National Poetry Month, Part 2

untitled

We are more than the worst thing that’s ever
happened to us. All of us need to stop apologizing
for having been to hell and come back breathing.

Your bad dreams are battle scars.
 

What doesn’t kill you cuts you fucking deep
but scars are just skin growing back
thicker when it heals.

Clementine von Radics

Stop Being So Religious

What
do sad people have in
common?
It seems
they have all built a shrine
to the past
And often go there
to do a strange wail and
worship.
What is the beginning of
happiness?
It is to stop being
so religious
like that.

by Hafez 

i thank you god for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today;

and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth

day of life and love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any-lifted from the no

of all nothing-human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

by e.e. cummings

Advertisement For the Mountain 

There are two versions of every life.

In the first one, you get a mother, a father,
your very own room.

You learn to walk, which is only done by walking.
You learn the past tense of have, which is hunger.

You learn to ask almost anything
is to ask it to be over,
as when the lover asks the other

“Are you sleeping? Are you beginning
to go away?”

(And whether or not you learn it, life does not penetrate
more than five miles above the earth
or reach more than three miles beneath the sea.

Life is eight miles long.

You could walk it, and be there before sundown.
Or swim it, or fall it, or crawl it.)

The second is told from the point
of view of the sky.

by Christina Davis

Untitled 

I'm never gonna wait

that extra twenty minutes

to text you back, 

and I'm never gonna play

hard to get

when I know your lfie

has been hard enough already

it's hard to watch

the game we make of love

like everyone's playing checkers

with their scars,

saying checkmate

whenever they get out

without a broken heart.

Just to be clear

I don't want to get out

without a broken heart.

I intend to leave this life

so shattered

there's gonna have to be

a thousand separate heavens

for all my flying parts.

by Andrea Gibson