But the Wise Perceive Things about to Happen by C.P. Cavafy

“For the gods perceive future things,                                 ordinary people things in the present, but                                 the wise perceive things about to happen.”                                                                Philostratos, Life of Apollonios of Tyana, viii, 7. Ordinary people know what’s happening now, the gods know future things because they alone are totally enlightened. Of what’s to come the wise perceive things about to happen. Sometimes during moments of intense study their hearing’s troubled: the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them, and they listen reverently, while in the street outside the people hear nothing whatsoever.

Young Poets by Nicanor Parra

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

Far From Any Road by The Handsome Family (+ analysis)

From the dusty mesa,
Her looming shadow grows,
Hidden in the branches of the poison creosote.
She twines her spines up slowly,
Towards the boiling sun,
And when I touched her skin,
My fingers ran with blood.

In the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom.
A strange hunger haunted me, the looming shadows danced.
I fell down to the thorny brush and felt a trembling hand.

When the last light warms the rocks,
And the rattlesnakes unfold,
Mountain cats will come to drag away your bones.

And rise with me forever,
Across the silent sand,
And the stars will be your eyes,
And the wind will be my hands.

the song tells about protagonist's fascination with Selenicereus Grandiflorus and his intention to watch it bloom, which is a unique occurrence by itself. Namely this species of cactus blooms only on a single night once every 2-3 years, and it(the bloom) withers within hours. There are also legends about people losing their minds while witnessing this rare event.

The symbolic meaning of the act and the cactus itself apparently reflect protagonist's affection towards the esoteric, the unfeasible and the beauty of strangeness embodied in the cactus.The cactus may also represent
a person with such characteristics who the author loves or feels for, which is implied by the use of the words "her skin" and his being tempted to touch it. It is located in a most foreboding place, a sweltering desert filled with dangerous animals and poisonous plants, and the cactus itself is spiny and allegedly induces insanity with its blooming, but nevertheless he/she is determined.

In the second stanza the night has fallen and the lyrics become more ambiguous and foreboding. There is a commotion of ominous shadows (which can be interpreted either as the onset of the overwhelming madness or as actual unearthly phenomenon) and also a reference to strange hands halting the character (from witnessing the blooming in entirety perhaps?), but still he/she collapses and feels his/her hands trembling from the trauma. The protagonist(s) may even have died, as the following lines describe the natural course of things in the desert: predators will come at night to feed on his/her corpse and tear it asunder.

eventual union in a different, unknown mode of existence, when his/her body has dissolved into particles and literally become a part of the desert which the cactus belongs to, a part of the still life, then his/her life essence will be able to relate to the morose beauty and ethereal being of the otherworldly cactus in an incomprehensible way(seeing each other with "stars" and touching each other with "wind").

IN SIPS by Sonia Gurdjieff

There is danger in writing, the pinning of things that float, the iridescence of moths, it goes if you keep touching

Bonfires, hair, rain.
The smells that make memory, what do mobile phones smell of?

Footprints in the snow at midnight, everything new and soft. No days are alike when you’re young. Winter is your friend, not something that delays trains. Foxes circle the lawn as low thunder breaks

Fear the dark and the silence, feel safe with hi vis neon and megaphones

Hunched and ashen-faced in mines of computers, lights and alarms go off and on; we emerge blinking with strange new customs. Untethered and adrift, flecked with violence, together alone, like suburbs

Statistics, systems, resources; I could be any old doll whose hair you burnt

Mid-century wood veneer cocktail cabinets, mannequins whose plastic skin has turned airplane-orange, lone ashtrays, kitsch throwaway dreams

Unstable and unheard, existing precariously like wildflowers beneath the pavements

The rain and the night have vinyl’d the city, taillights bleeding sickly rivulets in the streets. We wait for machines to move us from one place to the next. Space invaded; with headphones you won’t feel it

