after the kiss
reading her eyes
for oncoming trains
– Victor Piñeiro
Category: Poetry
Words are all we have
The Colossus
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, Out of the wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.
– Sylvia Plath
I Am Going To Carry My Bed…
I am going to carry my bed into New York City tonight
complete with dangling sheets and ripped blankets;
I am going to push it across three dark highways
or coast along under 600,000 faint stars.
I want to have it with me so I don’t have to beg
for too much shelter from my weak and exhausted friends.
I want to be as close as possible to my pillow
in case a dream or a fantasy should pass by.
I want to fall asleep on my own fire escape
and wake up dazed and hungry
to the sound of garbage grinding in the street below
and the smell of coffee cooking in the window above.
– Gerald Stern
Do You Recognise Anything?
Do you recognise anything? I said.
Anything familiar?
Yes, you said. The bed.
Better to watch the stream
that flows across the floor
and is made of sunlight,
the forest made of shadows;
better to watch the fireplace
which is now a beach.
– Margaret Atwood
A Fugitive Dream
This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem –
not out into the world of strangers’ eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,
home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,
which like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.
– Billy Collins
I Want To Sleep
I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.
When it’s dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.
Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.
– Federico García Lorca
I’m Tired
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