“
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
”
”
William Ernest Henley (Invictus)
“
Eating Fire
Eating fire
is your ambition:
to swallow the flame down
take it into your mouth
and shoot it forth, a shout or an incandescent
tongue, a word
exploding from you in gold, crimson,
unrolling in a brilliant scroll
To be lit up from within
vein by vein
To be the sun
”
”
Margaret Atwood (Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975)
“
I miss you because memory
is a kind editor.
The past is a long scroll and
in it is the story of us,
told with gentle metaphor, and
words that bring
you back and back, even as you
lie there, lying.
”
”
Corey Mesler
“
A poet warrior realizes both the brutality and the beauty in life, and apprehends that the suffering we tragically endure is partly what makes us human. What also makes us human is the ability to love, the ability to stand in nature’s presence, and to nurture this earthly paradise to tend to our family’s needs.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
The artistic methods of poetry, painting, photography, and writing share certain commonalities of deep composition: spirit, rhythm, thought, and scenery.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
No sword
Of wrath her right arm whirl'd,
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word
She shook the world.
”
”
Alfred Tennyson
“
A storm-filled life replete with piercing and unearthly sounds ravages the soul of any thoughtful person. In contrast, the genteel wind of restoration moves silently, invisibly. Renewal is a spiritual process, the communal melody that sustains us. Inexpressible braids of tenderness whispering reciprocating chords of love for family, friends, humankind, and nature plaits interweaved layers of blissful atmosphere, which copious heart song brings spiritual rejuvenation. For when we love in a charitable and bountiful manner without reservation, liberated from petty jealously, and free of the toxic blot of discrimination, we become the ineluctable wind that vivifies the lives of other people. The mellifluous changes in heaven, earth, and our journey through the travails of time, while worshiping the trove of fathomless joys of life, constitute the seeds of universal poetry.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
All love is bittersweet. Love is inexplicable; it is part poetry and part masochism. Part of love is the loss of self-control because one must openly surrender their sense of an exclusive self to the manic powers of love. The personal act of surrender to a lover leaves one vulnerable to entanglement in a maze of emotions. When we fall in love, our lover’s happiness and well-being assumes the primary role in our mind, they become copilots of our souls. When we are in love for the first time, we feel what it means to become a complete person; we identify who we are by seeing our reflection in our lover’s eye; and we sense what we might become when infused with love. When our lover leaves us, we feel vexed and vacant because we recognize that they took up such a large part of what made us feel intoxicated with life. When our lover abandons us, we lose our sense of self; we temporarily cease to exist as a whole person, and we must reconstruct the shattered remnants of oneself in the wake of a love lost.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Beauty surrounds us, but oftentimes it takes a person with a poetic perception, an artist’s way of looking at the world, to first notice the sublime, and then stagecraft the splendor of nature so that other people can perceive their synoptic vision. The spirit and aesthetic intention behind the work is what assigns the work its artistic quality. Great works of poetry and writing, for instance, express not simply a criticism of life, but also encompass a philosophy for living.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Our life story is a reflection of our internal poetry in motion, a poem which lyrical lines croons life as a groping accident, a playful roughness, a throbbing ordeal. Life’s posy permutations jell together to create a brawly emotional ambiguity. An interlacement of untidy paradoxes, fastened by a tincture of pyretic hopelessness, sounds the charming pitch of life.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
with you, the sense i have lost my place in a book
or simply lost — misplaced the memory
which isn't in the last place where I looked.
a thought that the clouds don't move — that it is we
who thunder past — there it is! an old vacation,
a train ride — sense of immobility.
as sky and forest scroll past in relation,
we are not moved, pretend to love the view,
resort at length to scripted conversation
by a poet-turned-screenwriter who
didn't want this job, career gone grossly wrong
and now drafts action film scripts wholly two-
dimensional unless you choose to don
the 3d glasses that do not stay on —
”
”
Joshua Ip (Making Love with Scrabble Tiles)
“
There in the mountains, close to the delights of Nature, everything you see and hear is a joy. It is a joy unspoiled by any real discomfort. Your legs may possibly ache, or you may feel the lack of something really good to eat, but that is all. I wonder why this should be? I suppose the reason is that, looking at the landscape, it is as though you were looking at a picture unrolled before you, or reading a poem on a scroll. The whole area is yours [...]. You are free from any care or worry because you accept the fact that this scenery will help neither to fill your belly, nor add a penny to your salary, and are content to enjoy it just as scenery. This is the great charm of Nature, that it can in an instant discipline men's hearts and minds, and removing all that is base, lead them into the pure unsullied world of poetry.
