poetry

"To those who abuse: the sin is yours, the crime is yours, and the shame is yours. To those who protect the perpetrators: blaming the victims only masks the evil within, making you as guilty as those who abuse. Stand up for the innocent or go down with the rest."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell youDon't go back to sleep!You must ask for what you really want.Don't go back to sleep!People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,The door is round and openDon't go back to sleep!"

"Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience."

"This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.I don't plan it.When I'm outside the saying of it,I get very quiet and rarely speak at all."

"Voodoo GirlHer skin is white cloth,and she's all sewn apartand she has many colored pinssticking out of her heart.She has many different zombieswho are deeply in her trance.She even has a zombiewho was originally from France.But she knows she has a curse on her,a curse she cannot win.For if someone getstoo close to her,the pins stick farther in."

"What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

"Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder."

"I like the posture, but not the yoga. I like the inebriated morning, but not the opium. I like the flower but not the garden, the moment but not the dream. Quiet, my love. Be still. I am sleeping."

"Be silent and safe — silence never betrays you; Be true to your word and your work and your friend; Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you,Nor judge of a road till it draw to the end."

"My turn shall also come:I sense the spreading of a wing."

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."

"Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain."

"The wind may be invisible, but it’s colored by memories of you, as you gently blew into my life, adding motion and emotion to my still-beating heart."

"Fly without wings; Dream with open eyes; See in darkness."

"PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there's a word to lift your hat to... to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry."

"I know you're tired but come, this is the way."

"When you part from your friend, you grieve not;For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, asthe mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain."

"It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours."

"Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error."