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Index of First Lines

An ongoing compendium of first lines of all poems featured on Read A Little Poetry

1. Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.

A boy told me

A break in the clouds. The blue

A cold rain starting

a drink

A girl whom I’ve not spoken to

A heart that’s been broken

A hippo sandwich is easy to make.

A life should leave

A man and a woman

A man said to the universe:

A man who keeps a diary, pays

A mermaid found a swimming lad,

A neighbourhood.

A parrot of irritation sits

A scar’s width of warmth on a worn man’s neck.

A serious moment for the water is when it boils

A slower pace, a somewhat slower pace will do.

A touch of cold in the Autumn night —

A white room and a party going on

A woman is reading a poem on the street

Above the quiet dock in midnight,

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Account for all the work.

After every war

After I broke up with someone,

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,

After the first glass of vodka

After the funeral, your hair

Afterward, the compromise.

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you 

All day I waited to be blown;

All girls should have a poem

All is quiet where I sit

All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling

All night long the hockey pictures

All night the sound had

All that I love

All the new thinking is about loss.

All this time,

Although you have betrayed him in a dream,

Although you mention Venice

Always be drunk.

Always caught up in what they called

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

Among the first we learn is good-bye,

And all of you so beautiful

And did you get what

And isn’t it enough that the mind’s caliper

And now they’ve all gone back

And the days are not full enough

And the stone word fell

And then I stood for the last time in that room.

and then Tony showed us the lake

And then we cowards

Any body can die, evidently. Few

Anyone here had a go at themselves

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter

Are you the new person drawn toward me?

As I walked out one evening,

As long as you want

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?

As the bruises fade, the lightning aches.

As the cat

As when someone

As you read, a white bear leisurely

At first we just say flower. How

At last I can be with you!

At least I have the flowers of myself,

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—

At one glance

At times my life suddenly opens its eyes in the dark.

Be strong Bernadette

Because birds will show only

Because my husband would not read my poems,

Because the night you asked me,

Because, in a wounded universe, the tufts

bed calls. i sit in the dark in the living room

Bend low again, night of summer stars.

Beneath my hands

Between going and staying the day wavers,

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter

Broken things are loveliest,

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

By the first of August

can be enough to make you look up

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.

Clear smoke,

Coming home with the last load I ride standing

Composed in a shine of laughing, Monique brings in sacks

Crisp cluster

crossed

crumbling. It died of old age,

dam’s broke,

Darwin.

Dawn comes later and later now,

Dawn’s faint breath

Days the weather sits

Days you are sick, we get dressed slow,

Dear love, though I am a hopeless correspondent,

Dear Madam, you have seen this play;

Death comes to me again, a girl

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?

Distance

Do not make things too easy.

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know

Don’t be ashamed that your parents

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.

Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an earful

Down near the bottom

Dreamed the thong of my sandal broke.

during my worst times

Each gesture

Eleven o’clock, and the curtain falls.

Enter without knocking, hard-working ant.

Even a rock

Even Eve, the only soul in all of time

Even if I now saw you

Even in this sharp weather there are lovers everywhere

even lying down, a sea

Even pain you can take, in waves:

Even the long-beloved

Even the purest writer is not entirely in his work, we must admit. A

Every day when I pick up my four-year-old daughter from preschool

Every morning

Every morning the maple leaves.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

Everyone who left us we find everywhere.

EYES:……………………………………Medium

Far away — far away —

Finally, I gave up on obeisance,

Finding a new poet

Finding is losing something else.

First, grant me my sense of history:

Flesh is heretic.

For some semitropical reason

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,

For those of us who live at the shoreline

For you I undress down to the sheaths of my nerves.

From blossoms comes

Geese appear high over us,

Give me tonight to be inconsolable.

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me

Green Buddhas

Had we nothing to prove

Hair is heaven’s water flowing eerily over us

Half of the world’s true glamour

Half past twelve. The time has quickly passed

Half the people in the world

Having used every subterfuge

He laughs and a breeze

He loved her and she loved him

He offers, between planes,

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?

Heart, you bully, you punk, I’m wrecked, I’m shocked

Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Honored when

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

How beautiful the sun as it skims

How can I sustain

How do they do it, the ones who make love

How funny you are today New York

How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans,

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder

I am a piece of chalk

I am always hungry

I am calling to wish you well. I am calling because I want to

I am dying

I am going to fail.

