“ ‘i feel there is an angel in me’ she’d say
‘whom I am
constantly shocking”
-lawrence ferlinghetti.
Tag Archives: poetry
{berets and bongos} 67;
{berets and bongos} 66;
“-tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they’ll scarcely find us (if they do,
we’ll move away still further: into now”
-ee cummings.
{berets and bongos} 65;
“i will come back to you, i swear i will;
and you will know me still.
i shall be only a little taller
than when i went.”
-edna st. vincent millay
{berets and bongos} 64;
“one grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
one not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.
one fine day.”
-lawrence ferlinghetti, recipe for happiness in khaborovsk or anyplace.
{berets and bongos} 63;
”…she collected dictionaries
as other women take up men
and shelve them:
manuals, grammars, teach Yourself
german, malay, italian, swahili, welsh,
like a passion for clothes that would hang
unworn in the dark,
for peridots, garnets, amethysts, pearls
in a shut case, nouns declined.
each unknown word shone with delicious fire
and the alien phrases silked her skin
with their genders and connotations.
she might have been the end house
on the waterfront of macau
welcoming every sailor in.
but the longing for many tongues
to part her lips – si, igen, ja,
ah oui, yes, yes –
was departure’s smile,
a leaning to the wind
that sweeps a glitter of light
across the sea and sets a silvery chill
at the neck. quick, to those books
guarding the mantelpiece,
ISBNs snug as a span of days;
to bread and fruit and sparkling wine…”
-jan owen, the return.
{berets and bongos} 62;
“you give me flowers resembling chinese lanterns.
you give me hale, for yellow. you give me vex.
you give me lemons softened in brine and you give me cuttlefish ink.
you give me all 463 stairs of brunelleschi’s dome.
you give me seduction and you let me give it back to you.
you give me you.
you give me an apartment full of morning smells—toasted bagel and black
coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill.
you give me 24-across.
you give me flowers resembling moths’ wings.
you give me the first bird of morning alighting on a wire.
you give me the sidewalk café with plastic furniture and the boys
with their feet on the chairs.
you give me the swoop of homemade kites in the park on Sunday.
you give me afternoon-colored beer with lemons in it.
you give me d.h. lawrence,
and he gives me pomegranates and sorb-apples.
you give me the loose tooth of california, the broken jaw of new york city.
you give me the blue sky of wyoming, and the blue wind through it.
you give me an ancient city where the language is a secret
everyone is keeping.
you give me a t-shirt that says all you gave me was this t-shirt.
you give me pictures with yourself cut out.
you give me lime blossoms, but not for what they symbolize.
you give me yes. You give me no.
you give me midnight apples in a car with the windows down.
you give me the flashbulbs of an electrical storm.
you give me thunder and the suddenly green underbellies of clouds.
you give me the careening of trains.
you give me the scent of bruised mint.
you give me the smell of black hair, of blond hair.
you give me apollo and daphne, pan and syrinx.
you give me echo.
you give me hyacinths and narcissus. you give me foxgloves
and soft fists of peony.
you give me the filthy carpet of an east village apartment.
you give me seeming not to notice.
you give me an unfinished argument, begun on the manhattan-bound f train.”
-rebecca lindemberg, dispatches from an unfinished world.
{berets and bongos} 61;
“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”
-frank o’hara.
{berets and bongos} 60;
and now for something a little different. one extremely lovely, extremely breathtaking, extremely badass spoken word poem by sarah kay.
“okay, there’s a few heartbreaks that chocolate can’t fix.
but that’s what the rain boots are for.
because rain will wash away everything, if you let it.
i want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that’s the way my mom taught me. “
but that’s what the rain boots are for.
because rain will wash away everything, if you let it.
i want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that’s the way my mom taught me. “
{berets and bongos} 59;
“fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
select the prince from a row of identical masks,
tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
and snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
or learn the phone directory by rote.
always it’s impossible what someone asks—
you have to fight magic with magic. you have to believe
that you have something impossible up your sleeve,
the language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
an army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
the will to do whatever must be done:
marry a monster. hand over your firstborn son.”
-a.e. stallings, “fairy tale logic”.
{berets and bongos} 58;
“last night as i was sleeping,
i dreamt—marvelous error!—
that i had a beehive
here inside my heart.
and the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.”
-antonio machado.
