If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
One fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other. They pulled out their swords and shot one another. One deaf cop, on the beat heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.
... It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness.
I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”-In the yellow time of pollen
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way.
Her shoes were so pink that if she stepped in bubblegum, nobody would be able to see. And my shoes were so brown that if I stepped in shit, you wouldn’t be able to tell that I had just trampled on the collected works of Allen Ginsberg.
What if you slept?What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in you hand Ah, what then?
Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I've tasted of desire,I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twiceI think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.
A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick. If, when you see the symptoms, you can tell, Your cure is quick.A sound man knows that sickness makes him sick and before he catches it his cure is quick.
Some thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs private pagus or demesne.Stranger, unless with bedroom eyesI beckon you to fraternize,Beware of rudely crossing it:I have no gun, but I can spit.
I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
IMPROVIDENCEThe other lives I might have ledAll now might as well beDead. Survived by no one.Barren, without issue of any sort:This withered bud, failedIn art and love. With no time leftTo change my course. But time enoughfor infinite remorse.
He that is thy friend indeed,He will help thee in thy need:If thou sorrow, he will weep;If thou wake, he cannot sleep:Thus of every grief in heartHe with thee doth bear a part.These are certain signs to knowFaithful friend from flattering foe.
This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