”
”
Natsume Sōseki (The Three-Cornered World)
“
Calliope, Muse of epic poetry; Clio, Muse of history; Thalia, Muse of comedy; Terpsichore, Muse of dance; Melpomene, Muse of tragedy. Clio holds a scroll to represent history, and Melpomene carries a tragedy mask.
”
”
Natalie Haynes (Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth)
“
The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
We can combat existential anguish – the unbearable lightness of our being – in a variety of ways. We can choose to work, play, destroy, or create. We can allow a variety of cultural factors or other people to define who we are, or we can create a self-definition. We decide what to monitor in the environment. We regulate how much attention we pay to nature, other people, or the self. We can watch and comment upon current cultural events and worldly happenings or withdraw and ignore the external world. We can drink alcohol, dabble with recreational drugs, play videogames, or watch television, films, and sporting events. We can travel, go on nature walks, camp, fish, and hunt, climb mountains, or take whitewater-rafting trips. We can build, paint, sing, create music, write poetry, or read and write books. We can cook, barbeque, eat fine cuisine at restaurants or go on fasts. We can attend church services, worship and pray, or chose to embrace agnosticism or atheism. We can belong to charitable organizations or political parties. We can actively or passively support or oppose social and ecological causes. We can share time with family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances or live alone and eschew social intermixing.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Poets deal in mysterious connections that tie people together, those difficult to catalog ethereal notions of love, beauty, joy, and broken hearts, or what and Richelle E. Goodrich, an American author and poet referred to as ‘the etched sorrows of despairing souls.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Humankind is an instinctive creature that is capable of feelings and rational thoughts, which accounts for why such a rich diversity exists amongst human nature. A person’s unique personality is simply a crystallization of particular aspects of human nature. Freedom of thought and expression ensures that no person replicates another person’s exact persona. Every person is a creature of predicable needs and impulses, infused with the poetry of multifaceted feelings, and ruled by a scientifically calculated instrument capable of precision of thought.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Allen was “queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting dearly to learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have.
”
”
Jack Kerouac (On the Road: The Original Scroll)
“
All writing is essentially autobiographical because our composed thought patterns reflect our accumulated life experiences. At some level, every type of work, whether it is literature, poetry, music, painting, photography, sculpture, or architecture, is always a portrait of the creator. We cannot escape ourselves any more than we can outrun our shadow.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Silken strings composing the harpsichord of life accommodate a score of emotional tidings. An orchestra of linked heartbeats strumming the melodious prose of our collective intones gives rise to sonnets of melancholy, producing an illimitable libretto stretching from the milky dawn of newborn’s amaranth life to the speckled sunsets of gentle souls whom we cherish.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
By love, I mean filling herself
with small right intentions. By life,
I mean she looks at you from the railings.
A kind of dare is in her, her tail curled
like a bass clef, or mutant fern.
You won't catch her. She's scrolling
from scent to sound to slightest motion.
However the light moves
might be ruin, or rich enough to rob.
The way she ransacks, hoards, loses,
lashes, bluffs the crouched cat,
the unleashed dog, her death,
a dozen times a day, is what I mean
by hopeless how she loves this life.
”
”
Max Garland (The Word We Used For It (Wisconsin Poetry Series))
“
Unlike essayists whom write primarily to understand complex situations or convince other people of the righteousness of their opinions, poets strive to stir memories, provoke feelings, and evoke emotions. Poets do not write to reach that exalted perch where logic replaces feelings. Poets write about the connective tissue that makes us human, the poignant remembrances, hopes, fears, and emotions of humankind. It is not our ability to think standing alone that makes us human, but a mélange of incongruous feelings, emotional tidings that are virtually inexpressible.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Grand Sky/Grand Prairie
Both harbor the vastness of space. One holds the space
Of starlight, thunder snow, rock and icy comets, scrolls
Of clouds; the other the spaces inside see heart and ovum,
Root webs, spider webs, budded blossoms.
