One eats in holiness and the table becomes an altar. Martin Buber

A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could...

I shall be your poet! I do not want to be a poet for others; make your appearance, and I shall be your poet. I shall eat my own poem, and that will be my...

Take each day in your open palms and close your fists around it. This life is not done with you yet.

Language is fossil Poetry.

I have no words — alas! — to tellThe loveliness of loving well!

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can’t express, and it hurts me. So I go home...

love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the “gai saber,” to whom...

Les rêves sont seuls les réalités de la vie.

Love is as iffy as Kipling.

J’étais si près de toi que j’ai froid près des autres. (I was so close to you that I feel cold near others.)

TonightA parapet of breezetonight on which to leanmy melancholy

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breastRose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

Love is bitter, death is sweet.

Children’s SongWe live in our own world,A world that is too smallFor you to stoop and enterEven on hands and knees,The adult subterfuge.And though you probe and pryWith analytic eye,And eavesdrop all our talkWith an...

She’s all the blood I’ve ever shed. She’s every time I’ve ever thought of death. She’s every time I’ve ever looked at happiness and thought, ‘That’s not meant for me.

Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.

Ah youth, youth! That’s what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare

The thing is to sift outthe important sounds, little syllables and vowels that bringhints of their lost words, and not to mistake the fossil forthe life, or the kiss for the love, not to mistake...

She dealt her pretty words like Blades –How glittering they shone –And every One unbared a NerveOr wantoned with a Bone –She never deemed — she hurt –That — is not Steel’s Affair –A vulgar...

in a worldfull oftemporary thingsyou area perpetual feeling.

Woman with known intentintending to exploreWoman with her senses on the edgeedging for some more…”From my poem, “Known Intent” – The Poetic Art of Seduction – Volume 1©Clarissa O. Clemens

leave me some musicthat’s chocolate for the heart.

The Lone Star of Africa Land of the free, on your beach and sacred forests loves flourished. You, Liberia, you my love to echo, the scream of freedom, holding tight and will never let go....

what ismore beautifultears, in someone’s eyesfor meor in my eyesfor them.

And I Said To My Soul, Be LoudMadden me back to an afternoonI carry in menot like a woundbut like a will against a woundGive me again enough manto be the childchoosing my own annihilationsTo...

lean in to kiss mein all the placeswhere the acheis the most special.

Don’t ask me any questions. I’ve seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.

tread carefullyinto my life, my dear.the currents are strong.you will get lostin this warm oceanof my skin.

Ye are better than all the balladsThat ever were sung or said;For ye are living poems,And all the rest are dead.

Let me begin again as a speckof dust caught in the night windssweeping out to sea. Let me beginthis time knowing the world issalt water and dark clouds, the worldis grinding and sighing all night,...

InsomniaI wonderIf those talks matterFew done in the clarity of dayOr the manyDone at 3 a.m. in the morning

…and so many colorsI will have seen…the menacing greysand pine greensthe soft pink and purplesof springand summer blueand so many otherswithout you.

I make so many plans but fail at follow-through. Gemini mind once a mat for you to wipe your feet. I’d beg for it. I’d plead ‘Here! I’m here waiting for you to be the...

Does one really have to fretAbout enlightenment?No matter what road I travel,I’m going home.

And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems.

There lived a sage in days of yore, And he a handsome pigtail wore; But wondered much and sorrowed more Because it hung behind him.

Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My true-love hath my heart and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given: I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss; There never was a bargain better driven.

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!

Sacred space in whichTo distil, like amber,The best of your love.

The fact that Iam writing to youin Englishalready falsifies what Iwanted to tell you.My subject:how to explain to youthat I don’t belong to Englishthough I belong nowhere else,if not herein English.

When you told me I didn’t love youI simply thought how would you knowFor I remembered the spaces between your fingersAnd the crease between your eyesHow dare you tell meI never thought of you as...

writing home”here in the wilderness of australiawriting home becomes easyin spite of the spreading wild firesthere is less heat, more certainty.writing home, writing thisi think of those without real homes–our city, people say, provides houseswhich...

We love the things we love for what they are.

Poetry is another name for a person’s telling of the self, existence and what is beyond, and one’s own perceptions.

I could give all to Time except — exceptWhat I myself have held. But why declareThe things forbidden that while the Customs sleptI have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,And what I would...

Dear Lover,Your laughter is warm rain, and you are the rainbow.

The Long HillI must have passed the crest a while ago And now I am going down– Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know, But the brambles were always grabbing at the...

before the gate –my walking stick’s made a riverof melting snow