laughter

laughter dies but is never dead
laughter lies outside the back of its head
laughter laughs at what is never said
it trills and squeals and swills in your head
it trills and squeals in the heads of the dead
and so all the lives remain laughing instead
sucked in by the laughter of the severed head
sucked in by the mouths of the laughing dead

reading

to read poetry is essentially to daydream

poetry lost...

...and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

revolution?

to create is to resist.

solitude

how happy the child who really possesses his moments of solitude.

poetics

an artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates

Federico García Lorca

Then I realised I had been murdered
They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches ....
but they did not find me.
They never found me?
No. They never found me.

THE SMILE - william blake

There is a smile of love,
there is a smile of deceit;
and there is a smile of smiles,
in which these two smiles meet.
And there is a frown of hate,
and there is a frown of disdain;
and there is a frown of frowns
which you strive to forget in vain,
For it sticks in the heart's deep core,
and it sticks in the deep backbone.
And no smile that ever was smiled,
but only one smile alone --
That betwixt the cradle and grave
it only once smiled can be,
but when it once is smiled
there's an end to all misery.

INFERNO - dante (excerpt)

Maintain the melancholy souls of those who lived without infamy or praise.

ROMEO IS BLEEDING - hilary henkin

you ever wonder what hell is mike?
maybe it ain't the place you think
fire and brimstone,
devil with horns poking you in the butt
with a pitchfork
what's hell?
the time you should have walked
but you didn't
that's hell...
you're looking at it.

THE STALKER (excerpt) - andrei tarkovsky

Here we are at the threshold.
This is the most important moment of your lives.
You have to know that here
your most cherished wish will come true.
The most sincere one.
The one reached through suffering.

AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION (excerpt) - dylan thomas

Though they go mad they shall be sane
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion

COLLOQUE SENTIMENTAL - mario de andrade

The street all naked . . . The lightless houses . . .
And the myrrh of unwitting martyrs . . .
"Let me put my handkerchief to my nose.
I have all the perfumes of Paris!"

SADNESS - mario de andrade

Deep down. Filthy my heart . . .
Look at the building: Continental Slaughterhouses.
Vices have corrupted me in false adulation without sacrifices . . .
My soul hunchbacked like the Avenue St. John . . .

AMOR - mario de andrade

humor

THE LISTING ATTIC (excerpt) - edward gorey

Each night Father fills me with dread
When he sits at the foot of my bed;
Id not mind that he speaks
In gibbers and squeaks,
But for seventeen years he's been dead.

SONG - seamus heaney

A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

SMALL SONG - a. r. ammons

The reeds give way to the wind
and give the wind away.

THIS PLACE IN THE WAYS - muriel rukeyser

Having come to this place
I set out once again
on the dark and marvelous way
from where I began:
belief in the love of the world,
woman, spirit, and man.

Having failed in all things
I enter a new age
seeing the old ways as toys,
the houses of a stage
painted and long forgot;
and I find love and rage.

Rage for the world as it is
but for what it may be
more love now than last year
and always less self-pity
since I know in a clearer light
the strength of the mystery.

And at this place in the ways
I wait for song.
My poem-hand still, on the paper,
all night long.
Poems in throat and hand, asleep,
and my storm beating strong!

ENDLESS HOPE - franz kafka

Yes, there is hope -- endless hope. But not for us.

OCEAN - leonard cohen

If you don't become the ocean
you'll be seasick everyday.

TRYING TO FLY - meng jiao

A poet suffers making poems -
better to waste your efforts trying to fly.

WANDERER'S SONG - meng jiao

The thread in the hand of a kind mother
Is the coat on the wanderer's back.
Before he left she stitched it close
In secret fear that he would be slow to return.
Who will say that the inch of grass in his heart
Is gratitude enough for all the sunshine of spring?

FORGETFULLNESS - billy collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

A MOOD OF QUIET BEAUTY - john ashbery

The evening light was like honey in the trees
When you left me and walked to the end of the street
Where the sunset abruptly ended.
The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself
To the fragile forget-me-not flower.
You climbed aboard.

Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones,
Dreams I had, including suicide,
Puff out the hot-air balloon now.
It is bursting, it is about to burst
With something invisible
Just during the days.
We hear, and sometimes learn,
Pressing so close

And fetch the blood down, and things like that.
Museums then became generous, they live in our breath.

WISHED LOST (excerpt) - sarah ruth jacobs

and sobbing they play again
like records scratched through the skin.

SECOND FIG - edna st. vincent millay

safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

FIRST FIG - edna st. vincent millay

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--

It gives a lovely light!

HOW I LOVE YOUR EYES - fyodor tyuchev

how I love your eyes, my friend,
with their radiant play of fire,
when you lift them fleetingly
and like lightning in the skies
your gaze sweeps swiftly round.

but there is charm more powerful still
in eyes downward cast
for the moment of a passionate kiss,
when through lowered eyelids glows
the sombre, dull flame of desire.

IRRATIONALITY - frederick neitzsche

The irrationalty of a thing is no argument against its existence rather a condition of it.

THOUSAND STARS - frederick nietzsche

You need chaos in your heart to give birth to a thousand stars.

THERE WILL COME SOFT RAIN - sara teasdale

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

KNOWLEDGE - andrei tarkovsky

knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in life.

MY LIFE - henri michaux

You're going someplace without me, my life.
You're rolling away.
And I'm still waiting to make my move.
You've taken the battle somewhere
Abandoning me on the way.
I never followed, I stay.
Where you are leading me, I can't plainly see.
The very little that I want, you never bring to me.
Because of this emptiness, I want
So many things, almost everything...
Because of this emptiness, that you never fill.

BUT THERE HAS TO BE MORE - arseny tarkovsky

Now summer is gone
And might never have been.
In the sunshine it's warm.
But there has to be more.

It all came to pass,
All fell inot my hands
Like a five-petalled leaf,
But there has to be more.

Nothing eveil was lost,
Nothing good was in vain,
All ablaze with clear light
But there has to be more.

Life gathered me up
Safe under its wing,
My luck always held,
But there has to be more.

Not a leaf was burnt up
Not a twig ever snapped...
Clean as glass is the day,
But there has to be more.

KEEPING THINGS WHOLE - mark strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

ANGELS (excerpt) - rainer maria rilke

angels
all of them
have weary mouths
and bright souls without a seam
and a longing (as towards sin)
goes sometimes through
their dreams...

A TOMB FOR ANATOLE (excerpt) - stephen marlame

oh you understand that if i consent to live
to seem to forget you
it is to feed my pain
and so that this apparent forgetfulness
can spring forth more horribly
in tears at some random moments
in the middle of this life
when you appear to me.