poetry

EdgesI am a child throwing rocks into the stream.Challenging the rushing water.Raising my fist and daring fate to do it worst.I am a dancer in the waves of the ocean.Swaying in time with the tide.Pirouetting, the current my only friend.I am the sun, rising across the canyonAscending, and shinning down.Giving the illusion of perception and motion.I am thoughts like a rolling river.Water cascading over the rocks of my soul.Shaping, forming, conforming.I am the peace of the rain forest.Basking in solitudeTranquil, serene, transfixing angles.Reflecting from within.Dripping and dropping. Shaking it off.I am the dust of the galaxy.Yearning to know itself.I am the wind.Wandering. Searching.A storm brewing from within.

I want to look into a mirror that will love my own reflection harder than I hate myself.

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple -- or a green field -- a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing -- an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness --wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak --to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.

What I know is nothing but that we are a spring path of autumn light carved into a river of ancient singing.

Don't shrink your standards, link yourself with those who think and ink like you.

What whispers from the center of the soul is an innocence__o loving, so pure, so divine__hat the sage bows and the wise man weeps at the sound of its soft singing.

When admiring other people's gardens, don't forget to tend to your own flowers.

I__ back there again, broken from being a champion,The boy that no one loved,The years I spent training like a method actor toBecome the man that everyone admired,But it means nothing, Like ashes on a forehead, they marked me inferior,When I was still young enough to receive it into the grain of my being

if you eat menand still feel like you__e starving, you__e craving something that they cannot give.

Poetry doesn__ pay. But I need it. And so do you.

We, peopling the void air, make gods to whom we impute the ills we ought to bear.

If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics_ to write poetry... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked 'What__ so special about humans...?', I__ at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don__ see why we__ be special_ because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I__ not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point....I could pose the same kinds of questions of you... So God says, 'You are guys are really, really special.' How does his saying it make us special? 'But you see, he gave us a soul.' How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say_ 'What__ so special about that?

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.

I am who I am.A coincidence no less unthinkablethan any other.I could have had differentancestors, after all.I could have flutteredfrom another nestor crawled bescaledfrom under another tree.Nature's wardrobeholds a fair supply of costumes:spider, seagull, field mouse.Each fits perfectly right offand is dutifully worninto shreds.

In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being.

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a lifeIt is a presenceit has a history a formDo not confuse itwith any kind of absence

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,no light and no land anywhere,cloudcover thick. I try to stayjust above the surface, yet I'm already underand living within the ocean.