The Theory Behind Silver Bullets

Blood in an old lady's lungs she can no longer wheeze out thoughts about life or death A doctor rises cool Dracula to night to float a grave of corridors bite her neck and leave Stretchers sigh towards a cape of red and white fleetingly passing rooms full of waiting Hands so small clocks tick recklessly on

Possibilities - Wislawa Szymborska

Possibilities

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

By Wislawa Szymborska
From "Nothing Twice", 1997
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

Who Can I Turn To - Sammy Davis Jr

Who can I turn to when nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know and so I must go 
where destiny leads me 
With no star to guide me
and no one beside me 
I'll go on my way and, after the day, 
the darkness will hide me  
And maybe tomorrow 
I'll find what I'm after 
I'll throw off my sorrow, 
beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter 
With you I could learn to, 
with you what a new day 
But who can I turn to if you turn away?  
With you I could learn to, 
with you what a new day 
But who can I turn to if you turn away?

'And the days are not full enough'

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
                Not shaking the grass.

Ezra Pound

Mute

Begin simply -
place a plunger
on the end of a trumpet
to quell the sound.
One by one, the players 
forget the importance of big. 

Soon, all books are banned
bras reluctantly put back on.
Rosa goes to the back of the bus.
Little by little, everything turns
back in on itself until we are all
at the place we fought so hard
not to be.

We sit in the dark
left reading nothng -
and wonder who 
struck the first match.

Epoch

My hair is loose job jar empty. I can't stop Venus from rising the wax and wane of moon a wild sea from rolling against a stubborn shore. My knees ache from kneeling to what confession? I will not grow old in my sins.

Time Ticks the Light Longer

There was an odd quality
to the light that day
how it fell through the window
changing the blue of her cup. 

She sat, newspaper folded
wondered why people turned. 
That sweet little girl in Indiana
in her pink nightgown, dismembered 
left to forever, such a long time.

Or how she had found out
he had lied to her for years.

Odd, how the light changes 
something as simple as colour.
How we are all deemed to die
different deaths.

Carnival

Few can see to the end of the tunnel of love the entry beckons heart-shaped

framing an empty void had it been labeled “Haunted House” half the fair-goers would politely decline citing the sudden need for candy floss the brave

would clamber into the small cars expecting to emerge from the other side

half out of their minds

anticipating that somewhere along the line a man in a mask taunting

a chain saw would roar into the moment or that severed arms and heads

would drop lifeless from the sky fingerless toothless

There would be screaming -

and plenty of it

How then, did she coax you into the tunnel?

You - with the logical mind, practical life?

Did she look at you with her goal-post eyes?

Calculate possibilities into tiny fractions,

subtractions, additions?

Did the car rattle and shake as you clasped hands and entered as fearless

as the guests in the Haunted House? Did she kiss you with her mouth open

as the tunnel gaped, swallowing you quickly?

Cobweb hair, goose-bump flesh, a strange sensation filling your belly

your heart talking in beats assuring your mind

No sign of severed arms, heads, or men with chainsaws.

No indication that the ride was faulty.

No chance of a refund at the other end.

Just the creak and sway of the car,

teetering precariously on the edge

of something unseen.

The mind a blank a magic realism painting where the grass is too green

the sky too blue her red dress too perfectly creased see through in the sunlight

nobody mentioned the tunnel of love would be so narrow lonely dark the fifty

percent chance of emerging as two instead of one but you knew it would feel good

so good to get lost in there for even a little while.

When the ride finally came to a stop, you reeled out of the car as if emerging

from a fighter plane that turned upside-down with a G8 force the bile rising

in your throat but you swallow it back denying the need for help your legs

wobbly and unstable she was no longer holding your hand

The crowd stared as if you were a freak in the big tent and you tried to smile

put on your best front your mask dripping with the sweat of denial

She was no longer holding your hand

Bonaparte

A powerful star
not to be followed

too many places
his heart always broken

perpetually pumping
driven by need

it takes strength to say
no

go, I will not be conquered 
even if it would only take one word

Horizon

earth-home

sky-home

a sea too distant

to close

a circle that separates

noon from midnight

in the corner of my eye

the split face

of a magnified moon

an illusion of ships

you arriving

always

A love like that

A love like that

Hafiz

Even
After
All this time
The sun never
says to the earth,
"You owe Me."

Look
What happens
With a love like that.

It lights the
Whole
Sky.

