Every evening words, not stars, light the sky. No rest in life like life itself.

Of this poetryI’m left with the emptinessof an endless secret

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might...

World of harmony and peaceI see it just over thereRight there.

Seated at table – no need for the fracture of the room’s silence; noiselessly they conversed.

Was I the first boy that you had ever found in the darkness? I hurt everywhere and maybe you just didn’t know how to hold me. The sincerest thing I ever said to you was...

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

And I am weary of the anguishIncreasing winters bear;Weary to watch the spirit languishThrough years of dead despair.So, if a tear, when thou art dying,Should haply fall from me,It is but that my soul is...

We will spend the rest of the day inventing a kind of love that no longer exists in the world, a kind of love no army can pillage at the outposts, no rumor could bring...

The Soul selects her own Society—Then—shuts the Door—To her divine Majority—Present no more—Unmoved—she notes the Chariots—pausing—At her low Gate—Unmoved—an Emperor be kneelingUpon her Mat—I’ve known her—from an ample nation—Choose One—Then—close the Valves of her attention—Like...

a flower knows, when its butterfly will return, and if the moon walks out, the sky will understand;but now it hurts, to watch you leave so soon,when I don’t know, if you will ever come...

I was coming together…limb by limb, after being brokenfor an infinity.

Where the mind is without pain Where knowledge is gain; With you, life is not vain Where hate is a burdenFaith in humanity is not entwine The traces of you is meI am you and...

There is somethingmystically sadand beautifulabouthowi will neversee youagainbut meet youagain and againin poetry.

Ik vind het doodzonde van mijn tijd om me te verdiepen in de organische geesteswoekeringen van een dichter die me niets beters te melden heeft dan het niets, de leegte, het onverstaanbare. Het onverstaanbare heb...

I am always trying to ‘preserve’ things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

With callused handsi tastedthe softness of the moonin the coldest windsi discoveredmy soul’s warmest fireplacein the roughnessof his stubblethe tenderest love.

On such a night,’ I thought, ‘were ill and good,Bright and unlovely; precious, tawdry, All mingled into oneAnd pressed against my heart.

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.