More tomorrow

The day comes
when we will eagerly trade the past
for more tomorrow.

Not

Those who care not live not.

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3

Catastrophes cure stasis,
stagnation and bliss.

2

We make mirrors out of everything
and each other, and still
we can't see ourselves.

1

Harmony requires deviance.

One or the other

If you find yourself working hard
to accomplish unnecessary things,
you've either gone very wrong
or you're doing it exactly right.

Everyone

Everyone you meet is someone
you'll someday never see again.

A process (Metzinger)

The self is not a thing but a process.

Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

On love

We love only life.
We fall in love because loving is living.

On choosing

At what point does not having chosen well justify the loss of choice?

Speak & listen

Speak as though every word hurt someone unknown;
listen as though every word missed hurt you.

Moral theory

If there is no moral justification for taking, then moral life is impossible. If all life is inherently amoral, then what use can life make of moral theory?

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The only

The only conceivable reason to seek Eden is to eat more apples.

3

Honest is not the same as unkind.
The point of honesty is to avoid unkindness.
To others.  To yourself.

2

What the enemy sells is not the dark
but the opaque, which can't be cured
by light alone.

1

Uncertainty is reality.

Stories have changed (Morgenstern)

"Stories have changed, my dear boy," the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad. "There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister's story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act?"

Erin Morgenstern, from The Night Circus

On rejection

Our weakest power is rejection,
yet we use it like it were our greatest strength.

Probably not

Must one be a prolific writer of poetry
to be a writer of prolific poetry?

If the canary doesn't sing (Darwish)

If the canary doesn't sing
to you, my friend...know that
you are the warden of your prison,
if the canary doesn't sing to you.

...

If the canary doesn't sing,
my friend,
blame only yourself.
If the canary doesn't sing
to you, my friend
then sing to it...sing to it.

Mahmoud Darwish, "Exile"

On the path

The path is good,
but the path is only better
when there is no destination,
only path's end.

On sages

Sages don't have the best answers.
They have the best questions.

3

We love ourselves in love,
but it's not enough.

2

What I am questions what you are where it differs from what you are.

1

Love is recognition of rightness
or mere fixation.

Why I Write

I write poetry to better understand,
to be better understood,
not to baffle.

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All of 'em

All of my poems are love poems,
for I love the truth…

And the chasm (Darwish)

If it were a bridge we would have crossed it. But it is home and the chasm.

Mahmoud Darwish, "A Horse for the Stranger"

On language

We polish our language until it perfectly communicates our hatred.

Winter wonderlands are cold

The last

The dawn of our last day
still charms the dew.

The opposition (Brooks)

Our conventional accounts of poetry which oppose emotion to intellect, "lyric simplicity" to "thoughtful meditation," have done no service to the cause of poetry. The opposition is not only merely superficial: it falsifies the real relationships. For the lyric quality, if it be genuine, is not the result of some transparent and "simple" redaction of a theme or a situation which is somehow poetic in itself; it is, rather, the result of an imaginative grasp of diverse materials—but an imaginative grasp so sure that it may show itself to the reader as unstudied and unpredictable without for a moment relaxing its hold on the intricate and complex stuff which it carries.

Cleanth Brooks, from The Well Wrought Urn

On greed

Greed isn't wanting more,
it's wanting others to have less.

When everything

When everything becomes available and everything is permissible, it is a predictable, if disappointing, thing for many to retreat to the old comfort of boundary and restriction.

Shrimp curry

Based on this recipe.

The divide

The primitive mind worships—or damns—
what the sophisticated mind investigates.

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The code

Compromise often, submit never.

Who (Darwish)

Who are the words looking for inside us?

Mahmoud Darwish, "The Hoopoe"

On sanity

Sanity is only the preferred madness.

A rare exception (Brin)

If 99% of societies were feudal pyramids of hierarchy and inherited status, it suggests that our own—with its emphasis on individualism, rights and competitive creativity is a rare exception. Not an outgrowth of “natural law” but instead an invention, spectacularly clever, complex and needing perpetual maintenance, lest it slump back into older, more entropic ways.

David Brin

Not always

Knowledge isn't always power.

Such blood (Bass)

The landscape gathered all men, across the ages, as the anguished, hungry, confused blood of man surged this way and that, sloshing around in the soft human vessels as if such blood no more belonged in them than a flock of wild birds, bright birds, would belong in a rusting wire cage.

Rick Bass, from All The Land To Hold Us

How much

How much does our function align with our intent?
How much does our form support our designs?

Mauled and distorted (Brooks)

"What does the poem communicate?" is badly asked. It is not that the poem communicates nothing. Precisely the contrary. The poem communicates so much and communicates it so richly and with such delicate qualifications that the thing communicated is mauled and distorted if we attempt to convey it by any vehicle less subtle than that of the poem itself.

Cleanth Brooks, from The Well Wrought Urn

The force

Is there any force
allied against life
other than improbability?

It won't

Don't stretch decency to cover preference.

On creation

Creation is everything we salvage from the cosmic No.

So many

So many lead lives without strategy, relying upon tactics like impulse and reaction.

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