Jeffrey McDaniel
I realise there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go.Collection: Break Up
I've had the wind knocked out of me, but never the hurricaneCollection: Anger
Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.Collection: Mermaid
If you heard your lover scream in the next room and you ran in and saw his pinkie on the floor, in a small puddle of blood. You wouldn't rush to the pinkie and say, 'Darling, are you OK? ' No, you'd wrap your arms around his shoulders and worry about the pinkie later. The same holds true if you heard the scream, ran in and saw his hand or -god forbid- his whole arm. But suppose you hear your lover scream in the next room, and you run in and his head is on the floor next to his body. Which do you rush to and comfort first?Collection: Running
I want to whisper poetry into your mind and imprint love letters to your soul and dance with you in an empty white room of potentialCollection: White
When I haven't been kissed in a long time, I create civil disturbances, then insult the cops who show up, till one of them grabs me by the collar and hurls me up against the squad car, so I can remember, at least for a moment, what it's like to be touched.Collection: Squad
I want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you. I want to ride in the swing of your hips. My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech.Collection: Rip
I've been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence so far, without spilling a drop.Collection: Silence
I swallowed a hand grenade that never stops exploding.Collection: Hands
I know it’s stupid to not own a gun yet have so many triggers, but in some other world gigantic seashells hold humans to their ears and listen to the echo of machines.Collection: Stupid
No rescue boat can save the touches I left bobbing in the wild ocean of your flesh, but if they cut open your heart, like the belly of a shark, dumped its contents on a table—would there be any trace of me?Collection: Ocean
When you were sleeping on the sofa I put my ear to your ear and listened to the echo of your dreams. That is the ocean I want to dive in, merge with the bright fish, plankton and pirate ships. I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you and ask them the questions I would ask you. Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke rising from a chimney? Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing? I don’t wish I was in your arms, I just wish I was peddling a bicycle toward your arms.Collection: Dream
There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.Collection: Women
Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the way someone falling down in the street is funny. I entered a revolving door and emerged as a human being. When you think of me is my face electronically blurred?Collection: Fall
We didn’t deny the obvious, but we didn’t entirely accept it either. I mean, we said hello to it each morning in the foyer. We patted its little head as it made a mess in the backyard, but we never nurtured it. Many nights the obvious showed up at our bedroom door, in its pajamas, unable to sleep, in need of a hug, and we just stared at it like an Armenian, or even worse— hid beneath the covers and pretended not to hear its tiny sobs.Collection: Morning
I want to rip off your logic and make passionate sense to you.Collection: Rip
Once I thought I found love, but then I realized I was just out of cigarettes.Collection: Cigarette
Your absence weighs more than someone else’s presenceCollection: Absence
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss. The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.Collection: Wall
I graduated first in my class from alibi school.Collection: Inspirational