Poetry quotes

There is no Love or Lust Only propensity Who would possess Is a nonentity. There is no First or Last Only equality And who would rule Joins the majority. There is no Space or Time Only intensity, And tame things Have no immensity.

I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pin-point nucleus of being Locate an irritation without It is within Within It …

I am the false quantity In the harmony of physiological potentiality To which Gaining self-control I should be consonant In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force Pain calls up in me The struggle is equal

The open window is full of a voice A fashionable portrait-painter Running up-stairs to a woman’s apartment Sings “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly All the girls are nice Whether they wear their hair in curls Or—” At the back of the thoughts to which …

It is unnatural in a Father Bewitching a daughter Whose hair down covers her thighs.

Though you had never possessed me I had belonged to you since the beginning of time

And sleepily I sat on your chair beside you Leaning against your shoulder And your careless arm across my back gesticulated As your indisputable male voice roared Through my brain and my body Arguing dynamic decomposition Of which I was understanding nothing Sleepily And the …

… interim of a thousand years But you who make more noise than any man in the world when you clear your throat Deafening woke me And I caught the thread of the argument Immediately assuming my personal mental attitude And ceased to be a woman

Beautiful half-hour of being a mere woman The animal woman

Understanding nothing of man But mastery and the security of imparted physical heat Indifferent to cerebral gymnastics Or regarding them as the self-indulgent play of children Or the thunder of alien gods But you woke me up Anyhow who am I that I should criticize …

… mastery and the security of imparted physical heat Indifferent to cerebral gymnastics Or regarding them as the self-indulgent play of children Or the thunder of alien gods But you woke me up Anyhow who am I that I should criticize your theories of plastic velocity

“Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed.”

Little tapers lighted leaning diagonally Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant Leaning to the breath of baited bodies Like young poplars fringing the Loire

… elements unconditionally primeval And now averted Seek each other’s surreptitiously To know if the other has seen While mine are inextricably entangled with the pattern of the carpet As eyes are apt to be In their shame Having surprised a gesture that is ultimately intimate

All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass.

Man of absolute physical equilibrium You stand so straight on your legs Every plank or clod you plant your feet on Becomes roots for those limbs

See the men pass Their hats are not ours We take a walk They are going somewhere And they may look everywhere

Men’s eyes look into things Our eyes look out

A great deal of ourselves We offer to the mirror Something less to the confessional The rest to Time There is so much Time Everything is full of it Such a long time

Virgins may whisper “Transparent nightdresses made all of lace” Virgins may squeak “My dear I should faint!” Flutter . . … flutter . … flutter . … . … “And then the man—”

Wasting our giggles For we have no dots

We have been taught Love is a god White with soft wings Nobody shouts Virgins for sale Yet where are our coins For buying a purchaser Love is a god Marriage expensive A secret well kept Makes the noise of the world Nature’s arms spread …

… out of their two windows Miovanni out of his library window Gina from the kitchen window From among his pots and pans Where he so kindly kept her Where she so wisely busied herself Pots and Pans she cooked in them All sorts of sialagogues

Some say that happy women are immaterial

So here we might dispense with her Gina being a female But she was more than that Being an incipience a correlative an instigation of the reaction of man From the palpable to the transcendent Mollescent irritant of his fantasy Gina had her use Being …

… consisted We cannot say Only that he was magnificently man She insignificantly a woman who understood Understanding what is that To Each his entity to others their idiosyncrasies to the free expansion to the annexed their liberty To man his work To woman her love

Succulent meals and an occasional caress So be it It so seldom is

While Miovanni thought alone in the dark Gina supposed that peeping she might see A round light shining where his mind was She never opened the door Fearing that this might blind her Or even That she should see Nothing at all So while he …

The scrubbed smell of the white-wood table Greasy cleanliness of the chopper board The coloured vegetables Intuited quality of flour Crickly sparks of straw-fanned charcoal Ranged themselves among her audacious happinesses

Pet simplicities of her Universe Where circles were only round Having no vices.

(This narrative halted when I learned that the house which inspired it was the home of a mad woman.

We might have coupled In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment Or broken flesh with one another At the profane communion table Where wine is spill’d on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly With the daily news Printed in blood on its wings

Once in a mezzanino The starry ceiling Vaulted an unimaginable family Bird-like abortions With human throats And Wisdom’s eyes Who wore lamp-shade red dresses And woolen hair

I am the jealous store-house of the candle-ends That lit your adolescent learning — — — — — — — — — —

Behind God’s eyes There might Be other lights

When we lifted Our eye-lids on Love A cosmos Of coloured voices And laughing honey

Today Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible To you I bring the nascent virginity of —Myself for the moment

No love or the other thing Only the impact of lighted bodies Knocking sparks off each other In chaos

Seldom Trying for Love Fantasy dealt them out as gods Two or three men looked only human

But you alone Superhuman apparently I had to be caught in the weak eddy Of your drivelling humanity To love you most

We might have lived together In the lights of the Arno Or gone apple stealing under the sea

Or played Hide and seek in love and cob-webs And a lullaby on a tin-pan

White where there is nothing to see But a white towel Wipes the cymophanous sweat —Mist rise of living— From your Etiolate body And the white dawn Of your New Day Shuts down on me

Unthinkable that white over there —⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠Is smoke from your house

Evolution fall foul of Sexual equality Prettily miscalculate Similitude

Ostracized as we are with God— The watchers of the civilized wastes reverse their signals on our track

Lepers of the moon all magically diseased we come among you innocent of our luminous sores

unknowing how perturbing lights our spirit on the passion of Man until you turn on us your smooth fools’ faces like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries

unknowing how perturbing lights our spirit on the passion of Man until you turn on us your smooth fools’ faces like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries

We are the sacerdotal clowns who feed upon the wind and stars and pulverous pastures of poverty

Our wills are formed by curious disciplines beyond your laws

And trains the common manifestations of creation to flatten before his eyes to one vast monopattern

Oh God That men and women having undertaken to vanquish one another should be allowed to shut themselves up in hot boxes and breed

Spirits of prey ceaselessly on the watch in their cruel privacy