"I’m looking for something to scare me out of my skin" - Henry Rollins

I’m looking for something to scare me out of my skin

I’m following myself

Playing jokes on myself

Injecting myself with nightmares

I wait in dark corners to jump out and scare myself

I’ve got to get away from myself

Popular Romance - Paul Guest

To hum in a smoke-dank alley a song by Elvis

was not the height of my love for you. To turn

my arm from its socket like a hateful thing

was not devotion only. To speak your name

like a spell to my imagined foes was not

peace, no, not ever. Rather, you were a stone

I licked and pretended to eat. You were

ever a dream of falling. An odor of smoke.

You were the design of my worst

crimes. What I stole for love added up.

It added up to nothing. To the air perfumed

by an absent woman. To a box

filled with crushed chalk. God save me

from the stars, once and for all—

I have had enough. Let me love anything

but that: let me go free and dream

of green oceans and the surf

that batters some other world to sleeplessness.

O. It is enough to whisper only

this. To speak to the flame in your breast

and hear nothing else. Once

I believed I could possess

what touched you: the worn sweater,

or the song on the radio

that meant nothing and all in that instant.

Against your door I pressed

my ear, and heard nothing, the whisper

of water, maybe, a breath of cool air—

the gossip of your absence—

and nothing in me could knock or wait,

and all around me the night

spread like water through a rag,

and I let my hands drop whatever they held.

The Fear of Oneself - Sharon Olds

As we get near the house, taking off our gloves,

the air forming a fine casing of

ice around each hand,

you say you believe I would hold up under torture

for the sake of our children. You say you think I have

courage. I lean against the door and weep,

the tears freezing on my cheeks with brittle

clicking sounds.

I think of the women standing naked

on the frozen river, the guards pouring

buckets of water over their bodies till they

glisten like trees in an ice storm.

I have never thought I could take it, not even

for the children. It is all I have wanted to do,

to stand between them and pain. But I come from a

long line

of women

who put themselves

first. I lean against the huge dark

cold door, my face glittering with

glare ice like a dangerous road,

and think about hot pokers, and goads,

and the skin of my children, the delicate, tight,

thin, top layer of it

covering their whole bodies, softly

glimmering.

THE POEM - Franz Wright

It was like getting a love letter from a tree

Eyes closed forever to find you—

There is a life which

if I could have it

I would have chosen for myself from the beginning

THE MAN WHO NEVER LOSES HIS BALANCE - Stephen Dunn

He walks the high wire in his sleep.

The tent is blue, it is perpetual

afternoon. He is walking between

the open legs of his mother

and the grave. Always. The audience knows this

is out of their hands. The audience

is fathers whose kites are lost, children

who want to be terrified into joy.

He is so high above them, so capable

(with a single, calculated move)

of making them care for him

that he's sick of the risks

he never really takes.

The tent is blue. Outside is a world

that is blue. Inside him

a blueness that could crack

like china if he ever hit bottom.

Every performance, deep down,

he tries one real plunge

off to the side, where the net ends.

But it never ends.

"I was at this guy's house." - Henry Rollins

I was at this guy’s house. I met this girl who was hanging out

there. She was real pretty, she had brown eyes and dark hair. She

was soft-spoken and real nice. I know that everyone has their

own life and they can do what they want and you shouldn’t think

anything of it or anything. But man, I couldn’t help but flinch a

little when I saw all those needle marks in her arm, they looked

so sore. Hateful little holes. I wanted to say something, but I

didn’t.

The Poet With His Face in His Hands - Mary Oliver

You want to cry aloud for your

mistakes. But to tell the truth the world

doesn’t need any more of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t

stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t

hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines

of rocks and water to the place where

the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that

jubilation and water-fun and you can

stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can

drip with despair all afternoon and still,

on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,

puffing out its spotted breast, will sing

of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

The Voices - Richard Shelton

Suddenly dawn

had to get up and build the trees.

I could no longer deny

the voices so I came

to terms with them: glistening

votaries dipped in madness,

a blue eye in the wrong socket,

an old chair

rocking by itself,

leather with its memory and silk

which forgets everything,

a machine producing time

in the factory.

