[Audio clip: view full post to listen] i. Pay no attention to the individuals behind the curtain The coupledom is real! The love is blissful. The charade, spectacular. ii. We know perpetual motion machines are not real. And yet we often insist on this kind of love: Dreams vivified by wills where passion is shaky [...]

If April is the cruelest month, then why was December so hard? One will die The other will flee This is an emotionally expensive dynamic How can April be so bad when August is forever ruined? Disappointment and blood Both spilled from me uncontrollably One will live To remind the other I almost died I [...]

American Life in Poetry: Column 262 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006 When we hear news of a flood, that news is mostly about the living, about the survivors. But at the edges of floods are the dead, too. Here Michael Chitwood, of North Carolina, looks at what’s floating out there on the margins. [...]

I can’t remember Why did they tell us you were crazy? Is it because you thought slavery was wrong? No, that can’t be it. Is it because you were willing to lay your life down for it? But supposedly 600,000 white men did that in the end. (And we are supposed to be thankful That [...]

Who says that any month holds the honor Of being the cruelest? I can tell you horror stories about all of them The December I died repeatedly Only to live through human cruelty In all of its emotionally expensive dynamics Or the August when my birthday Was only a terrible reminder of that December April [...]

I will never be a musician I know this the way I know That percussionist obviously listens to jazz He plays rock But he has studied jazz He has resonated it From ears to finger tips I don’t even like this song Or his band But I like what he heard I like that he [...]

American Life in Poetry: Column 261 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE All over this country, marriage counselors and therapists are right now speaking to couples about unspoken things. In this poem, Andrea Hollander Budy, an Arkansas poet, shows us one of those couples, suffering from things done and undone. Betrayal They decide finally not [...]

Cate Marvin’s World’s Tallest Disaster, was published, complete with a painting of a person falling from a burning skyscraper, just moments before 9/11. Her shocking foresight is matched only by her daring and refreshing freshness. At a young age, she was not afraid to write about “Me and Men” or to write about setting men, [...]

you are a poet i am a poet we, however, are not poetic.

If I am going to look myself in the mirror I must I must through Heaving sobs Sobs that threaten to rip open my chest to seize my heart and shatter my will I must I must carry my humanity to another day in the hopes that it lives despite him.