They lean together tightly day and night, pressing
One into the other, each creating the horizon of the other.
They exchange themselves. At evening one becomes
The steady night in which the other lives. Yet witness
How the moon first rises from the body of the prairie
Into the height of the sky that then possesses it.
Their horizons are persistent illusion.
”
”
Pattiann Rogers (Quickening Fields (Penguin Poets))
“
Personal essayists write in large part to escape pent-up emotional anxiety, retreat behind the typewriter or digital keyboard in an attempt to regroup before blithely pushing forward on the cambered road of life. Some essayists might be uncomfortable reconnoitering their memories and, in a perverse twist, largely write in an effort to forget, to consign their uncomfortable emotional perplexities to a dead letter file. In contrast, I wonder if most people write poetry because they do not wish to wipe their mental kit clear. Poets might write because they wish to remember evocative experiences and they wish to share their feelings.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Seal with a seal of gold
The scroll of a life unrolled;
Swathe him deep in his purple stole;
Ashes of diamonds, crystalled coal,
Drops of gold in each scented fold.
Crimson wings of the Little Death,
Stir his hair with your silken breath;
Flaming wings of sins to be,
Splendid pinions of prophecy,
Smother his eyes with hues and dyes,
While the white moon spins and the winds arise,
And the stars drip through the skies.
Wave, O wings of the Little Death!
Seal his sight and stifle his breath,
Cover his breast with the gemmed shroud pressed;
From north to north, from west to west,
Wave, O wings of the Little Death!
Till the white moon reels in the cracking skies,
And the ghosts of God arise.
”
”
Robert W. Chambers (The Messenger)
“
They went forth to battle, but they always fell;
Their eyes were fixed above the sullen shields;
Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well,
And sank heart-wounded by a subtle spell.
They knew not fear that to the foeman yields,
They were not weak, as one who vainly wields
A futile weapon; yet the sad scrolls tell
How on the hard-fought field they always fell.
It was a secret music that they heard,
A sad sweet plea for pity and for peace;
And that which pierced the heart was but a word,
Though the white breast was red-lipped where the sword
Pressed a fierce cruel kiss, to put surcease
On its hot thirst, but drank a hot increase.
Ah, they by some strange troubling doubt were stirred,
And died for hearing what no foeman heard.
”
”
Shaemus O'Sheel
“
Silent remembering is a form of prayer. No fragrance is more enchanting to re-experience than the aromatic bouquet gleaned from inhaling the cherished memories of our pastimes. We regularly spot elderly citizens sitting alone gently rocking themselves while facing the glowing sun. Although these sun worshipers might appear lonely in their state of serene solitude, they are not alone at all, because they deeply enmesh themselves in recalling the glimmering memories of days gone by. Marcel Proust wrote “In Search of Time Lost,” “As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savors the past.” Test tasting the honeycombed memories of their bygone years, a delicate smile play out on their rose thin lips. The mellow tang of sweet tea memories – childhood adventures, coming of age rituals, wedding rites, recreational jaunts, wilderness explorations, viewing and creating art, literature, music, and poetry, sharing in the mystical experiences of life, and time spent with family – is the brew of irresistible intoxicants that we all long to sip as we grow old. The nectar mashed from a collection of choice memories produces a tray of digestible vignettes that each of us lovingly roll our silky tongues over. On the eve of lying down for the last time in the stillness of our cradled deathbeds, we will swaddle ourselves with a blanket of heartfelt love and whisper a crowning chaplet of affection for all of humanity. After all, we been heaven blessed to take with us to our final resting place an endless scroll amassing the kiss soft memories of time yore.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
The poetry of music composes each generation of Americans’ autobiographical memories. Language and music represent two rotaries of the revolving and evolving wheels that we employ to internalize the axis of identification. Music plays a profound role in the definitive stages of most people’s lives. Reminiscent of the sounds and smells that flavored our youth, musical intonations organize our personal memories into temporal time sequence. Modulation of musical memories comprises an important quotient in people’s autographical memory system. If we listen to enough music, its pitch, tone, timbre, and cadence eventually seeps into our unconsciousness. The lilt of music becomes a portal through which we perceive, feel, and experience worldly inflections and how we synthesize swirling emotions.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle…
What I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand.
