There are times in life when one becoms a poet; when that joy and pain becomes irepressible and it wakes you up in the middle of the night to write the songs and wails of the heart

If you cannot join me
in my darkness
or weep as my heart breaks
I will ask what love is.
Will you buy me cigarettes
in the morning?
and serve me whiskey for lunch?
If you won't
I will ask what love is.
Can you see me in my empty eyes?
then feel the void in your heart?
If not, I will ask what love is.
In my asking
will you ask with me?
And if you shall
I will know what love is.

There's nothing different about the looks on those faces you recognize and hold dear. There was never anything ordinary about the faces you ignore. All are one and the same, besides what you invest in them. There is only one face, ever before you in a hundred wise, only one day infinitely repeating.

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Maya angelou

Silence is not a lack of words.
Silence is not a lack of music.
Silence is not a lack of curses.
Silence is not a lack of screams.
Silence is not a lack of colors
or voices or bodies or whistling wind.
Silence is not a lack of anything.

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out

octavio paz

Memories
the break up conversation game!

You only love what you cannot touch, for you know that your touch would mar any object of love beyond recognizability. You love what is fleeting only because it has no regard for you, can never be hurt or destroyed by you.

And you dream of being equally untouchable, you sit and think of the perfect love: some divine dualism where each regards the other equally and neither is capable of inflicting pain or suffering it.

People generally don't understand how this could be love. They're so used to, so hardened by, being with one another that they just assume love always entails pain.

We watchers of cloud, tracers of stars, we collectors of broken glass and broken light, we who love with camera and pen, with mind and soul, we know.

Jody-from sound to sense

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd advertise -- you know!

Where Did I Wake Up?
Where did I wake up? where am I? Where’s
my right side, where’s the left? where’s above, and
where’s below?

what can we do?
at their best, there is gentleness in Humanity.
some understanding and, at times, acts of
courage
but all in all it is a mass, a glob that doesn't
have too much.
it is like a large animal deep in sleep and
almost nothing can awaken it.
when activated it's best at brutality,
selfishness, unjust judgments, murder.

what can we do with it, this Humanity?

nothing.

Charles Bukowski

Tree Heart
by Raphael Dagold

In a tree, blackbirds -- a swarm, an open hive,
each black lightness its own small chamber:
The birds are not crows and are not death

and there are hundreds of them in the dryness,
quick late-summer breathing back at the leaves
they're hungry doubles of, wet shades of oxygen

gathering, a gather and a making of a flock
from a tree, a leaf a wing, two a bird, three a bird
with a beak and a flutter and a lack

of patience, sun up and a hot sheen
already, air heated and moving in quick drifts
shaking the leaves, the leaves are strange here,

so many of them shaking but still silent,
their sound is under the sound of the birds
loud in the light, light shooting clean

from one hillside through to the next, pale,
before it's gone and saturated everything,
light strung to a key the birds play, each of the hundred,

the birds are so loud it's easy to think this,
that the very light is sound:
Then one of them goes. No mission. No scout.

Just go, come back, like that, some more go
to land in the field below the tips of grain
so a haze begins, elastic, a stream of one body

from the tree like a cell's separation,
no flat, no hollow, no more,
you'd think, could fit where they all go

to eat, is all, all the flock's pieces
beating their wings for the ground.
It is almost. It is almost too much

for the field to carry where they've described
themselves, written their own low arcs,
rippling and settling for each new two or three

until the tree of birds is in the field. Murmuring.
The light is there. The light is a disappearance.
And they are eating. And they are making room.

"I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that
I am loved. I am
not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm
of silence is
large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of
light and speech,
and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very
dear."
George Eliot
- also known as Marian Evans