collect 25 of my favorite poems

In this dream, Pito and
Diane Arbus go out
for a cup of decaf
and a roll some place
You’re not drinking
your coffee, Pito says
That’s OK, says Diane
I just want to hear
you talk, How about
your roll, says Pito
You eating that
No, you can have it
says Diane, I’m too sick
to eat
Sick of what, says Pito
The doctor’s don’t know
she says, I think it’s
the birth control pills
and the hepatitis
I had once
So, you’re taking
the pill, says Pito
looking at Diane intently
I’ve lost eight pounds
says Diane as she fidgets
with the lens on one
of her cameras
You wear those cameras
around your neck
as if they were charms
or holy medals, says Pito
Diane looks up at him
and smiles wryly, Maybe
they are, she says
You’re the sexiest woman
I’ve ever known, says
Pito craning his neck
She’s let her minidress
slide back far enough
for him to see her panties
And then Pito is blinded
by the flash of Diane’s
camera
Not again, says Pito
Diane keeps clicking her
camera, she gets up
and takes shots of him
from all different angles
I don’t like you taking
my picture, says Pito
Not tonight
But Diane doesn’t listen
Not tonight
But Diane doesn’t listen
She’s possessed
Click, flash, click, flash
You’re blinding me, Pito yells
And when he wakes up
the bright light of morning
is hitting him in the face
and he’s in bed, alone

—Leo Romero

Where’s Madge then,
Madge and her men?
buried with Alice in her hair
(but if you the rain
he’ll not tell where.)

beauty makes terms
with time and his worms,
when loveliness
says sweetly Yes
to wind and cold;
and how much earth
is Madge worth?
Inquire of the flower that sways in the autumn
she will never guess.
but i know

my heart fell dead before.

—e.e. cummings

A little girl with scarlet enameled fingernails
Asks me what time it is -— evidently that’s a toy wristwatch
She’s wearing, for fun. And it is fun to wear other
Odd things, like this briar pipe and tweed coat

Like date-colored sierras with the lines of seams
Sketched in and plunging now and then into unfathomable
Valleys that can’t be deduced by the shape of the person
Sitting inside it -— me, and just as our way is flat across
Dales and gulches, as though our train were a pencil

Guided by a ruler held against a photomural of the Alps
We both come to see distance as something unofficial
And impersonal yet not without its curious justification
Like the time of a stopped watch -— right twice a day.

Only the wait in stations is vague and
Dimensionless, like oneself. How do they decide how much
Time to spend in each? One beings to suspect there’s no
Rule or that it’s applied haphazardly.

Sadness of the faces of children on the platform,
Concern of the grownups for connections, for the chances
Of getting a taxi, since these have no timetable.
You get one if you can find one though in principle

You can always find one, but the segment of chance
In the circle of certainty is what gives these leaning
Tower of Pisa figures their aspect of dogged
Impatience, banking forward into the wind.

In short any stop before the final one creates
Clouds of anxiety, of sad, regretful impatience
With ourselves, our lives, the way we have been dealing
With other people up until now. Why couldn’t
We have been more considerate? These figures leaving

The platform or waiting to board the train are my brothers
In a way that really wants to tell me whey there is so little
Panic and disorder in the world, and so much unhappiness.
If I were to get down now to stretch, take a few steps
In the wearying and world—weary clouds of steam like great
White apples, might I just through proximity and aping
Of postures and attitudes communicate this concern of mine
To them? That their jagged attitudes correspond to mine,

That their beefing strikes answering silver bells within
My own chest, and that I know, as they do, how the last
Stop is the most anxious one of all, though it means
Getting home at last, to the pleasures and dissatisfactions of home?