Bull fighting, tulipomania, football. We are no longer safe in numbers

Friends are not what Aristotle thought they were. They sip each other, editing the senses; they feel guilty about time and they share in isolation, tapping the hormones at weddings

Desires whispering along fibre optic cables to be mined like resources; cities like circuit boards; connectivity and obsolescence; you can feel it in your teeth when you watch TV

Broken cots and abandoned suitcases; something in the shadows beneath the eaves. Innocent eyes darting with feigned invincibility; unfinished homework. When you look back everything is in sepia, propped up by a shrouded figure

Escalators, cars, office chairs; the atrophy gets designed in

Driving past the Society for the Preservation of Useless Objects you wonder if this is what will remain of us. The conclusions they will come to with our snuff boxes, doll’s houses, colonial photographs and mummified rats

Power isn’t a man or a manifesto; time and space are currency; identity is a commodity and so is debt; drones and bots the agents of will to power

We meet through the interface while the organization watches; lovers pacing the circumference of a snow globe; slivers of self for consumption; nostalgic distractions to ease the transition; reality refracted in shards of simulation

I returned to my old house fifty years later, ivy creeping silently over cracked window panes, the once red bricks faded. Foxes wait in the tall grass while a crow watches from the rusty aerial. The hatch at the bottom of the garden; the apparition; the sad spot where baby birds fall from their nests

from an interview with Roberto Bolano

Which authors would you number among your precursors? Borges? Cortázar? Nicanor Parra? Neruda? Kafka? In Tres you write: “I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only human being to contemplate the end was Franz Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the death. From a wrought-iron seat in Central Park, Kafka was watching the world burn.”

I never liked Neruda. At any rate, I would never call him my one of precursors. Anyone who was capable of writing odes to Stalin while shutting his eyes to the Stalinist terror doesn’t deserve my respect. Borges, Cortázar, Sábato, Bioy Casares, Nicanor Parra: yes, I’m fond of them. Obviously I’ve read all of their books. I had some problems with Kafka, whom I consider the greatest writer of the twentieth century. It wasn’t that I hadn’t discovered his humor; there’s plenty of that in his books. Heaps. But his humor was so highly taut that I couldn’t bear it. That’s something that never happened to me with Musil or Döblin or Hesse. Not with Lichtenberg either, an author I read frequently who fortifies me without fail.

Musil, Döblin, Hesse wrote from the rim of the abyss. And that is commendable, since almost nobody wagers to write from there. But Kafka writes from out of the abyss itself. To be more precise: as he’s falling. When I finally understood that those had been the stakes, I began to read Kafka from a different perspective. Now I can read him with a certain composure and even laugh thereby. Though no one with a book by Kafka in his hands can remain composed for very long.

To Mrs. M. B. On Her Birthday by Alexander Pope

Oh be thou blest with all that Heav'n can send,
Long Health, long Youth, long Pleasure, and a Friend:
Not with those Toys the female world admire,
Riches that vex, and Vanities that tire.
With added years if Life bring nothing new,
But, like a Sieve, let ev'ry blessing thro',
Some joy still lost, as each vain year runs o'er,
And all we gain, some sad Reflection more;
Is that a Birth-Day? 'tis alas! too clear,
'Tis but the funeral of the former year.
Let Joy or Ease, let Affluence or Content,
And the gay Conscience of a life well spent,
Calm ev'ry thought, inspirit ev'ry grace.
Glow in thy heart, and smile upon thy face.
Let day improve on day, and year on year,
Without a Pain, a Trouble, or a Fear;
Till Death unfelt that tender frame destroy,
In some soft Dream, or Extasy of joy,
Peaceful sleep out the Sabbath of the Tomb,
And wake to Raptures in a Life to come.

Merengue by Mary Ruefle

I’m sorry to say it, but fucking
is nothing. To the gods, we look
like dogs. Still, they watch.
Did you lose your wallet?
Did you rip up the photo?
Did you pick up the baby
and kiss its forehead?
Did you drive into a deer?
Did you hack at the grass
as if it could kill you?
Did you ask your mother for milk?
Did you light the candles?
Did you count the buttons on your shirt?
Were you off by one? Did you start again?
Did you learn how to cut a pineapple,
open a coconut?
Did ou carry a body once it had died?
For how long and how far?
Did you do the merengue?
Did you wave at the train?
Did you finish the puzzle, or save it for morning?
Did you say something? Would you repeat it?
Did you throw the bottle against the wall?
Did it break? Did you clean it up?
Did you tear down the web? What did you do
with the bug the spider was saving?
Did you dive without clothes into cold water?
Have you been born?
What book will you be reading when you die?
If it’s a good one, you won’t finish it.
If it’s a bad one, what a shame.

bamboo and a bird by Linda Gregg

In the subway late at night.
Waiting for the downtown train
at Forty-Second Street.
Walking back and forth
on the platform.
Too tired to give money.
Staring at the magazine covers
in the kiosk. Someone passes me
from behind, wearing an orange vest
and dragging a black hose.
A car stops and the doors open.
All the faces are plain.
It makes me happy to be
among these people
who leave empty seats
between each other.

memory by Lucile Clifton

ask me to tell how it feels
remembering your mother’s face
turned to water under the white words
of the man at the shoe store. ask me,
though she tells it better than i do,
not because of her charm
but because it never happened
she says,
no bully salesman swaggering,
no rage, no shame, none of it
ever happened.
i only remember buying you
your first grown up shoes
she smiles. ask me
how it feels.

God's Justice by Anne Carson

In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks.

On the day He was to create justice

God got involved in making a dragonfly

and lost track of time.

It was about two inches long

with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.

God watched it bend its tiny wire elbows

as it set about cleaning the transparent case of its head.

The eye globes mounted on the case

rotated this way and that

as it polished every angle.

Inside the case

which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank

God could see the machinery humming

and He watched the hum

travel all the way down turquoise dots to the end of the tail

and breathe off as light.

Its black wings vibrated in and out.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
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.

Song of Speaks-Fluently

To have to carry your own corn far —
who likes it?
To follow the black bear through the thicket —
who likes it?
To hunt without profit, to return without anything —
who likes it?
You have to carry your own corn far.
You have to follow the black bear.
You have to hunt without profit.
If not, what will you tell the little ones? What
will you speak of?
For it is bad not to use the talk which God has sent us.
I am Speaks-Fluently. Of all the groups of symbols,
I am a symbol by myself.

Ballad of Orange and Grape by Muriel Rukeyser

After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you’ve read your reading
after you’ve written your say —
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.
. . .
Frankfurters, frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans —
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking.
I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE.
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, on each machine.
I ask him: How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? —
How can they write and believe what they’re writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE — ?
. . .
He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black  women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don’t do.
On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.

America by Tony Hoagland

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can't tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he's driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped, "Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty"—

Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, "I am asleep in America too,

And I don't know how to wake myself either,"
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

"I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future."

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

Personal by Tony Hoagland

Don’t take it personal, they said;

but I did, I took it all quite personal—

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;

the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain—

And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,

the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,

with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,

with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness

Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said

at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t

believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture

served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all

and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure

while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries

like wheeling birds

and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me

for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon

disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;

barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else

to take it personal too.

fragment of The Taoist Blues of Valle Hebrón Hospital by Robeto Bolano

That’s how you and I became
Sleuths of our memory.
And traveled, like Latin American detectives,
Over the dusty streets of the continent
Looking for the assassin.
But we only found
Empty shop windows, ambiguous manifestations
Of truth.

over and over by Roberto Bolano

Between one point and the other I see only
my own face
entering and leaving the mirror
over and over.
Like in a horror film.
Know what I mean?
The ones we call psychological thrillers.

the night, the sea by Roberto Bolano

The girl looking out the window
of the hotel. Oh words escape me, an imaginary Barcelona,
midnight on the street, people are happy,
the boyfriend, stars like gems encrusted
on a book that the foreigner will never finish reading
(at least in this lifetime), the night, the sea,
happy people leaning out an open window.

All the sadness of these years
will be lost with you.

...

All your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream—a dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person.

Afterlife by John Burnside

When we are gone

our lives will continue without us

– or so we believe and,

at times, we have tried to imagine

the gaps we will leave being filled

with the brilliance of others:

someone else gathering plums

from this tree in the garden,

someone else thinking this thought

in a room filled with stars

and coming to no conclusion

other than this –

this bungled joy, this inarticulate

conviction that the future cannot come

without the grace

of setting things aside,

of giving up

the phantom of a soul

that only seemed to be 

while it was passing.

An Essay Concerning Light by John Burnside

O nobly-born, listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. 
Recognize it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as 
regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead (tr. W. Y. Evans-Wentz)

I  Scotlandwell

All summer long, I waited for the night
to drive out in the unexpected gold
of beech woods, and those lighted homesteads, set
like kindling in the crease-lines of the dark,

catching a glimpse, from the road, of huddled dogs
and sleepless cattle, mustered in a yard
as one flesh, heads
like lanterns, swaying, full of muddled light;

light from the houses television blue,
a constant flicker, like the run of thought
that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems
to kindle us, and make us plausible,

creatures of habit, ready to click
into motion. All summer long,
I knew it had something to do
with looking again, how something behind the light

had gone unnoticed; how the bloom on things
is always visible, a muddled patina
of age and colour, twinned with light or shade
and hiding the source of itself, in its drowned familiar.

Morning by Maitreyabandhu

Every day I do nothing now -
light candles, drink tea, sit
in the old chair and watch
the usual slow-drift clouds.

Ash branches move together
in up-and-down beckoning
and the corner of a school
redbrick, pale brick, slate -

hums with children's voices.
Everyday I say to myself
Wait now, Gentle now... but
the carpet is a desert-place

of camels and palm trees
and someone comes in
with a message and a drink.
I should be doing nothing now -

undoing myself, waiting for
the pigeon flock of thought
to circle round the roof and
settle in the rafters of the house.

The Invention of Zero by Derek Collins

"The Muslims invented zero"
the taxi driver says
as he drives me home from the dentist.
Back at school in Kashmir
he'd been good at maths
encouraged that it was Muslims
who'd given zero a symbol,
a name, sifr. He's right.
I'd read in Dantzig's book, "Number",
how the Greeks could not imagine
the void, nothingness, as a number,
left it to the Arabs to lass emptiness
in a small circle, give it power
just as the dentist has filled
my hollow tooth to give it bite.
With the numbers the Arabs gave us
sums sharpened, became simple to do.

So simple and yet so difficult
to draw a circle around nothing,
around yearning,
so that it won't remain empty.

From The Tempest

Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself – 
Yea, all which it inherit – shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Parisian War Song by Arthur Rimbaud

Spring is here, plain as day,
Thiers and Picard steal away
From what they stole: green Estates
With vernal splendours on display

May: a jubilee of nudity, asses on parade
Sevres, Meudon, Bagneux, Asnieries -
New arrivals make their way,
Sowing springtime everywhere.

They've got shakos, sabers, and tom-toms,
Not those useless old smouldering stakes
And skiffs "that nev-nev-never did cut..."
Through the reddening waters of the lakes.

Now more than ever we'll band together
When golden gems blow out our knees.
Watch as they burst on our crumbling heaps:
You've never seen dawns like these.

Thiers and Picard think they're artists
Painting Corots with gasoline.
They pick flowers from public gardens,
Their tropes traipsing from seam to seam...

Their intimates of the Big Man, and Favre,
From the flowerbeds where he's sleeping,
Undams an aqeductal flow of tears: a pinch
of pepper prompts adequate weeping...

