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"How Falling in Love is Like Owning a Dog" by Taylor Mali

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"How Falling in Love is Like Owning a Dog" by Taylor Mali

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https://taylormali.com/poems/how-falling-in-love-is-like-owning-a-dog/

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If you are reading this poem at a wedding, consider buying
a beautifully printed letterpress broadside suitable for framing
by clicking here.
First of all, it's a big responsibility,
especially in a city like New York.
So think long and hard before deciding on love.
On the other hand, love gives you a sense of security:
when you're walking down the street late at night
and you have a leash on love
ain't no one going to mess with you.
Because crooks and muggers think love is unpredictable.
Who knows what love could do in its own defense?

On cold winter nights, love is warm.
It lies between you and lives and breathes
and makes funny noises.
Love wakes you up all hours of the night with its needs.
It needs to be fed so it will grow and stay healthy.

Love doesn't like being left alone for long.
But come home and love is always happy to see you.
It may break a few things accidentally in its passion for life,
but you can never be mad at love for long.

Is love good all the time? No! No!
Love can be bad. Bad, love, bad! Very bad love.

Love makes messes.
Love leaves you little surprises here and there.
Love needs lots of cleaning up after.
Sometimes you just want to get love fixed.
Sometimes you want to roll up a piece of newspaper
and swat love on the nose,
not so much to cause pain,
just to let love know Don't you ever do that again!

Sometimes love just wants to go out for a nice long walk.
Because love loves exercise. It will run you around the block
and leave you panting, breathless. Pull you in different directions
at once, or wind itself around and around you
until you're all wound up and you cannot move.

But love makes you meet people wherever you go.
People who have nothing in common but love
stop and talk to each other on the street.

Throw things away and love will bring them back,
again, and again, and again.
But most of all, love needs love, lots of it.
And in return, love loves you and never stops.

Taylor Mali

Mali. Taylor. "How Falling in Love is like Owning a Dog." What Learning Leaves. Write Bloody Books.

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How Falling in Love is like Owning a Dog

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If you are reading this poem at a wedding, consider buying a beautifully printed letterpress broadside suitable for framing by clicking here. First of all, it's a big responsibility, especially in a city like New York. So think long and hard before deciding on love.

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https://poets.org/poem/deer-hit

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2
Your father's waiting up, watching tv.
He's had a few drinks and he's angry.

Christ, he says, when you let yourself in.
It's Night of the Living Dead. You tell him

the car. Jesus, he says. A long silence.
Son of a bitch, looking in. He opens the tailgate,

in your nose. All your life, the trail of ruin you leave.

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2 Your father's waiting up, watching tv. He's had a few drinks and he's angry. Christ, he says, when you let yourself in. It's Night of the Living Dead. You tell him the car. Jesus, he says. A long silence. Son of a bitch, looking in. He opens the tailgate, in your nose.

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https://poets.org/poem/pockets-0

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won't stop the double slapping causing a grandmother, by habit, to yell out,
of the screen door against a frame,
Willie.

and a bandana strung from my pocket.

That's when I thought trouble could be run from,
could be avoided by never sitting
with your back to the door
or near a window.

that posted on the corners:
and men cruising in coupes, men built so big
they took up both seats,
I rode with them that summer.

Crips, Bloods, and butterflies.
A sunflower somehow planted
in the alley. Its broken neck.
Maybe memory is all the home
you get. And rage, where you
first learn how fragile the axis
upon which everything tilts.
But to say you've come to terms
with a city that's never loved you
might be overstating things a bit.
All you know is there was once
a walk-up where now sits a lot,
vacant, and rats in deep grass
hide themselves from the day.
That one apartment fire
set back in '76-one the streets
called arson to collect a claim-
could not do, ultimately, what
the city itself did, left to its own dank
devices, some sixteen years later.
Rebellions, said some. Riots,
said the rest. In any case, flames;
and the home you knew, ash.
It's not an actual memory, but
you remember it still: a rust-
bottomed Datsun handed down,
then stolen. Stripped, recovered,
and built back from bolts.
Driving away in May. 1992.
What's left of that life quivers
in the rearview-the world on fire,
and half your head with it.

