Kevin Young Quotes

#1. How humid the heart, its messy rooms! We eat spicy food, sweat like wood and smolder like the coal mine that caught fire decades ago, yet still smokes more than my great-uncle who will not quit- or go out-

Kevin Young

#2. Letters
I've never sent.

This life
we're only renting.

Battered the world is -
bartered -
wander over it
the stars finding

us wanting.

Kevin Young

#3. Darling, it is
your darkness
where I want
my body to be
buried. You burn me
at both ends, send
the geese bumping
within my skin.

Kevin Young

#4. Like God
Gumbo is hard
to get right
& I don't bother
asking for it outside
my mother's house.
Like life, there's no one
way to do it,
& a hundred ways,
from here to Sunday,
to get it dead wrong.

Kevin Young

#5. Like hot food
I love you
like warm
bread & cold
cuts, butter
sammiches
or, days later, after
Thanksgiving
when I want
whatever's left

Kevin Young

#6. To waste
this heart once more
& have you
here, not silent, only
quiet, as before.

Kevin Young

#7. Love is strange & almost always too late.

Kevin Young

#8. Holding tight / to their pocketbooks / at the pearly gates / just in case.

Kevin Young

#9. Daylight Savings
Like the money the light
doesn't go
as far these days

Kevin Young

#10. Do not write a poetry of rarity, or of rarification, but of *never again*.
Do not even write this poetry but find it, come across it, and step over it. The helpless ant that in the end can lift more than ten times its weight: that is a poetry.

Kevin Young

#11. Love is strange & almost always too late.

Kevin Young

#12. How I would sing

like a kettle to keep you

Kevin Young

#13. what you must
understand is that
the herald & the horror
are the same.

Kevin Young

#14. Not the storm
but the calm
that slays me.

Kevin Young

#15. It never ends, the bruise
of being

Kevin Young

#16. In the night I brush
my teeth with a razor

Kevin Young

#17. I now know pain
is part of any journey-
that this is the opposite
of grief, but grief
the only way I know
to describe waiting
and waiting without
knowing, hoping one day
joy will arrive.

Kevin Young

#18. At night I count
not the stars
but the dark.

Kevin Young