A good story is like a well-placed punch: quick, effective, and impossible to ignore.

Colliding with the bright lightOf my true self,My illusions scream loudly,Themselves illusionsCreated by other illusions,Finally knowing thatDeep within meBeneath the shellLies the sacred beautyOf my true self.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

Used to be hewas my heart’s desire.His forthright gaze,his expert hands:I’d lie on the couch with my eyesclosed just thinking about it.Never about the factthat everything changes,that even this,my best passion,would not be immune.No, I...

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;They called me the hyacinth girl.’ —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and...

The skies bend, the time stops, the lanes move and the fires dance,It can mean only one thing that I am with you.You are enigmatic yet so beautiful that I have lost my sense, You...

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—As if my Brain had split—I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—But could not make it fit.

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I...

I sing to use the waiting, My bonnet but to tie, And shut the door unto my house; No more to do have I, Till, his best step approaching, We journey to the day, And...

I am a tale, I am a book, written in different languages and styles I can’t be read, can’t be understood,neither by me nor the greatest of minds I am too big, I am too...

Being a blesséd writer is a cursed attribute, when you wish to no longer be encompassed by someone and yet you are surrounded by loose leaf papers filled with the sound of his voice.

there have been morningsso quiet and tenderlike a poem, on Thursday’s lipsthat I wonderedif I’d been kissed at all…

An artist is identical with an anarchist,’ he cried. ‘You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment...

the saddest thing is to bea minute to someone,when you’ve made them your eternity.

As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day,he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.

my love is a winter’s mistgently dissolvingthrough the windowat the nape of your neck.

Music is the universal language of mankind.

you areso deliciousto my poetic side.

I grow weary of the loveThat lasts for a nightWhen it should be thereThe next sunrise

Tomorrow camewith the illusion of todayeven more fleeting than yesterdayit camelike it always comesand wentlike it’s always gonelike a favorite song in its final secondsTomorrow came and leftleaving nothingnothing…but a familiarlingeringsense of loss behind.

But even Superman can be broken. Self-destruction, too, is a kind of kryptonite.

Science ask facts and religion ask faith, humans are confused between life and death.

There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this...

My mind: a thousand hungry daughters,my harlot heritage.Marbles: lost, no rescue search.Your heart: blooming thorns,and a stolen grocery cart.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps...

Don’t tell me you’re not beautiful. You’re the kind of beautiful the blind would see if we could figure out some way to give them three seconds of sight.

We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt’s the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.

Paradise is no whim.It takes time and trust,You see.

¡Los suspiros son aire y van al aire!¡Las lágrimas son agua y van al mar!Dime, mujer, cuando el amor se olvida,sabes tú adónde va?

Salty as a lip” is my favorite. It’s so alive: strange and human / earthy and raw. Mysterious but grounded. Mashak has manifested paradox, it seems. Bravo!

i bring my kiasu friend to the airportleavings are never easy, not for longand though we both saw blur along the waymemories flooded present tensions.in the curry of his life no lemak remainedso now the...

the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become...

Every time a poet is about to write, every time the open their mouth to say something, they express their inner world and tell of their own feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions, unless they are...

Unless you call attentionto your presencewho will know you’re there?Even a countryhas to weave and wave a flagas proof of its existence.

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I read [in, Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot]: This is one moment, /...

A BoyOut of the noise of tired people working,Harried with thoughts of war and lists of dead,His beauty met me like a fresh wind blowing,Clean boyish beauty and high-held head.Eyes that told secrets, lips that...

We write about love like we should be bound in padded rooms.

Im looking for a girl who’s fun to be around.

All poets are religious poets.

When there’s a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano…

I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy,...

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions....

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our...

the inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him,and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died.

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

O lead me onward to the loneliest shade, The darkest place that quiet ever made, Where kingcups grow most beauteous to behold And shut up green and open into gold.

World is suddener than we fancy it.

An old liar told me hereTo think ahead and save my money.I should have spent it on ribbons.I should have learned the tune my dead grandfather playedWhen the daft wife heard him resoundingIn the deep...