”
”
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“
The ability to perceive and feel, along with the intricacies of family relations unites us as a species. Poets collect succulent physical sense impressions and heartfelt feelings with equal enthusiasm. Poets have the alacrity to see and feel what most of us fail to perceive or otherwise ignore, take for granted, or attempt to forget. Similar to the art of Ukiyo-e (a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings depicting traditional Japanese scenes), poets make the nothingness of our lives come alive. Poets design their sun-filled salvations out of the minutia of nature and the seemingly ordinary happenings of life. Although essayist can also explore the liminal spaces of daily life by probing the avenues of common experiences, essayists are more interested in testing ideas and principles than in invoking memories, sharing feelings, or eliciting emotions.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
One UniVerse for the Living
While palaces attest to the power of men,
And monuments mark their wars,
Little remains of the women who've been-
Except for the sons that they bore.
But the voices of women were baked into bread
And later buttered with epics
While the souls of their daughters
Stitched with fine thread
Became tapestries stored in attics.
And all through the ages
Men boasted like beasts
Erecting pillars of marble and stone,
But still they found themselves only to be
Sculpted of flesh and bone.
Philosophers pondered the nature of gods
Outlawing temptations that plagued them
And earning themselves, against all odds,
The power to punish the pagans.
By writing themselves into sacred books
The clergymen sealed our fate
To follow decrees that have their roots
In nothing but misguided hate.
So, children of Adam and invisible Eve,
challenge the wisdom of sages.
Don’t be so sure sacred scrolls that you read
Aren't filled with human pages.
Walk in the wilderness.
Eat of the fruit.
Don't let them buy you with wages.
Plant your own garden.
Drink of the wine.
Learn how to be courageous.
Hearts that are hardened
To what is divine
Have honored the dead too long.
Search for the stories
Baked into bread
And eat until you are strong.
”
”
Nancy Boutilier (On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone: New Poems)
“
Kell skimmed the spell and frowned. “An eternal flame?”
Rhy absently plucked one of the lin from the floor and shrugged. “First thing I grabbed.” He tried to sound as if he didn’t care about the stupid spell, but his throat was tight, his eyes burning. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, skipping the coin across the ground as if it were a pebble on water. “I can’t make it work.”
Kell shifted his weight, lips moving silently as he read over the priest’s scrawl. He held his hands above the paper, palms cupped as if cradling a flame that wasn’t even there yet, and began to recite the spell. When Rhy had tried, the words had fallen out like rocks, but on Kell’s lips, they were poetry, smooth and sibilant.
The air around them warmed instantly, steam rising from the penned lines on the scroll before the ink drew in and up into a bead of oil, and lit.
The flame hovered in the air between Kell’s hands, brilliant and white.
He made it look so easy, and Rhy felt a flash of anger toward his brother, hot as a spark—but just as brief.
It wasn’t Kell’s fault Rhy couldn’t do magic. Rhy started to rise when Kell caught his cuff. He guided Rhy’s hands to either side of the spell, pulling the prince into the fold of his magic. Warmth tickled Rhy’s palms, and he was torn between delight at the power and knowledge that it wasn’t his.
“It isn’t right,” he murmured. “I’m the crown prince, the heir of Maxim Maresh. I should be able to light a blasted candle.”
Kell chewed his lip—Mother never chided him for the habit—and then said, “There are different kinds of power.”
“I would rather have magic than a crown,” sulked Rhy.
Kell studied the small white flame between them. “A crown is a sort of magic, if you think about it. A magician rules an element. A king rules an empire.”
“Only if the king is strong enough.”
Kell looked up, then. “You’re going to be a good king, if you don’t get yourself killed first.”
Rhy blew out a breath, shuddering the flame. “How do you know?”
At that, Kell smiled. It was a rare thing, and Rhy wanted to hold fast to it—he was the only one who could make his brother smile, and he wore it like a badge—but then Kell said, “Magic,” and Rhy wanted to slug him instead.
“You’re an arse,” he muttered
”
”
Victoria E. Schwab (A Conjuring of Light (Shades of Magic, #3))
“
Aelia, please stop worrying. You look beautiful. We've had large parties before and you haven't been nervous." There was the clink of cosmetic pots and bottles of nard used to perfume the forehead.
"I wasn't nervous until you mentioned Ovid would be coming," Aelia said.