I am in love, hence free to live

I am lazy, the laziest

I am learning to abandon the world

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

I am not ready to die yet: magnolia tree

i am running into a new year

I am surprised to see

I am trying to tell you

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house

I ask them to take a poem

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

I believe in trees.

I broke your heart.

I buried my father

I can seep in, I can dry clear.

“I cannot go to school today,”

I carry joy as a choir sings,

“i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)”

I caught a tremendous fish

I climb the mountain.

I close the shop at six. Welcome wind,

I closed the book and changed my life and changed my life and changed

I could never say anything about my mother:

I couldn’t do it again,

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

I daydream, melancholy at the windowsill—

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

I do not mean the symbol

I don’t know how to wish you well.

i don’t think so.

i don’t want to hate the president

I empty myself of the names of others.

I feel it when the game is done

I fell out of love: that’s our story’s dull ending,

I felt a Funeral in my Brain,

I found it and I named it, being versed

I found you and I lost you,

I gave my heart to a woman –

I get into bed with it, and spring

I go down to the edge of the sea.

I go where I love and where I am loved,

I got out of bed

I had a sense of

I had drawn my chair to the hotel window, to watch the rain.

I have a feeling that my boat

I have a friend

I have been wondering

I have been wounded so often and so painfully,

I have begun,

I have eaten

I have just listened to this

I have no illusions.

I have started to say

I have supposed my past is part of myself.

I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life,

I imagined that you’d miss me, thought

I know what my heart is like

I lay down in the empty street and parked

I left this morning saying ‘I love you’

i like my body when it is with your

I live on the water,

I lived between my heart and my head,

I look across the table and think

I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,

I never intended to have this life, believe me—

I never meant the words I said,

I never want to go when it’s time

I once knew an eccentric electrician.

I pick an orange from a wicker basket

I picked an azalea

I reason, Earth is short —

I said I will find what is lowly

I said perhaps Patagonia, and pictured

I said, “Nothing for the last time.”

I saw my father naked, once, I

I shall haunt you, O my lost one, as the twilight

I should be the shiny one,

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

I sink back upon the ground, expecting to die. A voice speaks out of my ear

I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet

I spend all day in my office, reading a poem

I spend the days deciding

I still feel like

I stopped looking for you

I take off my shirt, I show you.

I think I grow tensions

I think of you

I think that I shall never know

I told them to go listen to people talking,

I tried to live small.

I used to lie on the floor for hours after

I waited for my life to start

I waited for you calmly, with infinite patience.

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

I want a god

I want a red dress.

I want to write something

I want to write you

I wanted to know what it was like before we

I was always leaving, I was

I was asleep while you were dying.

I was fifty-three this morning,

I was watching a robin fly after a finch — the smaller bird

I watched the arctic landscape from above

I went for a walk on Hollywood Boulevard.

I went to sleep smiling,

I whispered, ‘I am too young,’

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,

I woke to a voice within the room. Perhaps.

I wonder how many people in this city

I worry that my friends

I would like to watch you sleeping,

I write poetry, worry, smile,

I’m curled into a ball

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

I’m not feeling strong yet, but I am taking

I’m not going to cry all the time

I’m ordered out to a big hump of stones

I’m standing in a place where I once loved.

I’m thinking of you. What else can I say?

I’m thinking today of how we hold it together,

I’ve become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie,

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

I’ve got to tell you

I’ve sent you a poem; your first glimpse

If Baroque were more than a manner

If I had a shining head

If I were a cinnamon peeler

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you

If it’s any consolation, when your wife took me

If this is Wednesday, write Lazartigues, return library books, pick up

If when my wife is sleeping

If you believe in the magic of language,

If you keep taking stabs at utopia

If you place a fern

If you travel alone, hitchhiking,

‘Interesting, but futile,’ said his diary,

In a field

In an effort to get people to look

In grayish doubt and black despair,

In Lijiang, the sign outside your hostel

In Singapore, in the airport,

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker

In the aftermath of calculus

In the deep fall, the body awakes,

In the desert

In the dimly lit room

In the end, I made myself

In the middle of the night, when we get up

In the night, in the wind, at the edge of rain,

In the room where we lie,

In the sunless wooden room at noon

In the worst hour of the worst season

In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I

In this world

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

Interesting how we fall in love:

is a system of posture for wood.