You rode your bike from your house on the corner to the dead end of the street, and turned it around at the factory, back to the corner again. This was the loop your mother let you ride, not along the avenue with its cavalcade of trucks, or up the block where Drac the Dropout waited to plunge his pointy incisors into virginal necks. You can't remember exactly your age, but you probably had a bike with a banana seat, and wore cutoff jeans and sweat socks to the knees. You are trying to be precise but everything is a carbon-like surface that scrolls by with pinpricks emitting memory's wavy threads. One is blindingly bright and lasts only seconds: You are riding your bike and the shadowy blots behind the factory windows' steel grates emit sounds that reach and wrap around you like a type of gravity that pulls down the face. You can't see them but what they say is what men say all day long, to women who are trying to get somewhere. It's not something you hadn't heard before. But until then, you only had your ass grabbed by boys your own age-boys you knew, who you could name-in a daily playground game in which teachers looked away. In another pin prick, you loop back to your house, where your mother is standing on the corner talking to neighbors. You tell her what the men said, and ask, does this mean I'm beautiful? What did she say? Try remembering: You are standing on the corner with your mother. You are standing on the corner. This pinprick emits no light; it is dark, it is her silence. Someday you will have a daughter and the dead end will become a cul de sac and all the factories will be shut down or at the edges of town, and the men behind screens will be monitored, blocked. And when things seem safe, and everything is green and historic and homey, you will let her walk from school to park, where you'll wait for her, thanks to a flexible schedule, on the corner. And when she walks daydreaming along the way and takes too long to reach you, the words they said will hang from the tree you wait under.

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won't stop the double slapping causing a grandmother, by habit, to yell out,of the screen door against a frame, Willie. and a bandana strung from my pocket. That's when I thought trouble could be run from, could be avoided by never sitting with your back to the door or near a window.

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https://poets.org/print/poem/19f16684-964f-4f91-a7d4-8f11b905c2e0

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Credit

From The Poems of Dylan Thomas, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1952, 1953 Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1967 the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1971 New Directions Publishing Corp. Used with permission.

Author

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas, born October 27, 1914, in South Wales, was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination

Date Published: 1937-01-01

Source URL: https://poets.org/poem/fern-hill

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Credit From The Poems of Dylan Thomas, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1952, 1953 Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1967 the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1971 New Directions Publishing Corp. Used with permission.

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http://collegewritinglatelunchf2014.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2014/09/oranges-by-gary-soto.pdf

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"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas

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"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas

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https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night

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Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

From The Poems of Dylan Thomas, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1952, 1953 Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1967 the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1971 New Directions Publishing Corp. Used with permission.

About Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas, born October 27, 1914, in South Wales, was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination

About Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages

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.

Because I could not stop for Death-
He kindly stopped for me-
The Carriage held but just Ourselves-
And Immortality.

We slowly drove-He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility-

It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintery sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughtér,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Do not go gentle into that good night - Discover the meaning of Dylan Thomas's famous villanelle about death, with an audio recording of the poet reading his classic poem. This poem was featured in the 2014 movie Interstellar.

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https://poets.org/poem/you-rode-loop

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(for Sergio Mondragón)

1. The body's hidden face removed of its excesses is cooked into a codex that reads:this little piggy went to market this little piggy piled high illuminates what's meant by surface. Everywhere a nation awaits, a cardboard raft soaks through. Everywhere is a drink of water swimming with the dead: Leagues that can't be reached or spoken.2. A man in the plaza sweats beneath the synthetic hide of historical sacrifice and does a dance making tourists in t-shirts feel so alive. Far north an altar will be built for the seamstress forgotten in piecing such garments.3. The question, as we sit by the grill, becomes: What is the real animal between us? What skin do we stretch, scrape and tension with our desire for expansion? For books that leap like bodies not our own? So we can never end with more or less than this: What does it mean to start here, with ataco de chicharrón, as if to say "fushigi na en" the encounter and consumption of skin launches every ship?

"Fushigi na en" is related to the Japanese concept of fate or destiny-i.e., when two people are bound to meet or feel a connection upon meeting. Chicharrón is fried pork rind.

She tosses a bolt of fabric into the air. Hill country, prairie, a horse trots there. I say three yards, and her eyes say more: What you need is guidance, a hand that can zip a scissor through cloth. What you need is a picture of what you've lost. To double the width against the window for the gathering, consider where you sit in the morning. Transparency's appealing, except it blinds us before day's begun. How I long to captain that table, to return in a beautiful accent a customer's request. My mother kneeled down against her client and cut threads from buttons with her teeth, inquiring with a finger in the band if it cut into the waist. Or pulled a hem down to a calf to cool a husband's collar. I can see this in my sleep and among notions. My bed was inches from the sewing machine, a dress on the chair forever weeping its luminescent frays. Sleep was the sound of insinuation, a zigzag to keep holes receptive. Or awakened by a backstitch balling under the foot. A needle cracking? Blood on a white suit? When my baby's asleep I write to no one and cannot expect a response. The fit's poor, always. No one wears it out the door. But fashions continue to fly out of magazines like girls out of windows. Sure, they are my sisters. Their machines, my own. The office from which I wave to them in their descent has uneven curtains, made with my own pink and fragile hands.