Aelia was not alone in her love of Ovid's poetry. Passia had read every word the man had ever written. He was considered to be one of Rome's experts on both love and beauty, and most women I knew owned several of his books. When Passia heard he would be in attendance I thought she might swoon.
There was the ruffle of a scroll being unraveled. "Could this be one of the sources of your concern? Women's Facial Cosmetics?"
I remembered the book. Apicius had bought it and other Ovid titles for Aelia two years earlier as a Saturnalia gift.
"I know, I shouldn't worry. But if he didn't know so much, how could he write it down? It is as though he were the mouthpiece for Venus herself!
”
”
Crystal King (Feast of Sorrow)
“
Callimachus divided the scrolls into separate classes, such as poetry, philosophy, and law, and then further subdivided them into a narrower range of subjects or genres.
”
”
Library of Congress (The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures)
“
Vile people displayed no gift for poetry or aptitude to display kindness. The Captain could not stretch the lineament of his mind beyond his own hide. He did not see his shadow. He could not hear the Parnassus muse whose voice raps at the hidden door of the poet’s soul. He had no coyote spirit to guide him; he was unable to comprehend the passionate wilderness of life. He could not talk to nature. He could not make friends with the thunder and he could not see beauty in the lightning. He did not open his bedroom window to let in the sweet smell of night rain. His hooded eyes did not glow in the moonlight. He did not appreciate the taste of quaintness. He could not sense the feelings of other people who soaked in the rose scented silence of a sunset. He was incapable of oneness. He never discovered how to dance barefooted for pure joy under a sprinkle of stars or take a knee in a meadow of tears mourning other people’s sorrow.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Some Consequences of the Made Thing
The End. Above these words the sky closes.
It closes by turning white. Not
The white of all clouds or being within a cloud.
White of worldless light. The End.
Feel a silence there that reminds you of a scent.
Crushed grass the hooves galloped through
Or is it the binder’s glue?
Some silence never not real finally can be
Heard. Silence before the first words.
Precedent chaos. Or marrow work.
Or just the sound of the throat opening to speak.
Like those scholars of pure water
Who rode through mountains and meadows
To drink from each fresh spring a glass
And then with brush and ink wrote poems
On the differences of sameness,
You too feel yourself taste the silent page
Of the end and the silent page of beginning.
They taste so much of whiteness never more
White than white that’s been lost.
You have some sense of the book
Altering, page sewn secretly next to page,
Last page stitched to first. O, earth—
It rolls around the solar scroll
Turning nothing into years and years into
Nothing. At The End you’re a witness to this work
That wears the witness away. And who are you
Anyway. Pronoun of the 2nd person. Lover,
Stranger, God. Student, Child, Shade.
Something similar gathers in you.
Another way of saying I in a poem—
Of saying I in a poem that realizes at the end
That I am just a distance from myself.
And so are you. That same distance.
”
”
Dan Beachy-Quick
“
We come into a world with a history shaped by the subtle dichotomy of culture and ethos, the dynamic forces of ideas and philosophy, and the mesmerizing undercurrent and of science and religion. The relentless clicking of time binds generations of people together. Family, country, cultural trends, and shared historical precepts link people. How we act in our lifetimes will affect the continuum of history. Our deeds will construct the industry, companies, commerce, cities, and governmental intuitions that shape our children’s lives. Our economic choices and environmental policies will determine the quality of the water that our children drink and the air they breathe. Our collective consciousness as depicted through works of literature, poetry, music, films, personal charity, and political benevolence will affect the cultural atmosphere for generations to come.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
The world was a glorious place this morning. The birds were particularly noisy in their greeting to the day. The sky was a cloudless blue, the color of delphiniums.
He'd never before equated the color of the sky to a flower.
This morning he would show Ellice some of the rare volumes in the Forster collection. He hoped she would be impressed at the illuminated scrolls or the Bible he suspected was one of the first Gutenberg volumes. Would she be interested in the Latin poetry he'd found? One of his ancestors had evidently collected erotic poetry.