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún,

Is it dirty

Is it starting to rain?

Is that where it happens?

is that you can never see the one you’re wearing,

is, after all, all we’ve ever done

Isn’t it always the heart that wants to wash

Isn’t the moon dark too,

It doesn’t matter

It happens surprisingly fast,

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

It is a kind of love, is it not?

It is all right. All they do

It is an afternoon toward the end of August:

It is big sky and its changes,

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

It is dusk. The birds sweep low to the lake and then dive

It is more onerous

It is no longer night. But there is a sameness

It is not the rain that wanly

it is so long since my heart has been with yours

It is the work of feeling

It scares me the genius we have

It seems these poets have nothing

It seems too enormous just for a man to be

It seems we’ve left skin

It was not love-why should I love you?-

It was your idea

it will not be simple, it will not be long

it’s 1962 March 28th

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill

It’s all I have to bring today —

It’s four o’clock in the afternoon,

It’s my lunch hour, so I go

It’s not how we leave one’s life. How go off

It’s so nice

It’s wonderful how I jog

January finally drags into February and one fumbles

John Keats

Just before she flew off like a swan

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,

Kisses can kiss us

Last night you left me and slept

Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way

Learning to love differently is hard,

let it go – the

Let me make this perfectly clear.

Let the light of late afternoon

Let’s fall in love —

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Lie still now

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is simple and gay

Light splashed this morning

Like a reminder of this life

Like primitives we buried the cat

Listen

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling

Listen:

Living is no laughing matter:

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the

Long ago on a night of danger and vigil

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived

Look at the birds. Even flying

Look, the trees

Look, your longing swung from the trapeze.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

Lord she’s gone done left me

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting

love is a deep and a dark and a lonely

love is more thicker than forget

love is not concerned

Love, is it a cat with claws and wild mate screams

Love, love, love, says Percy.

Lovely one,

‘Man who is a serious novel would like to hear from a woman who

Make a place to sit down.

Make some room for yourself, human animal.

Marahang-marahang

Marriage is not

may i feel said he

May mga kalungkutang hindi mabansagan,

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

Me up at does

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I

Miracle’s truck comes down the little avenue,

Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays

Morning at last: there in the snow

Morning is such a welcome time. It doesn’t demand

Morning of buttered toast;

Must I, in this question I am asking, include myself

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

My best lover ever

My body is both white and round

My body is white; my fate, softly rounded,

My candle burns at both ends;

my cat has been biting my cheeks lately

My father stands in the warm evening

My father taught me

My father, in middle age, falls in love with a dog.

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.

My girlfriend said,

My heart was full of softening showers,

My heart, sing praises to the men

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers

My mother never forgave my father

My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban

My party piece:

My sister doesn’t write poems.

My sister rubs the doll’s face in mud,

Nalulumbay ang puno ng goma sa gilid ng bulibard

Nature’s first green is gold,

Near the wall of a house painted

Night, what more do you want? Why this second per second

No hurt survives

No people are uninteresting.

No people are uninteresting.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

Not all days. But most days

—not pen. It’s got

Not so hot as this for a hundred years.

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,

Nothing in the cry

Nothing on earth

Nothing to tell. Nothing to desire.

Nothing’s going to become of anyone

Now it costs to say

Now that you’ve gone away for five days,

Now we will count to twelve

O generation of the thoroughly smug

O, how I faint when I of you do write,

Of all the public places, dear

Of course it was a disaster.

Of the genesis of birds we know nothing,

Oh I got up and went to work

Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head,

Oh, when I was in love with you,

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!

Old shoes,

Older, more generous,

On average, 5 people are born every second and 1.78 die.

On average, odd years have been the best for me.

On the beach, close to sunset, a dog runs

On the scales of desire, your absence weighs more

on Venus, time passes slowly because

Once again, the moment of impossible

Once when I was teaching “Dover Beach”

Once you had a secret love: seeing

Once, I knew a fine song,

One day it will vanish,

One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily,

One day you finally knew

One failure on

One grand boulevard with trees

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

Orange blossoms blowing over Castile

Out of the night that covers me,

Out of the sump rise the marigolds.

Out through the fields and the woods

Pain froze you, for years—and fear—leaving scars.

Peas never liked any of it.

Perhaps to love is to learn

Perhaps,

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course

Probably I hurt your aesthetic feelings.

Radishes flip their skirts in the wind

Rain fell in a post-romantic way.

Rain so dark I

Razors pain you;

Reality demands

Rebuked, she turned and ran

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change

Sa almusal kanina, namagitan sa atin

Sa iyo hahapon ang aking umaga,

Say tomorrow doesn’t come.

Seeing that there’s no other way,

Seems like a long time

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Shall I compare you to a rainbowed shower

She always writes poems. This summer

she died of alcoholism

She had a way of walking through concupiscence

She is sixty. She lives

She tells her love while half asleep,

She was a girl

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.

Sitting on the deck, bare feet

Skin meeting skin, we want to think

Skin remembers how long the years grow

Slated for demolition.

Snow melting when I left you, and I took

So early it’s still almost dark out.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years–

So that this will seem like words between

So this is what the ocean has been pushing across the table at us

So, there’s no way to be sure. Not

Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,

Some people might describe this room as spare:

Some people—

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some tourist of love

Someone I love is dying, which is why,

Someone was reading in the back,

Someone was saying

Something

Something came up

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,

Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,

Somewhere a seed falls to the ground

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

Somewhere in the Sargasso Sea

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows,

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you

Stay, I said

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Strephon kissed me in the spring,

Suddenly I remember the holes,

Sun in the knifed horizon bleeds the sky

Take the used-up heart like a pebble

Taking the hands of someone you love,

Talking in bed ought to be easiest

Tenderness and rot

Thank you whoever tuned the radio

That Mississippi chicken shack.

That spring when my parents’ bodies were still pristine,

That time

The afternoon turned dark early;

The apparition  of these faces       in the crowd   :

The Argument: You Wondered Why You Weren’t Published

The arrowhead,

The assignment was to fall in love.

The birds have vanished down the sky.

The birds they sang

The bloodstains on this page

The boy at the far end of the train car kept looking behind him

The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad.

The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister

The dark scissors of his legs

The day he moved out was terrible —

The days are hot and moist now. The doves say

The evening was the same as any other.

The fire in leaf and grass

The fist clenched round my heart

The fog comes

The heart under your heart

the history of melancholia

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

The light came through the window now

The married man dreamt last night

The mind becomes a field of snow

The modern biographers worry

The moment when, after many years

The moon did not become the sun.

The moon was like a full cup tonight,

The names are the first to go,

The old are kind

The painter is beautiful because he can see

The people of my time are passing away: my

The plants of the lake

The poppies send up their

The problem (if there was one) was simply a problem with the

The rat makes her way up

The rising hills, the slopes,

The river is famous to the fish.

The sea asks “How is your life now?”

The sea-wash never ends.

The self you leave behind

The shirt touches his neck

The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”

The slate black sky. The middle step

The spider, dropping down from twig

The talkative guest has gone,

The teacher asks a question.

The thing I’ll never write is the green leaf

The time will come

The tree lay down

The way air is at the same time

The way the world is not

The way we can’t remember heat, forget

The weight of the world

The whole idea of it makes me feel

The word Faith means when someone sees

The world is full of women

The young girl wanted a new voice. After all, people got

There are many that I miss

There are so many roots to the tree of anger

There are some things we just don’t talk about—

There are two versions of every life.

There are who teach only the sweet lessons of peace and safety;

there are worse things than being alone

There comes the strangest moment in your life,

There is a place where love begins and a place

There was an apple tree in the yard —

There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean.

There were the roses, in the rain

There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch,

there’s a bluebird in my heart that

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

These are amazing: each

these hips are big hips.

They amputated

They don’t publish

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They have photographed the brain

They have spent their

They say I mope too much

they set my aunts house on fire

// this is a test to determine if you have consciousness

They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.

They tore down the old movie palaces,

They wanted me to tell the truth,

They went home and told their wives,

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much

Things do not explode,

Think in ways you’ve never thought before

This being human is a guest house.

This evening, I sat by an open window

This is not fantasy, this is our life.

This is not Love, perhaps,

This is simply to inform you:

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready

This morning was something. A little snow

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

This room, how well I know it.

Those groans men use

Those who love the most,

Though I go to you

Three times my life has opened.