Why the image just now of a bullet entering the mouth? Why call it raw, when it isn't sticky and pink like a turkey meatball, just the usual: gold, and shiny, and cylindrical? What about this bullet is uncooked? Why does it multiply with you in parka or short skirt, versions of the you that you were, swallowing raw bullets as you walked? The images come without assailant, without gun, just the holes the bullets opened, the holes through which they went. And now at the age in which you ride enclosed in glass like the Pope or President you are spitting up the bullets slow-simmered in your own juices. You are shitting them out, feeling them drop from you in clumps of blood, in the days of bleeding left. But you cannot expel all of them. Some, raw as the day they entered, have expanded their mushroom heads into the flesh, or lodged their hot tip into the taste center of the brain. Will the tongue's first encounter with pomegranate seeds be forever a lost Eden, that fruit of your girlhood, which, also meaning grenade, was perhaps never innocent? Do your own raw bullets come back to you, my friends? Let us legislate the active voice, instead. Not, "Many bodies have been used as blanks, aluminum cans." But, "Here are the men who pulled the trigger, look at them."

Dead girls don't go the dying route to get known.
You'll find us anonymous still, splayed in Buicks,
carried swaying like calves, our dead hefts swung
from ankles, wrists, hooked by hands and handed
over to strangers slippery as blackout. Slammed
down, the mud on our dress is black as her dress,
worn out as a throw-rug beneath feet that stomp
out the most intricate weave. It ought not sadden
us, but sober us. Sylvia Plath killed herself. She ate
her sin. Her eye got stuck on a diamond stickpin.
You take Blake over breakfast, only to be bucked
out your skull by a cat-call crossing a parking lot.
Consuming her while reviling her, conditioned to
hate her for her appetite alone: her problem was
she thought too much? Needling an emblem's ink
onto your wrist, the surest defense a rose to reason
against that bluest vein's insistent wish. Let's all
us today finger-sweep our cheek-bones with two
blood-marks and ride that terrible train homeward
while looking back at our blackened eyes inside
tiny mirrors fixed inside our plastic compacts. We
could not have known where she began given how
we were, from the start, made to begin where she
ends. In this way, she's no way to make her amends.

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(for Sergio Mondragón) 1. The body's hidden face removed of its excesses is cooked into a codex that reads:this little piggy went to market this little piggy piled high illuminates what's meant by surface. Everywhere a nation awaits, a cardboard raft soaks through.

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https://www.tedkooser.net/excerpts/tattoo.html

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Tattoo

What once was meant to be a statement-
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart-is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.

from Delights & Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2004

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Tattoo What once was meant to be a statement- a dripping dagger held in the fist of a shuddering heart-is now just a bruise on a bony old shoulder, the spot where vanity once punched him hard and the ache lingered on.

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"I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakely's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'" by Billy Collins

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"I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakely's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'" by Billy Collins

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http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/billy_collins/poems/11337

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And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife
or anyone else's wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon,"

which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.

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I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of "Three Blind Mice" - Poem by Billy Collins

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And I start wondering how they came to be blind.If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,and I think of the poor motherbrooding over her sightless young triplets.

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https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-100/loud-music/

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From Cemetery Nights, 1988
Penguin

Copyright 1988 by Stephen Dobyns.
All rights reserved.

Reprinted by permission of Penguin from Cemetery Nights. Copyright 1988 by Stephen Dobyns.

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My stepdaughter and I circle round and round. You see, I like the music loud, the speakers throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so each bass note is like a hand smacking the gut. But my stepdaughter disagrees.

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https://wordsfortheyear.com/2015/08/14/god-says-yes-to-me-by-kaylin-haught/

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I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

from The Palm of your Hand, 1995
Tilbury House Publishers

Copyright 1995 by Kaylin Haught

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I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic and she said yes I asked her if it was okay to be short and she said it sure is I asked her if I could wear nail polish or not wear nail polish and she...

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"Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson

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"Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314

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Notes:

Note to POL students: The inclusion or omission of the numeral in the title of the poem should not affect the accuracy score. It is optional during recitation.

Originally titled "'Hope' is the thing with feathers - (314)"

Emily Dickinson, "'Hope' is the Thing with Feathers" from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permissions of the publishers and Trustees of Amherst College.

Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

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"Hope" is the thing with feathers by Emily... | Poetry Foundation

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"Anthem For My Belly After Eating Too Much" by Kara Jackson

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"Anthem For My Belly After Eating Too Much" by Kara Jackson

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/155514/anthem-for-my-belly-after-eating-too-much

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anthem for my belly after eating too much by Kara... | Poetry Magazine

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i look in the mirror, and all the chips i've eaten