”
”
Karen Ranney (The Virgin of Clan Sinclair (Clan Sinclair, #3))
“
The first step to finding internal peace is rejecting the world’s opinion. The second step is accepting without rancor social rejection, an inability to meld into groups. The third step is keeping a serene sense of being while living in solitude. The danger of solitude is giving up on life. A delicate balance exists between pursuing solitude and maintaining an active interest in the evocative activities of life including reading and thinking. A person living alone can find the poetry in their life or slip into the absurd realm.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
A poet risks all in order to create a sought after image. A talented writer and poet exhibit the courage to follow his or her mind to whatever shaded places it craves to travel. Exploring darkness and lightness of the soul allows an artist to render an artistic statement of his or her being.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Essayist and poets share many of the same alluring keystrokes, even if they are rather rabid about asserting their notable pedigree differences. The writer and the poet use the juxtaposition of words to create a lovely portrayal of the touches of sweetness and the bitter edges of life. By doing so, they clarify and affirm the bewildering array of inconsistencies, ironies, absurdities, delights, and enigmas that describe what it entails to be fully alive. Each artistic form serves the same essential purpose, which is to investigate, ponder, and explain the bouquets of comedy and tragedy, covenants of love and mercy, and stones of anger and hatred that compulsory merger contextualize human life. By linking words that explore the chaos and silence within all of nature, essayists and poets’ labor serves to uplift the author and inspire their brethren.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Art, mythology, religion, philosophy, history, anthropology, science, and medicine along with literature, autobiographies, biographies, essays, memoirs, poetry, and other works of fiction and nonfiction serve as a vast library for us to scour in search of the hidden keys to attaining knowledge and happiness. We glimpse individual revelation along with selective rays of radiance from every person’s conscientious act of documenting their long-term commitment to achieving a gleaming living testament to enlightenment.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
The metaphysical poetry of our innovative life springs from the aesthetic, scenic, and systematic processes of inventiveness, the creative impulse of an active mind generating aesthetical intuition.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Never be an artist that starts worshiping yourself or believe your little group is better than anyone outside of it. For, you are nothing more than a grain of sand on a hillside in this world of ours. Even Da Vinci’s work is only glanced at then scrolled past on a phone or computer these days. Climb down off your throne and become humble once more.
”
”
Jason E. Hodges (When The Cedars Shade Your Grave)
“
Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
When one verse in life ends in ignominy, we can use the glimmering marvel of nature’s splendor and frayed edges culled from the black linen of past failures to write uncanny poems that give voice to the fissures in our hollow, reflective poetry that echoes our supple inner world of cherished dreams colliding with the serrated edges of savage realism.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Humankind’s pathetic life supplies the poetry of our existence. Just as without tragedy comedy would lose its magical qualities, life without pain and absent knowledge of the inevitability of our death would result in our brief existence devoid of any note of sincerity and our lives ending without an apt punctuation mark.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Patience is best in every case,
For in this sentence is much meaning.
Patience giveth thee thy desire,
It relieveth thee from pain and misfortune.
Patience is the key of the door of thine aspirations
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Saadi (Sadi's Scroll of Wisdom)
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The ruby wine in the golden goblet
Is soul-inspiring, as it were a beautiful pearl.
Welcome is the fire of desire to those inspired with love!
Welcome are the delightful pains of the lords of love!
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Saadi (Sadi's Scroll of Wisdom)
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Lurking in roughly equal preeminence in humankind’s angst-ridden soul is an antipodal nature, a righteous persona manacled to an agathokakological creature. The species Homo sapiens creates art, literature, music, poetry, architecture, and developed mathematics and philosophy. This creature is also prone to homicide, equipped for rape and sadism, inclined towards religious violence and secular killings, and capable of torture and cannibalism.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Points of Issue
Errors or peculiarities in a book that help to differentiate it from other editions.
No one else's marginalia inside. An unbroken spine and a pliable binding. No one else's marginalia
unless it was penciled into her first pages then thoroughly erased. No ellipses but in the last chapters and then only in soliloquy.
No strands of hair in the meadow chapter, nothing ripped out in the two after that.
And halfway-a blank page, and a scrawl and dash from the girl. The final story of the back garden and her coiled braids and the dappled grey you kept too long.
The harmonica on the dashboard and the girl who taught you your scales. And the book
you were always reading, the pulled-off, pockmarked cover, the weight. The night
you left it in the trunk bed and in the morning its swollen pages. The girl reading your father's Wordsworth, the scrolling clouds in the meadow, your hands steady on her heaving chest. The final story of the back garden and the coiled girl
telling you no. The pages after that.