This does not mean

I learned to trust them

but I came to terms with them

because, as they said,

we are the only family you have.

DAUGHTER - Lisel Mueller

My next poem will be happy,

I promise myself. Then you come

with your deep eyes, your tall jeans,

your narrow hands, your wit,

your uncanny knowledge, and

your loneliness. All the flowers

your father planted, all

the green beans that have made it,

all the world’s recorded pianos

and this exhilarating day

cannot change that.

The Sirens - Lawrence Raab

After a while we got tired of singing.

One morning out on the rocks

with not a ship in sight, we all felt it—

a certain weariness, a malaise,

if you will. We felt it together,

sympathy having become

one of the finer aspects

of our nature. We’ve drifted apart

since those days, yet we’re happy

being remembered as impossible

to resist. The legends used to claim

we knew the future as well—all things

which shall be hereafter upon the earth,

as our song put it. Everyone only assumed

we were beautiful. But we were, and are,

though not unlike so many other

women now, those who promise much less,

but let you live. It was a relief

to give up our powers willingly.

That didn’t happen often in our world,

where the gods went on amusing themselves

with their meddling, and the hero

plowed ahead, lashed to the mast,

dying to be tempted. Did we enjoy the clamor

of shipwreck? The cries of the disillusioned?

It was our job, our particular talent.

We weren’t supposed to want anything else.

The Witch's Story - Lawrence Raab

Everything you have heard about me

is true, or true enough.

You shouldn’t think

I’d change my story now.

A stubborn, willful little girl

comes sneaking

around my house, peering

in all the windows. She’s disobeyed

her parents, who knew

where the witch lived. “If you go,

you’re not our daughter any more.”

That’s what they told her. I have

my ways of knowing. All pale

and trembly then, she knocks at my door.

“Why are you so pale?”

I ask, although of course

I know that too.

She'd seen what she’d seen—

a green man on the stairs, and the other one,

the red one, and then the devil himself

with his head on fire, which was me,

the witch in her true ornament, as I

like to put it. Oh, she’d seen what she needed

to send her running home

but she walked right in, which is the part

I never understand completely. Maybe

she believed, just then,

that she was no one’s daughter any more,

and had to take her chances, poor thing,

inside with me. “So you’ve come

to brighten up my house,”

I said, and changed her into a log.

It was an easy trick, and gave me little pleasure.

But I’d been waiting all day.

I was cold, and even that

small fire was bright, and warm enough.

intellectualism - Nikki Giovanni

sometimes i feel like i just get in

everybody’s way

when i was a little girl

i used to go read

or make fudge

when i got bigger i

read

or picked my nose

that’s what they called

intelligence

or when i got older

intellectualism

but it was only

that i was in the way

a wild, fresh wind blowing... - Charles Bukowski

I should not have blamed only my father, but,

he was the first to introduce me to

raw and stupid hatred.

he was really best at it: anything and everything made him

mad—things of the slightest consequence brought his hatred quickly

to the surface

and I seemed to be the main source of his

irritation.

I did not fear him

but his rages made me ill at heart

for he was most of my world then

and it was a world of horror but I should not have blamed only

my father

for when I left that... home... I found his counterparts

everywhere: my father was only a small part of the

whole, though he was the best at hatred

I was ever to meet.

but others were very good at it too: some of the

foremen, some of the street bums, some of the women

I was to live with,

most of the women, were gifted at

hating—blaming my voice, my actions, my presence

blaming me

for what they, in retrospect, had failed

at.

I was simply the target of their discontent

and in some real sense

they blamed me

for not being able to rouse them

out of a failed past; what they didn't consider was

that I had my troubles too—most of them caused by

simply living with them.

I am a dolt of a man, easily made happy or even

stupidly happy almost without cause

and left alone I am mostly content.

but I've lived so often and so long with this hatred

that

my only freedom, my only peace is when I am away from

them, when I am anywhere else, no matter where—

some fat old waitress bringing me a cup of coffee

is in comparison

like a fresh wild wind blowing.

