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Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you'll grow double: Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble? The sun above the mountain's head, A freshening lustre mellow Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow. Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music! on my life, There's more of wisdom in it. And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! He, too, is no mean preacher: Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher. She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless— Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness. One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.

1 I close my eyes and I see a dot. It becomes a spot of light. It grows into the size of a person who distances away until it returns to a spot of light, a dot. 2 Like communion bread, your words dissolve in my mouth and never die. 3 I don’t care under which sky — just sing your song till the end. 4 The bone-city I am choked by is also salt also sugar also boiling water in the kettle with no lid. 5 Ask not how many houses were built. Ask how many residents remained in the houses. 6 The flame opens like a giant plant swallowing them one by one with their lost and found sheep. 7 She whose song has no beginning nor end — She whose voice faded into stars and moons — Where is she? Where is she? 8 Dreams come in two types: vertical and horizontal. Tell me the shape of your dream and I will tell you where you come from. 9 Fire and light both sting. We go to sleep when the other half of the globe wakes up. Night and day crammed with dreams. 10 Your look passes through me like lightning. 11 The butterfly that flew a moment ago over the killed ones was the soul searching for home. 12 Our time together has ripened and smashed like berries. 13 Can your camera capture fear in the eyes of mother-sparrow, see the broken eggs in her eyes? 14 A little air means so much for the bird. In the air, a full world extends. The clouds gather and then separate. The leaves wave to each other. For the bird, everything hangs in the air. 15 The pomegranate seeds scattered with our steps were not from heaven. 16 My paper boat that drifted into the river with the world behind it had a special note. It may arrive one day, although late, all truths come late. 17 Dried leaves over there our first yearnings. 18 The shoes by the door will not fit them when they return. 19 She counts the pebbles by her fingers. The other pebbles under water are losses outside her hands. 20 Specks of sand scattered from the fingers our people. 21 The sun reveals a hole in the boat, a glow in the fins of fish still breathing. 22 The day and the night divide our steps on the road as they equally divide the world. 23 I was born. I write poetry. I will die. 24 Her shadow is still here feeding the birds.

1 I wanted to write an epic about suffering, but when I found a tendril of her hair among the ruins of her mud house, I found my epic there. 2 I didn’t sleep last night. As if the night were hiding in the morning coffee. 3 Her life is a game of snakes and ladders sent relentlessly back to square one, but whose life isn’t? She takes a breath and throws the dice again. 4 The city glitters below the airplane window, not because of the bones and skulls scattered under the sun, but the view through the frosted breather hole. 5 She died, and time changed for those she loved most, but her watch kept ticking. 6 A god carried the burdens until the weight persuaded him to transfer them to man — the new suffering god. 7 The map of Iraq looks like a mitten, and so does the map of Michigan — a match I made by chance. 8 If you can’t save people, at least don’t hate them. 9 Her bubbling annoys me — can’t understand a word she says. So what if I toss her from the aquarium? So what if I spill her new world with this nasty immigrant fish! 10 The city’s innumerable lights turning on and off remind us we are born to arrive, as we are born to leave. 11 The handkerchiefs are theirs, but the tears are ours. 12 Women running barefoot. Behind them, stars falling from the sky. 13 So strange, in my dream of us, you were also a dream. 14 He said to me:You are in my eyes. Now when he sleeps, his eyelids cover me. 15 Gilgamesh stopped wishing for immortality, for only in death could he be certain of seeing his friend Enkidu again. 16 Some say love means putting all your eggs in one basket. If they all break, can the basket remain intact? 17 The homeless are not afraid to miss something. What passes through their eyes is how the clouds pass over the rushing cars, the way pigeons miss some of the seeds on the road and move away. Yet only they know what it means to have a home and to return to it. 18 The wind and rain don’t discriminate in buffeting us. We are equal in the eyes of the storm. 19 When I was broken into fragments, you puzzled me back together piece by piece. I no longer fear being broken in any moment. 20 Freezing in the mountains without blankets or food, and all they heard was no news is good news. 21 Their stories didn’t kill me but I would die if I didn’t tell them to you. 22 Before killing them they collected their personal effects. Their cell phones are all ringing in the box. 23 We are not upset when the grass dies. We know it will come back in a season or two. The dead don’t come back but they appear every time in the greenness of the grass. 24 If yearning encircles us, what does it portend? That a circle has no beginning and no end?

