When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I ****** my *** in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose,
And the pear is, and so’s
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose—
But were always a rose.

He halted in the wind, and—what was that
Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?
He stood there bringing March against his thought,
And yet too ready to believe the most.

“Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,” I said;
And truly it was fair enough for flowers
had we but in us to assume in march
Such white luxuriance of May for ours.

We stood a moment so in a strange world,
Myself as one his own pretense deceives;
And then I said the truth (and we moved on).
A young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

nobody warns you about the first boy who tells you he wants to marry you.

nobody warns you about the tangible shift in the universe when he parts his lips to smile.

nobody warns you about the poetry he'll write you or how your knees will weaken or the melancholy hidden between the layers of his laughter.

nobody warns you that miles will morph into lightyears and you will curse the ocean for being the only thing that keeps his fingers from resting between yours.

nobody warns you about the day his sweater doesn't smell like him anymore.

nobody warns you that human hands are incapable of holding a person together.

nobody warns you that sometimes love is not enough, no matter how much you wish it was.

nobody warns you about the crippling nostalgia that renders you breathless.

nobody warns you about the nights when silence screams for your blood.

nobody warns you about the crater that forms in your chest in the middle of the night when he doesn't answer.

nobody warns you about how it's going to feel when he tells you he's in love with someone else.

nobody warns you that forever is a lie.

- m.f.

it is funny, you will be dead some day.
By you the mouth hair eyes,and i mean
the unique and nervously obscene

need;it’s funny.  They will all be dead

knead of lustfulhunched deeplytoplay
lips and stare the gross fuzzy-pash
—dead—and the dark gold delicately smash….
grass,and the stars,of my shoulder in stead.

It is a funny,thing.  And you will be

and i and all the days and nights that matter
knocked by sun moon jabbed ****** with ecstasy
….tremble (not knowing how much better

than me will you like the rain’s face and

the rich improbable hands of the Wind)

when i have thought of you somewhat too
much and am become perfectly and
simply Lustful….sense a gradual stir
of beginning muscle,and what it will do
to me before shutting….understand
i love you….feel your suddenly body reach
for me with a speed of white speech

(the simple instant of perfect hunger
Yes)
        how beautifully swims
the fooling world in my huge blood,
cracking brains A swiftlyenormous light
—and furiously puzzling through,prismatic,whims,
the chattering self perceives with hysterical fright

a comic tadpole wriggling in delicious mud