Untitled - Ryokan

I don't regard my life

as insufficient.

Inside the brushwood gate

there is a moon;

there are flowers.

The Forms - Sharon Olds

I always had the feeling my mother would

die for us, jump into a fire

to pull us out, her hair burning like

a halo, jump into water, her white

body going down and turning slowly,

the astronaut whose hose is cut

falling

         into

              blackness. She would have

covered us with her body, thrust her

breasts between our chests and the knife,

slipped us into her coat pocket

outside the showers. In disaster, an animal

mother, she would have died for us,

but in life as it was

she had to put herself

first.

She had to do whatever he

told her to do to the children, she had to

protect herself. In war, she would have

died for us, I tell you she would,

and I know: I am a student of war,

of gas ovens, smothering, knives,

drowning, burning, all the forms

in which I have experienced her love.

The Clasp - Sharon Olds

She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,

we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,

I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his

face, again, and when I had her wrist

in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple

of seconds, to make an impression on her,

to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost

savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing, the

expression, into her, of my anger,

"Never, never again," the righteous

chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very

fast—grab, crush, crush,

crush, release—and at the first extra

force, she swung her head, as if checking

who this was, and looked at me,

and saw me—yes, this was her mom,

her mom was doing this. Her dark,

deeply open eyes took me

in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment

she learned me. This was her mother, one of the

two whom she most loved, the two

who loved her most, near the source of love

was this.

Strangers - Richard Shelton

we find ourselves at the exact place

where the light becomes darkness

and turn our faces toward one another

realizing we could be lovers we could

be anything we could even be friends

we could carry our scars

like banners we could pray to each other

and answer each other’s prayers

                 

this is the earth we can touch it

the mountains expose their nipples

to the last rays of the sun

and day lingers on the undersides of leaves

with so much need on the horizon

surely there is a heart around here somewhere

but we are characters from a book who have

come here on vacation

to listen to the pulse of the sea

which makes an affirmation beyond despair

those who have heard it

do not recommend it to anybody

we have heard the hypnotized telephone

ring itself into a trance of silence we have

seen the poor pass by on borrowed legs

we have been enameled by the sun

and as we are slowly going under water

where all light

is the light of a green stone broken open

we keep our distance it is all we have

LONELY - Natalie Wee

I have taken to being in public places

by myself. My cleverest trick was

to hold intimacy against bone

without telling it my name. Like any

unloved thing, I don’t know if I’m real

when I’m not being touched.

Because who am I but who

I am to someone else?

I know now the ways of nameless

birds & the cost of a life built

from waiting. I go to any window

I please, bare-handed, hovering

a/part. Watching when devotion

becomes duty. When soft becomes

stranger. Look. I was soft once, &

then I was a stranger to

myself. No tender mouth is worth

a slow death. No heart is worth

the belly of a beast. The secret is:

tender attends the heels of bruises.

The secret is: be bigger

than your alone.

MAGIC - Shel Silverstein

Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,

Eddie touched a troll,

Laurie danced with witches once,

Charlie found some goblins’ gold.

Donald heard a mermaid sing,

Susy spied an elf,

But all the magic I have known

I’ve had to make myself.

Thank-You Note - Wisława Szymborska (Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)

I owe a lot

to those I do not love.

Relief in accepting

others care for them more.

Joy that I am not

wolf to their sheep.

Peace be with them

for with them I am free

––love neither gives

nor knows how to take these things.

I don't wait for them

from window to door.

Almost as patient

as a sun dial,

I understand

what love never could.

I forgive

what love never would.

Between rendezvous and letter

no eternity passes,

only a few days or weeks.

Our trips always turn out well:

concerts are enjoyed,

cathedrals toured,

landscapes in focus.

And when seven rivers and mountains

come between us,

they are the rivers and mountains

found on any map.

The credit's theirs

if I live in three dimensions,

in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,

with a real, ever-shifting horizon.

They don't even know

how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I owe them nothing,"

love would have said

on this open topic.