Prose Poetry Quotes

Later when they would mention, they would say, and everyone would know, but not nearly as well as they meant.

Mikl Paul

Nowhere hidden has ever turned away a goodheart guest.

Mikl Paul

...citizens of the U.S. live under an Empire of “evil doers” who have set themselves juxtaposed to humanity instilling in us from our youngest days how to slay our human element in exchange for an external existence of malnourished pride.

I’ll give you one chance to run,but may your shoulder always whisper in your ear…“It’s best to watch out for men, like me.

Only those who will love longer than they expected to can truly love pecan pie, which doesn't explain its status as death rows most requested last dessert, or why chopped pecans, corn syrup, directions from the Karo bottle's cherry-red side are what mercy taste like to some. But there you have it.

Kate Lebo

I am running and singing and when it’s raining I’m the only one left on the open street, smiling with my eyes fixed on the sky because it’s cleaning me. I’m the one on the other side of the party, hearing laughter and the emptying of bottles while I peacefully make my way to the river, a lonely road, following the smell of the ocean. I’m the one waking up at 4am to witness the sunrise, where the sky touches the sea, and I hold my elbows, grasping tight to whatever I’ve made of myself.

Charlotte Eriksson

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything. . . . he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys.

She told me there was a place on my face she wanted to inhale.

Mikl Paul

He said that he felt that there was a book hidden between us. Some small thing lodged between a rib or a summer. and He wanted to find it.

Mikl Paul

He left the next morning, searching for a city with light that reminded him of me. He would mail me empty envelopes and boxes, I would take them into my closet, shut the door, and quickly open them. A flash of foreign light would fill the room, but only for a moment. I would whisper ‘this is what we’re like, this is what we’re like.’…

Mikl Paul

What is this thing? trading passions for a tiny bit of acceptance.

Charlotte Eriksson

I negate this distance with / what it would be / to be shining you.

Mikl Paul

Decades from now, my grandchild is going to be a poet... And she's going to write about how she's a living testament to how her grandmother made love to hurricane and calmed the storm.

Danabelle Gutierrez

And perhaps, I'm a Tuesday night and you're a Wednesday morning the way we'll never even notice how we blend into each other.

Danabelle Gutierrez

So you will meet many ’someones’ who will give a new definition to your name. And you can not build walls, must not close the door and please don’t hide,because if you ask me about hurt and loveI will say love. Love because the hurt will come and go no matter what, but only love makes it worth while. Only love can cure it. Don’t be scared. Go. Love.

Charlotte Eriksson

I said ”I love you so much it’s killing me”and you kept saying sorryso I stopped explainingfor it never made sense to youwhat always did to meto let what you love kill youand never regret. As Romeo is dying Juliet says”I am willing to die to remain by your side”and love was never a static place of restbut the last second of euphoriawhile throwing yourself out from a 20 store windowto be able to say”I flew before I hit the ground”,and it was glorious.Don’t be sorry.The fall was beautiful, dear.The crash was beautiful.

Charlotte Eriksson

It was quite a beautiful thing, the way we simply just came to be, with no effort or trying and slowly we found each other’s hands in the dark. No chains or promises, just a simple sign of hopethat things will go on and get betterand that things and people and views are still out there, yet to be found.

Charlotte Eriksson

Objects and ObjectivesTo contemplate LEGO. Many colours. Many shapes. Many inventive and useful shapes. Plastic. A versatile and practical substance. Symbolic of the resourcefulness of man. Oil taken from the depths of the very earth. Distillation of said raw material. Chemical processes. Pollution. Creating a product providing hours of constructive play. For children all over the world. Teaching our young. Through enjoyment. Preparing them for further resourcefulness. The progress of our kind.A book. Many books. Proud liners of walls. Fingered. Taken out with great care. Held open. Gazed upon / into with something like awe. A medium for the recording of and communication of knowledge. From the many to the many. Down the ages. And of art. And of love. But do you hear the trees outside whispering? Do their voices haunt you? No wonder. They are calling for their brothers. Pulped. Pressed. Coated. Printed. Bound. And for their other brothers which made the shelves to hold them. And for the roof over them as well.From the very beginning - everything at cost. A cave man, to get food, had to deal with the killing. And the bones from one death proved very useful for implementing the death of another.

YENWhat happens if you take a cup? Put it to your lips. A cup of desire. Of dazzling colour. Of intoxicating aroma. You can't resist. Drink. And in the bottom of the cup. There is a fish. And the fish says "You have uncovered me! Now I am condemned. To die."What happens if you find a box? 35mm by 35mm exactly. And are curious. You open it quickly. Of course. And inside there is an eye. And the eye seems to think that the box is its exclusive property. And fixes you with a terrifying glare.What happens if you catch a soft sound? A voice whispering in the air. Above the tree tops. And you can't quite hear what it is saying. But you have to listen. So you float up. Then you find you can't come down again. When the conversation is finished.

Time is not ours and we would not own it. It does not wound us to say so.from the prose poem INNOCENCE

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Charles Baudelaire

To write you into poems,and make you unerasable.

And you might try to hide or protect yourself, or compare the different states of love,but you must not grow up, must not act wise when it comes to love.You must stay foolish and fall for every heart will beat in different ways together with yours and love is not meant to be compared, only enjoyed, and suffered, and remembered.

