Dirty Valentine

There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you.
I touch myself, I dream.
Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending
that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands,
these shins, these soapy flanks.
The musicians start the overture while I hide behind the microphone,
trying to match the dubbing
to the big lips shining down from the screen.
We’re filming the movie called Planet of Love-
there’s sex of course, and ballroom dancing,
fancy clothes and waterlilies in the pond, and half the night you’re
a dependable chap, mounting the stairs in lamplight to the bath, but then
the too white teeth all night,
all over the American sky, too much to bear, this constant fingering,
your hands a river gesture, the birds in flight, the birds still singing
outside the greasy window, in the trees.
There’s a part in the movie
where you can see right through the acting,
where you can tell that I’m about to burst into tears,
right before I burst into tears
and flee to the slimy moonlit riverbed
canopied with devastated clouds.
We’re shouting the scene where
I swallow your heart and you make me
spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls
right out of my mouth.
You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.
Lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, I didn’t want to see it this way,
everything eating everything in the end.
We know how the light works,
we know where the sound is coming from.
Verse. Chorus. Verse.
I’m sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious.

Richard Siken

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Jack Gilbert

improve your poetry

Read the work of a variety of poets. The simplest way to improve your poetry is to read poems. You may be familiar with great poets like William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson but less familiar with contemporary poets and new poems. Part of becoming a better poet is constantly finding new poetry collections and reading contemporary literary magazines to expose yourself to new voices. There’s no harm in revisiting your favourite poems by great poets in an old poetry book, but part of becoming a better writer is finding new literary journals and expanding your poetry reading to include young poets and diverse voices.

Billy Collins
Tips for Writing Poetry

Poets and language

Contemporary poets do not aspire to ‘greatness’; the role they are meant to fulfil is the role of the earthworm. The soil of the earthworm is language.

Wojciech Bonowicz
Modern Poetry in Translation

Falling in love…

When I was seven years old, I started going to the library and I took out ten books a week. The librarian looked at me and asked, “What are you doing?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

And she said, “You can’t possibly read all of those before they are due back.”

I said, “Yes, I can.”

And I came back the next week for ten more books.

In doing so, I told that librarian, politely, to get out of my way and let me happen. That’s what books do. They are the building blocks, the DNA, if you will, of you.

Think of everything you have ever read, everything you have ever learned from holding a book in your hands and how that knowledge shaped you and made you who you are today.

Looking back now on all those years, to when I first discovered books at the library, I see that I was simply falling in love. Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books.

The library in Waukegan, Illinois, the town where I grew up, was a temple to the imagination. It was built by Andrew Carnegie, the philanthropist, who built libraries all across this great land. I learned to read by studying the comic strips in the Chicago Tribune. But I fell in love with reading at that old Carnegie library. It was this library that served as the inspiration for the library in my 1962 novel, “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

Ray Bradbury
The Book And The Butterfly
(Introduction to: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012)

The Eleusinian Mysteries

The Eleusinian Mysteries became the principal religious ritual of ancient Greece, begun circa 1600 BCE. Originally a secret cult devoted to Demeter, the rites honoured the annual cycle of death and rebirth of grain in the fields. The resurrection of seeds buried in the ground inspired the faith that similar resurrection might await the human body laid to rest in the earth. The religious rituals of the Eleusinian Mysteries lasted two thousand years, became the official state religion, and spread to Rome. They laid the groundwork for Christianity’s belief in resurrection and were ultimately overthrown by the Roman emperor in the fourth century CE.

The canonical source of Demeter’s story, the ‘Homeric Hymn to Demeter,’ dates from about a thousand years into the practice of these rituals. It is called Homeric because it employs the same meter as The Iliad and The Odyssey – dactylic hexameter, the rhythm of ‘Picture yourself in a boat on the river / With tangerine trees and marmalade skies.’

The foundation of the Mysteries is Demeter’s power over the fertility of the land. When her daughter Persephone is stolen by Hades to be his lover in the underworld, the mother’s grief is so acute that she refuses to let the fields produce grain. People are in danger of starving, but Demeter resists, saying there will be no crops until she sees her daughter return. When Persephone does come back, after many trials among mortals and much dealing making among the gods, Demeter’s sudden transformation of bare ground into a ‘vast sheet of ruddy grain’ marks the miracle of fruition returning after a fallow time and sparks the fertility cult of the mysteries. This metamorphosis occurs in mythic time, so it is safe to say that it continues in the present moment for the mind embracing its truth.

Alison Hawthorne Deming
Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit

kiss your sweet melody

Let me kiss your sweet melody and dip my tongue into the wonderful tune of you.

View from the darkside

You are like an abrupt, unexpected precipice…

between the trees

It’s not that I want to become a dark forest, no, it’s more I want to become the wild things living between the trees.