I notice it
It is slight
In meaning and in size

A momentary interruption
A mere flicker
in the tenement of steel
A brief flaw
in the consummate white

this thing they call fire
unfed, licking on all sides

I wouldn't touch it
even if I were close enough

but
for a moment, there

a faint bit of scarlet
outlined in ochre
bright, and brilliant
and about to die

a momentary interruption
a spasm
in the cold, undeviating line of time

WRITTEN ON THE PULSE

Time was
when wheat was
a living gold

that moved with the wind
moving me
to tears

unable to hold
the ecstasy of
its beauty

or the green of trees
alive with sunlight
made me cry that I

had no words to touch it
and all I could do
was to love it so

with all
my soul
before words came

and attached themselves
to these ordinary
miracles

the world teaching me
to say itself
to understand

the ravishing of the senses
the language of feeling
written on the pulse

*

My five year old memories held in the soul until words came and helped me to express them.
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

E.E. Cummings - enormous SMALLNESS

It was winter
I sat there waiting for you
when I knew I shouldn’t be

in the passenger seat of that
blue and silver volkswagen

the grey of the dashboard
stretching out
into the pale dusk of the road
the scene was monochrome

not flat, not nondescript
simple
the clouds just before snow
the grass just before ice
the time for color to drain away
and come back fuller in spring
it seemed just right

I knew it shouldn’t

I wake and remark
the cold in my bundled clothes
the cheerlessness of winter
every shade of grey
bleeding into one another

looking beyond that dashboard
from inside your empty car

I wonder why it seems so beautiful

I think that it was
my winter clothes
and your car
and the pre-snow

a scene
that held your memory
a scene that could still hope for who you’d be

a scene that you weren’t in
a scene that was all me
gloved and hatted in
the fabrics of Corinthians 13

believing,
waiting

I wonder why it seems so beautiful

I think that it was me

there’s never any woman
who is more unfortunate to be a woman
than the woman
who is near you

now, I’ve got no idea of beauty
but when you said “I love your femininity,”
I can coalesce what you meant

“woman,”
"woman,"
“woman”

soft, accessible, permissible
the earthly mans ego-stroking
shower-fantasy
of what it means to be
“A Proverbs 31 woman”

a beauty, meaning

something to reflect you
endlessly
a mirror with a nice rack
a way to hear yourself talk
again and again and again and again
stripped bare for you
mouthing it all back

“you’re beautiful,”

it sounds
so very, very, very ugly
when I know just what you mean

how dare you make
“woman”
sound like something like that

I’ve got no idea of beauty
still reconciling femininity
my womanhood
still reconciling me

but I’ll never fit your narrative
or engage with your empty analects
of what it means to be

because you don’t know how to

and you certainly don’t know beauty

When I was  
younger,
I had to learn
sit and wait to  
write.  
I  would get
impatient and force it.
If you read it,
you could tell.
Now I’m quite a bit older, and
I quit trying.
Fodder seems to be  
everywhere.
I can write about
the most mundane
things.
Today I’m at the  
library waiting for my
girlfriend to
finish up at the dentist.
She’s getting her  
teeth cleaned.
All my drinking ruined  
my teeth.
When I got them  
pulled a year ago,
there wasn’t a  
good tooth in my head.
I have dentures now, so
I don’t have to  
worry about how much I drink.
I know this isn’t a
very good poem, but
hey,
there she is
all shiny and bright…  
and sober.