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8ba92bd one burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet, Billy Collins
0221c6b These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one telling it whom you can stop. One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar, then about a man with a big nose on his honeymoon, then about a kangaroo who walks into a bar. Each one takes up an entire day. The sun looks like a prank Nathanael West is pulling on the world; on the drive to work cars are swinging comically from lane to lan.. life-and-living life Billy Collins
772ca13 After counting all the sheep in the world I enumerate the wildebeests, snails, camels, skylarks, etc., then I add up all the zoos and aquariums, country by country. By early light I am asleep in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood, nights flood sleeplessness noah Billy Collins
5caaca4 This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens-- the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the .. time poetry living Billy Collins
0f924e0 In a while, one of us will go up to bed and the other one will follow. Then we will slip below the surface of the night into miles of water, drifting down and down to the dark, soundless bottom until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still, below the shale and layered rock, beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure, into the broken bones of the earth itself, into the marrow of the only place we know. Billy Collins
0f961b2 Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line, the tortoise has stopped once again by the roadside, this time to stick out his neck and nibble a bit of sweet grass, unlike the previous time when he was distracted by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower. poetry living mindfulness Billy Collins
5e55eef To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born you would be all done in only one more year? Of course, you couldn't have done it alone, so never mind, you're fine just as you are. You are loved simply for being yourself. But did you know that at your age Judy Garland was pulling down $150,000 a picture, Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory, and.. Billy Collins
3cce7d9 Central Park It's hard to describe how that day in the park was altered when I stopped to read an official sign I came across near the great carousel, my lips moving silently like the lips of Saint Ambrose. As the carousel turned in the background, all pinions and mirrors and the heads of horses rising to the steam-blown notes of a calliope, I was learning how the huge thing was first designed to be powered by a blind mule, as it turned out.. Billy Collins
426c597 The birds are in their trees, the toast is in the toaster, and the poets are at their windows. [...] The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong game of proofreading, glancing back and forth from page to page, the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes, and the poets are at their windows because it is their job for which they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon. poets writing Billy Collins
08a86d2 The girl who signed her papers in lipstick lipstick cool smoking Billy Collins
89ecde2 No Time In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents lie buried side by side under a smooth slab of granite. Then, all day long, I think of him rising up to give me that look of knowing disapproval while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down. Billy Collins
693cac8 In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took his death to bed with me and his death was my bed and in every corner of the room it hid from the light, and then it was the light of day and the next day and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page. Billy Collins
f084d36 It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead. life the-past Billy Collins
7afd743 I can see one of them clearly now, walking along with a newspaper tucked under his arm. he has cut himself shaving and a bit of tissue with a circle of blood is stuck to his cheek, newspaper shaving details Billy Collins
586f42d And when my heart is beating too rapidly in the dark, I will go downstairs in a robe, open it up to a blank page, Billy Collins
32f77a2 It seems only yesterday I used to believe There was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. Billy Collins
08888f7 Yet the one I think of most often_"" Billy Collins
b36fe20 I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only/ responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation/ poetry writing small-joys mundane Billy Collins
eb7598c Just pour the tea, just look into the eye of the flower, just sing the song-- one thing at a time and Billy Collins
0a00491 The Lanyard The other day I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly-- a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning .. Billy Collins
d71265e Returning the Pencil to Its Tray Everything is fine-- the first bits of sun are on the yellow flowers behind the low wall, people in cars are on their way to work, and I will never have to write again. Just looking around will suffice from here on in. Who said I had to always play the secretary of the interior? And I am getting good at being blank, staring at all the zeroes in the air. It must have been all the time spent in the kayak this .. Billy Collins
bf485c4 Eastern Standard Time Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address only those in my own time zone, this proper slice of longitude that runs from pole to snowy pole down the globe through Montreal to Bogota. Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band, sitting up in your many beds this morning-- the sun falling through the windows and casting a shadow on the sundial-- consider those in other zones who cannot hea.. poetry morning night Billy Collins
2ba8f12 The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska Too bad you weren't here six months ago, was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska. You could have seen the astonishing spectacle of the sandhill cranes, thousands of them feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River. There was no point in pointing out the impossibility of my being there then because I happened to be somewhere else, so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment if only.. Billy Collins
05177f1 You are turning me like someone turning a globe in her hand, and yes, I have another side like a China no one, not even me, has ever seen. So describe to me what's there, say what you are looking at and I will close my eyes so I can see it too, the oxcarts and all the lively flags. I love the sound of your voice like a little saxophone telling me what I could never know unless I dug a hole all the way down through the core of myself. poetry Billy Collins
461f0f7 tjws lryH lbyt kshbH fy hdhh llyl@ w bynm 'tlk' `l~ bb lnwm 'fkWr b'wl shkhS r'~ Hlman, wkm l bdW kn blG lhdw fy lSbH ltly bynm wqf lakhrwn Hwl lnr mtdthryn bjlwd lHywnt, mtklmyn l~ b`Dhm b`Dan blHrwf llyWn@ dh kn hdh qbl zmn Twyl mn khtr` lHrwf lskn@. *** rbm dhhb bmfrdh wjls `l~ Skhr@ wrH yt'ml lDbb `l~ SfH@ bHyr@ bynm yHwl 'n ykhbr nfsh bm jr~, kyf 'nh dhhb l~ mkn m mn dwn 'n ydhhb Hqan, kyf khnq bdhr`yh wHshan mftrsan l yqtrb mnh lakhrw.. Billy Collins
6786466 The whole idea of it makes me feel Like I'm coming down with something, Something worse than any stomach ache Or the headaches I get from reading in bad light - A kind of measles of the spirit A mumps of the psyche, A disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, But that is because you have forgotten The perfect simplicity of being one And the beautiful complexity introduced by two But I can lie on .. growing-old passage-of-time ageing growing-up Billy Collins
38c1496 I thanked everyone whose job it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers, and I gave general thanks that I was lying facedown in a warm puddle of soap and not a warm puddle of blood in some corner of this incomprehensible city. Billy Collins
a8f8211 would pass in the street, mostly people whose existence I did not believe in, Billy Collins
0fbcba7 The fly lands on the swatter. The movie runs backwards and catches fire in the projector. This species apes us well by talking only about itself words poetry Billy Collins
3d480ec There are easier ways of making sense, the connoisseurship of gesture, for example. You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase. You lift a gun from the glove compartment and toss it out the window into the desert heat. guy heat gun surrealism Billy Collins
48d5fdb though they know in their adult hearts, even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed for his appalling behavior, that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids, their wives are Dopey Dopeheads and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants. youth fun youthful silly youthfulness children Billy Collins
0321710 When i believe in everything, I could not see the actors semicircled around a studio microphone flipping the pages of scripts in unison. I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult, accusing each other of murder. murder voices radio Billy Collins
5e32d11 I had to send away for the beacuse they are not available in any store. They look the same as any sunglasses with a light tint and silvery frames, but instead of filtering out the harmful rays of the sun. they filter out the harmful sight of you -- poetry Billy Collins
bc8fe8e Is Death miles away from this house, Reaching for a window in Cincinnati Or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker In British Columbia? Is he too busy making arrangments, Tampering with air brakes, Scattering cancer cells like seeds, Loosening the wooden breams of roller coaster To both with my hidden cottage That visitors find so hard to find? Or if he stepping from a black car Parked at the dark end of the lane, Shaking open the famil.. my-number Billy Collins
b77164d C'e nessuno che voglia unirsi a me nel lanciare alcuni sassi verso quegli insegnanti che amano porre la domanda: <> come se Thomas Hardy e Emily Dickinson si fossero sforzati ma alla fine avessero fallito: Billy Collins
e1ae007 Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin. I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter. I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on. I find it difficult to ignore the temptation. Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter. Billy Collins
847ba5e I would rather eat at the bar, but such behavior is regarded by professionals as a form of denial, so here I am seated alone at a table with a white tablecloth attended by an elderly waiter with no name- ideal conditions for dining alone according to the connoisseurs of this minor talent. I have brought neither book nor newspaper since reading material is considered cheating. Eating alone, they say, means eating alone, not in the company of.. poetry Billy Collins
35d936c I Love You' Early on, I noticed that you always say it to each of your children as you are getting off the phone with them just as you never fail to say it to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call. It's all new to this only child. I never heard my parents say it, at least not on such a regular basis, nor did it ever occur to me to miss it. To say I love you pretty much every day would have seemed strangely obvious, like saying I'm loo.. poetry Billy Collins
a7500b7 and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page a few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, Billy Collins
06852b7 On Turning Ten" The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. B.. Billy Collins
c31dd5a This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is where you find the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the letter A, a woman ironing on a bare stage Billy Collins
5172bf1 Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant I am glad I resisted the temptation, if it was a temptation when I was young, to write a poem about an old man eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant. I would have gotten it all wrong thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world and with only a book for a companion. He'll probably pay the bill out of a change purse. So glad I waited all these decades to record how hot and.. Billy Collins
a0221d7 Theme It's a sunny weekday in early May and after a ham sandwich and a cold bottle of beer on the brick terrace, I am consumed by the wish to add something to one of the ancient themes- youth dancing with his eyes closed, for example, in the shadows of corruption and death, or the rise and fall of illustrious men strapped to the turning wheel of mischance and disaster. There is a slight breeze, just enough to bend the yellow tulips on th.. hopelessness immortality poetry love Billy Collins
834fbae Building with Its Face Blown Off How suddenly the private is revealed in a bombed-out city, how the blue and white striped wallpaper of a second story bedroom is now exposed to the lightly falling snow as if the room had answered the explosion wearing only its striped pajamas. Some neighbors and soldiers poke around in the rubble below and stare up at the hanging staircase, the portrait of a grandfather, a door dangling from a single hinge... exposed ruined food city Billy Collins
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