Yusef Komunyakaa Quotes

I am this space my body believes in.

I ate mythology & dreamt' - Yusef Komunyakaa (Blackberries)

Whoever said men hit harder when women are around, is right. Word for word, we beat the love out of each other.

Now I have beaten a song back into you, rise and walk away like a panther.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

I ate the mythology & dreamt.” —YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, “Blackberries

Title: Blue Light Lounge Sutra For The Performance Poets At Harold Park Hotel the need gotta be so deep words can't answer simple questions all night long notes stumble off the tongue & color the air indigo so deep fragments of gut & flesh cling to the song you gotta get into it so deep salt crystalizes on eyelashes the need gotta be so deep you can vomit up ghosts & not feel broken till you are no more than a half ounce of gold in painful brightness you gotta get into it blow that saxophone so deep all the sex & dope in this world can't erase your need to howl against the sky the need gotta be so deep you can't just wiggle your hips & rise up out of it chaos in the cosmos modern man in the pepperpot you gotta get hooked into every hungry groove so deep the bomb locked in rust opens like a fist into it into it so deep rhythm is pre-memory the need gotta be basic animal need to see & know the terror we are made of honey cause if you wanna dance this boogie be ready to let the devil use your head for a drum

Foolhearted mindreader, help us see how the heart begs, how fangs of opprobrium possess our eyes.

Years ago you followed someone here, in love with breath kissing the nape of your neck, back when it was easy to be at least two places at once.

Putting my hands on. What April couldn't fix Wasn't worth the time: Egg shell & dried placenta Light as memory. Patches of fur, feathers, & bits of skin. A nest Of small deaths among anemone. A canopy edged over, shadowplaying The struggle underneath As if it never happened

Go & tell your drinking buddies & psychoanalyst your neighbor has risen from the ashes. I wonder if I should tell you about the love letters hidden behind the doorjamb. This house still stands among my lavender flowers. Tell your inheritors to think of me when they smile up at the sky.

My doors enter from the sidestreet, my windows painted basement black, my mouth kisses the blues harp, my heart hides like notes locked in a cedar chest.

I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland. Her voice smelled like an orange, though I'd never peeled an orange. I knocked on the walls, in a circle.

You can two-time satan But you can't lick the Holy Ghost.

A goddess of dawn scooted under a zing of barbed wire to witness your birth.

I'm turning you into a girl chasing a butterfly, a she-wolf on a hilltop, & then back into a woman.

The older I get the quicker Christmas comes, but if I had to give up the heavenly taste of Guinness dark, I couldn't live another goddamn day. Darling, you can chisel that into my headstone.

Inside my skin, loving you, I am this space my body believes in. — Yuself Komunyakaa, from “Unnatural State of the Unicorn,” Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. (Wesleyan University Press 1993)

The place was a funeral pyre for the young who died before knowing the thirst of man or woman. Furies with snakes in their hair wept. Tantalus ate pears & sipped wine in a dream, as the eyes of a vulture poised over Tityus' liver.

We were The Hottentot Venus Draped in our mothers' dresses, Wearing rouge & lipstick, Pillows tucked under floral & print cloth, the first day of spring, As we balanced on high heels. Women sat in a circle talking About men; the girls off Somewhere else, in other houses. We felt the last kisses Our mothers would give us On the mouth.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreams fire has singed the edges of, they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with. Shimmering fans work against the heat & smell of gunpowder, making money float from hand to hand. The next moment a rocket pushes a white fist through night sky, & they scatter like birds & fall into the shape their lives have become.

Omens" Her eyelids were painted blue. When she closed her eyes the sea rolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots, leaving behind silence above & below a thousand years old. He stood beneath a high arched window, gazing out at fishing boats beyond the dikes, their nets unfurled, their offshore gestures a dance of living in bluish entourage. He was only the court’s chief jester. What he said & did made them laugh, but lately what he sometimes thought he knew could cost him his polished tongue & royal wig. He was the masked fool unmasking the emperor. Forget the revelation. Forget the briny sea. He had seen the ravishing empress naked in a forbidden pose. Her blue eye shadow. Aquamarine shells crusted with wormy mud. Anyway, if he said half of what was foretold, the great one would become a weeping boy slumped beneath the Pillars of Hercules. Poetry Apr 2012, Vol. 200 Issue 1, p15

In the old days, the general's ribbons / & medals rainbowed across his chest, / & if he were interrogating himself, / by now, blood would be on the walls.