Tightly-folded bud,

Time and again

Time will say nothing but I told you so,

To be held

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives

To grow old is to lose everything.

To lie in your child’s bed when she is gone

to love life, to love it even

To love like God can love, sometimes.

To pray you open your whole self

To pull the metal splinter from my palm

To smother their smallness

Today again I am hardly myself.

Today I pass the time reading

Today it’s going to cost us twenty dollars

Today the snow is drifting

Today when I woke

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking

True love. Is it normal

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Tuwing makakahanap ako ng tula

verily everything that is lost will be

Virginia Woolf, incested

visiting a past self. Being anywhere makes me thirsty.

Wait, for now.

Walking in the dark streets of Seoul

Was it for this I uttered prayers,

was when the

Watch out for power,

Watching the first sunlight

Water, bone, bed, bedrock –

 What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for

We are apart; the city grows quiet between us,

We are hard on each other

We are protected from so much pain. For example: graves.

We are reading the story of our lives

We can’t stand sitting still.

We don’t know how to say goodbye.

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August

We find out the heart only by dismantling what

We have lost even this twilight.

We know the story.

We know the story. 

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t grow

We met in a coastal village

We say

We searched for each other

We smile at each other

We stand in the rain in a long line

We stopped at perfect days

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

We will call you “Agua” like the rivers and cool jugs.

We’ve come so far, thought the astronaut

well, girl, goodbye,

What am I, after all, but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own

What are days for?

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space

What can a yellow glove mean in a world of motorcars and governments?

What do they think has happened, the old fools,

What do we do with the body, do we

What happens to a dream deferred?

What have I to say to you

What I see now in our snapshots

What little we have ever understood

What seemed a mystery was

What starts things

What the bad news was

What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?

Whatever happens. Whatever

whatever slid into my mother’s room that

When death comes

When despair for the world grows in me

When I have you, the passions of love make me stay awake;

When I see a couple of kids

When I think how far the onion has traveled

When I was a child

When I was lonely, I thought of death.

When my dad first started to die

When sailors crossed the oceans

When she cannot be sure

When the desert refused my history,

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge

When they say Don’t I know you?

When we wake up in our bodies, first we weep.

When we were nine or ten and used to play

When you appeared it was as if

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold

When you fall in love,

when you’re lonely in your room, and the year

When your life looks back—

Where what I see comes to rest,

“Which is bigger,” he asks me, “the ocean or sky,”

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

While the long grain is softening

While we stood in the window and wept.

Whispering to each handhold, “I’ll be back,”

 who needs it

Who was this girl

Who would I show it to

Whose woods these are I think I know.

Why did you vanish

Why do you always stand there shivering

Why does one write, if not to put one’s pieces together? From the

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?

Will obedience leave me unknown to myself, stranded?

Winter is out for a lot this year

Wipe the crumbs off the counter.

With some surprise, I balance my small female skull in my hands.

With what stillness at last

Wittgenstein was wrong: when lovers kiss

Woke up this morning with

won’t you celebrate with me

Word you created

Yes, I’m truly a dunce

Yesterday, for a long while,

You always called late and drunk,

You are riding the bus again

You are so beautiful and I am a fool

You are tired,

You ask how I spend my time–

You asked me once,

You begin this way:

You can

You can get there from here, though

You could say I grew up in a rough neighborhood: We owned boxing

You do not always know what I am feeling.

You do not have to be good.

you fit into me

You have only these hours and days.

You have to try. You see the shrink.

You lie in our bed as if an orchard were over us.

You looked at me with eyes grown bright with pain,

You meant more than life to me. I lived through

You might come here Sunday on a whim.

You must have felt it working in your bones. It’s begun: The papers

You need a reason, any reason—skiing, a job in movies,

You put on some new pants. I put

You show me the poems of some woman

You simply go out and shut the door

You turn towards meteor showers in August,

You wake up filled with dread.

You want to cry aloud for your

You want to know what work is?

You will hear thunder and remember me,

You would not think

You’ll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are:

You’re sad because you’re sad.

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:

You’ve tried the rest.

Your body, hard vowels

Your death must be loved this much.

Your letter unfolds and unfolds forever.

your life is your life

Your lungs fill & spread themselves,

Your silence is leaning toward judgment.

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