Sonnetesque

By Lynn Emanuel I love its smallness: as though our whole town were a picture postcard and our feelings were on vacation: ourselves in mini- ature, shopping at tiny sales, buying the newspapers--small and pale and square as sugar cubes--at the fragile, little curb. The way the streetlight is really a table lamp where now we sit and where real night, (which is very tall and black and at our backs), where for a moment the night is forced to bend down and look through these tiny windows, forced to come closer and put its hand on our shoulder and stoop over the book to read the fine print.

Great TV Monologue

Some people do not have to search - 
they find their niche early in life and rest there, seemingly contented and resigned. 
They do not seem to ask much of life, 
sometimes they do not seem to take it seriously. 
At times I envy them, 
but usually I do not understand them - 
seldom do they understand me. 

I am one of the searchers. 
There are, I believe, millions of us. 
We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, 
hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. 
We continue to explore ourselves, 
hoping to understand. 

We like to walk along the beach - 
we are drawn by the ocean, 
taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. 
We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. 

Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. 
To share our sadness with the one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - 
unless it is to share our laughter. 

We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, 
for everything beautiful it can provide. 
Most of all we want to love and be loved. 
We want to live in a relationship that will not impede 
our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls. 

We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love. 
We are wanderers, dreamers and lovers, 
lonely souls who dare ask of life everything good and 
beautiful. 

- - James Kavanaugh

My life has been the poem I would have writ

My life has been the poem I would have writ But I could not both live and utter it. -Henry David Thoreau

the soul of humanity

“Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entire ly their own fault. It is what they do to them selves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find your self with out it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”

-Frank Lloyd Wright

Old Boy
by A. Van Jordan

If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don't fall victim to the Hypnotist's
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories 
pulse. Resist the taste for something still 
alive for your first meal; resist the craving 
for the touch of a hand from your past. 
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There's
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out 
in one's mind. When there's no more 
space, we grow desperate. You'll ask 
if practicing love for years in your mind, 
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one's life
is the same as living? You'll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove 
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you've already released
your pain onto the world; don't believe
there's some joy in forgetting. 
There's no joy in the struggle to forget. 
And what appears as an endless verdant field, 
only spreads across a building's rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field. 
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage 
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you've forgotten this 
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life, 
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit 
until, within a moment's glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting, 
small acts of love or trauma 
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn 
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one's mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop 
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.

turns out

we are only human after all

Vulnerability

Vulnerability is not weakness, it is emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty, it fuels our daily lives. 

Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage. To be vulnerable is to let ourselves be seen, to be honest.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation creativity and change.