You just go on your nerve.

I wish I weren’t reeling at all.

The artificial is always innocent.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

I embraced a cloud but when I soared it rained.

I am always tying up and then deciding to depart.

The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.

O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors

Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible

Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!

And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.

That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.

A man was the cause of it all. An unarmed man with a weapon.

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

I call to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence

If you don't appear at all one day they think you're lazy or dead.

I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.

I am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile.

and I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world.

life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages.

There were occasionally rifts in the cloud where the face of a woman appeared, frowning.

I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.

I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.

There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.

I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

There is a geography which holds its hands just so far from the breast and pushes you away, crying so.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days!

And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space.

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!

Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

It may be the coldest day of The year, what does he think of That? I mean, what do I? And if I do, Perhaps I am myself again.

I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are

The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.

the beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions

I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

But it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it.

And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for bullfight and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they'll soon tear down.

down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

oh mothers you will have made the little tykes so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies they won't know the difference and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy

When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there. There's nothing so spiritual about being happy but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.

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