In the beginning was the Word eternal,
sunshine of the spotless,
mind petals on a wet, black bough,
the best laid plans of mice
between the shadow and the soul.
Death is nothing to us, since
there’s a bluebird in my heart, for love
is strong as death, friends, Romans.
Countrymen, lend me your hope,
is the thing with feathers, all kisses
are metaphors decipherable by sea
that bangs in my throat. Between my
fingers and my thumb, I wandered lonely
as a cloud, the mind is its own place.
I have heard the mermaids singing
when a woman loves a man, the clock
strikes with her hands, when we two
parted in silence, your absence has
gone through me. The breezes at dawn
have secrets, the rain is full of ghosts.
Do I dare disturb the universe?
You can hear the dew falling.
I carry your heart with me and
your fingerprints on my windows
in the machinery of the night.
Between the dark and the daylight
the stars are not wanted now,
death makes angels of us all.
Two roads diverged in a wood
and in between are the doors.
Now I’m trying to dig deeper, things
fall apart; the centre cannot fear
in a handful of dust to be, or not to be;
I still have time to be, a narrow fellow
in the grass, going where I have to go.
Tonight, let us not become tragedies.
To err is human; to forgive, I celebrate
myself, and sing myself. Like a bridge
over troubled waters, the weight
we carry is love.
Although this is technically not necessary, nevertheless here are the lines by their authors in order of appearance:
The Bible, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, Pablo Neruda, Epicurus, Charles Bukowski, The Bible, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Saul Williams, Anne Sexton, Seamus Heaney, William Wordsworth, John Milton, T.S. Eliot, David Lehman, Saul Williams, Lord Byron, W.S. Merwin, Rumi, Edna St. Vincent Millay, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings, Allan Ginsberg, Henry Longfellow, Jim Morrison, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Jim Morrison, Richard Siken, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Anis Mojgani, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roethke,
Buddy Wakefield, Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Paul Simon, Allan Ginsberg
