I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.
– Anna Akhmatova
Tag: poems
Eat Flowers
Mad Girl’s Love Song
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
– Sylvia Plath
All Along
The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,
they’re in each other all along.
– Rumi (tr.Coleman Barks)
Beclouded
I resent you for bringing out these feelings:
I was better off without them.
You have evicted me from myself;
banished me to a semi-autonomous region;
to a statelessness beclouded
by fear of regret.
Quiet
the way to end a poem
like this
is to become suddenly
quiet.
– Charles Bukowski
The Gravest Moment
a man said:
–the gravest moment in my life took place in the battle of the Marne, when they wounded me in the chest.
another man said:
–the gravest moment in my life, occurred during a Yokohama seaquake, from which I was miraculously saved, sheltered under the eaves of a lacquer shop.
and another man said:
–the gravest moment in my life happens when I sleep during the day.
and another said:
–the gravest moment of my life has taken place in my greatest loneliness.
and another said:
–the gravest moment in my life was my imprisonment in a Peruvian jail.
and another said:
–the gravest moment in my life is having surprised my father in profile.
and the last man said:
–the gravest moment in my life is yet to come.
Cesar Vallejo
memoryhouse 