Quotes from Dean Young

If the human soul is just a bright idea, does that make it exist any less?

The quality of mercy is not strained, there's like, umm, lumps in it.

Our poems are what the gods couldn't make without going through us.

What tame, memory-dependent work I was doing. How polite my poems were, how still they sat, how representational. We poets talked about craft, but what we meant were tricks and illusions.

Desire is perpetual transformation.

an orange potato trolls the White House. If you didn't wake up screaming, you didn't wake up...

More people have sex in Chevrolets than during Star Trek recent findings suggest which I can't understand...

The kaleidoscope remains the most efficacious instrument for those of us who've been shattered. There's so much I can't explain if someone would just give me the chance...

Demonic Possession Is 9/10 of the Law" What's in cryostasis should stay in cryostasis. Do not core-sample the frozen alien. If the landlord tells you not to hang a mirror in that room, do not hang a mirror in that room. Do not jump off the train in the Carpathians to investigate a castle ruin. A stake through the heart is only half of it. All flowers eat meat. Put no faith in a sequel. The ultimate monster is always the self.

Sometimes is it okay to perpetuate the hoax of sincerity leading a centralized self to commodified epiphanic end-stops even though the context is perpetually deferred and everything flies apart especially me-ee-eee-eeee? Even

Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water, cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed. — Dean Young, from "Scarecrow on Fire

There are no ordinary feelings just as there are no ordinary spring days or kicked-over cans of paint. Are feelings ever succinct? The haiku is quick but its ripples to the horizon go.

You start with a darkness to move through but sometimes the darkness moves through you.

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, but now I want a Russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping.

but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud.

You start with a darkness to move through but sometimes the darkness moves through you.

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, but now I want a Russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping.

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

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.

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.

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

but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud.

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?

You are made of bent coat hangers, honey, gravel, epoxy and handstands. I am made of lying on the floor, the same song on repeat.