nobody can save you but yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly
inside.

nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don't, don't, don't.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?

nobody can save you but
yourself
and you're worth saving.
it's a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.

think about it.
think about saving yourself.
your spiritual self.
your gut self.
your singing magical self and
your beautiful self.
save it.
don't join the dead-in-spirit.

maintain your self
with humor and grace
and finally
if necessary
wager your life as you struggle,
damn the odds, damn
the price.

only you can save your
self.

do it! do it!

then you'll know exactly what
I am talking about.

-- Charles Bukowski


'To the Moon'

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

'Parting'

Green mountains rise to the north;
white water rolls past the eastern city.

Once it has been uprooted,
the tumbleweed travels forever.

Drifting clouds like a wanderer's mind;
sunset, like the heart of your old friend.

We turn, pause, look back and wave,
Even our ponies look back and whine.

-- Li Po


'Reply to the Question: "How can You Become a Poet?"'

take the leaf of a tree
trace its exact shape
the outside edges
and inner lines
memorize the way it is fastened to the twig
(and how the twig arches from the branch)
how it springs forth in April
how it is panoplied in July
by late August
crumple it in your hand
so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness
chew its woody stem
listen to its autumn rattle
watch it as it atomizes in the November air
then in winter
when there is no leaf left
invent one

-- Eve Merriam


'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evenings full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

-- William Butler Yeats


'The Icelandic Language'

In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.

In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.

But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

In this language, you can't chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can't
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.

Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

-- Bill Holm


'All The Seas'

All the seas
hold all the tears
that ever were wept
through all the years

And so
the seas
are salty

-- dk


'Cats'

Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned

To rules or routes for journeys; counter
Attack with non-resistance; twist
Enticing through the curving fingers
And leave an angered empty fist.

They wait obsequious as darkness
Quick to retire, quick to return;
Admit no aim or ethics; flatter
With reservations; will not learn

To answer to their names; are seldom
Truly owned till shot or skinned.
Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.

-- A. S. J. Tessimond


'The Wind'

The bay is thick with flecks of white.
The freezing air is honed and thinned.
The gulls sleep on the stones tonight,
Wings locked against the prising wind.

With no companion to my mood,
Against the wind as it should be,
I walk, but in my solitude
Bow to the wind that buffets me.

-- Vikram Seth


'The Eagle' (a fragment)

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson


'What The World Is'

The world is a tumbling jumble of rocks,
biomass and enough water
to wash it all down with.

-- dk


'Young Poets'

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

-- Nicanor Parra


'On Problems'

Our choicest plans
have fallen through
our airiest castles
tumbled over
because of lines
we neatly drew
and later neatly
stumbled over.

-- Piet Hein


'Untitled'

What grieves me is not
What lies within the heart,
But those things of beauty
Which never can be . . .

They are the shapeless shapes
Which pass, though sorrow
Cannot know them
Nor love dream them.

They are as though sadness
Were a tree and, one by one,
Its leaves were to fall
Half outlined in the mist.

-- Fernando Pessoa


'To Tu Fu from Shantung'

You ask how I spend my time--
I nestle against a treetrunk
and listen to autumn winds
in the pines all night and day.

Shantung wine can't get me drunk.
The local poets bore me.
My thoughts remain with you,
like the Wen River, endlessly flowing.

-- Li Po


'One Art'

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

'Slider'

Slippy slick,
smooth-as-ice, ice,
sparkling clear and cold;
slipping
sliding
swiftly down,
spinning
swirling
round and round,
like a turtle
on its back.

-- dk


'untitled'

A little road, not made of man --
Enabled of the eye,
Accessible to thill of bee,
Or cart of butterfly;

If town it have, -- beyond itself,
Tis that I cannot say --
I only sigh --
No vehicle
bears me along that way

-- Emily Dickinson


'An Infinite Number of Monkeys'

After all the Shakespeare, the book
of poems they type is the saddest
in history.

But before they can finish it,
they have to wait for that Someone
who is always
looking to look away. Only then

can they strike the million
keys that spell
humiliation and grief, which are
the great subjects of Monkey
Literature

and not, as some people still
believe, the banana
and the tire.

-- Ronald Koertge


'Banana Love'

Love is like
a banana,
here today,
gone manana.

-- dk


'What Love is Like'

Love is like
a pineapple,
sweet and
undefinable.

-- Piet Hein


'What Life Seems Like'

Life seems like
a tangled ball of yarn.

We tease out an end
and continuously weave it
into something we can understand.

Or, we could just admire
the intricate,
interwoven threads
that hold our place
in the Universe.

-- dk


'The pennycandystore beyond the El'

The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality

Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum

Outside the leaves were falling as they died

A wind had blown away the sun

A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room

Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!

-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti


'After'

Oh, the littles that remain!
Scent of mint out in the lane;
Flare of window; sound of bees; --

These, but these.

Three times sitting down to bread;
One time climbing up to bed;
Table-setting o'er and o'er;
Drying herbs for winter's store;
This thing; that thing; -- nothing more.

But just now out in the lane,
Oh, the scent of mint was plain!

-- Lizette Woodworth Reese


'Sandinista Avioncitos'

The little airplanes of the heart
with their brave little propellers
What can they do
against the winds of darkness
even as butterflies are beaten back
by hurricanes
yet do not die

They lie in wait wherever
they can hide and hang
their fine wings folded
and when the killer-wind dies
they flutter forth again
into the new-blown light
live as leaves

-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti


'moon shines'

The moon shines
like one big eye
asking me "what now"?

I have no answers.

I am only I.

-- dk

Many more poems at Wondering Minstrels I like to use the Random poem link : /

War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! -- Written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Motown label in 1969, performed by Edwin Starr

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
-- David Friedman

After the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
-- John F. Kennedy

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953 ~~ More war quotes here

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'universe', a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest
- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affectation for a few people near us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
-- Albert Einstein


Life is kinda funny.
In a jab yourself in the eye kinda way.

-- dk