Dean Young

“Hark, dumbass, the error is not to fall but to fall from no height. Don't fall off a curb, fall off a cliff.”

“Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.”

“‎I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.”

“Just because a thing can't be done doesn't mean it can't be did. We all look into mirrors and see phantoms. Our error is our Eros. Why is there something instead of nothing? The answer is reckless and surreal.”

“Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.”

“You start with a darkness to move throughbut sometimes the darkness moves through you.”

“Go down any road far enoughand you'll come to a slaughterhouse,but keep going and you'll reach the sea.”

“Often beauty is disguisedby appearance just as music can beby sound, the dreaming wish by the wakingwish until there's this terrible stressbecause a thing must finally reveal itself,break itself. Leaning shadow, cinderheart, shouts. In Gorky's The Unattainable,the line begins to free itself from anyutility of contour and becomes a trajectory.One day, Gorky hung himself from a beambut left us in charge of those ravishments.Hello, interior of the sun. Usually alone on Sundays, she won't get off until late,the man steams rice because it's cheapand easy and feels in its austerity poeticlike candles during a power outageor trying on overcoats all afternoon,buying none. ”

“You bend the nailBut keep hammering becauseHammering makes the world”

“Here is a semi-transparent pebble I picked up on the way to my EKG. Probably worthless but it is my heart so take it. ”

“There are no ordinary feelings. Just as there are no ordinary spring days or kicked over cans of paint.”

“A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.”

“Kissing a rose is a dumb thing to donot just from the rose's point of view.But it's a startlike driving off a cliff's probably a finish.In beween you'll probably want to go to Mexico,get so drunk you think what you're doing is a dance.”

“When you look ito the still, deep water,you can feel it looking back,trying to come up with the proper punishment.Fucking water, who made you the boss?”

“but nothing can be taken back,not the leaves by the trees, the rainby the clouds. You want to take backthe ugly thing you said, but some shrapnelremains in the wound, some mud.”