B.J. Ward Quotes

#1. As hard as the diamonds in your smile,
the wind carries its hammers with no hands
and sustains a moan with no mouth,
seems to cradle solitude in its rough arms like firewood
to be burned in my house as it passes through
and asks, Where does she sparkle from?

B.J. Ward

#2. A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly.

B.J. Ward

#3. The words I speak to these chairs
must be silencing.
It has stunned them
into a profound emptiness.
No creaking from the gallery
no James Joyce here, nor Malory
An unknown author
in a very large chain
can't you hear me rattling?

B.J. Ward

#4. You better ignore this.
You better staple your eyes shut
and put pot-lids over your ears
and pinch your nose with vice grips
and cement your mouth shut
with real cement and while
you're at it or in it or whatever
cut off your hands for good measure

B.J. Ward

#5. Leads to Bear Down
Bear Down
gives way to little crown
Crown concedes the Head
then Head produces All
Snip the fruity cord
little King begins to bawl
then grows bored
So begins his fall

B.J. Ward

#6. I'd reconstruct Heaven, or usurp Hell
write till I swing open like a door hinge.
I arrive - a rogue who'd refurbish town.
I take my pen, begin to nail things down.

B.J. Ward

#7. Out in this profane city,
sometimes sidewalks
seem the only cement that connects us,
pressed by the sacred strangers
we will never touch.

B.J. Ward

#8. These words are my mother's,
my father's, my brother's, my lender's, my garbage
man's - the poem runs
like oil on fire
beneath this earth where we know each other.
Witness the black smoke everywhere.

B.J. Ward

#9. Little bucktoothed alligator
ready to taste my bills.
Make something suffer.
Make something stick.

B.J. Ward

#10. My fist is her flag still furled. Take the cannoli and leave the tuxedo - This is my jackleg opera to the world.

B.J. Ward

#11. From ragbag, stumblebum, peripatetic lout
To bonfire of catnip that burns itself out
Bristled sack of hiss & claws
Cinched at the maw

B.J. Ward

#12. The judge sentenced us to life
real, awake life
out of the jails we had been roaming in
life in prism
then started handing out fines
for parking too long.

B.J. Ward

#13. I am thinking of poets who haven't written well in years
but who rubbed against the sun twenty years ago
Aren't they in their own kinds of prisons too?

B.J. Ward

#14. Shakespeare's felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed.

B.J. Ward

#15. As children we learned our shadow
is a darkness we never totally shake
until we lie down, pull the shades,
draw the curtains, shut out the world,
and turn our own light out.

B.J. Ward