The stones of the city are hot,
Despite all of your gasoline showers.
Doubtless an appropriate moment
To roust your kind from power...

And the Nouveau Riche lolling peacefully
Beneath the shade of ancient trees,
Will hear the boughs break overhead:
Red Rustlings that won't be leaves!

Words, Wide Night by Carol Ann Duffy

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this

is what it is like or what it is like in words.

De Amore by Ernest Dowson

Shall one be sorrowful because of love,
Which hath no earthly crown,
Which lives and dies, unknown?
Because no words of his shall ever move
Her maiden heart to own
Him lord and destined master of her own:
Is Love so weak a thing as this,
Who can not lie awake,
Solely for his own sake,
For lack of the dear hands to hold, the lips to kiss,
A mere heart-ache?

Nay, though love's victories be great and sweet,
Nor vain and foolish toys,
His crowned, earthly joys,
Is there no comfort then in love's defeat?
Because he shall defer,
For some short span of years all part in her,
Submitting to forego
The certain peace which happier lovers know;
Because he shall be utterly disowned,
Nor length of service bring
Her least awakening:
Foiled, frustrate and alone, misunderstood, discrowned,
Is Love less King?

Grows not the world to him a fairer place,
How far soever his days
Pass from his lady's ways,
From mere encounter with her golden face?
Though all his sighing be vain,
Shall he be heavy-hearted and complain?
Is she not still a star,
Deeply to be desired, worshipped afar,
A beacon-light to aid
From bitter-sweet delights, Love's masquerade?
Though he lose many things,
Though much he miss:
The heart upon his heart, the hand that clings,
The memorable first kiss;
Love that is love at all,
Needs not an earthly coronal;
Love is himself his own exceeding great reward,
A mighty lord!

Lord over life and all the ways of breath,
Mighty and strong to save
From the devouring grave;
Yea, whose dominion doth out-tyrant death,
Thou who art life and death in one,
The night, the sun;
Who art, when all things seem:
Foiled, frustrate and forlorn, rejected of to-day
Go with me all my way,
And let me not blaspheme.

Theory by Wallace Stevens

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.

To Himself by Giacomo Leopardi

Now you’ll rest forever
my weary heart. The last illusion has died
I thought eternal. Died. I feel, in truth,
not only hope, but desire
for dear illusion has vanished.
Rest forever. You’ve laboured
enough. Not a single thing is worth
your beating: the earth’s not worthy
of your sighs. Bitter and tedious,
life is, nothing more: and the world is mud.
Be silent now. Despair
for the last time. To our race Fate
gave only death. Now scorn Nature,
that brute force
that secretly governs the common hurt,
and the infinite emptiness of all.

keeping things whole by mark strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole

...

And here’s why I think “You just need to cheer up!” is the downfall of civilization: It’s the fact that we’re treating sadness like it’s a heart attack or a seizure, something that requires an emergency response. It’s not – it’s a perfectly normal, valid state of mind. Sometimes things don’t go your way, so you get sad about it. then things get better and you’re happy and the happiness is sweeter because you remember being sad.

And I think this belief that a normal, well-adjusted human should be happy every waking moment is killing us. It trains us to be constantly seeking little pleasures and distractions (Video games, porn, food, weed) to prevent deep reflection on a bad situation, to the point that we consider a “normal” mood is just a state of breezy distraction. I mean, think about it. any kind of success (Financial, personal, spiritual, whatever) depends on your ability to delay gratification. You tolerate the tedious hell of learning a new task, and then it pays off after you’ve learned it. you tolerate the humiliation of failing at something new until you get good enough not to fail. But during the hard part—the soreness that comes before the muscle—you have all these voices telling you, “Any pain and sadness you feel isn’t normal and needs to be cured immediately,” So you quit and go masturbate and take a nap. Then you wake up and find its 20 years later and your life hasn’t advanced an inch.