Poetry

http://www.poetryireland.ie/resources/feature-articles/did-some-poets-detest-poetry.html

Like the busted jaw of a lion, downtown lays open wide, its teeth jagged from trying to eat the stars. We hold each other when the earth shutters, keep our heads down when the windows fall like loose scabs. In that embrace, our breath mingles and we’re in a typhoon, hidden from a crowd, looking up, their mouths agape. The sky crusts over into the insides of a geode, winking itself onto the walls, refracting darkness into glitter. Hold me, hold me, because when we look up, this will all be gone and my eyes will be moon, yours, sun.

I want you to know
there are at least seventeen types
of loneliness. Not the belly dancing
begonias, not the loons, bare feet on gravel, though
you could count the flames or scan the desert
sky for wings.
I don't know what I miss
exactly. So much
that happens is simultaneous: geese, dark against
blue water, a line floating and then, without cause, airborne
like the day it rains by the river
and the hover of your hand creates its own heat
on my back. I couldn't hear
their leaving or your breath on the side of my face.
I try to tell you there is no light
except the glint worn by objects. The eyes
with false windows. Now
I'd pay the river its ransom, pennies and bones, if
I could reach in my hand and pull out yours.
I wanted you to know.
Seventeen types, maybe more.

-- Donna Prinzmetal, Portland

Nuances of a Theme by Williams Wallace Stevens

It's a strange courage

you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise

toward which you lend no part!

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze

that reflects neither my face nor any inner part

of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses

you in its own light.

Be not chimera of morning,

Half-man, half-star.

Be not an intelligence,

Like a widow's bird

Or an old horse.

“The road made wet by the water of August
shines like it was cut in full moonlight”
― Pablo Neruda

"I can't travel
away from you.

Each time I leave,
my ship hides

in your dreams."

I said never apologize for how you feel. No one can control how they feel. The sun doesn’t apologize for being the sun. The rain doesn’t say sorry for falling. Feelings just are.

by Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance