• we pull our boots on with both hands but we can’t punch ourselves awake (richard siken, “little beast”)

‎

• here i am leaving you clues. i am singing now while Rome burns. we are all just trying to be holy. my applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. we are all going forward. none of us are going back. (richard siken, “snow and dirty rain”)

‎

• how much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder? (richard siken, “portrait of fryderyk in shifting light”)

‎

• how poor a gift is freedom to the spirit that loved the labor. (mary oliver, “jack”)

‎

• to live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. (mary oliver, “in blackwater woods”)

‎

• the path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. it’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honour it. oh, what will i do, what will I say, when those white wings touch the shore? (mary oliver, “the swan”)

‎

• had i the heavens’ embroidered cloths, enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half light, i would spread the cloths under your feet: but i, being poor, have only my dreams; i have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams. (w.b. yeats, “aedh wishes for the cloths of heaven”)

‎

• whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination, 
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
 in the family of things. (mary oliver, “wild geese”)

‎

• i was standing under a tree. the tree was a tree with happy leaves, and I was myself, and there were stars in the sky that were also themselves at the moment at which moment my right hand was holding my left hand which was holding the tree which was filled with stars and the soft rain - imagine! imagine! the long and wondrous journeys still to be ours. (mary oliver, “last night the rain spoke to me”)

‎

• but we both know how it goes– i say i want you inside me and you hold my head underwater, i say i want you inside me and you split me open with a knife. (richard siken, “wishbone”)