actoúnico

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victum(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
-electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born-pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if-listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door;let’s go

e.e. cummings

(fucking genius how he wraps us in his philosophical debate like flies in a web and then suddenly opens the door to release. we listen of course with springs suddenly beneath our feet.)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

1875, William Ernest Henley

i will always love you for sure.
in some measure of a way.
for now that i know you - because
before i didn’t - which begs
the question, who did i love then?

who did you love? but then, it doesn’t really
matter does it? (a hand opens inside me)

who we are, right now, can never be loved,
for noone knows us, not even us, among our
small and non-trivial lies, not right now that
we’ve changed yet again. into what?

will what i have changed into
still be lovable by the one i used to love?

we love the one that passed and are
loved that same way back - those rare moments,
when love is, hold us for dear time: the debt
is claimed when all is quiet yet again.

it is to those moments we come back
so they may warm us through the night.
then we know: such rare moments hearts
must claim.

anna s. buckley

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

- billy collins

these small remnants of life. photos, a letter to be written,
something to be made over.

i spread these things over the table, they’re my corpse.
i contemplate them slowly withering
away.

even words, ever a companion, have turned
to silence. hope whispers

from a tight loop. i faint myself
dead through the days.

i leave them there like tiny breadcrumbs
over a road you cannot go back through.
i save it for regret.

so tonight i toast to my fear, it is
my only company and i treasure it

so.

After I wrote this, a friend scrawled on this page, “Yes.”

And I said, merely to myself, “I wish it could be for a
different seizure–as with Molly Bloom and her ‘and
yes I said yes I will Yes.”

It is not a turtle
hiding in its little green shell.
It is not a stone
to pick up and put under your black wing.
It is not a subway car that is obsolete.
It is not a lump of coal that you could light.
It is a dead heart.
It is inside of me.
It is a stranger
yet once it was agreeable,
opening and closing like a clam.

What it has cost me you can’t imagine,
shrinks, priests, lovers, children, husbands,
friends and all the lot.
An expensive thing it was to keep going.
It gave back too.
Don’t deny it!
I half wonder if April would bring it back to life?
A tulip? The first bud?
But those are just musings on my part,
the pity one has when one looks at a cadaver.

How did it die?
I called it EVIL.
I said to it, your poems stink like vomit.
I didn’t stay to hear the last sentence.
It died on the word EVIL.
It did it with my tongue.
The tongue, the Chinese say,
is like a sharp knife:
it kills
without drawing blood.

Anne Sexton

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.

I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
for signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.

There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

by Carol Ann Duffy

(uma nota: este poema foi recentemente retirado do programa curricular inglês por incitar à violência nos jovens adolescentes. e eu a pensar que seria uma excelente forma de os pôr a falar sobre aquilo que sentem. notícia aqui)

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Prospective Immigrants Please Note - Adrienne Rich