Emotions and Feelings

Tugging all day at perverse life: The indignity of it!

O let none say I Love until aware What huge resources it will take to nurse One ruining speck, one tiny hair That casts a shadow through the universe.

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.

In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark.

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window Or just walking dully along.

O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed. The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

The greater the love, the more false to its object, Not to be born is the best for man; After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle, Break the embraces, dance while you can.

Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all But will his negative inversion, be prodigal.

O my floating life Do not save love to the flood

Here lies my past. Good-bye I have kissed it; Thank you, kids. I wouldn’t have missed it.

I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable.

The trouble with a kitten is THAT Eventually it becomes a CAT.

What happens to a dream deferred? Maybe it just sags Or does it explode?

Good morning, daddy! Ain’t you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred?

I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied.

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

I have so fiercely dreamed of you And walked so far and spoken of you so, Loved a shade of you so hard That now I’ve no more left of you.

But I believe that since my life began The most I’ve had is just A talent to amuse.

But I believe that since my life began The most I’ve had is just A talent to amuse.

I’ll see you again, Whenever spring breaks through again.