Tagus, farewell, that westward, with thy streams, Turns up the grains of gold already tried, With spur and sail for I go seek the Thames, Gainward the sun that show'th her wealthy pride, And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams, Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side. My King, my Country, alone for whom I live, Of mighty love the wings for this me give.

Not for nothing are we given at least as much sense as God gave a goose, which we have no access to, sensewise. We don’t speak goose nor recognize what body language there may be in a body which is mostly neck and dollop. But down, now there is something to build dreams on. We have recourse and in the morning the feathered snow will have come and closed the roads. Linger. Leave off.

Nikita zips across stage Trailed by a troop of white-gloved One-wheelers: Killer Joes, The 12 & Under Crew In disguise. A sixth sense guides him Beyond darkness. An Inner voice says when, Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, I’ll tell you when

Take, oh, take those lips away That so sweetly were forsworn And those eyes, like break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn; But my kisses bring again, Seals of love, though sealed in vain. Hide, oh, hide those hills of snow, Which thy frozen bosom bears, On whose tops the pinks that grow Are of those that April wears; But first set my poor heart free, Bound in those icy chains by thee.

My ancestors were not diligent and so they lived beside the fort that's neither on the maps of Heaven, Nor of Hell. In these lands, there is no difference between a star and thrown car keys. Chicken nuggets hatch from the eggs of eagles. I grow dirty while bathing in bottled water. My bed comforter is a wet parking lot, I wrap myself up in. If I eat in the morning, there's nothing left in the evening My dish of grass and cigarette butts topped with expired coupons. Stir all I like; I never swallow it down. All the while, my rabbit's foot runs about from Las Cruces to West Memphis searching for flawless luck. The more one cries, the more one prospers . . . O' ancestral demon, may my lamentation become verbal sorcery.

I come from Inuit oil money, From instruments of chance and divination. The most loose, shut in, wavering mind, Recording my day with recitations, antennae, Narration and figure, my phone might die. I'm walking dirty. Shop and mob cops, not to touch my mother's breast Or the queen's royal crown signature Izzy Juju—hijacked, forsaking all others. The untamed scotch is mine. It cost the picture a fortune To say nothing of my turban, costume copies Of topaz bracelets, the umpteenth translation. Did you ever know Micah, Gay Sunshine, Grace Cathedral, Coconut? I went from heels at Barneys to the depths of the bins. Who could be like dropping in? I'll fold both my hands In gloves and wait, Hope Diamond peeking out.

No chain link fences leapt in a single bound. No juke move Nike commercial, speeding bullet Skittles-hued Cross Trainers. No brown skin Adonis weaving trails of industrial Vaseline down a cobblestone street. Heisman-shucking trash receptacles. Grand jeté over the little blue recycling bin, a prism of clouds rising beneath his feet. Nobody all-fucked in boot cuffs wide enough to cloak court appointed tethers. Or slumped over, hoodie-shrouded —sheepishly scary according to one eye witness. Definitely not going to be your Louis V Sweat Suit red carpet fashion review, coming at you live from E! & Fox News outside of the morgue. No chance for homeboy in the peekaboo boxer shorts. Homeboy with the frozen wrists. Iced. Homeslice with the paisley, Pretty Flacko Flag flying by the seat of low-slung denim — no defense attorney gets to call me Gang Related. Tupac in a mock leather bomber. No statement taken from the Clint Eastwood of your particular planned community, saying he had the right to stand his ground at the Super Target. Because my flat-billed, fitted cap cast a shady shadow over his shoulder in the checkout line. No, siree. See, I practice self target practice. There is no sight of me in my wears. I bedecked in No Wrinkle Dockers. Sensible navy blazer. Barack Obama tie, Double Consciousness- knotted. Stock dandelion pinned to the skin of an American lapel with his head blown off.