Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.
I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn’t learned a thing I didn’t know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.
I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.
The past is a bucket of ashes.
After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars.
There are men and women so lonely they believe God, too, is lonely.
There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted.
There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.
Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the women don’t get you then the whiskey must.
Now I am here – now read me – give me a name.
I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.
God, let me remember all good losers.
Tell no man anything, for no man listens Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.
And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash.
Come clean with a child heart Laugh as peaches in the summer wind Let rain on a house roof be a song Let the writing on your face be a smell of apple orchards on late June.
Somebody’s little girl- how easy it is to make a sob story over who she once was and who she now is.
Let your heart look on white sea spray and be lonely. Love is a fool star. You and a ring of stars may mention my name and then forget me. Love is a fool star.
I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.