Grass of Walt
[D!@%] of Moby
Boz gets Lit
Bard’s the [$h¡t]
poetry: about
Emily’s dash
Say what! You mean
That’s not why they call it an
Em dash? — those Dickinson
Hyphens between?
Inkdreaming
the smell of ink is
intoxicating to me —
others may have wine
but I have poetry
Only bruises
Poetry allows
my soul to age gracefully
my mind to land softly
amongst the new gray hairs —
without it I’d have thunked
into my forties with
tail bone, funny bone
and spirit broken
Marrow
Poetry is the dancing skeleton of
Flux
cracks in poetry
are not ruins
but gaps to let
meaning breathe
Midair
poets swing too high
until the chain kinks
and snaps
the
fall
is
poetry
The Poet, II
My body was once a beautiful house of marble,
Kissed to pale rose by the passionate heat of the sun,
Wherein through cunning channels flowed forever
Health-giving crimson blood in steady tides.
My eyes were then quick to see and to welcome beauty,
My lips smiled often with gratified desire,
My hands shook not, but were fit for caress or grapple,
My arms rose and my body moved in strength.
Then not a single line of any poem
Had my hands raped from my brain, but untouched and pure
They abode in the land of distant visions where no man
Heard my voice calling for them at eventide.
My blood lies in great black lakes now, sluggish and frozen,
Or fumes in like some boiling, stinging, poison brew
Till it suddenly stops in a lassitude unspoken,
Or bursts through my pores and covers me with red dew:
My eyes are bleared now and dull with sleepless midnights,
My lips are shrunken purses—their gold is spent,
My hands unsteadily clutch and paw and tremble,
My arms are as strings of macaroni bent.
And as for my chest, ’tis like a leaky air-box
Fixed to some cheap melodeon out of tune,
The bellows creak, the loose and brown keys rattle,
And the music that comes is like a dog’s sick moan.
But in my brain there seethes an adulterous hotchpotch
Of poems clean and disgusting, mad and sage;
And pain, like a dry fire, keeps them ever a-boiling
Till they splash over and blacken some wasted page.
Yes, I am a poet now to be mocked and applauded,
A turnspit that turns and must never taste the meat:
Behold how great I am, but I wait for a greater,
Even Death, who will silence the march of these crippled feet.
—John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950),
Essence
A poet can translate birdsong much more faithfully than the biologist ever could.
Silence in the poet
after a lifetime of doing almost nothing
but collecting words, now — here i am
finding that my life has become all about
that which cannot be expressed by words —
after a half-life of a burning desire to write
in order to find myself, suddenly i’ve found
an even more impassioned desire to write
by leaving behind that moulten shell, and
in this moment i find — silence is poetry
when the poet has nothing more to say
Final draft
When the poem just won’t come out right, sometimes the best revision is to crumple it up and throw it poetically into the trash.
I sew ragged
Poetry is patchwork —
& only the best poets
can hide all the seams.
Heartwritten
Your prayer can be poetry, and poetry can be your prayer.