahniuk
From Diary

Pay attention

Pay attention to the gentle ones, 
the ones who can hold your gaze 
with no discomfort, 
the ones who smile to themselves 
while sitting alone in a coffeeshop, 
the ones who walk as if floating. 
Take them in and marvel at them. 
Simply marvel. 
It takes an extraordinary person 
to carry themselves 
as if they do not live in hell. 

- D. Bunyavong

The rest is gravy

The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. 
It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atoms bound.
The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; 
you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, 
and space is a beauty married to a blind man. 
The blind man is Freedom, or Time, 
and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. 
The world came into being with the signing of the contract…
A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 
A poet says, 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.' 
This is what we know. 
The rest is gravy.

 - Annie Dillard
From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

- Dylan Thomas

I’ve had it

I’ve had it
with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent.

- Stephen Dunn
From Different Hours 

I have this strange feeling

I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. 
It's hard to put into words, 
but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, 
and someone came, disassembled me, 
and hurriedly put me back together again. 
That sort of feeling.

-  Haruki Murakami
From Sputnik Sweetheart

Dropped

Dropped
and falling
from such
heights
for so
long
that
maybe
I will have
enough time
to learn
flying.

- Vera Pavlova

The Only Poem

This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn’t kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn’t turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn’t sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me

- Leonard Cohen

Bad People

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks--what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams--that's the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, "You."
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn't move on its own. It takes sometimes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless God--who refuses to let you
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge--can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

- Robert Bly

Belief in Magic

How could I not?
Have seen a man walk up to a piano
and both survive.
Have turned the exterminator away.
Seen lipstick on a wine glass not shatter the wine.
Seen rainbows in puddles.
Been recognized by stray dogs.
I believe reality is approximately 65% if.
All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas.
I believe we’re surrounded by crystals.
Not just Alexander Vvedensky.
Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard’s bullet did him in.
Nonetheless.
Nevertheless
I believe there are many kingdoms left.
The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.
A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life
even though
even though this is my second heart.
Because the first failed,
such was its opportunity.
Was cut out in pieces and incinerated.
I asked.
And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart
in a jar.
Strange tangled imp.
Wee sleekit in red brambles.
You know what it feels like to hold
a burning piece of paper, maybe even
trying to read it as the flames get close
to your fingers until all you’re holding
is a curl of ash by its white ear tip
yet the words still hover in the air?
That’s how I feel now.

- Dean Young

My Soul

In the flame of the flickering fire   
The sins of my soul are few
And the thoughts in my head are the thoughts of a bed   
With a solitary view.
But the eye of eternal consciousness   
Must blink as a bat blinks bright
Or ever the thoughts in my head be stilled
On the brink of eternal night.

Oh feed to the golden fish his egg
Where he floats in his captive bowl,
To the cat his kind from the womb born blind,   
And to the Lord my soul.

- Stevie Smith

Man

Tiger got to hunt, 
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit 
and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, 
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself 
he understand.

- Kurt Vonnegut
From Cat’s Cradle

Every Beautiful Thing

The sun is perfect and you woke this morning. 
You have enough language in your mouth to be understood. 
You have a name, and someone wants to call it. 
Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it. 
If we just start there, 
every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible. 
If we start there, 
everything, for a moment, is right in the world.
- Warsan Shire

I Go Down To The Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

- Mary Oliver
From A Thousand Mornings

To Be

To love. 
To be loved. 
To never forget your own insignificance. 
To never get used to the unspeakable violence and 
the vulgar disparity of life around you. 
To seek joy in the saddest places. 
To pursue beauty to its lair. 
To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. 
To respect strength, never power. 
Above all, to watch. 
To try and understand. 
To never look away. 
And never, never to forget.

- Arundhati Roy
From The Cost of Living

Sometimes

Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
the past, for if there is anything we must change
it is the past. To look back
and see another map.

Love enough to fill
a shoe, a suitcase, a bit of ink,
a painting, a child’s eyes at a chalkboard,
a bit of chalk, a bit of
bone in ash.

All that is cupped,
all that is emptied

the rush of water from a pump,
a word spelled out
on a palm.

- Anne Michaels
From Correspondences

Fairy- tale Logic

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

- A.E. Stallings

silently if, out of not knowable

silently if, out of not knowable
night’s utmost nothing, wanders a little guess
(only which is this world) more of my life does
not leap than with the mystery your smile

sings or if (spiraling as luminous
they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams,
less into heaven certainly earth swims
than each my deeper death becomes your kiss

losing through you what seemed myself;i find
selves unimaginably mine;beyond
sorrow’s own joys and hoping’s very fears

yours is the light by which my spirit’s born:
yours is the darkness of my soul’s return
–you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars

- e.e cummings

My Thoughts

The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; 
My thoughts follow the exact same process.

-  Virginia Woolf

Lullaby of Crossing the River

Carrying a day
is like carrying a mountain,
those endless small words
men use to guard
their helplessness.
Put your day down.
Come to the bank in the snow
wearing grace and pain,
the silence at the end of sentences.
Breathe the snow
and the sad odor of human dust.
All the roads are inside you,
even the desire
not to desire
brooding over your own horizon.
The innocents await you.
There is no one to wish farewell
except yourself in the orphaned dark.

- Terrance Keenan
From St. Nadie in Winter: Zen Encounters with Loneliness