Leaving Early Lady, your room is lousy with flowers.When you kick me out, that’s what I’ll remember,Me, sitting here bored as a loepardIn your jungle of wine-bottle lamps,Velvet pillows the color of blood puddingAnd the white china flying fish from Italy.I forget you, hearing the cut flowersSipping their liquids from assorted pots,Pitchers and Coronation gobletsLike… Continue reading Sylvia Plath
Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the… Continue reading Joseph Campbell
This ocean, humiliating in its disguisesTougher than anything.No one listens to poetry. The oceanDoes not mean to be listened to. A dropOr crash of water. It meansNothing.ItIs bread and butterPepper and salt. The deathThat young men hope for. AimlesslyIt pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. NoOne listens to poetry. — Jack Spicer, “This ocean,… Continue reading Jack Spicer
The ‘Other Half’ is the word. The ‘Other Half’ is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the ‘Other Half’ is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common ‘hallucinations’ of subject during sense withdrawal is the… Continue reading William S. Burroughs
She is my landlordand she lowers the rent,points to her chest and says, “Man, if you lived hereyou’d be home by now.” — Derrick Brown, from “Cheap Rent,” Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife. (Write Bloody Publishing; 5th edition May 23, 2014)
Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the… Continue reading L.M. Montgomery
I want to be filled with longing againtill dark burn marks show on my skin. I want to be written againin the Book of Life, to be written every single daytill the writing hand hurts. —Yehuda Amichai, from “I Walked Past a House Where I Lived Once,” Art & Love. An Illustrated Anthology of Love… Continue reading Yehuda Amichai
His examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning…to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera. — Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.… Continue reading Gabriel García Márquez
Nights like thisI dream I am lightning,or a cigarette littoo long, my bodya lighthouse,beacon made of bone. — Katie Vagnino, from “The Storm,” Words Apart, Issue 4 (April 30, 2015)
Our struggle is–isn’t it?–to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so… Continue reading C.S. Lewis
The Vale of Soul-Making 