Poetry Forum

anyone can wear the mask..... but you can take it off

the holes in the carpet where love
wiped the dirt off its feet, the closet
door I leave open so that
my clothes don't get scared

Remember By Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

The crowd murmured, and asked
one another what could nothing
possibly mean.

Empathy is the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. ... “Cognitive empathy,” sometimes called “perspective taking,” refers to our ability to identify and understand other people's emotions.

Night will break like a thousand year egg,
its yoke weighing heavy on his creaking frame.

There is some sort of correlation, it seems to me, between UK mainstream poetry and its presentation of longwinded narratives with an epiphanic ending, what I have previously classed as ‘smartarse’ poetry in the UK (in a KFS anthology of the same title which I edited), and the US hybrid of narrative and experimental poetry evidenced at its best by the poems of Dean Young and Josh Bell.

Whilst the first of these relies on a reader’s emotional empathy, ego and experiences of a similar nature, the other two are more interested in the possibilities of language and storytelling.

http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/?view=magazine

Who hasn’t thought of throwing
the first stone when no-one’s around?