Restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
What did I know about drowning or being drowned?
Sorrow is my own yard,
And in short, I was afraid.
My life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt and the heroine has studied her face and it’s defects
Who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks,
Who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessively,
Who jumped off the Brooklyn bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten.
I used to pray to recover you
Who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard, wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts
Who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation.
Your most frail gesture are things which enclose me.
At twenty I tried to die.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Watching the others go about their days, likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming.
How do they do it, the ones who make love without love
these are some of my favorite lines from the poets of, T.S. Eliot, Lucille Clifton, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Robert Hass and Sharon Olds.