BTS and the poems they remind me of
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I? / Can’t fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk. / Well, I think, I can read books.
”What’s that you’re doing?”
the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately.
I want to write something
so simply / about love / or about pain / that even / as you are reading / you feel it
and as you read / you keep feeling it / and though it be my story
it will be common, / though it be singular
it will be known to you / so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize— / that it was all the while / yourself arranging the words, / that it was all the time / words that you yourself, / out of your own heart / had been saying.
I Want to Write Something So Simply by Mary Oliver
But darkness holds it all:
the shape and the flame,
the animal and myself,
how it holds them,
all powers, all sight —
and it is possible: its great strength
is breaking into my body.
I have faith in the night.
You Darkness by Rainer Maria Rilke
He stood alone in my backyard, so dark
the night purpled around him.
I had no choice. I opened the door
& stepped out. Wind
in the branches. He watched me —
his eyes kerosene blue.
What do you want, I asked, forgetting I had
no language. He kept breathing,
to stay alive. But I was a boy
then. Which meant I was a murderer
of my childhood. & like all murderers, my god
was stillness.
What’s Not to Love
about a broken bowl,
now two half-bowls,
still ready to hold
what they can, even
What’s Not to Love by Brendan Constantine
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it / and everything you’ve held dear / crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, / your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat / thickening the air, heavy as water / more fit for gills than lungs; / when grief weights you down like your own flesh / only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face / between your palms, a plain face, / no charming smile, no violet eyes, / and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
The Thing Is by Ellen Bass
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent; / for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be / true before you; / want to describe myself like a / picture I observed / for a long time, one close up, / like a new word I learned and embraced, / like the everyday jug, / like my mother’s face, / like a ship that carried me along / through the deadliest storm.
I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone by Rainer Maria Rilke
How much can you change
and get away with it, before you turn into something
else, before it’s some kind of murder? Difficult
to be confronted with the fact of yourself. Opaque
in the sense of finally solid, in the sense of
see me, not through me. The selves, glaze on glaze,
accumulating their moods and minutes. We tremble
and I paint the trembling. I enlarged his mouth
and everything went blurry, a forgery. It might
as well be. And all my fingers turned to twigs. Inside
himself he jumped a little. Why build a room you
can live in? Why build a shed for your fears?
The life of a body is a nightmare.
Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light by Richard Siken
Turn yourself inside out / and paint your organs the color of what you see / in your dreams.
This is the art of / living with a ticking heart, a grenade you / throw through windows to make a / point that language / has no room for.
This is how I destroyed you.
And this,
is how I kept you alive.
Advice From Dionysus by Shinji Moon
What would a better me paint? There is no
new me, there is no old me, there’s just me, the same
me, the whole time. Vanity, vanity, forcing your
will on the world. Don’t try to make a stronger wind,
you’ll wear yourself out. Build a better sail. You
want to solve something? Get out of your own way.
What’s the difference between me and the world?
Compartmentalization. The world doesn’t know
what to do with my love. Because it isn’t used to
being loved. It’s a framework problem. Disheartening?
Obviously. I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard
to make it love.
Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper by Richard Siken
It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.
September Tomatoes by Karina Borowicz
The holes in this picture are not flowers, they are not wheels, and the phone is ringing ringing, a headache word, it’s ringing for you. This is in the second person. This is happening to you because I don’t want to be here. Is there anything I won’t put words around? Yes, there is.
And so there are gaps. And so naturally things try to get into the gaps. I imagine things because I like them or sometimes I dislike them and I am afraid of them and I live in an imaginary world. The phone is ringing and I don’t want to hear this. The T.V. is on and I don’t want to see this, I don’t want to rise to this occasion.
I stood the yard in my everyday clothes singing Wings little monster, listen to my soup bones. Does it help? What does this have to do with the airplanes and the buildings falling down?
Black Telephone by Richard Siken
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