“Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.”
Category: other people’s writing
Blue by Becca Yenser
I like the blue cold gelcaps,
Blue as an ocean,
If an ocean could be combed clean,
Fat as a beluga whale, no waist,
Nothin’, just a shape equally
Thick at both ends, no taper.
I like my pillow a certain way,
Feathers lifting the thoracic vertebra,
Tents and bears and campfires.
In my dreams I take a train through
Europe, I own a farm with Nick Cave,
My dog is alive again, mid-river.
This is not what I meant to say.
The president is shooting holes
Through my bedsheet. Why are
you laughing? In the morning
I’m a foot soldier in slippers;
Taking word arrows to the skull.
There is no end to the way the
World will end.
Oh my god, to be asleep
In a sea of crushed blue whatevers..
Robert Frost – Birches
Why do some people hate poetry?
“Poetry had undergone a fantastic transformation. Poetry, Shelley says, is “connate with the origin of man,” and “a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” Poetry comprises every creative activity of human nature, including the arts, politics, and science: “The institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life” are all in some sense poets, since they shape reality in the light of their vision. Shelley even speaks of “the poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ,” as if Christianity itself were just one enormous poem.
10 Greatest Poems Ever Written
Top 10 lists are a marketer’s click-bait-dream. We consume lists like these because they are easy to digest. Because our time can’t be bothered by more than 10 things chosen arbitrarily at a time.
Oh, how I love them.
Comment on Moving Backwards – A Tribe Called Quest
“I have been feeling like a row of cups, some of them full and some of them not. Spilled one day, filled the next, empty then overflowing. The changes have been too fast, too sudden, to follow. I am an inconsistent row of cups. I am thirsty, I am prosperous, I am doomed, I am safe, I am among friends, I am alone. Just a row of cups. When Tribe’s Jarobi and Tip arrive, with Anderson.Paak and Consequence, it is as if they are holding pitchers of water. It is free refills. Music that’s pure relief – rhyme and rhythm, beat and leap, restoration. The reminder of a kind of solidarity – kinship despite difference – or of other artists’ dexterity – an admiration for everything you can’t do, but others can. Moving backwards but making progress; this isn’t my song but I’ll borrow it.” – Sean: saidthegramophone.com
after all by Dena Rash Guzman
this is scatterbrain
a theory of a war-torn mind
a disturbance of experience
thus a theory of melancholia
meets its manic parent
(don’t let me spend all the money)
(don’t let me near the knives)
(don’t let me let me let me out)
this is why I quit writing
how I put my faith in garbage
where I went from advocate to patient
thus a theory of mania
meets its melancholic cousin
(don’t leave me all alone)
(don’t let me drown)
(don’t let me drown)
this is where I get off
this is the place I relearn joy
this is when! I regain balance
I hold my loved ones close
a reward after reconstruction
(don’t let me drop hope)
(don’t forget I’m in here)
(don’t let me let me let me out)
(don’t let me drown)
You and I: Mask and Mask by Adam Cornford
You are the God-made image of God
I am a flat-faced ape with an overgrown brain
You are the composed captain of your fate I
am an ocean’s bone-coral colony of specialized cells
You are identity’s animate armor striding through
time I am a superposed standing wave in a ceaseless flow
Your body is towered clay with a soul folded in My body is
a ramifying weave of energy trees and information trees
Your skin is a sheath for unregarded meat My skin
is the sail of a vessel voyaging in all directions
at once You are first person singular
I am first people singular
Tyler Strittmatter 