Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt–marvelous error!–
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt–marvelous error!–
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt–marvelous error!–
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt–marvelous error!–
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

……Anthonio Machado

our hearts hurt a lot…..we forget that’s part of the deal of being alive……we forget that we can’t figure it all out by analyzing or reasoning or debating…….we need to embody our truth, directly through our own bodies, our dreams, our intuitive wisdom…..the mediator of our experience…..

Most people mistakenly follow the voice of conscience when they should be listening to the voice of their own selves. Emerson called this voice the ‘inner gleam’ and wrote: A man should learn to watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament, of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more abiding lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous impression with good-natured inflexibility when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Remember, it is more important to follow the inner gleam in the big things than in the small things. The ‘housekeeping’ of life—working out what route to take to get to work, when to schedule servicing on the car, and so on—can be handled consciously. But life’s big decisions—whom to marry, what vocation to pursue—are best handled by the inner gleam. Most people get all this upside down. They trust the inner gleam on the small things, and mistakenly worry and fret over the big things. They’re like the tennis player who tries to control the big points and end up ‘choking’ instead. The champion just goes ahead and does it, without fretting!

– John Wareham

feelin’ it all like poetry & the deeply embedded groove

of your first rock concert….

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night —
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky — the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.
And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,
and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.
Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.
But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.
And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.
And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti —
to be perfectly honest for a moment —
the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

…..Billy Collins