JESUS emptied the devils of one man into forty hogs and the hogs took the edge of a high rock and dropped off and down into the sea: a mob.

The sheep on the hills of Australia, blundering fourfooted in the sunset mist to the dark, they go one way, they hunt one sleep, they find one pocket of grass for all.

Karnak? Pyramids? Sphinx paws tall as a coolie? Tombs kept for kings and sacred cows? A mob.

Young roast pigs and naked dancing girls of Belshazzar, the room where a thousand sat guzzling when a hand wrote: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin? A mob.

The honeycomb of green that won the sun as the Hanging Gardens of Nineveh, flew to its shape at the hands of a mob that followed the fingers of Nebuchadnezzar: a mob of one hand and one plan.

Stones of a circle of hills at Athens, staircases of a mountain in Peru, scattered clans of marble dragons in China: each a mob on the rim of a sunrise: hammers and wagons have them now.

Locks and gates of Panama? The Union Pacific crossing deserts and tunneling mountains? The Woolworth on land and the Titanic at sea? Lighthouses blinking a coast line from Labrador to Key West? Pigiron bars piled on a barge whistling in a fog off Sheboygan? A mob: hammers and wagons have them to-morrow.

The mob? A typhoon tearing loose an island from thousand-year moorings and bastions, shooting a volcanic ash with a fire tongue that licks up cities and peoples. Layers of worms eating rocks and forming loam and valley floors for potatoes, wheat, watermelons.

The mob? A jag of lightning, a geyser, a gravel mass loosening...

The mob ... kills or builds ... the mob is Attila or Ghengis Khan, the mob is Napoleon, Lincoln.

I am born in the mob-I die in the mob-the same goes for you-I don't care who you are.

I cross the sheets of fire in No Man's land for you, my brother-I slip a steel tooth into your throat, you my brother-I die for you and I **** you-It is a twisted and gnarled thing, a crimson wool:
                One more arch of stars,
                In the night of our mist,
                In the night of our tears.

The soonest mended, nothing said;
  And help may rise from east or west;
But my two hands are lumps of lead,
  My heart sits leaden in my breast.

O north wind swoop not from the north,
  O south wind linger in the south,
Oh come not raving raging forth,
  To bring my heart into my mouth;

For I've a husband out at sea,
  Afloat on feeble planks of wood;
He does not know what fear may be;
  I would have told him if I could.

I would have locked him in my arms,
  I would have hid him in my heart;
For oh! the waves are fraught with harms,
  And he and I so far apart.

I look into the mirror and expect to see me,
but it is not me that I see
Well, it is, but truly it is not me
I expected to see a face healthy and full of life
Instead I see one that is ghastly and full of strife
Instead of bright eyes, hers are gaunt
Instead of rosy cheeks, hers are sallow, sunk
My lips I'm sure are of a healthy hue
Not hers, they appear to be blue
"This is not me!" I yell at the mirror of me
Then my image smiles and whispers "soon"
At this I take flight
My entire being filled with fright
All the while I hear her laughing
*Coming from within the mirror in my room

After rain the empty mountain
Stands autumnal in the evening,
Moonlight in its groves of pine,
Stones of crystal in its brooks.
Bamboos whisper of washer-girls bound home,
Lotus-leaves yield before a fisher-boat --
And what does it matter that springtime has gone,
While you are here, O Prince of Friends?

"Where are your hopes and dreams?"

"It's in my heart."* I replied.

"But it's broken!" they cried.

Is it wrong to have hopes
And dreams in a broken heart?

You don't keep them anywhere
Where they would fade with the time.

You don't place them somewhere
Where they could be forgotten.

They must be safe in a place
Where they would not cease to exist
Or be passed by the hands of time.

Even if the heart, itself, is not safe.

And when your heart breaks,
*That's when they become true.