May 2011
26 posts
Ten Steps to Stay Sane
for Ray
1. Eat well Better yet- cook well Make bread by hand regularly (and cakes, and jam) Understand the importance of dessert
(Eat ice cream- Not a lot but seasonally and from time to time out of season)
2. Listen to live music
(at least twice a month Better yet, play music at least once a week)
3. Have a lot of fulfilling sex
4. Remember to take advantage of summer...
bright star | john keats
goodpoetry:
bright star, would i were steadfast as thou art — not in lone splendour hung aloft the night and watching, with eternal lids apart, like Nature’s patient, sleepless emerite, the moving waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask of snow upon the mountains and the moors — no — yet still steadfast, still...
enivrez-vous | charles baudelaire
goodpoetry:
be always drunken. nothing else matters: that is the only question. if you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
drunken with what? with wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. but be drunken.
and if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, ...
the uses of sorrow | mary oliver
(in my sleep i dreamed this poem) someone i loved once gave me a box full of darkness. it took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
damages | ruby rahman
there are some sorrows, some damages, for which there is no compensation; you are that irreparable loss of mine. where you cast your glance light of the conjoining stars dances along the great longitude; the courage to dream blooms in the blood and the difficult habit of staying alive, nurtured from the moment of birth, crumbles like conch-shell dust. you are that inconsolable sorrow...
milan kundera | slowness
aflashinthedark | thought-emancipation
there is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. at a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. automatically he slows down. meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived...
gamblers all | charles bukowski
goodpoetry:
sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, i’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside remembering all the times you’ve felt that way, and you walk to the bathroom, do your toilet, see that face in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your hair anyway, get into your street clothes, feed the cats, fetch the newspaper of horror, place it on the coffee table,...
even if i saw you | izumi shikibu
goodpoetry:
even if i now saw you only once, i would long for you through worlds, worlds.
i'll affect you slowly | richard brautigan
goodpoetry:
i’ll affect you slowly as if you were having a picnic in a dream. there will be no ants. it won’t rain.
you who never arrived | rainer maria rilke
goodpoetry:
you, beloved, who are all the gardens i have ever gazed at, longing. an open window in a country house - , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. streets that i chanced upon, you had just walked down them and vanished. and sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. who knows? perhaps the same ...
the kite runner | khalid hosseini
i wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
lines for winter | mark strand
goodpoetry:
and if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are.
near the wall of a house | yehuda amichai
goodpoetry:
love is not the last room: there are others after it, the whole length of the corridor that has no end.
heavy things | denver butson
goodpoetry:
the world cannot bear the weightlessness of sparrows or the confetti of our illegible addresses the moon’s breathless ascent the world cannot bear it so the world makes heavy things like airplanes and skyscrapers like your heart and heavy things fall down because the world cannot bear them either
quiet girl | langston hughes
i would liken you to a night without stars were it not for your eyes. i would liken you to a sleep without dreams were it not for your songs.
mis mai a mis ionawr | dafyyd ap gwilym
welcome, with your lovely greenwood choir, summery month of may for which i long! like a potent knight, an amorous boon, the green-entangled lord of the wildwood, comrade of love and of the birds, whom lovers remember, and their friend, herald of nine score trysts, fond of exalted colloquies.
tired | langston hughes
i am so tired of waiting. aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind? let us take a knife and cut the world in two — and see what worms are eating at the rind.
the quiet world | jeffrey mcdaniel
goodpoetry:
in an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. when the phone rings, i put it to my ear without saying hello. in the restaurant i point at chicken noodle soup. i am adjusting well to the new way. late at night, i call my long distance...
instantes | jorge luis borges
if i were able to live my life anew, in the next i would try to commit more errors. i would not try to be so perfect, i would relax more. i would be more foolish than i’ve been, in fact, i would take few things seriously. i would be less hygienic. i would run more risks, take more vacations, contemplate more sunsets, climb more mountains, swim more rivers. i would go to more places where...
two cures for love | wendy cope
1. don’t see him. don’t phone or write a letter. 2. the easy way: get to know him better.
you begin | margaret atwood
you begin this way: this is your hand, this is your eye, that is a fish, blue and flat on the paper, almost the shape of an eye. this is your mouth, this is an O or a moon, whichever you like. this is yellow. outside the window is the rain, green because it is summer, and beyond that the trees and then the world, which is round and has only the colors of these nine crayons. this is the world,...
the peace of wild things | wendell berry
when despair for the world grows in me & i wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life & my children’s lives may be, i go & lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, & the great heron feeds. i come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. i come into the presence of still water. & i feel...
extremely loud and incredibly close | jonathan...
hopesichord:
when i heard that your organization was recording testimonies, i knew i had to come. she died in my arms, saying, “i don’t want to die.” that is what death is like. it doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. it doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. i thought if everyone could see what i saw, we would never have war anymore.
#just bringing this back because...
for an album | adrienne rich
our story isn’t a file of photographs faces laughing under green leaves or snowlit doorways, on the verge of driving away, our story is not about women victoriously perched on the one sunny day of the conference, nor lovers displaying love: our story is of moments when even slow motion moved too fast for the shutter of the camera: words blew our lives apart, like so, eyes that cut &...
atheist conches | antler
are there conches that don’t believe after they die they echo the sea? that go to great lengths to prove to other conches the foolishness of believing after they die they will echo the sea? spend their whole lives writing books about how there is no air or beach, only the sea, and when you die that’s it, there’s no echo?
eyesight | a.r. ammons
it was may before my attention came to spring and “my word,” i said to the southern slopes “i’ve missed it, it came and went before i got right to see.” “don’t worry,” said the mountain, “try the later northern slopes or if you can climb, climb into spring: but,” said the mountain “it’s not that way with all...
