Lyric Bones

I would like to step out of my heart/ and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive.

What groaning, what lament, what song of death, what dance of Hades shall I do?

True singing is a different breath, about / nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.

“Short Talk on Defloration,” by Anne Carson

From “To My Twenties,” by Kenneth Koch

Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.

Wild to be wreckage forever.

The self persists like a dying star.

O sweet frustrations, I shall be back for more.

You can try to answer, but you need / words for that, and you don't have any.

Eat and love, to be sure, but you better eat first.

It's quite a mystery, albeit largely unacknowledged, to be alive, and, quite simply, in order to remain alive you must keep eating. My notion, scarcely original, is that if you eat badly you are very probably living badly.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.