Goodbye in Slow Motion with Those Trees Waving Back

As if these words could alter wind's lucid course
And make the trees wave hello again;


As if the wind had something new to bless,
Confess; that, finally, today's losses were palpable, explicable

Even; as if there were a reason for this self-pity
To descend again like shade

From the maples and lilacs and palms,
The sweet peach and lacquered locust,

Those cherries, chestnuts, and oranges .... It has to be

All of them, all of them
                                   lining those streets whose names I loved:

Calle de la Bonanova, Rue Descartes, Aldstadter Ring,
And further still, Coates and Sharon, which aren't

In Barcelona, Paris, or Prague, but from Sharon Hill, from childhood,
Places that don't exist anymore.

As if childhood were some tourist destination to visit
Off season, walking those sun-stroked sidewalks,

Sipping wine in the street-side cafés, saying hello to those
I'll never know in a tongue I used to know.

As if anyone's history were myth, and that myth an unconditional love
For loss. As if sorry didn't exist,

Any need for sorry.

If only childhood would tell the wind where to go,
If only it had a home.

If only this poem could hold childhood in its hands—
All gnarl-knuckled, chapped, blood-cracked—long enough

To say goodbye, to the bartender in Prague
Who was from Brooklyn, who talked with me awhile

About what home can't mean to him anymore, who got lost
Hiking in the Alpines and "ended up in here somehow, never left.... "

As if childhood's a place never left and never found, never
Said goodbye to;

As if that mattered now, as if there were time enough
To say goodbye to childhood

With all the slowness loss demands;

As if loss and childhood were distinct.


As if there were someone to talk with, walk and smoke with.

Besides, after awhile, we'd feel a need to sleep,
This me and that you I once was,

Our skin chilled a little, turning to gooseflesh a little, swept
By an August breeze weaving its way through the trees.

It doesn't matter, though, does it?
You've already begun to name the trees for yourself.

But feel that?

The trees are waving, too.

I'd like to teach you the names of these trees, to confess
How much I need to miss you to finish this off.

Alexander Long

Pitch

Begin the morning with a stiff
regimen of something 
quick - shake it off.

Have on hand a notebook
a small machine
something you can pull out

on the sly to calculate
the length of a shark tooth at lunch.
Smack your lips, smile large.

A sharpened pencil 
for back-up in case
one has to scribble

a quick cliché for deployment
in a new situation.
Same tactics new fascination.

Employ the use of nicknames
so as not to slip on a banana
peeled off in haste.

Be confident in humility
flex the muscles of growing
unhappiness enough 

no more or less than what you choose
to draw. Use whatever medium suits
each task. Ensure a timely departure

close the door behind you
before a yolk of sun splits and spills.

One Art

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.


Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.


Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.


I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.


I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Alone With Everybody - Charles Bukowski

the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too much and nobody finds the one but keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills. - Charles Bukowski

Gentleman Alone

The young maricones and the horny muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,
Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters
Surround my solitary home,
Enemies of my soul,
Conspirators in pajamas
Who exchange deep kisses for passwords.
Radiant summer brings out the lovers
In melancholy regiments,
Fat and thin and happy and sad couples;
Under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon,
There is a continual life of pants and panties,
A hum from the fondling of silk stockings,
And women's breasts that glisten like eyes.
The salary man, after a while,
After the week's tedium, and the novels read in bed at night,
Has decisively fucked his neighbor,
And now takes her to the miserable movies,
Where the heroes are horses or passionate princes,
And he caresses her legs covered with sweet down
With his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes.
The night of the hunter and the night of the husband
Come together like bed sheets and bury me,
And the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are masturbating,
And the animals mount each other openly,
And the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically,
And cousins play strange games with cousins,
And doctors glower at the husband of the young patient,
And the early morning in which the professor, without a thought,
Pays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast,
And to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly
On beds big and tall as ships:
So, eternally,
This twisted and breathing forest crushes me
With gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth
And black roots like fingernails and shoes.

Translated by Mike Topp 

Pablo Neruda 

from The Book of Questions

III. Tell me, is the rose naked or is that her only dress? Why do trees conceal the splendor of their roots? Who hears the regrets of the thieving automobile? Is there anything in the world sadder than a train standing in the rain? Pablo Neruda

If You Forget Me - Pablo Neruda

I can write the saddest lines tonight. Write for example: ‘The night is fractured and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’ The night wind turns in the sky and sings. I can write the saddest lines tonight. I loved her, sometimes she loved me too. On nights like these I held her in my arms. I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky. She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes. I can write the saddest lines tonight. To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her. Hear the vast night, vaster without her. Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass. What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her. The night is fractured and she is not with me. That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off, my soul is not content to have lost her. As though to reach her, my sight looks for her. My heart looks for her: she is not with me The same night whitens, in the same branches. We, from that time, we are not the same. I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her. My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her. Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses. Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes. I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her. Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long. Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms, my soul is not content to have lost her. Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer, and these are the last lines I will write for her. Pablo Neruda