"The Art of Drowning" by Billy Collins

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.
How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.
Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,
a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

--Billy Collins

"Nightclub" by Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a fool
to be in love with you
is a theme that keeps coming up
in songs and poems.
There seems to be no room for variation.
I have never heard anyone sing
I am so beautiful
and you are a fool to be in love with me,
even though this notion has surely
crossed the minds of women and men alike.
You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool
is another one you don't hear.
Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.
That one you will never hear, guaranteed.
For no particular reason this afternoon
I am listening to Johnny Hartman
whose dark voice can curl around
the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness
like no one else's can.
It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette
someone left burning on a baby grand piano
around three o'clock in the morning;
smoke that billows up into the bright lights
while out there in the darkness
some of the beautiful fools have gathered
around little tables to listen,
some with their eyes closed,
others leaning forward into the music
as if it were holding them up,
or twirling the loose ice in a glass,
slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.
Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,
borne beyond midnight,
that has no desire to go home,
especially now when everyone in the room
is watching the large man with the tenor sax
that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.
He moves forward to the edge of the stage
and hands the instrument down to me
and nods that I should play.
So I put the mouthpiece to my lips
and blow into it with all my living breath.
We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish
we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

--Billy Collins

"Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins

Introduction To Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

--Billy Collins

Real Learning

Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning.

-- Peter M Senge

"Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day

Summer has come and passed

The innocent can never lastwake me up when september ends

like my fathers come to passseven years has gone so fast

wake me up when september ends

here comes the rain again

falling from the stars

drenched in my pain again

becoming who we are

as my memory rests

but never forgets what I lost

wake me up when september ends

summer has come and passed

the innocent can never last...

--Green Day

Begger Sitting on a Pot of Gold

...We are like Tolstoy's fabled begger who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaway that his own fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure--your perfection--is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and into the silence of the heart.

--from "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert

Wishbone

You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone outta be.

--from "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert

Dog at the Dump

"You're like a dog at the dump, baby -- you're just lickin' at an empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you're not careful, that can's gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it."



--from "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert

Soul Mate

"Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to review another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.

--from "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert

Only Beauty Can Be Trusted

In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptable. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business -- not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into...rhetoric and plot.

--from "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert

"I Carry Your Heart" by EE Cummings

I carry your heart with me

(I carry it in my heart)

I am never without it (anywhere I go, you go, my dear;

and whatever is done by me is your doing, my darling)

I fear

No fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)

I want no world (for beautiful, you are my wold, my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;

which grows higher than the soul can hope

or the mind can hide)

And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart).

--EE Cummings

How to Save a Life" by The Fray

Step one, you say we need to talk

He walks, you say sit down it's just a talk

He smiles politely back at you

You stare politely right on through

Some sort of window to your right

He goes left and you stay right

Between the lines of fear and blame

And you begin to wonder why you came.

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend

Somewhere along in the bitterness

And I would have stayed up with you all night

Had I known how to save a life.

Let him know that you know best

Cause after all you do know best

Try to slip past his defence

Without granting innocence

Lay down a list of what is wrong

The things you've told him all along

And pray to god he hears you

And pray to god he hears you.

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life.

As he begins to raise his voice

You lower yours and grant him one last chance

Drive until you lose the road

Or break with the ones you've followed

He will do one of two things

He will admit to everything

Or he'll say he's just not the same

And you'll wonder why you came

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life.

Never Met

I think I would miss you, even if we never met

--quote from "The Wedding Date"

Wander

...Not all those that wander are lost.

--J. R. R. Tolkien

Illusions

Illusions are dangerous people, they have no flaws.

--line from "Sabrina"

Imperfect Person

You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly. --Sam Keen

Dreams

Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.

--James Dean

The Hand Dealt

We have no say over the hand dealt us in life, but we do have a lot of control over how this hand is played. We are responsible for bringing out the meaning of our own lives in each moment that we live. Remember each moment happens only once and can never be retrieved again.

--Roberta Andersen

"Sea Fever" by John Masefield

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

All I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the seagulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trip's over.

--John Masefield

"I am a Rock" by Paul Simon

A winter's day-
in a deep and dark December
I am alone-
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock, I am an island.
I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mity
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
friendship causes pain
It's laughter and loving I disdain
I am a rock, I am an island
Don't talk of love
but I've heard the word before
It's sleeping in my memory
I won't disturb the slumber of the feelings that have died
If I never loved I never would have cried
I am a rock, I am an island
I have my books
and my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armour
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb,
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock, I am an island
And a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.

--Paul Simon

"No Man is an Island" by John Donne

No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.
-- John Donne