Alone is delicious.
There’s no one to see.
I can eat these low clouds
and the body of wind
that’s turning them into rolling
tumbleweed, eat with my hands,
get crumbs over everything,
crumbs of clouds on my nose,
in my fingernails, clouds smeared
all over my shirt and my chin,
I can lick the clouds off my fingers
and no one can see or care if
I have as much dessert as I want.
I just reach into those blue
holes that I’ve left and pull out
whole fistfuls of sky, of infinity.
It’s tasteless and so hard
I can chew it for hours.
(Jonathan Holden)
I'm Nobody! Who Are
You?
Are you--Nobody--too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd banish us--you know!
How dreary--to be--Somebody!
How Public--like a Frog--
To tell your name--the livelong June--
to an admiring Bog!
(Emily Dickinson)
It isn't that I've forgotten
Or don't intend to do
With my life what I
Know I should,
That is, transcend the petty concerns
And live
In Truth
And in beauty
according to the
Higher aims of my existence.
Yet,
I have trouble
getting started
somehow
And day by day,
Hour by hour,
Wait,
For the spell
to be broken,
And go on,
Life as usual,
minute by minute,
pulse beat
by
pulse beat,
paying bills,
doing the laundry,
going to work,
putting band-aids
on little scraped knees,
watching TV,
Swept along
and along.
(Janet
Campbell Hale)
25th High School Reunion
We come to hear the endings
of all the stories
in our anthology
of false starts:
how the girl who seemed
as hard as nails
was hammered into shape;
how the athletes ran
out of races;
how under the skin
our skulls rise to the surface
like rocks in the bed
of a drying stream.
Look! We have all
turned into
ourselves.
(Linda Pastan)
So you aren't Tolstoy or Saint Francis
or even a well-known singer
of popular songs and will never read Greek
or speak French fluently,
will never see something no one else
has seen before through a lens
or with the naked eye.
You've been given just the one life
in this world that matters
and upon which every other life
somehow depends as long as you live,
and also given the costly gifts of hunger,
choice, and pain with which to raise
a modest shrine to meaning.
(Leonard Nathan)
With their stares others tell me
what I already know to be the truth;
my features do not conform
to the conventions of beauty or grace
When I hurry across Capital
with its unforgiving light
my feet and arms fail me,
and when I speak
my thoughts, though clear,
are slush as much as ice--
Still I say the difference between us
is only that of form.
You see, I too scan storefront windows
to verify I exist;
I too am stunned by the polluted sunset
like a gash in skyscraper glass;
I too hear the churchbells
ringing in the early orange dusk;
I envy youth its poetry
and its unrelenting lust
and my breath, like yours--
warm, humid, and grey--
lifts from deep within my lungs
pauses in the December air
and evaporates
as we all
must
in our sad
anointed time
in our
difference of like, not kind
(Bob Henry Baber)
He has come to report himself
A missing person.
The authorities
Hand him the forms.
He knows how they have waited
With the learned patience of barbers
In small shops, idle,
Stropping their razors.
But now that these spaces in his life
Stare up at him blankly,
Waiting to be filled in,
He does not now how to begin.
Afraid that he might not answer
To his description of himself,
He asks for a mirror.
They reassure him
That he can be nowhere
But wherever he finds himself
>From moment to moment
Which, for the moment, is here.
And he might like to believe them.
But in the mirror
He sees what is missing.
It is himself
He sees there emerging
Slowly, as from the dark
Of a furnished room
Only by darkness,
One who receives no mail
And is known to the landlady only
For keeping himself to himself,
and for whom it will be years yet
Before he can trust to the light
This last disguise, himself.
(Donald Justice)
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disk
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,--
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
(William Carlos Williams)
People think I'm so and so
But I am not so and so
People think I am this
But I am that.
(Margarita Cuadrado, 6th grade)
(Untitled Behavioral Self-Portrait)
My arms are wrapped fast around myself.
I hear my sister breathing loudly down the hall.
The Begonia is living.
Lenore is my friend.
There are cigarettes I hate on the dresser.
The door is wide open.
No one is coming in.
Steve is away, camping alone for four days.
My dog has a tumor.
My mother and father have jobs.
I don't.
I'm middle class in America.
I love my country.
I walk the streets at two a.m. nude.
No, I don't.
My older sister is married.
I will go to college and soon be an adult.
Ducks laugh in the pond at night when no one's there.
My other sister is homosexual.
I can drive a car well.
I love the black sweater in the closet.
My father gave it to me.
I'm seventeen and a spy.
My body is on the chair.
I don't shave my legs.
I am a woman.
It's autumn and cold outside.
Not inside.
My hands are ripe for you.
I cry.
I hate to go to sleep.
I love dessert and the sun going down on the highway
overpass.
Kiss me.
(Amy
Smiley, High School Student)
The only thing we know is the thing
we turn out to be, I don't care what
you think, it's true, now you think
your way out of this
(Leroi Jones [Imamu Amiri Baraka])
I am lost in hot fits
of myself
trying
to get
out. Lost
because
I am kinder
to myself
than I
need
Softer w/ others
than is good
for them.
Taller
than
most/
Stronger
What is it
about me
that frightens me
loses
me
tosses me helplessly
in
the air.
oh love
Songs
dont leave
w/o me
that you
are the weakness
of my simplicity
Are feeling
& want
All need
& romance
I wd do anything
to be loved
& this
is a stupid
mistake.
(Leroi Jones
[Imamu Amiri Baraka])