The bats inebriate the sky . . .

What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye—corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen...

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...

If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!

One probably hears about it.One, wire, recognizes.One holds her bones up next to each other.One insists, grinding the clutch.One would powder and powder.One would ask out of the back of the throat.One refuses.One is so...

There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have words.

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between...

As it has been said:Love and a coughcannot be concealed.Even a small cough.Even a small love.

The ink of a pen is simply the blood of a heart

You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist.

we are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecuewe are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted we arean unwantedburningas we sizzle and fryto the bonethe coals of...

Recuerdo que algún día yo le hablé de mi río y una como tormenta se agitó en sus estrañas. No sé si fue mi pecho que tembló de recuerdo o si fueron mis ojos que...

sometimes all we need to be able to continue aloneare the deadrattling the wallsthat close us in.

Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.

Criticism is like politics: if you don’t make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.

Memory revises me.

I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.

Oh, there are no living poets, Miss Van Damn. We’re not entirely sure there ever were. They’ve found some shreds of sonnets in England and, embedded in a chalk wall of a cave in France,...

Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please,With too much spirit to be e’er at ease,With too much quickness ever to be taught,With too much thinking to have common thought:You purchase pain with all that...

I am she who lifts the mountainsWhen she goes to hunt,Who wears mamba for a headbandAnd a lion for a belt.Beware!I swallow elephants wholeAnd pick my teeth with rhinoceros horns,I drink up rivers to get...

Passers-byPassers-by,Out of your many facesFlash memories to meNow at the day endAway from the sidewalksWhere your shoe soles traveledAnd your voices rose and blentTo form the city’s afternoon roarHindering an old silence.Passers-by,I remember lean ones...

I have met with most poetry on trunks; so that I am pat to consider the trunk-maker as the sexton of authorship

I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in theresolution of doubts but in their proliferation

…across the snowy field the barn light gleams – it’s the loneliness of November twilight…

The statement ‘There is nothing more American than an Indian’ happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity...

You may continue to call it a breakup. I will continue to call it an exorcism.

To come to nothing through something is the way to outside from both sides.

I am inclined to trust you. You shouldn’t be like that with another man, not ever; but I can’t help it. I felt it strongly from the instant I heard your voice; and though I...

Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.

We pull our boots on with both handsbut we can’t punch ourselves awake and all I can do is stand on the curb and say Sorryabout the blood in your mouth. I wish it was...

Since nothing is absolute There is no absolute silence, Only an appearance Of temporary peace.

If I could find one wordthat would shudder the airlike that frightened sob,that wordless prayerof my newly-born,who drew one breath,and with unopened eyessank back into death;If I could break the world’s cold heartwith that cry,then...

In the biggest and the smallest I sleep but at the same place I stay.

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

I had to learn to live without you and I couldn’t make sense of it, because I left so much of me inside of you.

There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into...

I know how you feel because I’ve been there too. I’ve hated and I’ve loved. I’ve seen my demons root and crawl and my angels branch and soar. I’ve died within myself and lived a...

Darkness moves like a pack of wild dogs.The wind moves like a wounded animal.The ground must be full of teeth by now.

Sparrows and cats will live in my shoe,Sooner than I will live with you.Fish will come walking out of the sea,Sooner than you will come back to me.

Picnic, LightningIt is possible to be struck by a meteoror a single-engine planewhile reading in a chair at home.Safes drop from rooftopsand flatten the odd pedestrianmostly within the panels of the comics,but still, we know...

Determined, I riseand face the dawn with resolve.This time I will win.

He thought others were small; that was his greatness.

There’s two ways to become a famous Poet, find that one person that knows somebody, that knows somebody, that knows somebody.Or die trying

A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.

If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has...

My emotions have already spilled out on a canvas; I need you my king, to rescue me from the madness!

JASON: ‘Intended wings.’ How depressing.MICHAEL: Yes. Makes them into suicides, really, the pigeons.JASON: No – no, it doesn’t. It could mean the wings were ‘intended’ to carry them upwards, out of the darkness, but they...

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.