The Way the Cards Fall " Why did you stay away so long? I’ve buried another husband, since I last saw you holding to the horizon. I hear where you now live it snows year-round. The pear & apple trees have even missed you– dead branches scattered about like war. Come closer, my eyes have grown night-dim. Across the field white boxes of honeybees silent as dirt, silent as your missent postcards. Evening sunlight’s faded my hair, the old stable’s slouched to the ground. I dug a hole for that calico, Cyclops, two years ago. Now milkweed & blackberries are keepers of the cornfield. That’s how the cards fall; & Anna, that beautiful girl you once loved enough to die over & over again for, now lives in New Orleans on both sides of Bourbon Street.

Now, what I know makes me look down at the ground. I can almost feel how the owl’s beauty scared the mice to death, how the shadow of her wings was a god passing over the grass. from ‘Tree Ghost

Say something about real love. Yes, true love—more than parted lips, than parted legs in sorrow’s darkroom of potash & blues. Let the brain stumble from its hidingplace, from its cell block, to the edge of oblivion to come to itself, sharp-tongued as a boar’s grin in summer moss —Yusef Komunyakaa, from “Safe Subjects,”Neon Venacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)

Facing It" My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way--the stone lets me go. I turn that way--I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

See how forgiving - how brave nature is.

I stared at a tree against dusk Till it was a girl Standing beside a country road Shucking cane with her teeth. She looked up & smiled & waved. Lost in what hurts, In what tasted good, could she Ever learn there's no love In sugar?

We were born between Oh Yeah & Goddammit. I knew life Began where I stood in the dark, Looking out into the light, & that sometimes I could see Everything through nothing. The backyard trees breathed Like a man running from himself As my brothers backed away From the screendoor.

See her? I was born to read her mind. I can get so close to her my breath is cool on her skin, & she'll be seven blocks away when a cry leaps into her throat & she knows I untied the money belt hidden under her velvet jacket.

She lives between the Vale of Kashmir & nirvana, beneath a bipolar sky. The voice speaks of an atlas & a mask, a map of Punjab, an ugly scar from college days on her abdomen, the unsaid credo, but I still can't make the voice say, Look, I'm sorry. I've been dead for a long time.

I am five, Wading out into deep Sunny grass, Unmindful of snakes & yellowjackets, out To the yellow flowers Quivering in sluggish heat. Don't mess with me 'Cause I have my Lone Ranger Six-shooter. I can hurt You with questions Like silver bullets. The tall flowers in my dreams are Big as the First State Bank, & they eat all the people Except the ones I love. They have women's names, With mouths like where Babies come from. I am five. I'll dance for you If you close your eyes. No Peeping through your fingers. I don't supposed to be This close to the tracks. One afternoon I saw What a train did to a cow. Sometimes I stand so close I can see the eyes Of men hiding in boxcars. Sometimes they wave & holler for me to get back. I laugh When trains make the dogs Howl. Their ears hurt. I also know bees Can't live without flowers. I wonder why Daddy Calls Mama honey. All the bees in the world Live in little white houses Except the ones in these flowers. All sticky & sweet inside. I wonder what death tastes like. Sometimes I toss the butterflies Back into the air. I wish I knew why The music in my head Makes me scared. But I know things I don't supposed to know. I could start walking & never stop. These yellow flowers Go on forever. Almost to Detroit. Almost to the sea. My mama says I'm a mistake. That I made her a bad girl. My playhouse is underneath Our house, & I hear people Telling each other secrets.

You and I Are Disappearing - 1947- —Bjöm Håkansson The cry I bring down from the hills belongs to a girl still burning inside my head. At daybreak she burns like a piece of paper. She burns like foxfire in a thigh-shaped valley. A skirt of flames dances around her at dusk. We stand with our hands hanging at our sides, while she burns like a sack of dry ice. She burns like oil on water. She burns like a cattail torch dipped in gasoline. She glows like the fat tip of a banker's cigar, silent as quicksilver. A tiger under a rainbow at nightfall. She burns like a shot glass of vodka. She burns like a field of poppies at the edge of a rain forest. She rises like dragonsmoke to my nostrils. She burns like a burning bush driven by a godawful wind.

We move like a platoon of silhouettes balancing sledge hammers on our heads, unaware our shadows have untied from us, wandered off & gotten lost.