Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.
What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
I leave you, home, when I'm ripped from the doorstep by commerce or fate. Then I submit to the awful subway of the world.
I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.
My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.
The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.
Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.
Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.
Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.
I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl; it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.
I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.
There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning.
It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.
Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
My objects dream and wear new costumes, compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.
It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics. Or form a Piss Club where we all go in the bushes and peek at each other's sex.
For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.
She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.
It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious
I who was a house full of bowel movement, I who was a defaced altar, I who wanted to crawl toward God could not move nor eat bread.
The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.
Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar.
My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them.
To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can't be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.
I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.
With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!
Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.
Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.
For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.
Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.