The Chartown Gent• Show poetry

-"Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking."
-Buckminster Fuller

-"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be."

-Poeta nascitur, non fit. (A poet is born, not made)

-"Try as hard as you like, but in the end, only the language of the heart can ever reach another heart, while mere words, as they slip from your tongue, don't get past your listener's ears."
-St. Francis de Sales

-"Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance."
-Sam Brown

-"If they were drowning to death I'd put a hose in their mouth."
-Ray Kroc on his business rivals

-"I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants."
-A. Whitney Brown

-"If I had my say, I would have made it so Hitler went to Heaven instead of Hell. Think about it. In Heaven, everybody'd be giving him dirty looks and swatting him in the head for all eternity. In Hell, he'd just be getting high-fives all the time."
-Jay Pinkerton

-"I am the watch you always wear but you forget to wind. Nobody plans to be half a world away at times like these, so I sat alone and waited out the night. The best part of what has happened was the part I must have missed. So I'm asking you to shine it on and stick around. I'm not writing my goodbyes."
-"Guernica," Brand New


-"They weren't happy, and yet, they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"

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We held hands on the last night on earth.
Our mouths filled with dust, we kissed in the fields and under trees,
screaming like dogs, bleeding dark into the leaves.
It was empty on the edge of town but we knew everyone floated
along the bottom of the river. So we walked through the waste where the road curved into the sea and the shattered seasons lay, and the bitter smell of burning was on you like a disease.
In our cancer of passion you said, "Death is a midnight runner."
The sky had come crashing down like the news of an intimate suicide.
We picked up the shards and formed them into shapes of stars that wore like an antique wedding dress. The echoes of the past broke the hearts of the unborn as the Ferris wheel silently slowed to a stop.
The few insects skittered away in hopes of a better pastime.
I kissed you at the apex of the maelstrom and asked if you would accompany me in a quick fall, but you made me realize that my ticket wasn't for two.

I rode alone.

You said, "The cinders are falling like snow." There is poetry in despair, and we sang with unrivaled beauty, bitter elegies of savagery and eloquence of blue and grey. Strange, we ran down desperate streets and carved our names in the flesh of the city. The sun was stagnated somewhere beyond the rim of the horizon and the darkness is a mystery of curves and lines. Still, we lay under the emptiness and drifted slowly outward, and somewhere in the wilderness we found salvation scratched into the earth like a message.
-A.F.I., "Untitled"

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Peace out, I'm off like a Prom dress.