Donald Stabler (poetry)

Impediments of angels the bare wire influence, the divine
art of serene birds, elephants and apples,"Hose the dire
credence over ice and parfait like a chimp or chump sucker
in a motion plower flower, choke!!",the band beats up the
try, a sunny day in Harlequin you dust flowers over pin
head aphrodisiacs,"Bolt has me by the throat, it creams!!"

Meryl Streep

Being a celebrity has taught me to hide, but being an actor has opened my soul.

Wei Ying-wu (737-791)

Alone at Night at My Monastic Residence: To Secretary Ts’u

 

The recluse is in bed but not asleep
leaves are falling in flurries
a cold rain makes the late night darker
fireflies are gone from the tower
the blue flames of dawn are no help
I still suffer from a thin summer robe
I didn’t realize the year was so lateor living apart was so lonely

John Picacio

Maya Angelou

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”  

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

“Everything you can imagine is real.”  

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)

Our March

Beat the squares with the tramp of rebels!
Higher, rangers of haughty heads!
We'll wash the world with a second deluge,
Now’s the hour whose coming it dreads.
Too slow, the wagon of years,
The oxen of days — too glum.
Our god is the god of speed,
Our heart — our battle drum.
Is there a gold diviner than ours/
What wasp of a bullet us can sting?
Songs are our weapons, our power of powers,
Our gold — our voices — just hear us sing!
Meadow, lie green on the earth!
With silk our days for us line!
Rainbow, give color and girth
To the fleet-foot steeds of time.
The heavens grudge us their starry glamour.
Bah! Without it our songs can thrive.
Hey there, Ursus Major, clamour
For us to be taken to heaven alive!
Sing, of delight drink deep,
Drain spring by cups, not by thimbles.
Heart step up your beat!
Our breasts be the brass of cymbals.

Miru Kim

Han Shan (8th-9th cent.)

 

In a tangle of cliffs, I chose a place -

Bird paths, but no trails for me.

What's beyond the yard?

White clouds clinging to vague rocks.

Now I've lived here - how many years -

Again and again, spring and winter pass.

Go tell families with silverware and cars

"What's the use of all that noise and money?"

Victor Safonkin

Li-Young Lee

The Gift

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he'd removed
the iron sliver I thought I'd die from.

I can't remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy's palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife's right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he's given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

 

Li-Young Lee :

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)

A list of some observation...

A list of some observation. In a corner, it's warm.
A glance leaves an imprint on anything it's dwelt on.
Water is glass's most public form.
Man is more frightening than its skeleton.
A nowhere winter evening with wine. A black
porch resists an osier's stiff assaults.
Fixed on an elbow, the body bulks
like a glacier's debris, a moraine of sorts.
A millennium hence, they'll no doubt expose
a fossil bivalve propped behind this gauze
cloth, with the print of lips under the print of fringe,
mumbling "Good night" to a window hinge.

Joseph Brodsky :

Katerina Shtanko

Thomas McNulty

Chuang Tzu (4th cent. BC)

Creation and Destruction

When you break something up, you create things.
When you create something, you destroy things.
Material things have no creation or destruction.
Ultimately these concepts connect as one.
Only the enlightened know that they connect as one,
So instead of debating this with your preconceptions,
Approach it in an ordinary way.
Those with this ordinary approach, simply apply the idea.
Those who apply it, connect with it.
Those who connect with it, attain it.
This easily attained understanding is not far off.

Chuang Tzu, – From: The True Tao

Jaroslaw Jasnikowski

W.C. Fields (1880-1946)

“I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. ”  

Woody Allen

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”  

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”