It’s as though a visible chorus called up the different
Stages of the journey, singing about them and being them:
Not the people in the station, not the child opposite me
With currant fingernails, but the windows, seen through,

Reflecting imperfectly, ruthlessly splitting open the bluish
Vague landscape like a zipper. Each voice has its own
Descending scale to put one in one’s place at every stage;
One need never not know where one is

Unless one give up listening, sleeping, approaching a small
Western town that is nothing but a windmill. Then
The great fury of the end can drop as the solo
Voices tell about it, wreathing it somehow with an aura

Of good fortune and colossal welcomes from the mayor and
Citizens’ committees tossing their hats into the air.
To hear them singing you’d think it had already happened
And we had focused back on the furniture of the air.

—John Ashbery

You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I’m all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask. The nauseous vault
Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.

They’ve changed all that. Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two,
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard. . .
I don’t know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I’m in the country.
Skin doesn’t have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I’m twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband’s sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn’t a cat yet.

Now she’s done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.

—Sylvia Plath

Without just one nest
A bird can call the world home
Life is your career

- Chuck Palahniuk

A virus threads its way through us, rides our blood
like a subway, erasing everything. But it’s

alright, I don’t want to remember floorplans or
thresholds anyway, the light
finding the airspace around my mother’s door,

the black air filling her lungs

until all inside her
hangs darkly. I left the attic
unlatched, shimmied up the gutterpipe, I knew

I’d never wake her, no matter how hard I
knocked.

—

She opened herself like a time-lapsed rose. I thought
our bodies were mostly water

but there was so much blood. I rinsed the rags

in the sink & she whirlpooled
away, below my feet, filling sewers,

so much flowing from that moment, that
Atlantic.

—

All the payphones hang stuffed with quarters,
the map has been folded too many times.

—

I’m sick of God & his teaspoons. I don’t want

to remember her
reaching up for a kiss, or the television

pouring its blue bodies into her bedroom.

I’d stare at the dust lit up by the sun,
it formed fallen pillars
connecting the windows to the floor & I knew

they were all that kept the walls
from collapse.

—Nick Flynn

I love you, because in my thousand and one nights of dreams,
I never once dreamed of you.
I looked down paths that traveled from afar,
but it was never you I expected.
Suddenly I’ve felt you flying through my soul
in quick, lofty flight,
and how beautiful you seem way up there, far
from my always idiot heart!
Love me that way, flying over everything,
And, like the bird on its branches, land in my arms
only to rest,
then fly off again.
Be not like the romantic ones who, in love, set me on fire.
When you climb up my mansion,
enter so lightly, that as you enter
the dog of my heart will not bark.

- Luis Llorens Torres
(Translated by Julio Marza)

I want to sniff the glue that holds families together.
I was a good boy once.
I listened with three ears.
When I didn’t get what I wanted, I never cried.
I banged my head over and over on the kitchen floor.
I sat on a man’s lap.
I took his words that tasted like candy.
I want to break something now.
I am the purple lips of a child throwing snowballs at a taxi.
There is an alligator in my closet.
If you make me mad, it will eat you.
I was a good boy once.
I had the most stars in the classroom.
My cheeks overflowed with rubies.
I want to break something now.
My bedroom is so dark I feel like an astronaut.
I wish someone would come in and kiss me.
I was a good boy once.
The sweet smelling woman used to say that she loved me.
The man with the lap used to read me stories,
swing me in his arms like a chandelier.
I want to break something now.
My heart beat like the meanest kid on the school bus.
My brain tightened like a fist.
I was a good boy once.
I didn’t steal that kid’s homework.
I left a clump of spirit in its place.
I want to break something now.
I can multiply big numbers faster than you can.
I can beat men who smoke cigars at chess.
I was a good boy once.
I brushed my teeth and looked in the mirror.
My mouth was a spectacular wound.
Now it only feels good when it bleeds.

- Jeffrey McDaniel

A perfume like an acid plum
sword on a road,
sugary kisses on the teeth,
vital drops trickling down the fingers,
sweet erotic pulp,
threshing floors, haystacks, inciting
secret hideaways in spacious houses,
mattresses asleep in the past, the pungent green valley
seen from above, from the hidden window:
all adolescence becoming wet and burning
like a lantern tipped in the rain.

- Pablo Neruda
(Translated by Jack Schmitt)