Charlotte Eriksson

It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now,and I'm not letting go.

Charlotte Eriksson

A poet is a blind optimist.The world is against him formany reasons. But thepoet persists. He believesthat he is on the right track,no matter what any of his fellow men say. In hiseternal search for truth, thepoet is alone.He tries to be timeless in a society built on time.

I was never afraid of the dark and I spent my youth walking through empty playgrounds at midnight, worried mothers telling girls to be careful and ”the world is an ugly place and not everyone wants you well”. But I was not afraid and I wished for adrenaline to make my veins pulsate in that way that puts them more on the outside of my skin than inside.After the first night with you I never walked alone at night again because suddenly I had something to lose. Something to save.

Charlotte Eriksson

If freedom is free and none need worry, then what blood drops for thee?

I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well, a contradiction I never figured out.

Charlotte Eriksson

The universe on your skin is emptyfrom all the silence on your tongue.Forgive yourself. Let your body healfrom all the wounds you did not inflicton yourself. Drop the sword you carryon your shoulder for self-defense.Lower the armor you hold high upfor protection. Those who harmed youare not going to come back. Those whohave left never intended to return.

I am clumsy, drop glasses and get drunk on Monday afternoons. I read Seneca and can recite Shakespeare by heart, but I mess up the laundry, don’t answer my phone and blame the world when something goes wrong. I think I have a dream, but most of the days I’m still sleeping. The grass is cut. It smells like strawberries. Today I finished four books and cleaned my drawers. Do you believe in a God? Can I tell you about Icarus? How he flew too close to the sun?I want to make coming home your favourite part of the day. I want to leave tiny little words lingering in your mind, on nights when you’re far away and can’t sleep. I want to make everything around us beautiful; make small things mean a little more. Make you feel a little more. A little better, a little lighter. The coffee is warm, this cup is yours. I want to be someone you can’t live without.I want to be someone you can’t live without.

Charlotte Eriksson

I do not just want you at your best.I almost do not carewhere your Happiness lives,but please,let me visit your pain?Take me to the placewhere your sadness goes,and show me the tragedythat no one knows.

Meraaqi

And someday,when the partiesdon’t dazzle you anymore,and when the alcohol failsto amuse your senses,come to me.We’ll lie on the grass,stare at the stars,and talk about Life.Maybe I will become the Momentyou rediscover yourself again.

Meraaqi

Embrace your inner goddess, never let go of the light you carry within.

Cynthia Dougherty-Bernal

We danced with the devil with demons in our heart.

J. Limbu

I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day and you must build your own.

Charlotte Eriksson

Don’t despair nowyou fell in love with the maskand not what was behindit touched the chords inside your heartand made it beatand now that you have seen behind itdon’t despair

I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything,at any time,and I am not your fault.

Charlotte Eriksson

Of the many forms that silence takes, the most memorable is the dry husk of the cicada.

Jon Davis

I am a free soul, singing my heart out by myself no matter where I go and I call strangers my friends because I learn things and find ways to fit them into my own world. I hear what people say, rearrange it, take away and tear apart until it finds value in my reality and there I make it work. I find spaces in between the cracks and cuts where it feels empty and there I make it work.

Charlotte Eriksson

The stars are brilliant at this time of night and I wander these streets like a ritual I don’t dare to break for darling, the times are quite glorious.I left him by the water’s edge,still waving long after the ship was goneand if someone would have screamed my name I wouldn’t have heard for I’ve said goodbye so many times in my short life that farewells are a muscular task and I’ve taught them well. There’s a place by the side of the railway near the lake where I grew up and I used to go there to burry things and start anew. I used to go there to say goodbye. I was young and did not know many people but I had hidden things inside that I never dared to show and in silence I tried to kill them, one way or the other,leaving sin on my body scrubbing tears off with saltand I built my rituals in farewells. Endings I still cling to. So I go to the ocean to say goodbye.He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my headand though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right onefor I have used them myself and there is no coming back.Minds like ours are can’t be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.I turned away from the oceanas not to fall for its pleafor it used to seduce and consume meand there was this one nighta few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewellsand just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone.But I was younger then and easily fooledand the ocean was deep and dark and blueand I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones.I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival.Then days passed by and I spent them with my work and now I’m writing letters I will never dare to send.But there is this one day every year or sowhen the burden gets too heavyand I collect my belongings I no longer needand make my way to the ocean to burn and drown and start anewand it is quite wonderful, setting fire to my chains and flames on written wordsand I stand there, starring deep into the heat until they’re all gone. Nothing left to hold me back.You kissed me that morning as if you’d never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss like chains wrapped around my veins,and if you see a fire from the shore tonightit’s my chains going up in flames. The time of moon i quite glorious. We could have been so glorious.

Charlotte Eriksson

I am not a Sunday morning inside four wallswith clean bloodand organized drawers.I am the hurricane setting fire to the forestsat night when no one else is aliveor awakehowever you choose to see itand I live in my own flamessometimes burning too bright and too wildto make things lastor handlemyself or anyone elseand so I run.run run runfar and wideuntil my bones ache and lungs splitand it feels good.Hear that people? It feels goodbecause I am the slave and ruler of my own bodyand I wish to do with it exactly as I please

Charlotte Eriksson

Feelings and emotionran through my veinslike a hurricane.And that's when everythingbegan to look like poetry.—You look like poetry