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Brittany Cavallaro (Girl-King (Akron Series in Poetry (Paperback)))
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Diablo Space Element Time Set: Fire turns portals Inna vortex rift key, Wind maps whorls Inna puzzle cube ring, Water sages runes Inna stony field prism, Earth oaks trees inna town scroll Tristram.
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Jonathan Roy Mckinney
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Lately I’m too tired to care
about getting old. I never put my phone down.
I scroll many futures away. I sleep many futures
away, I write them away, the longer I live,
the more the future disappears.
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Lena Moses-Schmidt
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Every mage knew of her legend. Ancient scrolls believed to be written by the Seraphim and Cherubim, also known as the Poetry of Angels, had been translated by High Priests to human language. Within the sacred text was a warning: Beware Amelia's hair of silk and predator's eyes, blacker than a moonless starless midnight sky. Seductive smile and flawless skin, concealing unholy demon living within.
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Aubrey Law (Jenny Greenteeth: Swamp Witch (Black Annis Origins #4))
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Song and the lyric poem came first. Prose was invented centuries later. In Israel, Greece, and China came the primal, model lyrics for two and a half millennia. Read the biblical Song of Songs in Hebrew, Sappho in Greek, and Wang Wei in Chinese and be deeply civilized. You will know the passions, tragedy, spirit, politic, philosophy, and beauty that have commanded our solitary rooms and public spaces. I emphasize solitary, because the lyric, unlike theater and sport, is an intimate dialogue between maker and reader. From the Jews we have their two bibles of wisdom poetry, from the Chinese we have thousands of ancient nightingales whose song is calm ecstasy, and from the Greeks we have major and minor names and wondrous poems. However, because of bigotry, most of Greek poetry, especially Sappho, was by religious decree destroyed from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. So apart from one complete ode, we read Sappho in fragments. Yet there survive fragrant hills for lovers and dark and luminous mountains for metaphysicians. Most of ancient Greek lyric poetry is contained in this volume. Do not despair about loss. You are lucky if you can spend your life reading and rereading the individual poets. They shine. If technology or return to legal digs in Egypt and Syria are to reveal a library of buried papyri of Greek lyrics equivalent to the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Gnostic Nag Hammadi Library, we should be able to keep singing and dancing for ten moons straight. For now, we have the song, human comedy, political outrage, and personal cry for centuries of good reading.
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Pierre Grange
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All methods of writing represent an intellectual technique of inquiry and expression. Both personal essay writing and poetry provide a reputable method of a person sharing their physical and emotional experiences, observations, and thoughts.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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All types of writing – prose, poetry, philosophy, and musical verses – entail sharing of thoughts and feelings. Similar to creating any of type of artistic oeuvre, a person whom writes essays and poetry must give part of oneself to other people.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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The aesthetics of language is the ineluctable medium of thought that wends through the leas of prose and poetry, literature and philosophy. People who think are always analytical. Essays, literature, and poetry are analytical and philosophical. All philosophy is literary prose; all philosophy contains the poetry of thought.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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In the forest canopied with the leafy niche of daily events, a benevolent listener reverberates in the canonical poetry of the ages humming irrepressible visceral contradictions. A squall of tears of bereavement pierces the elegiac sea of a silent night. The red-rimmed eye of sunrise greets us with a torrent of rage spilling over from frontlines of an examined life’s vital quarrels. The flute of life ushers in a welcoming breeze of reassuring resonance.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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As a child, Adriana had owned a book that told the fable of an emperor who owned a bird which he fed rich foods from his table, and entertained with luxuries from his court. But a pet bird needed different things than an emperor. He wanted seed and millet, not grand feasts. He enjoyed mirrors and little brass bells, not lacquer boxes and poetry scrolls. Gorged on human banquets and revelries, the little bird sickened and died.
Adriana vowed not to make the same mistake with Lucian, but she had no idea how hard it would be to salve the needs of something so unlike herself.
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Rachel Swirsky (Eros, Philia, Agape)
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Here by the camp-fire's flicker,
Deep in my blanket curled,
I long for the peace of the pine-gloom,
When the scroll of the Lord is unfurled,
And the wind and the wave are silent,
And world is singing to world.
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Robert W. Service