Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish and glee and throw them over the bridge, watching the smash, orange, as...

If you are a monster, stand up.If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,If you’ve built a steam-powered wishing machineIf you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,If you kidnap maidens or dabble...

Strategy for a MarathonI will startwhen the gun goes off.I will runfor five miles.Feeling good,I will run to the tenth mile.At the tenthI will say,Only three moreto the halfway.”At the halfway mark,13.1 miles,I will knowfifteen...

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage.You stand red-handed.You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grassWhat are you supposed to...

Dream by making and make by dreaming.

….my sacred landscape is the foothills of the stars – I go there often to sleep …

We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.

Fire will run like poetry through your blood.

Courage is more important than to be deceived by shallow victory waiting for a delayed defeat.

RequiescatTread lightly, she is nearUnder the snow,Speak gently, she can hearThe daisies grow.All her bright golden hairTarnished with rust,She that was young and fairFallen to dust.Lily-like, white as snow,She hardly knewShe was a woman, soSweetly...

What does infinity mean to you? Are you not infinity and yourself?

His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it...

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

Sometimes those we love break us to bind us whole within the transition.

To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery.

You’re not a bad person, you’re just a little bit different and I’m a sucker for that.

MarginaliaSometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the...

There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of spirit on the body. Seawaterbegs the pearl to break its shell.and the lily, how passionatelyit needs some wild darling! Atnight, I open...

Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer.

A whiff of fresh mintthat tastes like strawberry pie.Your kisses tempt me.

All those big words produce disgust today.

Most of the poems I write take 5 minutes, but the words can give a lifetime of relief. Many people that have read my book say it helped them with their grief.

Sun is a hearthstone, a merry-go-round of extinguished hearthstones.

I think can sit here for hours,Arguing with the world as to why I can’t give up,Tell everyone around me what a blessing you are,Laugh at all the times that you’ve brought sun into my...

Conditional love. Far from Gods original love.

You smile and draw me near and whisper, “Do as dreamers do.”I lean to you and whisper in your ear, “I cannot dream tonight my Dear. For it is you.

come back so i can say yes this time do it again now that i know what to call what you didthis time i’ll be ready i like it rough now and i’m done with...

Sharing one umbrella,We have to hold each other,Round the waist to keep together,You ask me why I’m smiling-It’s because I’m thinking,I want it to rain forever.

You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating themlike sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing waysreturn might be possible against these homesick inventions, trace the traveller’s alien steps across borders, and in between discover...

Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.

The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief of grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw,—it must have...

UtteranceSitting over wordsVery late I have heard a kind of whispered sighingNot farLike a night wind in pines or like the sea in the darkThe echo of everything that has everBeen spokenStill spinning its one...

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement … It is trembling on the edge. A little less – and it would lose its poetry. A little more – and it would be over into the abyss,...

The comedy of the wicked,Is the tragedy of the saint;But the saint’s comedy,Is the wicked’s remedy.

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

I take this continent with me into the grave.

Alles wat ik van het leven weet maakte ik me buiten de muren van de school eigen, en zodra ik me binnen die muren bevond leek het of ik achterwaarts leefde.

The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.

RaptureI can feel she has got out of bed.That means it is seven a.m.I have been lying with eyes shut,thinking, or possibly dreaming,of how she might look if, at breakfast,I spoke about the hidden place...

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

You are to me like white islands, in a world of vast darkness.

To see a World in a grain of sand,And a Heaven in a wild flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,And Eternity in an hour.

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it–

I am telling himwhat he wants to hear: antsdying of love underthe constellation of the dandelion.I swear that a white rose,sprinkled with wine, sings.I am laughing, tiltingmy head carefullyas if checking an invention.I am dancing,...

This poetry is utilitarian—heavy-duty, industrial strength poetry. It is meant to be read aloud and, even better, memorized and recited. It is best used in the natural world where there are starlit skies, the warmth...

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most...

I cannot forgive you. That day, if you had not refused, I would have given you a present. I would have carved my love in stone.

In a cage of wire-ribsThe size of a man’s head, the macaw bristles in a staringCombustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes.In the old lady’s parlour, where an aspidistra succumbsTo the musk of faded...

Beneath it allI kept faith with Ithaca, travelled,Travelled and travelled,Suffering much, enjoying a little;Met strange people singingNew myths; made myths myself.But this lion of the seaSalt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail,Touched with power, insistentOn this brief...