As Planned

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don't you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

~Frank O'Hara

A Song of Love

Hey, rose, just born
Twin to a thorn;
Was't so with you, O Love and Scorn?

Sweet eyes that smiled,
Now wet and wild:
O Eye and Tear - mother and child.

Well: Love and Pain
Be kinfolks twain;
Yet would, Oh would I could Love again.

~Sidney Lanier

Life

What is our life? A play of passion,
Our mirth the music of division,
Our mothers' wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are dressed for this short comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss.
Our graves that hide us from the setting sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest,
Only we die in earnest, that's no jest.

~Walter Raleigh

O Living Always, Always Dying

O living always, always dying!
O the burials of me past and present,
O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.

~Walt Whitman

Sense Of Something Coming

I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live it through.
While the things of the world still do not move:
The doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full of silence,
The windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.
I leap out, and fall back,
And throw myself out, and am absolutely alone in the great storm.

~Rainier Maria Rilke

He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with gold and silver light,
The blue and the dim and dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

~William Butler Yeats

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In the Water

I heard the old, old men say,
"Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away."
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
"All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters."

~William Butler Yeats