Photograph by Harold Feinstein
What can I do with my happiness?
How can I keep it,
conceal it,
bury it
where I may never lose it?
I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain,
gather it up with lace and silk,
and press it over myself again.
- Anaïs Nin
From Henry & June
Photograph by Kata Sedlak
Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there.
- Raul Gutierrez
Photograph by Jonas Bendiksen
The bigness of the world is redemption.
Despair compresses you into a small space,
and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground.
To dig deeper into the self, to go underground,
is sometimes necessary,
but so is the other route of getting out of yourself,
into the larger world, into the openness
in which you need not
clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest
Being able to travel in both ways matters,
and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question
begins by going outward and beyond.
- Rebecca Solnit
From The Faraway Nearby
Photograph by Danny Lyon
Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears.
Take in what is there and
give no thought to what might have been there
or what is somewhere else.
That can come later,
if it must come at all.
- C.S. Lewis
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Photograph by Bill Burke
I have to tell you,
there are times when
the sun strikes me
like a gong,
and I remember everything,
even your ears.
- Dorothea Grossman
Photograph by Simone Strijk
Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten
what it is that hurts or where, until you move?
There is a second of consciousness that is clean again.
A second that is you, without memory or experience,
the animal warm and waking into a brand new world.
There is the sun dissolving the dark,
and light as clear as music,
filling the room where you sleep
and the other rooms behind your eyes.
- Jeanette Winterson
Photograph by Tim Barber
Everything in the world is beautiful,
but Man only recognizes beauty
if he sees it either seldom or from afar.
Listen, today we are gods!
Our blue shadows are enormous!
We move in a gigantic, joyful world!
- Vladimir Nabokov
Photograph by Leon Levinstein
“Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down.
But it is one of those words, like Love,
that I have never quite understood.
Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them
and I am no exception –
especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong.
They are too elusive and far to relative
when you compare them to sharp, mean little words
like Punk and Cheap and Phony.
I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin,
but the big ones are tough and it takes
either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.
- Hunter S. Thompson
From The Rum Diary
Photograph by Doug Dubois
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
Photograph by Tytia Habing
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
Photograph by Preston Gannaway
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.
Photograph by Lauren Fleishmann
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
Photograph by Jay Maisel
I’ve had it
with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches.
A heart is to be spent.
- Stephen Dunn
From Different Hours
Photograph by Mitch Epstein
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
Photograph by Jeff James
Dropped
and falling
from such
heights
for so
long
that
maybe
I will have
enough time
to learn
flying.
- Vera Pavlova
Photograph by Andrew Bush
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
Photograph by Sophie Green
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
Photograph by Igor Moukhin
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
Photograph by Sebastian Hidalgo
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
Photograph by Harry Gruyaert
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