poems.txt

To To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,
Darlings, if your owners say you are / not usually like this / then I must take them / at their word / I am
 that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due
like you / not crazy about that which towers before me / particularly the buildings here / and the people
time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.
inside / who look at my name / and make noises / that seem like growling / my small and eager darlings / what
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is,
it must be like / to have the sound for love / and the sound for fear / be a matter of pitch / I am afraid to
that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn
touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo / there is a difference / between burying
to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the
a thing you love / for the sake of returning / and leaving a fresh absence / in a citys dirt / looking for a
firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of
mercy / left by someone / who came before you / I am saying that I / too / am at a loss for language / cant
genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great
beg myself / a doorway / out of anyone / I am not usually like this either / I must apologize again for how
works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous
adulthood has rendered me / us, really / I know you all forget the touch / of someone who loves you / in two
impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else,
minutes / and I arrive to you / a constellation of shadows / once hands / listen darlings / there is a sky / to
to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time,
be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise / I will not
and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
beg for you to stay this time / I will leave you to your wild galloping / I am sorry / to hold you again / for
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that
so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.
imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;
Hanif Abdurraqib - For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essay on Self Reliance