New poems

+15

Your mind (James)

You close your mind the way a furious child closes his fists.

Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Either the truth

Either the truth is discernible in the random
or there is no truth.

On principle

Principle is a precipice.

New poems

+15

Real freedom (Savage)

Real freedom, after all, means the ability to spend your time as you see fit—to write, to think, to paint, to sculpt, or to do nothing in particular—and, under capitalism, the rich have a lot more freedom than the rest of us. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Luke Savage

As remarkable (Oppen)

It is impossible the world should be either good or bad
If its colors are beautiful or if they are not beautiful
If parts of it taste good or if no parts of it taste good
It is as remarkable in one case as the other

George Oppen, from "Some San Francisco Poems"

Identity

Identity is absolutely approximate.

Bound (Rexroth)

This ego, bound by personal
Tragedy and the vast
Impersonal vindictiveness
Of the ruined and ruining world,
Pauses in this immortality,
As passionate, as apathetic,
As the lava flow that burned here once;
And stopped here; and said, "This far
And no further."  And spoke thereafter
In the simple diction of stone.

Kenneth Rexroth, from "Lyell's Hypothesis Again"

The monster

The monster is the one that you cannot tolerate based simply on who and what it is.

And

Yesterday's strange is today's normal,
and vice versa.

New poems

+14

Either way

You can kill what is sweet or wait
for it to die:  either way you will learn
the power of sour.