Great lions can find peace in a cage

Great lions can find peace in a cage
but we should only do that as a last resort

so those bars I see that restrain your wings
I guess you won’t mind if I pry them open.

~Rumi

Dorothea Lasky : Ars Poetica

Ars Poetica

I wanted to tell the veterinary assistant about the cat video Jason sent me
But I resisted for fear she’d think it strange
I am very lonely
Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again
And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess
He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness
No other human had before to my ears
And told me that I was no good
Well maybe he didn’t mean that
But that is what I heard
When he told me my life was not worthwhile
And my life’s work the work of the elite.
I say I want to save the world but really
I want to write poems all day
I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep,
Write poems in my sleep
Make my dreams poems
Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes
I want my face to be a poem
I have just learned how to apply
Eyeliner to the corners of my eyes to make them appear wide
There is a romantic abandon in me always
I want to feel the dread for others
I can feel it through song
Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few
Like when he said I am no good
I am no good
Goodness is not the point anymore
Holding on to things
Now that’s the point

~Dorothea Lasky

Pablo Neruda: Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks

Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the color of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.

~Pablo Neruda

The First Word Ever You Spoke Was…

The first word that you ever spoke was: light.
Thus time began. For long you said no more.
Man was your second, and a frightening, word
(the sound of it still shrouds us in its night),
and then again you brooded as before.

But I am one who would not hear your third.

I often pray at night: Be but the dumb,
confined to gestures, growing quietly,
he whom the spirit moves in dreams, that he
may write on speechless brows the heavy sum
of silence, and on peaks for us to see.

Be you the shelter from the angry scorn
that violated the ineffable.
In very paradise night fell:
be you the herdsman with the horn,
that once was blown, but so they only tell.

~Rainer Marie Rilke, Book of Hours

The Piano Speaks – Sandra Beasley

The Piano Speaks

after Erik Satie

For an hour I forgot my fat self,
my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.

For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.

For an hour I was a salamander
shimmying through the kelp in search of shore,
and under his fingers the notes slid loose
from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs
that took root in the mud. And what

would hatch, I did not know—
a lie. A waltz. An apostle of glass.

For an hour I stood on two legs
and ran. For an hour I panted and galloped.

For an hour I was a maple tree,
and under the summer of his fingers
the notes seeded and winged away

in the clutch of small, elegant helicopters.

~Sandra Beasley

The Self is Unstable – Elisa Gabbert

Don’t just be yourself — build your personal brand. The self is unstable. It might not be found by the search engines. It might be rejected. The self regenerates every five or six days. A consistent brand, a coherent self. Consider the interface, testing for usability. Even crows have a sense of self, and the accompanying self esteem, self loathing. The crow is self-reflexive, self-defeating. How dejected is the crow.

~Elisa Gabbert

Hugo Claus: Envoi

Envoi

My verses stand gawping a bit.
I never get used to this. They’ve lived here
long enough.
Enough. I send them out of the house, I don’t want to wait
until their toes are cold.
Unhampered by their unclear clamour
I want to hear the humming of the sun
or that of my heart, that treacherous sponge that hardens.

My verses don’t screw classically,
they babble commonly and bluster far too nobly.
In winter their lips leap.
in spring they lie flat at the first warmth,
they ruin my summer
and in autumn they smell of women.

Enough. For another twelve lines on this sheet
I’ll hold my hand over their head
and then they’ll get a boot up the arse.
Go and pester elsewhere, one-cent rhymes
tremble elsewhere before twelve readers
and a snoring reviewer.

Go now, verses, on your light feet,
you have not trodden hard on the old earth
where the graves laugh when they see their guests,
the one corpse stacked on top of the other.
Go now and stagger to her
whom I do not know.

~Hugo Claus